Wilder Perkins: Hoare and the headless Captains

"I am given to understand that Thoday is an excellent gunner as well, although he has had no chance to demonstrate his prowess with our poor little popguns." So Mr. Clay was a secret fire-eater, thought Hoare.

Aloud, he whispered, "We shall have to correct that as soon as I return, shan't we?"

They had ordered an Admiralty chaise to be ready to leave at the turn of the watch, so Hoare would not even have time to shave. Whitelaw picked up the portmanteau he had yet to unpack for his Commander and, lugging it, led the way from Royal Duke's cabin into the misty evening.

At the boarding port, Whitelaw handed the bag to Thoday, who accepted it without blinking an eye. Mr. Clay doffed his hat in salute.

"Since you have issued no orders to the contrary, sir, may I presume that I should continue with the projects assigned us before Royal Duke left London?"

"Exactly. But I would like you to add some drill with her-er-great guns."

"Even without her gunner, sir?"

"Especially without her gunner, Mr. Clay."

"Aye aye, sir." Hoare thought to see an ironic smile on Thoday's thin lips. Was there an undercurrent of something here? he wondered.

"Give way, all," said the coxswain.

Before the chaise departed Portsmouth in the chill of late evening, Lemuel Rabbett had to undergo Thoday's inquisition. The little clerk showed himself as full of local knowledge about the Nine Stones Circle, and the copses and heathy moors in which it was set, as any harbor pilot must necessarily be about his local waters. Not so long ago, he explained, the area had been largely enclosed and left fallow to support the growing flocks of several local landowners. As the party already knew, it was one of the shepherds whose dog had sniffed out the bodies of Captains Francis and Benjamin Getchell. In his boyhood, Rabbett had roamed the area, studying the birds and his namesake coneys, and he knew most of the lonely men, as well as their dogs.

The Nine Stones Circle, he told them as the chaise trundled through the moonlit October countryside, was itself something of a magnet for the curious. He had even heard that strangers gathered in and around its nine stones at the equinoxes and solstices to conduct ungodly rites. After all, the Poor Lot Barrows lay only a few miles farther west, and everyone knew that there, on those same occasions, the wights came out to dance with the neighboring witches.

Of course, if one were to ask Rabbett his opinion, only the locals believed in that sort of thing. A native of Dorchester himself, four miles distant, Mr. Rabbett knew perfectly well there was nothing in it. Besides, since neither an equinox nor a solstice was at hand, as the Naval gentlemen surely need not be told, the Captains' deaths could have had nothing to do with any Satanistic celebrations in the Nine Stones Circle.

"Nonetheless," Rabbett said, "it's odd, is it not, gentlemen, that All Hallows' Eve is not so many days away?"

And so on and on, throughout the night. Rabbett must be habitually nocturnal. He left Hoare, at least, only a few minutes in which to nap. Whenever he woke, Thoday was sitting opposite him, awake, erect, and silent, and Rabbett was talking.

The bodies of the Captains Getchell, Hoare had been told, were reposing at the Church of All Angels. Here the chaise drew up before sunrise, just as a sleepy sexton trudged into sight.

The sexton made no trouble about letting them see the two corpses. The weather had been mercifully cool, so the odors of corruption were still faint. Nevertheless, Rabbett gagged and pressed a kerchief to his face.

"Have the relatives of the dead men been notified, do you know?" Hoare whispered to the sexton.

"Ye needn't whisper, sir. There's only one of 'em as 'as ears to 'ear with, and 'e ain't listenin'."

For, as Hoare had already been told, only a ragged stump remained on one of the bodies, windpipe and neck-bones projecting obscenely with the shrinkage of the tissue from around them. The other head had been replaced on the neck, where it no longer seemed to fit. The owner had been struck fiercely from behind, his occiput being crushed and part of his brains splattered. The single pair of eyes that remained, now mercifully closed by those who had found the bodies, must have almost bulged from their sockets. Blood and brains stained both uniform coats, suggesting to Hoare that the missing head would display the same injuries. Their coats had been stripped of their gold braid and buttons, their shoes were missing, and their stockings- and their breeches, of course-stained and ruined. Coat and breeches pockets had been turned out.

"Oh, dear me," Rabbett said from behind Hoare and Thoday. The latter looked at each other and shrugged; there was little these sad, dead shapes could tell them. As they turned to leave, Hoare saw Thoday cross himself. This explained something about the gunner-but hardly everything.

"You did not answer my question… except with an untimely impertinence," Hoare whispered to the sexton. "Kindly restrain your misplaced humor and give me a civil answer. Have the relatives been notified?"

"I don't know, sir," the sexton said. "Ye'd be better talking with Vicar, or the Capting. He be crowner, he be."

"The Captain?"

"Aye. Capting Spurrier. Ye don't know the Capting? Well, 'e'll put you right, 'e will."

"His whereabouts?"

The sexton cackled. "Ye'll find him in town hall, if anywhere."

But Hoare's itch to view the scene of the crime was too strong to resist. Captain Spurrier must wait to "put him right," whatever that meant. Rabbett knew that Mr. Trowbridge was vicar at the Church of All Angels but could not enlighten Hoare about Captain Spurrier. Hoare directed the chaise's driver to take them west to Winterbourne Abbas.

The morning sun, still low, was casting shadows ahead of them when the chaise put the scattered cottages of Winterbourne Abbas behind it. The Circle, a broken ring of high gray fangs, appeared out of the ground fog, reminding Hoare of a giant's skeletal lower jaw buried to the teeth in sand, except that here the "sand" was cropped greensward. Once there, and a wandering shepherd found, the two seagoing men needed Rabbett to interpret the heavy local dialect. No, this man was Emmon Tredegar. It was his wife's cousin Dym they wanted, for it was Dym and his dog Boye who had found the horror in the ring. Dym and his flock were probably down over the coombe yonder. The man pointed vaguely northward.

There was no road that way, only a path that wound lazily off into the distance. The three left the chaise in its driver's charge and plodded on in single file, half-asleep, pausing every so often to negotiate a stile. At last, the barking of a dog brought them fully awake. Hoare caught sight of a man standing lofty among his surrounding sheep, their owner's reddle mark blood-red above their dirty tails. Between the strangers and the flock it owned, the dog stood its ground, calling, War! Fear! Foes! at the top of its lungs. Rabbett, who happened to be in the lead, uttered an odd whistle that appealed to Hoare's ear instantly. Apparently the dog was of the same mind, for it quieted, sniffed Rabbett's hand and then, in a more intimate manner, that of each of the two other intruders, and led the way through the flock of its bored-looking, bleating charges to its master, tail waving proudly in a victory signal.

Dym Tredegar, when they managed to communicate with him at last, squatted and offered around some of the hard, strong yellow cheese in his scrip. He must explain first that while he was, indeed, Emmon's wife's cousin, he was also Emmon's own cousin. That understood, he was happy to tell his tale once more to these strangers. He knew the story well, and he was a skilled raconteur, though sometimes unintelligible to foreigners like Hoare. At these points, Dym must turn to Rabbett for an interpretation.