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
… but there. Dugas knew too much to be left in enemy hands. He had to be silenced. I owe penance for that, and for the death of the honest doctor. He, too, was well-meaning-"
"Mais qu'est-ce que vous dites, monsieur?" came Fortier's appalled voice in Hoare's ear. Moreau fell silent for a moment.
"There," he then said. "I've told you all this so you can meditate about it while you drown. Overboard with him. Now."
Each of the men holding Hoare was well-muscled, and their grip was unbreakable for a man of Hoare's age and condition. He found himself swinging by his arms and legs between two pairs of powerful arms. Helped along by a light, disdainful push from Moreau, they tossed Hoare over Marie Claire's low rail. He barely had time to draw breath before he struck the water.
Chapter XIV
Irish Pennants-the occasional tag ends of line left by careless crewmen to drag along over a vessel's side-had always spelled slipshod seamanship to Hoare, and, like his fellow officers, he had suppressed them wherever found, as if they were so many signs of sodomy. Now, however, he thanked fortune that Moreau, at least, cared nothing for them. From a cleat below Marie Claire's toy stern gallery a good three fathoms of half-inch line trailed sinuous in her wake. One of Hoare's flailing hands found its bitter end. It might have been the painter of a poorly minded skiff, for it was frayed and not whipped. Whatever else it may have been, it was a blessing.
Hoare kicked off his shoes. As silently as he could, he hauled himself up the line in the dark, hand over hand. As silently as he could, he hoisted himself far enough out of the water to shift his grip to the rail of the stern gallery. The carven structure was a mere flourish which Moreau must have installed to make his little schooner seem bigger. It was rugged enough to carry part of Hoare's weight, but when he tried to hoist himself as silently as he could out of the water, it creaked softly, alarmingly, out of the vessel's own rhythm.