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Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities

St. Martin's Press

Bartholomew Hoare and Eleanor Graves first met on the east reach of Portland Bill, across two sprawled bodies. It was late on a gray afternoon in mid-June of 1805 — Trafalgar year.

The week before, a water hoy, returning empty from supplying the ships on the Brest blockade, had brought in Scipio's launch. Scipio, 74 — a seventy-four-gunship of the line — had not been reported since she departed Plymouth five weeks ago, bound for that same Brest blockade. The launch was awash, empty, charred in places, badly mauled. Scipio had been well-found, well manned, and there had been no adverse weather on her presumed course.

The condition of the lonely launch had shouted "explosion" to Hoare. Moreover, he had had a brief encounter in May with the contents of an oddly well-made keg. The keg, of the small, ten-gallon size known as an "anker" to the vintner trade, had been picked up by a Coastguardsman on a country roadside near Corfe. It might have been poorly packed on a pony; the pony might have escaped from a midnight caravan; the caravan might have belonged to one of the region's flourishing smuggler gangs. Whatever the anker's provenance, its contents — strange pieces of clockwork — were far more interesting to His Majesty's government, and to Hoare, than mere brandy would have been.

Caught in the narrow grooves between the anker's tarred staves he had found grains of a fine grayish sand, of which he had kept a sample. The anker had been officially spirited out of Hoare's possession and taken off, he believed, to London. It was when he put together the two bits of information — the anker's contents and the ruined launch — that he had placed his suspicions before Sir George Hardcastle, Port Admiral in Portsmouth. An hour later Hoare had set off westward on a wearisome fourteen-hour day of tacking down-Channel in his own little pinnace-yacht Inconceivable, bearing the sand with him.

He had landed last night in Lyme Regis and had spent most of the day conferring with old Richard Dee about where the anker might have come ashore. Old Dee, Hoare had learned a year or more ago, had sold his fishing boat and gear when his aching bones got the better of him and on the proceeds had retired to an overturned barge on the western outskirts of Lyme. Here he had taken up the subject of sand. He claimed to be able to tell the source of any handful of sand, provided it derived from any beach between Land's End and Dover.

Hoare had found himself hard put to it to understand Dee. To his ear, the Dorset dialect comprised nothing but zs and oos. The man sounded like a giant obsolete bee. Moreover, since a spent ball had crushed Hoare's voice box at the Glorious First of June and old Dee was quite deaf, Hoare's remaining whisper of a voice was useless.

To communicate at all, then, he had had to dredge up an interpreter. Young Mary, the oldster's granddaughter, had had some schooling; she could pick up Hoare's whispers, relay them to her gaffer, and interpret his buzzing replies. Hoare felt indebted to her, although finding even her milder accent hard to understand at times.

He had begun by testing Dee's reported gift, using sand specimens whose provenance he knew and which he had brought along in tiny apothecary's vials. He had wholly failed to catch the old man out. Hoare had even set Dee a trap by combining dead-white sand from the Conqueror's landing place at Pevensey with a blood-red grit that he had collected on the beach below the cliff at Goonhilly Downs during a recent passage from Cornwall. Dee had peered at the pink mixture, rolled it between thumb and forefinger, smelled it, and cackled.

"Gaffer says, 'Ye'll not gammon Dickon Dee that easy,' sir," young Mary said. When the sand master went on to tell Hoare exactly where he had picked up both moieties, Hoare had to admit his feeble ruse. As penance, he had bought the old fisherman a second pint before offering him the specimen that he really wanted him to identify.

"Buzz. Ooo. Zuzz."

"He says: 'Now you'm goin' to tell me you didden pick her up on way past Weymouth,' sir," the girl said. "'But you'll be wrong again. That there sand be from off easterly side of Portland Bill, she be.

"'Halfway up the Bill, where the tide sets shoreward,' he says."

This time, Hoare had taken Dee at his word. After tipping young Mary and buying the old man his third pint, Hoare had hoisted his lanky self back aboard Inconceivable and cast off from Lyme's stone pier.

Today, the westerly wind was wet, raw for the season. Little spits of mixed rain and spray carried across the Bill to sting Hoare's face. Before taking her back up-Channel to her berth in Portsmouth's Inner Camber, he would collect another bit of sand from the spot old Dee had named and see for himself how well it matched his sample. While there, he would snoop a bit to see if any interesting flotsam besides the well-made anker had drifted ashore there.

Now as close to his goal as guesswork permitted, he slipped into Inconceivable's bows and lowered her kedge, deep enough to hang below her keel as a makeshift lead. The tide might be making, but he had no wish to ground her tender bottom on the knobby cobbles whose round tops crowded out the sand hereabouts like so many black grinding teeth.

