"Let's see them, then," Hoare said.
Still carrying the infant, Mrs. Pickering disappeared behind the curtain and came out with a small roll of sketches. "That's all we have, sir," she said.
Hoare did not stop to examine them but wrapped them around the others. He hauled out a fistful of small change and handed it to her.
"Oh, sir! Oh, oh, oh!" Mrs. Pickering cried, and burst into tears. As Hoare raced down the flights of stairs to the street where his ragamuffin guide waited, he heard her voice, fading with the distance, crying, "Oh, Beatrice, Beatrice! The heavens have opened, and rained down a full year's rent!"
Just as Hoare reached the foot of the stairs, a small hatless figure crashed into him and nearly sent him flying. Thrusting him out of his way, Timothy Pickering raced up the stairs down which Hoare had just come, shouting something about having sold poor David's hat.
Upon returning to the Golden Cross, full of self-praise for his generosity to the poor and deserving, Hoare found that Thoday had preceded him and was waiting in the private bar to make his report.
"I have made the rounds of the dead-houses, sir, as far as was needful," he told Hoare. "At the third, in Cripplegate, I found our man's body."
"Are you quite sure?" Hoare whispered.
"Quite, sir. I examined every portly corpse I saw, comparing its features with the likeness you provided me. It was, if I may say so, an experience I should not care to repeat."
Hoare could only sympathize. From time to time in his career as Sir George Hardcastle's investigative dogsbody, he had had his own occasions to inspect numbers of the dead, in conditions ranging from the still-warm to the nearly deliquescent. The sweet sickening stench of human corruption was unforgettable.
"The man I found had been dead for about a week," Thoday went on. "Since most of that time had been spent in the water, his more prominent features were missing, eaten by crabs or lobsters. But the pockmarks remained, and their pattern was identical to the one shown in the likeness of the missing man. Since, as you informed me, the artist manages to capture every salient detail of a subject's countenance, I satisfied myself that the corpse was indeed that of Mr. Ambler, and I felt no need to continue my search."
"So he was drowned, then," Hoare whispered.
"Not so, sir. He was felled by a gunshot-a pistol bullet, unless I miss my guess, fired from close enough that the explosion drove powder granules and parts of the man's clothing into the wound. I withdrew the ball and some fragments, which I have with me. Here."
From one pocket, Thoday removed a folded paper, which he unfolded and tendered to Hoare. Mentally if not physically, Hoare shrank back. None too faintly, Thoday's specimen bore the cloying odor Hoare hated.
"Never mind, Thoday. Wrap the thing up again, will you? In oilcloth, if you can find some. I'll take it to Sir Hugh in the morning, when I report to him on my meeting with Mr. John Goldthwait.
"But there is something else I must take up with you, Thoday." With this, Hoare recounted his morning's call at the establishment of Timothy Pickering, Esq.
"Here are some of the likenesses I bought from his wife." Reaching into his bulging pocket with a sense of relief that his uniform coat was now returned to a reasonable shape, Hoare produced the roll of drawings. He peeled off one after another without inspecting them, dumping them at random upon the table before him. Near the core, he slowed.
"Ah, here we are," he whispered in triumph at last, and handed the gunner's mate Pickering's drawing of him. "How do you explain this, Thoday?"
Thoday inspected the sketch without visible emotion.
"An excellent likeness, sir, I would say. Of course, I am looking at a reoriented image of myself, so to speak, since the familiar countenance I see in the mirror of a morning is, of course, in reverse."
"But how did Pickering come to take your likeness?"
"Why, at the behest of Sir Hugh Abercrombie, sir," Thoday replied. For the second time that day, Hoare felt the blood rush to his face. Of course. Sir Hugh's acquaintance with the Royal Dukes was close; in fact, he had probably chosen most of them himself. Hoare felt an utter fool. And in any case, why, he wondered, had he been looking forward to confounding Thoday?
"May I look at the rest of these, sir?" Thoday asked.
"Of course," Hoare whispered. "I haven't really inspected them myself… But let us take them upstairs to my quarters, where we can examine them in peace, without my host peering over our shoulders." For Berrier had just bustled up, to see if he or his cellar could be at their service. Hoare took the whole batch of drawings under one arm, while instructing Berrier to have a decanter of port for himself brought to his room.
"And for you, Thoday?"
"Porter, if you please, sir. I've acquired a taste for it."
Hoare nodded his assent to the proprietor, and then withdrew, Thoday at his heels.
Upstairs, the refreshments having arrived and their porter dismissed, they undertook to sort out the likenesses, setting visages either man recognized in one pile, unfamiliar faces in another, with the doubtful ones in between. None of the drawings bore names. Hoare counted thirty-nine of them in all.
Onto the first pile went one of Mrs. Pickering and the infant Beatrice, the only example of a rendering that included more than one head, Thoday's own portrait, and likenesses of several other Royal Dukes, including one of Sarah Taylor, master's mate, and Hoare's own.
In the middle of the heap, Hoare paused in astonishment. He heard a gulping noise from his companion; Thoday would hardly demean himself by gasping. Hoare stared into a froglike face.
"What can he be doing in this company?" Hoare knew perfectly well that Thoday would have no answer, but he could not forbear asking the question all the same.
"I have no notion, sir," Thoday replied as expected. "I think of the gentleman in association with Dorset and not London. It is unmistakably Sir Thomas, however. And he has nothing whatsoever to do with the Admiralty."
"Hardly," Hoare said. In fact, on the only occasion of their meeting, the knight-baronet and Sir George Hardcastle had nearly come to fisticuffs.
Hoare and Thoday leafed on.
"I know that one," Hoare whispered. "I saw him this very day."
"Indeed, sir?"
"John Goldthwait, Esquire, of Chancery Lane."
"Like the others, then," Thoday said. "I suppose them to be trials which the artist chose to save for his own records. Perhaps he hopes to find an engraver and earn a few shillings by hawking them to him."
"I wonder who has the finished works. In any case, so, Thoday, I hardly think the subjects would be pleased, do you? Look here."
Hoare held up the likeness of Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, whom they both had last seen marching in dudgeon from the tragicomic Halloween ceremony in the Nine Stones Circle. The scarred face reeked with royal pride, self-indulgence, and malice.
Among the unknowns were faces unfamiliar to either of them. By their attire, most of these were visibly aristocratic. Young and old, overwhelmingly male, their visages lacked sensibility. Among them, the assortment could have been models for each and every one of the seven deadly sins.
"We must keep these portraits safe, Thoday," Hoare whispered. "I think they are very important."
"I know just the place, sir," Thoday said. "Once we have brought them safe to Royal Duke, you can place the roll of them in the Herschel telescope."
"An excellent thought, Thoday." The Herschel telescope was a huge thing in gleaming brass, mounted on a teakwood tripod, that lurked at the forrard end of the yacht's tweendecks. It was an acquisition of Hoare's predecessor in command of Royal Duke, who had been a devoted astronomer as well as a master of the intelligence trade. As far as Hoare knew, no one ever even looked through it. He found himself slightly surprised at what, for Thoday, was a flight of fancy. As a rule, he was a sobersided man.