Wilder Perkins: Hoare and the matter of treason

After completing them, the party lay below for supper; they then left a few lucky comrades behind to roister noisily, took up their assigned positions on deck and overside in Hoare's pinnace and the green launch, and waited-in the knowledge that they might have to go through the whole rigmarole again, night after night, until the attack descended upon them. If that happened, Hoare had assured them, each Royal Duke would have his turn on roistering duty.

At the entry port squatted Blassingame, who had mysteriously gone missing for two days after introducing Bubble and Squeak and who, as punishment, had been deprived of his roistering watch and placed on anchor watch of nights. From his slurred voice, however, his shipmates had comforted him with more than apples, for Hoare could hear him moaning an endless, tuneless, tipsy song. Hoare lodged himself with a stout hatchet under the starboard shrouds of Royal Duke's foremast, where he settled down, adjusted his lanky form to resemble a layabout keg as much as possible, and, his breath sweeping softly upstream on a steady easterly wind, made ready for another night of alert, snowbound idleness.

It was the second night of roistering and waiting. There was silence on deck; from below came only the cheerful sound of voices and an occasional burst of song. A faint light rose from the skylight amidships. Good. The roisterers were in full swing. The roistering, incredibly, sounded a trifle forced in Hoare's ears. It went to show, he thought sleepily, that at bottom the Royal Dukes were not true roaring seamen. The moon, just past full, was late in rising, and when it rose, it was quickly quenched by a thickening cloud layer. It began to snow, more thickly by the minute. Hoare sat against the coach-house, outboard of the awning, concealed in a loose boat cloak.

Before very long, Hoare realized that he was seeing much more than he would have expected to see under these weather conditions. In fact, despite the snowfall, the brig's full length lay open to his sight, in an eerie rosy glow. He puzzled, then realized that the light derived from the huge mass of London's lamps and candles, reflected from the clouds. Well, so be it. There was nothing he could do about it; moreover, the canopy still cast a shadow.

From between two dockside buildings came the softest of rustles, from below Royal Duke's cutwater came the softest of splashes. As Hoare watched, a shadowy arm reached up, groped about, grasped Royal Duke's rail at the heads, and heaved up a shadowy figure. There was the tiny snap of someone's thumb against fingers; a second figure joined the first, a third, and then a fourth. One at a time, each shadow slipped over the coaming in the bows, beyond the rigged canopy. Hoare turned his eyes aft without budging his head; he would remain a keg until every invader was well into the bag. In ones and twos, more swarmed aboard, until Hoare counted a near dozen. Three carried glowing objects-slow match, most likely. Out of the corner of his eye, he clearly saw a figure standing below Royal Duke in the dock's trodden snow, face upraised in his direction, just as he had last seen it: Mr. Goldthwait. Just behind him stood another form. The man Ogle?

"I shall break him!" came his enemy's enraged croak, "with a rod of iron! I shall dash him in pieces like a potter's vessel!"

Crack! The first caller's feet went out from under him, and then another's. Hoare set fingers to lips and sounded his emergency whistle. Its shriek filled the air.

"Now!" Bold cried from the fore crosstrees. He cast off the awning. From her post in the main top, Taylor followed suit. As the canvas fell flopping over the intruders, the roisterers swarmed up from the fore hatch and the lurkers overside from the boats. In an orderly circle, they began to work their way over the awning, belaying pins in hand, stomping and thumping anything that moved underneath as they went. Grunts of distress came from beneath the squirming awning. The pair on the snowy pier paused, alarmed perhaps.

A cleaver appeared from below, ripped the canvas, and a familiar head broke out.

"Welcome back aboard, Green," Leese said in a savage voice. He swatted the woman's cleaver away and batted his belaying pin into the side of her head. She dropped soundlessly.

"Hammer that man!" came Mr. Clay's roar. A Royal Duke obeyed, and a boarder, escaping from under the awning, collapsed before he could scramble back overboard. The two men alongside turned now, as if to leave their beleaguered party to its fate. At Hoare's ear, a firepot sizzled, stank, and went out.

Among the combatants, marlinespike at the ready, roved Dan'l O'Gock, Anglo-Inuit. Thrice, Hoare saw him pause over a head, examine it as if to assure himself that it belonged to a boarder, and then tap it sharply with the spike. Hoare remembered that, however much the people of his fathers craved animal blood, they were chary indeed of shedding that of humans.

Having closed his trap on the boarders, Hoare found he could barely rise from his squat. He struggled, but managed only to drop his hatchet. He was forty-four, and far too stiff and chilled for battle. The pair below-Goldthwait and his underworld guide Ogle, if that were he-were on the move, and he must follow. For Goldthwait still held Hoare's Jenny. Hoare would see which man would be broken with Goldthwait's rod of iron.

Lurching to his feet at last, he drew a belaying pin from the row in the pinrail at his knees, hurled it at the retreating pair. It skidded wildly, as he knew it would; he lacked the eye his womenfolk possessed. He stuck two more pins into his belt and clambered across Royal Duke's rail, to take up the chase, while the shouts of combat aboard his command now sounded somewhat more feeble behind his back. For a stunned second, he wondered what they should do with these people, but then decided to leave the question to Mr. Clay, whose bellowed battle orders still filled the snowy air.

His quarry's double track, already filling with snow, led up the wide steps of Greenwich Palace. Knowing he was falling behind with every step, suppressing a growing sense of futility, he followed.

Set into the left-hand valve of the formal bronze palace gate, a smaller doorway stood ajar, leaving a crack of uninformative blackness within. Hoare entered here, to stand in the silent dark, his eyes helpless, ears and nose a-prick. From his left, a cold, dank zephyr brought him a tantalizingly familiar smell. He could swear he associated it with Sir Thomas and Goldthwait. Yes, by Jove! Russia leather! He turned and commenced a blind march along the marble pavement.

Within moments, he had no idea which way to go. He stood in the midst of blank, dank darkness. The darkness was not absolute; from some high clerestory, a faint glow of reflected city lights reached him, but he could make out nothing of his surroundings.

Yank.

Like a startled hare, Hoare leapt in place and dropped back to his feet, prepared to flee.

"Me, sir. Bubble. They gone that-a-way. Come along, if ye pleases."

A hand, certainly not Bubble's, took his. It was soft and gentle, yet surprisingly strong. He was in the clutches of the Struldbrug, Squeak.

"I'll show that barstid Ogle 'oo knows theseyear tunnels," Bubble growled, " 'im or me. 'E'll be goin' parst the beer an' then a-takin' the spy-'ole, the eejit."

The handless man's mention of "beer" left Hoare feeling more confused than ever, but, with no alternative to hand, he let himself be towed along in Squeak's wake. The "beer" question resolved itself in the next chamber, a vast one in which rested an amorphous looming construction, ebon in the cavernous space. Close to, it revealed itself a jury-rigged thing of green lath, held together by lengths of crape-the abandoned bier where the victor of Trafalgar had lain in state before being rowed upstream by Hoare's acquaintance Hornblower. Having heard of the other's struggles, Hoare knew he could never have managed the job, even if he had had the voice for it.