Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities (18 page)

“Which gentleman arrived first?” Hoare asked.

Mrs. Graves shook her head. “I fear I do not recall, sir. They both said all the proper things, I suppose, and did what must be done, but by then I had begun to be a trifle confused. One of them—Sir Thomas, I suppose, as the senior magistrate—took charge of affairs. It must have been he who had Simon's body removed from the chair and laid out decently on his bed.

“I am ashamed to say that from that moment until the next morning—the Wednesday—I remember nothing. I awakened in my own bed, with no knowledge of how I got there. In fact, I was hard put to it to recall any of the previous night's events. It seems that Agnes, who I am sure meant well, administered a draft to me, unaware that Mr. Morrow had already taken it upon himself to do so.”

“Mr. Morrow? How would he have found…?”

“Mr. Morrow has become quite familiar with my husband's workplace. I believe that is to be laid at
your
door, Mr. Hoare.”

This brought Hoare up all standing. “I do not understand you, ma'am,” he protested.

“Simon had little to say to me about the project in which he was engaged with Mr. Morrow,” the widow said. “He was always very closemouthed about his doings, both as a physician and as a natural philosopher or mechanician—whichever term you prefer. But he gave me to understand the two were experimenting with nonmedical uses of the listening device which so caught Mr. Morrow's interest when you and he dined with us a fortnight ago.”

That explanation was as good as any. Hoare himself had noticed the American's interest in the instrument. He went on to the matter of most immediate interest.

“And the message? When did you notice it was missing?” he whispered.

“After I came to my senses on Wednesday morning,” Mrs. Graves said. “I returned to where we are now standing, to greet my dead husband. The servants had had mercy on me, for his body was cleaned and decently laid out on his cot.

“I sat down beside him once again for a moment, to share with him a few last memories. Then I recalled myself to duty and went to his writing table to begin informing those who should be informed … his sons, of course, and a few more distant relatives.

“That was when I realized the document that interests you so much had disappeared from the worktable. So, too, had the sheet upon which Simon had been writing. The Bible, though, was still there, right where it is now.”

“The Bible?”

“Did I not tell you, sir? Here.” She took the familiar black volume and offered it to Hoare, who leafed through it.

“But it's in French!” he exclaimed.

“Which makes it doubly peculiar,” she said. “As a rule, Dr. Graves would hardly have been reading his Bible at all, let alone in French. He was no more godly than myself, I fear. We have not been well regarded at St. Ninian's. In fact, I was surprised when Mr. Witherspoon consented to pray over him. Nonetheless, my husband's knowledge of Scripture was as great as any bishop's. And he speaks—spoke—French as well as you or I speak English.

“In any event, I felt it important to know what Simon was doing in those last minutes before he was killed, so I took the occasion of his burial to ask Mr. Morrow and Sir Thomas if they knew anything of the documents. Neither gentlemen could tell me anything. In fact, it was then that Sir Thomas suggested I had imagined them. He reminded me, ever so gently, that I was already in a state of confusion and that I had subsequently swooned. Mr. Morrow—the two gentlemen were together—agreed. I did not swoon, Mr. Hoare. I never swoon. I was drugged.”

“Drugged, ma'am?”

“Yes. As I told you just a minute ago, Mr. Morrow had administered a calmative draft from my husband's shelves, and my well-meaning abigail followed suit. I … did … not … swoon.”

“I understand, ma'am,” Hoare replied, trying to make his flat whisper sound as placatory as he could.

To his surprise, Mrs. Graves smiled. It was the first time Hoare had seen her dimples since that first evening, in this very house, when she had displayed her writing tricks.

She looked at him quizzically. “Has anyone ever told you, Mr. Hoare, that you could make your fortune on the stage? Your facial expressions—and, indeed, the motions of your entire body—give a remarkably clear picture of your state of mind. Perhaps it is a subtle way of communicating what a whisper such as yours cannot convey … a compensation, do you think?

“Forgive me, sir,” she said. “I grow ever more impatient with men who assume that, because I am a woman, I am
mere
 … not only feeble but foolish. I am neither.

“To return to the matter of the message: despite Sir Thomas and Mr. Morrow, there is clear evidence that there had been papers on my husband's table when he was killed, which were no longer there by the time I returned to this room.

“Look.” She pointed to the table. “The spatters of blood have been wiped from its surface, but not before they left these stains in the wood. They were hard to see by candlelight, I suppose, against the polished mahogany, but there they are. Do you see what I see?”

Hoare nodded. Now that Mrs. Graves had pointed them out, he could see that several of the dark spots were not perfectly round. They were semicircles, as if part of the blood had fallen on another surface, which had then been abstracted. The ghostly outlines of two pieces of paper met his eyes, as clearly as if the sheets were still there.

“Shall I tell you what I think, Mr. Hoare?” Mrs. Graves asked.

Hoare nodded again.

“I believe one of my two callers that night removed the message for reasons of his own. And, since Edward Morrow had the most to do with my husband, I think I now suspect him of being the more likely culprit.

“Why he might behave in such an underhanded way can only be a matter of speculation, but it might have to do with the inquiry he and my husband were carrying out together. Perhaps the message related to some valuable discovery, which Mr. Morrow decided on the spot to arrogate to himself alone. But that, as I say, is only speculation, and in suggesting it I may be blackening the reputation of a blameless man.”

Hoare made a mental note. He had long since decided he must question both Mr. Morrow and Sir Thomas. His inquiry of Mr. Morrow, at least, would now have added substance.

“Would your witchcraft with the pen extend to a description of the message?” he asked.

“I have no witchcraft, Mr. Hoare,” Mrs. Graves said sadly. “No broomstick could bear me; I am too stout.”

Once again, a forthright remark of the widow's left Hoare at a stand.

“Let me try to show you, however,” she said. “If you will be so kind as to bring me a chair … No, no, Mr. Hoare, not my husband's wheeled chair. Choose another, if you please.”

The summer sun caught her hair as she settled herself down at the writing table. Hoare noted a few more white strands in it than he had seen when they first met on Portland Bill. She drew a fresh sheet to her and began to write.

“I cannot recover the words,” she said. “In fact, I doubt they
were
words in the usual sense, for they were singularly uniform.”

Looking over her shoulder, Hoare saw the “words” take shape. He had seen the selfsame formations not so long ago, on the tissue-paper messages Mr. Watt had studied so fruitlessly.

“The only word I could decipher was this last one,” Mrs. Graves said as she wrote.

“Jehu!” Hoare's exclamation was a strangled grunt of triumph.

“Did you sneeze, sir?”

Hoare laughed. A woman of his acquaintance had described his laugh as the sound of a dropped eyelash. “No, ma'am. I said, ‘Jehu,' as you were writing it down.”

“Yes,” she said. “The wild driver, you know. Second Kings, chapter 9, verse 20, I believe.”

“I did not tell you, Mrs. Graves, but a series of documents with the same signature has come into my possession under suspicious circumstances. Tell me, are you also gifted at ciphering and deciphering secret codes?”

She shook her head. “No, sir.” She paused. “Of course!” she cried. “The document was a ciphered message, and Simon had begun to translate it into readable form!”

“I do believe…,” Hoare began, but Mrs. Graves overrode his whisper. She handed Hoare her re-creation, and he pocketed it.

“Why, pray, would Mr. Morrow have abstracted it? And why would Simon have had it in his possession in the first place?”

Hoare shrugged. “We cannot even guess now, ma'am. Let us see how matters unfold.”

“There is more, Mr. Hoare. Let us remove into my drawing room, where it is more comfortable and the memories are less painful.”

When Mrs. Graves had resumed her tuffet, she continued.

“I have decided that since you are not only a naval officer but also evidently deal with confidential matters from time to time, I shall do England no harm by informing you of an activity in which my husband engaged himself on behalf of our country. He was sworn to secrecy. So, therefore, was I.”

Hoare sat forward.

“An agent of the English intelligence service approached Simon several months ago. He had learned that Simon, besides being a physician of some standing, was also skilled in the contrivance of novel mechanisms of a scientific kind—not only clocks and watches with unusual properties but also orreries, for instance, and the like.

