These thoughts interwove themselves in Hoare's brain with thoughts about the ciphered messages. Now, he was sure. There must be a link between the anker full of clockwork, Dr. Graves, and the late Mr. Kingsley of Vantage. What was it? And why had the two men-so different in ability and calling- been killed?
The fog's sudden onset caught Hoare by complete surprise. A slightly heavier breath of breeze, a brief gurgle under Unimaginable's bows, and the stars vanished. With them went the wind. The pinnace slowed perceptibly. Hoare's view forward shortened, was gone. Within a minute, he could barely make out Unimaginable's own mast, and she lay idle, sails slatting in a low, greasy leftover swell. Only the faint red and green glows of her running lights reached him now.
He went below to get out the conch shell he used as a fog horn. Back on deck again, he returning to his niche against the taffrail and blew a long, mournful hoot into the featureless gray-black. He repeated the blast about every minute, counting by his regular pulse. Between hoots, he listened.
There were no other hoots, though once he thought to hear a faint echo of his own.
Aft, a faint blur in the darkness. He aimed the conch toward it and hooted.
"Ahoy," came a quiet call.
Not being able to reply, he set down the conch, drew out his boatswain's pipe, and twittered.
A blaze, a crack, and a stunning blow across the back of his head, and the stars returned, flickering across his vision like so many fireworks. He slumped sideways. So this was death, he thought.
He could not have been unconscious for more than a minute. He could not understand, he could not see, he could not move… but he could feel, for he felt a soft thump against Unimaginable's larboard side. He could hear. He heard a man say something. He could not understand. As far as he could tell, he was sprawled against the tiller, looking upward and seeing only the fog… or nothing.
He felt Unimaginable lurch to larboard with the weight of someone coming aboard. Whoever it was-he could see! — leaned over him, picked him up by the shoulders, and shook him. His jaw lolled. Pain lanced through his head, and he heard the steady, slow drip of his blood on Unimaginable's quarterdeck. Damn him, he thought, and laughed at himself. I'll make the bloody bastard pay for bloodying my bloody quarterdeck with my own bloody blood.
"Mort. Bon." He understood this, well enough. "Aides-moi, louche. Mettons-le en bas."
Another man came aboard. Between the two of them, they hauled Hoare to Unimaginable's hatchway and dropped him below. He landed on his face and felt his nose crunch against the cabin table. He heard at least one of the men follow him, using the more civilized ladder. A light flared. A fist took him by the hair, picked his head up, and dropped it onto the floorboards.
"Vous devez lui couper la gorge, monsieur, pour la surete," said the second man. ("You'd better cut his throat, sir, to be sure.)
"Non. Il a ete officer et gentilhomme. Viens; prends-toi les pieds. Vite, alors!" (No. He was an officer and a gentleman. Come on, take his feet. Quickly.)
Both men's French had an odd, eerily familiar accent. But Hoare was very tired. He decided to go away again.
Hoare's right side lay in water. The other side was cold and wet. The back of his head throbbed, and he could not breathe through his swollen nose, so he could smell nothing. But he could see again. A square of fog showed him the open hatchway through which the boarders had dropped him. And he could hear-the heavy slosh of seawater about him and the regular bump, bump, bump of some pot or other swanning about in Unimaginable's bilges.
And he could move. He reached painfully up with one arm, gripped the edge of the table, and heaved enough so as to bring the other arm up in aid of its friend.
Had the boarders stove Unimaginable in, then? If they had, he thought wildly, he'd have their balls for breakfast. But she could not have taken on much water yet. If he knew where he was… He was sitting in water, not on the combined floorboards and trail boards that bore Unimaginable's aliases, but directly in her bilges. The hard object intent on grinding him a new arsehole was her open seacock. Being a small, tight vessel, she only needed one cock. By being lightly impaled on it, he was keeping Unimaginable afloat by keeping it from doing its proper work of letting in the Channel. He apologized to the seacock, turned it off, vomited an ounce of bitter bile, rolled over, and fainted again in the bilges.
Hoare returned to his senses to see gray daylight outlined in the hatchway. Unimaginable still lay hove-to, swaying heavily in a slow, greasy swell. He summoned the strength to clamber up the ladder onto her deck, where he crawled forward and manned her pump. Stopping to rest after every few feeble heaves, he was able to summon a thin, intermittent stream of seawater from below to pour over the side.
Twice he had to make his way back below to clear floating debris from the intake. On the second of these trips, he thought to get a piece of soft tack from the waterproof cupboard over his stove. He picked up a soggy stocking, wrung it out, and returned topside. He wrapped the stocking around his throbbing head and sat himself beside Unimaginable's idly swinging tiller while he devoured the bread. When he was through, he felt stable enough on his pins to get to his feet and look about him, holding onto her larboard shrouds.
Though the sky was still a dull gray, the fog had lifted, and he could see several fisherman in the middle distance, between Unimaginable and Anvil Point. Through the haze on the horizon ahead, he could see the Needles. Unimaginable, praise God, had carried him quietly with the flowing tide past the eddies of St. Alban s Ledge during the night, without his help. She had brought him more than halfway home.
Hoare found the strength to trim the two standing sails and set Unimaginable on an easterly course under the faint southerly breeze. Still too full of ocean for comfort, she wallowed but complied.
Hoare felt weary, dizzy, and languid. He went below and sloshed about among the flotsam until he laid hold of a half-empty bottle of vin ordinaire and a slab of braxy ham, which he brought back on deck. Since this soaked him to the crotch once more, he resolved not to return below until Unimaginable was home and dry. The trip had been worth it, however, for the meat and wine brought a bit of energy to his body. He went forward and worked the barge's pump in a desultory way, while she idled on toward the Solent, helped along by the last of the flood. As the tide went slack, the breeze picked up, as often happens in these waters, until Unimaginable began to leave a gurgling wake. Hoare's deadened mind began to function again.
Obviously, the two men who had boarded his craft in the fog and left him for dead were French or Channel Islanders. More likely the latter, for they were scattered all over the south coast of Britain, making their living as fishermen, workboat men, smugglers. Searching his memory, he found within a hundred miles of here only one Frenchman who was not a prisoner of war or an officer on parole-Marc-Antoine de Chatillon de Barsac, the maitre d'escrime whose Portsmouth establishment Hoare haunted whenever occasion offered. But de Barsac was a friend and, moreover, suffered from violent seasickness. He had vowed never to set foot on a waterborne vessel again until he could return to France in triumph, with his King. He would hardly have been lying in wait for Hoare off St. Alban's Head on the sunniest of June days, let alone a foggy night.