Hoare now had Mr. Prickett conduct him to the narrow cabin off Vantage's wardroom where Mr. Wallace lay supine, snoring softly in a miasma of used rum.
"Sir! Sir!" cried Mr. Prickett. "Here's Mr. Hoare to talk with you about Captain Hay's murder!"
"Oh, my God," Wallace said. "Hasn't honor been satisfied yet?" He tried to sit up in his berth but fell back with a grunt of pain. "Talk away, then, Hoare. I'm at your mercy."
"Just tell me what happened the night of the murder, if you will."
Wallace had nothing to add to Sergeant Doyle's evidence. He had not even been aboard Vantage at the time of the murder, although he had returned aboard within the hour and had directed Doyle to muster the men. To Wallace's shame, he was even more ignorant than his sergeant of the men in his detachment. All were new.
As Hoare was about to leave, Wallace cleared his throat.
"I owe you an apology, sir." His whisper was little louder than Hoare's.
"No apology is necessary, Mr. Wallace," Hoare replied. "Honor has already been satisfied."
"I was drunk last night, I confess," Wallace went on. "I was doubly at fault, first for miscalling you and then for mocking your lack of a voice. I did not know, then, the circumstances under which you lost it. I shall not forget your lesson. Indeed, I'll remember it in my gettings up and my lyings down, or whatever the phrase is… unh!"
Hoare could not forbear his silent laugh, but Wallace was not finished.
"Will you shake hands, sir?"
"Of course."
At last, Hoare could shove off in the late Captain Hay's borrowed gig, under sail. Mr. Prickett was bouncing like a ball in its bows despite the orders of the senior mid at the tiller to bloody keep still in the boat. He had successfully implored his acting captain to let him remain seconded to Mr. Hoare's inquiry.
Hoare directed the midshipman-coxwain at his side to land them, not at Portsmouth Hard, but at the Inner Camber, where he found Peter Gladden again awaiting him in the snug of the Swallowed Anchor. He dismissed Mr. Prickett to the inn's kitchen to be stuffed like a goose under the eye of the pink girl Susan.
Gladden had caught the first mudlark he had seen, gave him Hoare's message to deliver to Jom York, and then called upon his brother in his place of confinement. It was a dark little room in the cellars of Commissioner's House.
"This affair has been death on breeches as well as on post captains," he said to Hoare. "It has ruined the ones your target Wallace was wearing when you shot him, Mr. Watt's when Captain Hay bled all over them, my poor brother's… and for that matter," he added, "I hardly suppose Captain Hay's own unmentionables are any the better for their experience the other night.
"But you were going to tell me about Jom York."
"Jom York is the king of the beachcombers of Southampton Water," said Hoare. Hoare himself, he explained, spent his spare time, whether ashore or aboard
Insupportable, in snooping. He had snooped into the Weymouth Town Hall, with those perplexing results. He snooped into coves, often when not wanted, as once when he had interrupted a clutch of petty smugglers unloading a cargo of casks. It was this that had earned him the trust of at least one gang and had resulted in his being given the interesting anker and then having it taken from him by person or persons unknown. It had been in another cove, of course, that he had encountered that singularly interesting, deadly partridge, Eleanor Graves.
He watched surgeons at their grisly work and listened to them. He interrogated butchers, masters-at-arms, tradesmen, cordwainers, mudlarks-anyone, in short, who had enlightenment to offer him.
Only country folk were immune to Hoare's curiosity. He had no use for farmers. He lumped all herders with beekeepers as men who had dangerous creatures in their power. But even in the countryside he made exceptions for poachers, tinkers, and gypsies.
During one of his snooping expeditions, he explained, he had encountered Jom York, king of the beachcombers, in a slimy little shebeen. Later, Hoare made a friend of the man when he slipped one of his royal henchmen out from the grip of the press. Jom York kept every longshoreman and mudlark, as well as his beachcombers, well under his eye and his large, horny thumb. He extracted his dues of information from all, and from their receivers and fences as well.
It was a long tale, made longer by Hoare's need to use his exhausting emergency whisper toward the end.
"He smells horrible, but he has his uses," Hoare concluded. By now, the two were dissecting a grilled turbot.
"But what about the Marine uniform?"
"As you observed this morning, it is unheard of for a captain to allow his cabin door to go unguarded. The captains right here at Spithead in '97 learned that to their cost, as did Bligh of the Bounty."
"And Hermione's beast of a captain, as well," added Gladden.
"Exactly. And from what we have learned of Captain Hay, he was no man to skimp on proper routine. So I believe that, as Sergeant Doyle avows, a Marine guard was posted and that the murderer either enticed him away from his post or did away with him in some way. Or-more likely-the murderer was the Lobster himself.
"And Vantage's sergeant of Marines admits the head count he took that night may have been off by one or even two. And he reports a missing uniform."
Chapter VI
Wednesday afternoon, a frightened, fetid wharf rat brought a soggy parcel to the Swallowed Anchor's snug. Susan the pink girl brought both rat and parcel to Hoare and Gladden. Mr. Prickett, who now would let no one detach him from his mute lieutenant, looked with wide, delighted eyes at the smelly things. Both objects, wrapped in oatmeal-colored shoddy, oozed and stank of harbor mud. As between the courier and the packet, only one was the object of Hoare's interest. He dismissed the other with a shilling, and the creature poured gratefully away, carrying its stench with it and singing Hoare's praises discordantly.
Hoare drew his sheath knife and cut the cord binding the parcel. A waterlogged red garment slipped to the floor. He smiled at it as if it were cloth of gold.
Hoare brought the coat's collar up to his nose and sniffed. Then he did the same, first with one of the folded-back cuffs, then with the other. He took a huge white kerchief out of his own coattails and wiped it across the inside of the coat collar where it would have rubbed against the wearer's neck, and then across the cuffs. He nodded to himself and handed the coat to the little mid.
"Take it away, Mr. Prickett," he whispered, "and label it 'Coat found in Portsmouth Harbor.' Put today's date on it. Oh, and take this, too, please."
He handed Mr. Prickett the kerchief. "Label it 'kerchief, with matter removed from Marine uniform found in Portsmouth Harbor, this date.' So, Gladden. We can be practically certain this coat was not last worn by one of Vantage's Marines."
"How can you say that?" asked Gladden.
"Work it out, sir. Work it out."
That afternoon Mr. Gladden escorted Hoare to the place where his brother lay in durance.
Fortunately, the durance faced south, and the afternoon sun poured into it through a small barred window set high in the rough stone walls. There was no need to light the tallow candles flanking the pitcher and basin on the deal table.
In looks, the brothers shared only their wavy corn-yellow hair. Where Peter was shorter than Hoare, Arthur Gladden would have looked him in the eye when he rose to greet them, but for his stooped, scholarly posture. Instead of a bright cornflower blue, his eyes looked faded. Where his brother's face was robust and ruddy, Arthur was lantern-jawed and pallid. He wore clean breeches at last, but the odor of his lapse lingered faintly about him. It was reinforced by the reek of the untended chamber pot in one corner.