“He asked my husband if he could devise a sturdy, accurate mechanism that would sound a small signal bell at a preset time, as far ahead as a year from the time it was set. It would be used, the man said, as a check upon a vessel's longitude as determined by conventional means. I admit I do not understand how that was to be done, but then I am no navigator. Undoubtedly it will be obvious to you, Mr. Hoare.”

“It is not, ma'am, but that is of no consequence. I was never a close student of the arts. As any midshipman must, I learned to fix my ship's position with clock, quadrant, and line of bearing, but no more. And even that experience is nearly ten years out-of-date.”

“In any case, Simon built a first trial model, then a second improved design. I believe he constructed five or six of them all told.”

“Do you know who the English agent was?” Hoare asked.

“No, Simon kept that information to himself, and I never spied on him.”

“Of course not.” Hoare's heart sank. “Thank you for telling me. I shall treat the information in the confidence it deserves.”

At his request, Mrs. Graves now assembled the other witnesses at hand—the small staff of household servants—and withdrew to the drawing room so he could question them without her possibly disturbing presence. He quickly found that the maid, Agnes, and Mrs. Betts, the cook, had nothing to contribute save tearful words of woe.

Tom, the Graveses' manservant, had more interesting things to tell him.

“I thought I heard a shot like in the night, sir, but I was that tired, I rolls over and goes back to sleep till the mistress woke us by callin' up back stairs.

“Well, then I gets me breeches and shoes on, sir, and goes downstairs to Master's rooms. There Mistress is a-settin' on the floor in the middle of the room, a-holdin' of Master's head.

“‘Go quick, Tom,' she says, ‘an' knock up Mr. Morrow an' Sir Thomas.' So I goes to Sir Thomas, who was abed, and then I goes uphill to Mr. Morrow, and then I comes home.”

“Had Mr. Morrow also been in bed?”

“'E were in shirt and breeches, sir, so I dunno.”

“Thank you, Tom. You did quite right,” Hoare whispered.

He followed Tom out of the doctor's workplace and made his way into the drawing room.

“I think I have finished my business here, ma'am,” he said. “It only remains for me to call briefly upon Mr. Morrow and Sir Thomas, and to question the examiner … Dr. Olney, is it not?”

“Mr. Olney, sir,” she said. “He is a surgeon, you will remember, and not a physician. As to the two gentlemen, may I speak a word of caution?”

“Please.”

“Mr. Morrow is a very deep man, and proud. He built the competence left him into a fortune. He was not the first to discover the distaste our English gentry have for money earned in trade, as he earned his, instead of inheriting his wealth. He is therefore proud of having made his way into acceptance in our modest country society, and he is likely to resist anything that puts his hard-bought standing at risk.

“I have known Sir Thomas longer than I have Mr. Morrow. He is as proud of his ancestry as Mr. Morrow is of his accomplishments. He believes, I think, his blood to be a brighter blue than that of some of the nation's governors at Windsor and Whitehall, and is convinced that he is being refused the higher rank which he therefore deserves. He will brook no interferences in his reign over Weymouth and its environs. But there. You will laugh at my presumption.”

“It is no presumption, ma'am. It sounds very much like keen perception.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hoare,” she said. “Be frank with me, then. You are prepared to help me in my pursuit of my husband's killer?”

“As far as my service duties permit, ma'am. The matter of the ciphers leads me to believe that there is, in fact, some connection between your late husband and the work of some less savory characters in Portsmouth.”

At once, Hoare regretted these words, for Mrs. Graves's eyes grew cold. “Surely not, sir. Not only was he a cripple; despite his education in France, he was the most honest of Englishmen. Will you not explain yourself?”

“I had not known Dr. Graves was educated in France.”

Mrs. Graves's voice was now far less cordial. She showed no dimples at all. “At Lyon, Toulouse, and the Sorbonne. He studied with both Dupuytren and Laënnec, as you already know. That is general knowledge.

“But I fear I keep you here under a misapprehension. I had hoped to enlist your help in tracking down my husband's killer, not in blackening his name as a loyal British subject. You know your way out, I believe. I bid you a good day, sir.”