It was now that Hoare first saw Eleanor Graves: a short woman in brown, her brown hair blowing across her face in the spray-laden gusts. She rose from behind an overturned shallop, to face two tinkerlike men with long cudgels who were approaching her along the beach at a purposeful trot. Fifty feet from her, and the same from him, Hoare could hear their jeering voices.

Putting two fingers into his mouth, Hoare blew a piercing whistle. The attackers paused. Then, seeing they had only one man to contend with, one turned to await Hoare's landing while the other continued his purposeful advance.

The woman reached back. In her left hand she held a sling — a sling! She twirled the ancient weapon underhand as if she were heaving the lead in a man-of-war's chains and slung a rock at her leading assailant. It struck him full in the forehead; he dropped, his legs twitching like a pair of gaffed salmon.

The other attacker stopped in his tracks. This was his mistake, for now the woman took a full step toward him and let fly another rock. She threw it this time, using her right hand and not her left. She must have hit her target in his nose or mouth, for Hoare saw him clap both hands to his face and heard a choked cry of pain.

Inconceivable grounded with a soft crunch at the feet of the two men. Hoare pulled the tiller from its straps to serve as a makeshift quarterstaff and launched himself over her bows at them. There was no need; the two were in no condition to fight on.

"Davids two, Goliaths zero," whispered Hoare to himself, and stepped up the shingly beach toward the woman in brown.

She had already whipped out a length of spun yarn from a coil hidden somewhere about her person and had bent over to secure her first target. The cold rage in her face changed to welcome on seeing Hoare's naval coat, and she finished knotting the man's limbs together in a neat cat's cradle behind him. "Well met, sir," she said, and cut another length of spun yarn. "Would you mind ...?" She handed him the second hank.

The woman would not be able to hear his whispered reply over the louder whisper of the soft surf, so Hoare simply nodded and turned to and triced up the other.

"I am in your debt, sir," she said in a clear contralto voice, "for coming to my rescue, even though I appear to have managed by myself.

"To whom am I indebted, may I ask?"

Even standing erect, she had to tilt her head back to look up into Hoare's faded gray eyes, for she could have been little more than five feet tall. Her figure was sturdy, if not plump; she reminded Hoare of an assertive partridge. Her piercing eyes were brown. There were a few gray streaks in her coarse brown windblown hair.

Hoare reached into an inner pocket of his coat and drew out several pieces of paper. Selecting one, he handed it to the brown woman with an apologetic look and a bow. She read it just loudly enough to be heard over the soft, pulsating rumble of surf.

"'Permit me to present myself: Bartholomew Hoare, Lieutenant, Royal Navy. My deepest respects. That I am not speaking to you is not a matter of intentional discourtesy but is due to my inability to speak above a whisper.'"

Unlike many strangers, the brown woman did not now assume that because Hoare was all but dumb he must be deaf to boot, for her next words were neither shouted nor spoken with the exaggerated care the unthinking use with infants and other incompetent persons who cannot talk back.

"I am Eleanor Graves, sir, wife of Dr. Simon Graves of Weymouth. I know he will add his thanks to mine for coming to my defense against this cowardly attack."

One of the bound bodies on the shingle, the man she had struck in the nose, had already struggled to a sitting posture. He was hunched over as far as his bonds permitted, dripping scarlet steadily onto the shingle between his leather breeches.

From Mrs. Graves's behavior, she and Hoare might have been meeting at a Bath cotillion instead of over their two victims on a cold, wet September beach.

"Now, sir, what shall we do with these rogues?" she asked.

For his answer, Hoare pulled out a set of wax tablets, of the kind the ancient Romans used, and wrote: "My boat — to Weymouth?"

"Excellent," she said. So, between the two of them, they dragged their cocooned captives across the shingle to Inconceivable, attached them to a handy-billy, and hoisted them aboard. They heaped the rogues out of the way but within sight, just aft of her companionway.

Hoare subjected the two men to a quick search. Other than a miscellany of miserable personal effects, seaman's sheath knives, two mason's hammers, and three guineas a man, Hoare found only the cudgels and a length of tough, thin line. He tossed the cudgels over the side, sequestered the hammers, the knives, and their sheaths, and appropriated the line for Inconceivable's small stores. He handed the guineas to Mrs. Graves.

Without any apparent concern about soaking her skirts, Mrs. Graves helped Hoare heave the pinnacle off the beach. She then took the hand he reached down to her, sprang aboard, and got out of his way. He trimmed the flapping sails, returned the tiller to its straps, and set a course alongshore toward Weymouth. It was not far.

His passenger sat silent in the tiny cockpit, facing him. Hoare realized she understood the futility of trying to converse with a stranger when she could not hear his replies. Unlike the few other women he knew, she seemed comfortable enough without speech passing. But as Inconceivable drew into the dock behind Weymouth's breakwater, she spoke.

"Do you know this harbor, Mr. Hoare?"

The town and the slopes behind it gave enough of a lee so that Hoare thought he could make himself heard. He cocked his head and shrugged. "Yes, but not well," he whispered. "I'll welcome local knowledge."

"If you do not choose to continue your voyage tonight — and I hope you will not — you may wish to rest at the Dish of Sprats. Over there to the left of where you are aiming now, this side of St. Ninian's Church. That's the steeple you can see."

Mrs. Graves might not know her nautical terms — she said "left" like a landsman, not "port" like a seaman — but her directions were clear all the same, and Hoare eased his helm to suit.

"Will you hold the tiller for a moment while I take off sail?" he whispered.

She heard the whisper. She hesitated for a moment, then grasped the tiller ahead of his hand, lightly at first, then with increasing assurance.

"So, so," he said. He stepped forward around the captives' surly bodies and dropped Inconceivable's jib onto its club, lashing it in place with its own sheet. He uncleated her main halliard and brought it aft with him to the helm.

"I'll take her now, ma'am," he said. "I'll be dropping the mainsail in a heap, so you should edge over to the rail."

Hoare thrust the tiller smoothly to starboard. As Inconceivable luffed up, he waited until she had just enough way left to make the harbor's sloping shore and let her tall mainsail go with a run to drop on top of the prisoners, together with the boom. He left them there for now, one muttering in a dazed voice. The little yacht's keel grated on the shingle once again, and she came to rest, listing slightly to starboard, while Hoare gave the mainsail its own rough furl and propped it in a pair of jeers.

He locked the cabin hatch and hopped ashore to offer Mrs. Graves a hand down. She took it — more out of courtesy than of necessity, Hoare thought — and leaped nimbly down in her soggy skirts to stand behind him, looking back at Inconceivable.

"We might turn our captives over to the port guard?" she said, half-inquiringly.

"Or the Chief Constable," Hoare suggested. "Whichever is less likely to be their drinking companion." While not actually acquainted with Weymouth's guardians of the law, he knew that all along Britain's beleaguered south coast the lawman and the unlawful were often as close as a virgin's thighs.

Mrs. Graves's laugh was an odd throaty gurgle. "Of course. Sir Thomas Frobisher, then. It would be ... what, three o'clock?"

Hoare nodded.

"Then he will be at the Town's Club — as will Dr. Graves, in all likelihood. Come."

She took Hoare's arm and directed him to a building facing the new esplanade below St. Ninian's. It was a large house, which Hoare thought could have belonged to a leading merchant of the town.

"The Club's house once belonged to a prominent merchant of the town," she said as if reading his thoughts. "But he fell on hard times, and a cabal of other leading citizens clubbed together to buy it and make it their meeting place. To be away from their wives, you know."

Hoare laughed. The breathy little noise, according to the waspish wife of a fellow officer, sounded for all the world like an angry butterfly.

The pale, leathery steward of the Town's Club must have seen Mrs. Graves coming, for he opened the massive door himself.

"Why, Mrs. Graves!" he cried. "You must have gone wading in the sea — and in this wet weather, too! Come in to the fire in the Strangers' Room, and make yourself comfortable while I call Dr. Graves!" He bustled ahead of the brown woman and Hoare, stirred up the sea-coal fire in the grate, and was about to leave them to toast in front of it when Mrs. Graves called after him to ask if Sir Thomas was in the house. He was.

"Ask him, Smith, if he would be so kind ... And perhaps, too, you would send a man to Dr. Graves' home for my maid. He should tell her to bring my olive twill gown and a cape to me here at the Club."

The fire's growing warmth was welcome.

Mrs. Graves looked up at Hoare. "If you were not present, sir, I would be hoisting these poor skirts to warm my person directly."

"If you wish, ma'am, I shall be happy to withdraw and leave you to your privacy."

"I wish no such thing," she said. "That would be poor return indeed for your services."

"What, ma'am, may I ask, took you to the beach under Portland Bill?" Hoare whispered.

"Stones, Mr. Hoare."

"Stones, ma'am? For use as missiles?"

"Only incidentally, as needed. Ever since I was a child, I have had a fondness for the remarkable shapes and colors of sea-washed stones. They dwell in flat pans filled with water, to keep their colors bright.

"I patrol Portland Bill quite regularly, for the local urchins who collect stones elsewhere — sometimes from under my very nose — remember the old Saxon belief that the Bill was once the druids' Isle of the Dead and shun it.

"Dr. Graves has sometimes chided me for taking up a whole room of our house for my collection. But 'tis a small room in a large house, I remind him, and he need not begrudge me the space.

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Excerpted from Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities by Wilder Perkins. Copyright © 1998 Wilder Perkins. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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