Wilder Perkins - Hoare and the headless Captains

The white-cloaked pouting man beside Spurrier, Hoare saw with dismay, was one who must already be quite familiar with processions, if not-Hoare hoped devoutly- of this sort. His left eye glared fixedly to his larboard side. In his good hand, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, bore a footed dish. It was a krater, a bowl or chalice. It might be, Hoare thought, the very chalice Titus Thoday had included in his inventory of Spurrier's peculiar possessions. Hoare wondered what the Duke was making of this bucolic bacchanal.

Beside Hoare, Sergeant Leese startled. Yes, he, too, had been subjected to Cumberland's sneering inspection on board Royal Duke.

Spurrier and Cumberland reached the altar, Selene Prettyman and the Frobisher woman following on their heels, the wicker cage between them. With a final ragged bleat, jangle, and thump, the musicians fell silent.

So far, except for the time and the open-air venue, this could be Sunday morning service in Dorchester's Church of All Angels, and, except for the decorously exposed bosoms, the congregation could be the ton of the town.

Turning to face his flock, Spurrier raised his arms skyward.

"Let us invite and invoke our prepotent masters and mistresses," he intoned. A confused mumble followed. From it Hoare thought to hear names he was sure he had heard elsewhere: "Isis"… "Asmodeus"… "Ashtaroth." "Baal" was certainly familiar. Hadn't the Phoenicians or the Carthaginians or the Philistines sacrificed babies to Baal? For his part, Hoare hoped that Selene Prettyman and Lydia Frobisher were not lugging someone's missing child about in that covered container and that he was not about to witness a ritual infanticide.

Hoare could not doubt it. Plautus might have been written the whole ceremony into one of his broadest comedies. But from the intent expression of Captain Walter Spurrier, whatever deity he was addressing was a real one to him, and a dreadful one.

Spurrier turned to Selene Prettyman and Lydia Frobisher. From the wicker cage he withdrew-not a baby, Hoare was relieved to see, but a great black cock nearly the size of a turkey. Holding the struggling bird by the neck with one hand, Spurrier raised it in the direction of the moon in dedication, as though he were elevating the Host, intoning more gibberish as he did. He murmured an instruction to Ernest, Duke of Cumberland.

Cumberland appeared as if he devoutly wished himself elsewhere. These people, Hoare could tell already, were too simple for the Duke's tastes-and too sincere. So was the ceremony. But he was the son of a King, after all, and noblesse oblige. With his sound left hand, the Duke extended the chalice and set it on the ashlar.

Spurrier grunted, caught the cock's neck with his weapon's strange hook, twisted the bird onto the altar, and beheaded it with one clean backhand blow. The headless creature fluttered to the altar and, as any chicken will when its head is chopped off, staggered about the broad stone surface for several seconds, spattering its blood about before Spurrier caught it and held it over the chalice as firmly as he could. In the deathly silence of the Circle, the blood trickled audibly into the chalice.

Like acolytes, two of the faun-boys came up, looking pale. One bore a brass jar and the other a torch. After rendering an unseemly backward-facing obeisance with evident gusto, the lad with the jar emptied part of its contents into the chalice and part onto the headless cock. It was rum, as Hoare knew from its odor, and powerful rum at that.

Taking the torch from the second boy, Spurrier thrust it onto the rum-soaked flapping cock. A puff of bluish flame, and the pungent, acrid reek of burnt feathers drifted into Hoare's nose. He must struggle against a coughing spell. Spurrier resumed his unintelligible chant. "Gaah," said the Duke, and backed away with a disgusted look to join the two bare-breasted ladies.

Perhaps Spurrier sensed that his royal auditor was becoming discontented, for, using plain English now, he called into the darkness, "The sacrifice has been accepted. Draw nigh, ye worshipers, and receive your token of our sacrifice; then go ye hence, to foregather at the Hall of Feasting!"

With this, Spurrier plucked a branch of heather and dipped it into the mixture of cock's blood and rum that filled the chalice. Selene Prettyman took one of the Duke's arms and Lydia Frobisher the other and led him to the altar, where Spurrier stood ready to dash the branch across the three clenched faces.

The Duke shook himself free.

"That will be enough, Spurrier. Call this a rite?" he grated. "Why, it's the most farcical piece of fustian I've ever had to witness. You had the gall to bring me all the way from Plymouth for this? Compared to Dashwood and his crowd, you're a choirboy. And if you call this a 'pagan orgy,' you can call me an abbess. By the time I was fourteen, I'd seen more, and done more, than you could dream up in a hundred opium dreams. Be damned to you, indeed."

He spun to address Selene Prettyman.

"And as for you, madam, I shall have words with you at my later convenience."

The lady sank into the deepest of curtseys; the Frobisher woman followed suit with far less grace.

The Duke marched off into the dark in the direction from which he had come. The ladies lifted up their heavy skirts and followed. After an embarrassed pause, Spurrier resumed his summoning of the congregation.

In response, the common folk approached timidly to receive their aspersion, then drifted away as silently as they had arrived, leaving the celebrant to stand alone, facing his altar and his stinking headless bird as if rendering a closing prayer. Perhaps, Hoare thought, Spurrier would now dodge round to the entrance of the Stone Circle as if by magic, like the vicar at Sunday service, to greet his parting flock and be congratulated on his powerful sermon.

At Hoare's side, Leese stirred restlessly and gave his Commander an inquiring look. Call it off? he mouthed.

Hoare put out a hand and pressed it onto the Sergeant's shoulder. Wait, his gesture said.

Spurrier still brooded at the altar, cope and all. As Selene Prettyman returned into the ring of megaliths, he looked up, visibly hauling himself back to the mundane world from whatever bourne he had been sojourning in.

"What are you doing here now?" Spurrier asked. "You're supposed to be shepherding Cumberland back to Dorchester."

Spurrier sounded depressed, it seemed to Hoare, as well he might, considering that his ceremony had been a fiasco and that he had just lost one powerful backer.

"Don't worry, Spurrier," she said. "I gave him into the protection of the Frobisher children, who have him under their wings. I kissed him good-bye. Perhaps he'll linger at those odd quarters of yours. If so, you can make your excuses to him yourself."

"That's all very well. But you have no business here now," Spurrier said.

"You should know by now that I go where I choose to go," Selene Prettyman said briskly. "Now be about your own business, for if I'm not mistaken, your business is about to come to you." As she shrugged, her breasts bounced. Under other circumstances, Hoare thought, their motion would have been enticing.

"Very well," Spurrier said. "Keep out of my way, then, d'ye hear? Now then, let's be about it."

He bent, retrieved a torch, struck fire to it, and waved it in an unmistakable signal. There was a scuffle outside the Circle.

"Come along, you," came a hoarse voice from the dark. "Don't give us no trouble, now."

Two captives were half-hauled, half-carried into the torchlight, each gripped by a pair of hard-looking men. The prisoners were hoodwinked, their arms bound, their shoeless legs hobbled.

"Take off their hoods, you men. We'll start with the little one," Spurrier said.

Hoare suppressed a grunt of dismay. The prisoners were Hoare's own men, Rabbett and Thoday.