Wilder Perkins - Hoare and the headless Captains

" 'In loco parentis,' indeed! He knows perfectly well that both my parents are perfectly well, considering their age. He's nearer their age than mine. Furthermore, he maintained that I was imperiling my soul."

She tossed her glossy brown head.

"My soul, for pity's sake! I have no more soul than the cat, Chaos! If I do, then where in my body it is located, pray tell me!"

Hoare remembered Dr. Graves's having confided to him that his wife doubted the existence of such things as souls.

"Furthermore," she said severely, "Sir Thomas reminded me that you are a married man."

"Married? I am no such thing! Like you, I am widowed, but long since. I had thought you knew."

"How should I have known, Bartholomew? You never saw fit to tell me. Shall you tell me now, as we walk?"

So Hoare told his companion how, when Beetle was on the North American station in the weary closing years of the American war, he and Antoinette LaPlace had fallen desperately in love and married, over the powerful objections of her devout family. How he had left her in Halifax early in '83, great with child, only to discover on his return after the peace that she had died in childbed. Her parents had swept up the babe, a daughter, and returned to disappear in the uplands of Quebec.

"So I have never even seen my daughter," he concluded, "but I dream of Antoinette very often."

"Of course, you do." Eleanor Graves pressed the arm she was holding. "And perhaps that explains your feelings for the child Jenny, of whom you speak so fondly."

"Fondly? Do I? Why, perhaps I do. Well… well, here we are, on our way to St. Ninian's," he said, "presumably for the betterment of our souls at Mr. Witherspoon's feet."

"My soul, if any, is a poor neglected thing in sad need of betterment. However, Bartholomew, I accepted your offer to escort me to church because of the damned- excuse me-damned neighbors. I wish to show them where I stand. Busybodies all, and Sir Thomas the busiest body of them all. He should be busying his body about those poor dead Captains you told me of. I can well take care of my own reputation and my own entirely hypothetical soul." She tossed her head again and snorted.

To himself, Hoare had long compared Eleanor Graves to a partridge, albeit a dauntless one. Now, with her snort, she resembled a moor pony, one like the beast he had seen her astride when, between them, they had put Edouard Moreau to death.

"Do you wish me to take Sir Thomas aside and reprove him?" he asked. He rather looked forward to the idea.

She stopped in midstreet and looked up at him. "You shall do no such thing, Bartholomew. I am a tub that stands on its own bottom, as well you know. He and you are sufficiently at odds already. It would do you no good were you to spring to my defense and would put poor pompous Sir Thomas into harm's way. No. We shall attend matins in peace, as we planned, and all the world may stare."

She tucked her arm in his; his heart leaped.

All the world stared, indeed, as the little party marched into St. Ninian's. The congregation's whispering made Hoare feel quite at home. Eleanor Graves was no person to hide herself. Chin high, her black-gloved hand resting lightly on the arm of her blue-and-gold escort, her progress followed by the staring faces of all Weymouth's best, she paraded up the aisle as if going up to dance.

The service having concluded and the Reverend Mr. Witherspoon duly congratulated on his endless sermon, the two left the porch of St. Ninian's only to come face-to-face with Sir Thomas Frobisher. No words passed between them, only stiff nods, though Hoare thought to hear the other breathe the word bats. Sir Thomas's footman opened the emblazoned door of his berlin, and he entered. As Hoare knew, he had all of four hundred yards' journey ahead of him.

Foursquare, high of cheekbones, with slanted eyes and a shock of unconventional coarse black hair, the knight's coachman had an oddly familiar look. Where had Hoare seen his like?

It came to him at last. During his station in Halifax, when he had courted his dear Antoinette, married her, and lost her, he had run across a family of wandering Esquimaux walrus hunters from the upper Labrador. Someone had told him that the first Sir Martin Frobisher, the famous one, had brought a family or two back with him to England, where they had become as much a nine days' wonder as would have been one of Dean Swift's Struldbrugs. Could this merry-looking manservant be one of their descendants?

Eleanor Graves's murmur returned Hoare to the autumn Sunday.

"The frog and the crane," she said.

"Sir Thomas and myself?" Hoare asked.

"Or you and myself," she said with a smile, and Hoare's heart leaped once again.

"You are no frog, my dear," he whispered.

They walked on in companionable silence for a while, arm in arm, trailed at a discreet distance by the girl Agnes. Then Eleanor looked up at him.

"That was pleasant, Bartholomew. To make the congregation stare so! Oh! I must dress only in this horrid black, which I know does not become me. I must remain at home for years, receive only my relatives and Simon's- or the widowed Sir Thomas Frobisher, who is hopping about, turning up every stone within fifty miles in his search for a new wife to cover. Yet I know what my beloved Simon would have wished for me."

"What would he have wished?"

"That as soon as possible I would commence to live the life of a normal woman. I want children, Bartholomew, and the time grows late."

On Monday morning, as Hoare walked out of the Dish of Sprats for a constitutional before breakfast, he saw the clerk Rabbett striding toward him down the cobbled street, a bundle tied to a stick over one shoulder and his other hand wielding a stout staff. Rabbett, Hoare realized, had benefited by this venture out of his customary hole in Admiralty House, Portsmouth.

Heretofore, in Hoare's opinion, Rabbett had not only resembled the creature with which he shared a name; his actions had also been leporine. Lately, however, Rabbet even seemed taller. Was he standing straighter?

Fleetingly the thought entered Hoare's mind that he, Bartholomew Hoare, might have been thinking and acting in error throughout his life. Ever since he learned that his precious name was applied to Bad People, and female ones to boot, Hoare had been defending that name against misuse as if against dishonor. To him, Rabbetts were timid, Wolfes predatory-and Hoares sinful. Others shared his obsession, he knew; he had once been acquainted with a fellow Orkneyman by descent who bore the even more unfortunate name of Bugga. Poor Mr. Bugga had defended his name on the field of honor no fewer than four times before falling at last, a brave Bugga to the end.

Some other Hoares, he knew-the eponymous bankers of Stourhead, for example-must certainly be happy Hoares as well as wealthy ones, and their bank could scarcely be mistaken for a bordello. Why, then, should he, Bartholomew…

"Sir," Rabbett said, "a message came to you in Dorchester last night. The man would not go beyond Dorchester, and I knew of no quicker way to bring you the message than to carry it myself. So I rose before dawn and set off for Weymouth without breaking my fast."

The clerk extended an envelope. Hoare broke its Admiralty seal, to find a note to which had been attached a slip of tissue.

The note read:

Admiralty House, Portsmouth,

17 October

Sir:

The attached arrived momentarily by carrier pigeon, from your command.

In the future, pray arrange for communications of this kind to be transmitted by a more direct route.

Your humble, etc., etc.,

G. Hardcastle

The enclosure bore a mere handful of lines in a minuscule handwriting:

Royal Duke, 17 October

Sir: