Wilder Perkins: Hoare and the headless Captains

"You'll have to ask someone else that, Hoare," Spurrier drawled. "You are insolent, just as Sir Thomas said you were, as well as stupid."

That he was still naked to the waist and no longer even had the blasphemous cope to keep him warm in the November dawn had evidently not dampened his superb self-confidence.

"Your master, Sir Thomas, has much to answer for," Hoare replied, "and answer for it he will. It's a pity for you that you did not receive his last message before you, er, raised the curtain on your two-act melodrama."

"You are absurd as well as impudent," Spurrier said. "The frog-the man you call my master-he's no more than a useful puppet, an o ver-the-hill jackanapes with mad pretensions of being the rightful occupant of the throne. It was bad enough that his tadpoles had to be present. D'ye think that if the frog himself had anything to do with it, I could have got…"

"Got what?"

Spurrier shook his head.

"A different frog, then, Spurrier? A Frog from over the water, perhaps?"

"I have nothing further to tell you," Spurrier declared. "In the first place, you are my enemy. More important, you interrupted a holy sacrifice. So did the Prettyman woman. She will live to regret it, as will you, but not for long. Both of you will regret last night's doings, I promise you on behalf of my masters. My word, yes."

Rabbett's face went white in the dawning, while Thoday's remained impassive.

"So you serve two masters, Spurrier," Hoare whispered. "One on earth, I suppose, and one… elsewhere. You will forgive me, I'm sure, if I confess myself a devout skeptic concerning the Deity's existence; that being the case, I must logically doubt the existence of the Enemy as well.

"It is your earthly master that interests me. His purpose I think we know; it is to throw a spoke in the wheel of the Royal Navy whenever he can. The infernal machines your colleague Kingsley caused to be planted in Vantage and her sister ships out of Portsmouth were one such spoke; your attempt to decapitate the Navy by decapitating its senior officers was another."

Here Thoday intervened. "I must confess, sir, that the purpose of Mr. Spurrier's essay at gathering in the Duke of Cumberland eludes me. Perhaps he will enlighten me."

When Spurrier had nothing to say, Hoare decided to put up a possible motive to see if he could bounce the prisoner into telling more.

"I rather suppose, Thoday," Hoare said, "that the notion stemmed from Sir Thomas… by example, perhaps, or by direction. The bee in Sir Thomas's bonnet, about his being the rightful occupant of the throne now beneath King George-"

"God bless him!" Rabbett declared.

"— yes, Rabbett-is well known. And it is also well known that the Prince's younger brothers, Cumberland in particular, have ambitions of their own in that direction.

"If Spurrier here could stir up the Duke, turn him into a fellow Satanist-if he needed turning, that is-and promise him support from over the Channel, that would be a spoke in the wheel, not only of the Navy… but of the entire kingdom, would it not?"

Although Thoday made no observation, his look told Hoare that his point had merit. Spurrier's expression told Hoare he had struck home.

But the chaise was approaching Weymouth, and time was running out.

"Pray tell me about your master," Hoare whispered. "The earthly one, I mean. His name, his whereabouts."

Spurrier uttered an imprecation from between thinned lips. "I have nothing to say to you," he said. "You and your crew are dead men."

That might be the case, Hoare admitted to himself, for it was obvious that Spurrier himself was in deadly fear.

As the chaise drew up to the low scarp overlooking Weymouth, Hoare could see Royal Duke hove to outside the harbor, breasting the easy seas that rolled gently in from the Channel. He also heard the sound of bells. It was a confused cacophony, a compound of merry, even jubilant rounds, underlain by a solemn tolling, as if for a great person's death. The ringing must come from every church in Weymouth town.

Once down in the town itself, Hoare thrust his head out of the chaise window.

"What is happening?" he croaked at a passerby, but must needs repeat himself before the other raised his head. His face was beslobbered with tears.

"It's Nelson," the man said. "Dead, dead. Struck, he was, at the instant of victory."

The party was silent amid the bells until they had hoisted their prisoner into a wherry and were being rowed out to Royal Duke.

"I shall never forget this moment," Thoday said in a voice pregnant with feeling. "The morning of November the sixth, 1805. This is the place, and the time, where I was when I learned of Nelson's death."

Spurrier's two hard men were not so hard after all, Hoare found. Questioned separately, both admitted having been present when Spurrier butchered the two Captains Getchell and to having been among the gang that assaulted Admiral Hardcastle and Delancey in Admiralty House. They denied knowledge of the dead Marine, Baker, and knew nothing of his head's whereabouts. When it came to disclosing the names of the person or persons behind Spurrier, their claims of ignorance were persuasive.

"I never seen the Capting talkin' business with no one but Sir Thomas," one said. " 'E'd ride off for parts unknown every few weeks an' come back wi' some new bit o' mischief."

When Leese had convinced Hoare that Spurrier's men had been milked of all the information they had, he had the pair stowed in the brig's bilges. He would not risk setting them ashore here in Weymouth; Sir Thomas Frobisher ruled here. He would take them to Portsmouth as soon as he could; there he would feel safe in sending them ashore under guard for trial and disposition.

Spurrier himself, bound into Admiral Oglethorpe's huge hanging chair in Hoare's cabin, resisted Hoare's most persuasive questioning. As the chair swung with Royal Duke's gentle motion, however, Hoare saw Spurrier's discomfort increasing. Hoare remembered, now, Spurrier's passing remark when he was previously in this very cabin on the occasion of Cumberland's disastrous inspection.

"You go to sea in this little thing?" he had asked. "Makes me want to spew just to think of it."

"Your men have laid two murders at your door, Spurrier," Hoare said now. "There can be no question; you killed the two Captains in the Nine Stones Circle. I'm sure we'll find evidence that you killed my Marine, too, and your own followers, the ones my men took captive the other night. You've lost your interest with Cumberland now. You'll hang.

"But if you name your master, the agent of the French, I will try to arrange for you to be shot instead of hanged. It would certainly be less dishonorable, and I understand it is far quicker. Now. We know you go by the code name of'Levi.' Who, pray, is 'Saul'?"

There was no reply.

He remembered overhearing Morrow/Moreau, the Canadian turncoat, refer to a "Louis" in London. Hoare knew there was a connection between Spurrier and Moreau and that it was almost certainly Sir Thomas Frobisher.

"Who is 'Louis'?" he asked, on the spur of the moment.

"Louis?" the prisoner echoed. "Never heard of him. King of France, I suppose." He clamped his jaw again.

"And where did you go so suddenly after our first encounter in Dorchester?"

Royal Duke gave an extra lurch just then, and Spurrier's color grew even unhealthier. For a moment, Hoare thought the prisoner would tell him, but his lips hardened, and he shook his head.

"I have nothing to say to you, Hoare. I have already said-and done-too much. Now bugger off."

Hoare watched Spurrier carefully for a few more moments. He might be doing his best to behave like an iron man. Nevertheless, he was sweating and his color worsening.

"Put the prisoner in the forepeak, Leese," Hoare said at last. "Right up in the eyes of the ship."