Wilder Perkins: Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities

"And Lecompte whom you just murdered, and Dugas to whom I had to give the quietus after Madame Graves crippled him for you, and Fortier here grew up together with me," he added proudly. "Almost as brothers. I even permit them to address me as 'monsieur' instead of 'monseigneur.' Only they had-have-that honor. Now, for the third time, tell me how you sniffed me out."

Crack.

"I was in Weymouth in the first place," Hoare whispered when his head cleared, "because of the infernal machine the Revenue picked up inland from there. Then I could not help but note your interest in Dr. Graves' avocation of clock-making.

"I was impressed, by the way, with the simple, clever reason you gave when you asked him to make up pieces of clockwork-'for the British secret service,' quotha!"

He braced himself for another crack. When it did not come, he was bold enough to ask a question of his own.

"What led you to leave your estate, then?"

"Because I am metis, m sieur, as you know very well. The peasant folk care nothing that a man has Indian blood. Why, Bessac here is a quarter Naskapi, and as proud of it as I am of being the son of a Cree chieftainess.

"But the grands seigneurs-ah, that is different. With them, blood's the thing! No, I was not received in the neighboring seigneurs' manors, and I must not pay court to their daughters.

Morrow's-Moreau s-voice took on more than a trace of a French accent. "And when the English came! Ah, M'sieur Hoare, it was you English that made life intolerable for us! You scorn Holy Church; you have stolen our trade; you have debauched our women."

Hoare barely contained himself. He had not "debauched" his dear, dead Antoinette; he had wooed and won her as a gentleman should.

"It was worse still," Moreau went on, "when Monseigneur mon pere decided that since the English were here to stay, one of his sons-I, the younger-should be educated as an Englishman, and sent me to the English school in Quebec. I need hardly tell you, English officer that you are, the beatings, the bullying-treatment no gentleman should have to endure. But I endured it, m'sieur! I learned to be as English as any milord! Why, even you thought me English, did you not?"

But nobody, Hoare told himself, had thought to teach the young Moreau the rhymes and nursery tales English children learned in the nursery. Hence Moreau's perplexity when Dr. Graves had recited his harmless trope about "Jack Sprat, who could eat no fat" as he took his guests in to dinner that first evening, when Hoare first met Eleanor Graves. It had been then that Hoare had begun to suspect that Edward Morrow was other than he presented himself to be.

And it had also been that evening, he realized, that he- Bartholomew Hoare-had already begun to fall in love with the wife of his host.

"I should have recognized your accent as soon as I heard you speak French," Hoare said.

For the first time, Moreau looked startled. "French? When did you hear me speak French?"

"When you and your man-Bessac? — boarded me, thinking you had killed me, with my own rifle, at that," Hoare said bitterly, and decided to press his luck further. "As you suggest, I, too, have been an English schoolboy. I assure you, sir, that a lad with a name like mine faces unusual problems, too. And yet, hating us English the way you do, you chose to come into our midst." He paused inquiringly.

Upon learning that Hoare could not speak, many people concluded wrongly that he could not hear and talked with each other, or with him, as if he were a useful piece of furniture-a side table, perhaps, with a compote on it. Hoare sometimes found this attribute useful, if sometimes insulting, and encouraged it. He did so now, by remaining silent and trying to look like part of Marie Claire-a fife rail, perhaps, or a mop.

Moreau bit and, having bitten, swallowed the bait all the way down.

The year 1794, he told Hoare, was when representatives of the new French Republic made their way covertly to Canada. They found young Moreau, feeling as he did about the English, a ready recruit. Any cause that advocated the recapture of the lost New France was a cause for which he felt himself ready to die. This, and his perfect English, suited him to the role of undercover agent in England. So Jean Philippe Edouard Saint-Esprit Moreau became Edward Morrow, and off to England he went.

As Hoare already knew from Dr. Graves, from his wife, and, indeed, from Moreau himself, Edward Morrow, with his manners and his money, had had no difficulty in establishing himself in Dorset society.

Moreau stopped in middiscourse to take flint and steel from his pocket and light the binnacle. His face bore a reminiscent expression.

"And Kingsley?" Hoare prompted.

"Kingsley?" Moreau paused, then smiled wryly and shrugged. "Ahhh, the light-minded lieutenant." Moreau, he said, had met Peregrine Kingsley at a Portsmouth gambling house, long before that officer was seconded to Vantage and while he was still on half-pay. Moreau had seen Kingsley take certain liberties with the cards. On making inquiries of his own, Moreau had also learned that the lieutenant was intensely ambitious, unscrupulous, heavily in debt, and deeply involved with several women simultaneously, women of low degree and high. Whenever it became time to use him, Moreau knew he would have Kingsley in his pocket, ready to be used.

At about the same time, Moreau had discovered Dr. Simon Graves's inventive gifts and put them to use, leading the doctor to believe that in doing so he was advancing the Royal Navy's ability to locate its ships and unaware that, instead, he was helping Moreau to blow them up. Because he could not always communicate with the doctor directly, he had made him privy to the cipher that he himself had been given.

"A permutation cipher, Graves called it," Moreau went on reminiscently. "A temurah, or some such word. Out of the Jewish Cabala, as I remember. It was fortunate that he, like…" He caught himself.

Of course. That explained to Hoare why Dr. Graves had a French Bible at hand when he was killed. Perhaps, too, it explained why Mr. Watt had failed to break the cipher; it had not been written in English but in French. But… what had Moreau stopped himself from saying?

"He, like…," he had begun. Like whom, or what?

But, Moreau continued, when Dr. Graves had balked at making any more identical devices for him, he had seen the danger the physician posed. To ensure himself a more reliable supply, he had diverted one of the machines, in its English anker, to France-as he thought-to be copied in larger numbers and returned to him. This perfectly natural move had, so to speak, blown up the entire affair.

"It was an understandable mistake, Mr. Hoare, I think. As far as the smuggling gentry are concerned, barrels do not leave Britain-they and their precious contents come into your peculiar country."

So the anker with the clockwork samples Dr. Graves had unknowingly made for the Continental watchmakers was on its way back inland when one of the smugglers had the notion of checking its contents. When they found that it held, not the brandy that their customers were expecting, but a confused mass of springs and gears, they must have discarded it.

"And Dr. and Mrs. Graves?" Hoare whispered.

"I needed more power over the cripple, if I were to control him as I must. I had yet to find an alternative source for my clockworks, so I still needed him alive to supply me. I sent Dugas-my good Dugas-with a local rough to take the woman while she was wandering foolish and alone along the beach at Portland Bill. I would not have harmed her, of course. I thought her an estimable lady, if fat. I would simply have sequestered her at my quarry or here aboard Marie Claire, and held her hostage against the doctor's continued service to me.

"I misjudged her. She was not gentle, but vicious. With her damned stones she wrecked poor Dugas' face and, with your meddling to help her, caused him to fall into the hands of the English. Even Frobisher