Alongside the brig at last, Hoare saw all the others, including the dead attacker and the one Thoday had stunned with the falcon, hauled aboard in safety before he hauled himself through the low entry port. Once on deck, he could sort them all out. He ordered Mr. Clay-who, sensible man, had been long abed and appeared with his uniform coat hastily donned over his nightshirt-to see that Matthew and Bert the boatmen were suitably refreshed, then turned to his captives.
Now that Hoare could see them plain, out on an open deck, he realized that between them he and Thoday, with only minimal assistance from Matthew and none at all from Bert, had defeated four opponents. Five, if one counted the woman, though one should not, for she had been of no consequence in the affray. She alone was on her feet. He himself had pushed two opponents into the Thames, on or under which he presumed they remained. One, dead of the cut into his back, lay staring blankly up into the graying sky. The man Thoday had stunned had come to his senses, more or less, but still sprawled on the deck, muttering. The young woman stood facing Hoare, shivering with fear, cold, or a combination of the two. All hands were soaking wet.
"All right," Hoare whispered to her. "Which one of you is the leader of this crew?"
" 'Im," said the woman from between her chattering teeth. She pointed at the stunned man, since he could not yet speak for himself.
"Well? Who is he? And, for that matter, who are you?"
"P-P-Poll, sir, if ye please. Floppin' Poll, they calls me."
"And he?"
"Dickson, sir. Dick Dickson. " 'E's scurf of a school o' water-flimps… I dabs it up wif'im."
Thoday saw Hoare's blank expression. "'Beds with him,' she means, sir. He commands a fleet of river-going scroungers… petty pirates. He is new to me."
"And how did Dick Dickson and you, and his other friends, come to take us on?" Hoare whispered.
"Dunno, sir. All I know is, Sol come to the lurk an' took Dick aside. I hollered, o' course. I 'eard 'im tell me Dick to get a crew togewer an' lay off Grinnage an' nobble any wherries wot come dahnstream. You was the first come by, sir, worse luck. The perisher, 'e din't tell us you wasn't no flats. Nah look wot ye done to me cove. I'll 'ave the lor on fez, I will."
Hoare could not help admiring Floppin' Poll's reviving spirit, so he forbore to point out to her the illogic of calling the law on him, the gang's intended victim. Besides, she was turning blue. One of the female Royal Dukes, McVitty, the librarian with permanent spectacles, was loitering about, looking anxiously at her. He should think of her as a Royal Duchess, he supposed.
"Get her below, McVitty, will you, and turn her over to Tracy?" Tracy, surgeon's mate, had been a medical student at St. Bart's, but had married unfortunately and run off, as he thought, to sea.
"Aye, aye, sir. Come on, woman." McVitty hoisted one of the other woman's arms over her shoulder and half-supported her to the yacht's fore hatch, where Hoare lost sight of them.
"Best to get this one down to Tracy, too, sir," Mr. Clay advised. "He's breathing peculiarly."
"Make it so, Mr. Clay," Hoare said. He went below to his pigeon-smelling cabin, and turned in. It had been a long, adventurous day.
Back aboard Royal Duke at last, weary and confused, Hoare lay long abed before he could compose himself for sleep. Sleeplessness was an unusual thing for Bartholomew Hoare; ever since his first lonely nights as a mid, he had dropped off as quickly as any other sailor. It was a skill necessary for survival, he thought as he stared up through the dark at the deck beams a foot above his nose. A sailor must learn early to take his sleep as he could find it, generally in all-too-short snatches, generally hungry, often wet. Compared with those days and with other ships, his state tonight was one of luxury.
He managed to put the late encounter behind him, and think back to the preceding day and those three damnable inquisitions, one after another.
Something, he thought, had been disturbing Sir Hugh deeply-something besides the grave matter that the massive man had described, something behind that which he had not wished to disclose. Something personal, perhaps. Certainly, Sir Hugh's state of health must be distressing him. But Hoare was too tired to think further, and fell asleep.
Upon awakening, he lay for a space, wandering idly across the meadows of his memory, stopping once in a while to browse off some pleasant morsel, and overlooking the weeds for now. He had begun to share his meadow with Eleanor, only to find that she had a similar meadow of her own, to which she was making him, too, welcome.
He paused in mid-browse, upon realizing that there was someone else in his cabin. When he opened his bleary eyes, they hit upon the face of Eleanor herself, regarding him with her usual serenity from within the depths of Sir Hugh's enormous swinging chair. He sat up too suddenly and struck his head a stunning blow on the deckhead. She was supposed to be safely tucked away with her father, well north of London. Yet here she was.
"I had… thought you in Great Dunmow, visiting your papa," he said as soon as he could speak coherently.
"As you can see, I am not," she answered. "I am sorry to have startled you. Does your head hurt?"
"Not much," he said, sitting up and rubbing it. "I am truly delighted to see you." Indeed, he was. Every day since they first met on the shingle of Portland Bill, he had become fonder of her.
"What moved you to change your mind and join me here?" he asked.
"Well, it was you yourself, for one thing," she said. "As time goes by, I grow fonder of you. I don't understand why.
"There was another reason," she said, somewhat later. "More than one, in fact. It seems that I have become accustomed to my independence-at least, from my father and my brothers. Jack, my childhood protector, is long gone to Pondicherry, where he is making his fortune a-shaking the pagoda tree like that Lord Manymead you tell me about. In his absence, Gerald rules the roost, our father included. He is more the bully than ever. And poor Jude-well, he always was a scrub, I fear.
"No, I prefer my own household, my own little ward, my own people. And my own husband, thank you very much, sir. " She nuzzled his shoulder where it joined his neck. "Now, tell me your tale. What dragons have you slain lately, for king and country?"
Hoare gave her a drastically curtailed precis.
"You seem to have learned a great deal, Bartholomew, while on the North America station," she said. Her voice was slightly acid. "In addition, of course, to getting married. This 'burling' you described, for instance. Why, I should not be surprised to learn that you learned gambling as well as the other naughty habits-those I enjoy so much."
Hoare startled and gulped. His past, in fact, held a secret that, while it would not be held disgraceful in the eyes of the world, he preferred to keep to himself. Stationed in Halifax as second in a sloop during the closing days of the fratricidal American war, he had taken up cards. He had been almost as lucky at the table as he had been earlier in the rebellion, when he had snatched up a small fortune in prize money while still a mere midshipman.
However, his shame derived from neither the gambling itself nor his good fortune in it. The shame was that, wrongly accused of cheating by a spirited young French-Canadian seigneur who had lost heavily to him at a card game, honor had compelled him to call the man out. Georges-Louis Honore Laplace was an inexperienced stripling, though a creditable shot like most of his fellow countrymen, but Hoare had already been out almost as many times as he had years. In the ensuing encounter, he had missed his aim, which was to inflict a mere gentle chastisement, and had severely wounded his opponent.
During his long convalescence, young Laplace was attended by his slender younger sister Antoinette. Once, when duty allowed him ashore, young Bartholomew had visited his victim's sickbed below the Citadel, met the sister, and lost his heart to her.