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man should have been the leader of the two. And who had known this to be the case? He could not remember.
    He stopped, turned in his tracks, and climbed up the town hall steps. Common sense told him the town lockup would be in the hall’s cellars; that would be the proper location for a dungeon, be it real or fictional. He found it there, guarded by a whiskery turnkey who was sleepily closing a barred door behind him.
    â€œI’m a friend of Mrs. Graves,” Hoare told him. “I want to see the man who died attacking her.”
    â€œYe needn’t whisper, sir,” the guard said, pointing over his shoulder. “Dead as King Charles, ’e be. ’E be right in there, layin’ quiet as can be.”
    Hoare pushed open the door. Below the rough, bloodstained bandage around its head, the face of the corpse was an ashen blue. No one had closed its staring eyes. There were traces of blood around its nostrils and a crust of dried foam around its lips.
    Hoare had seen enough men dead of enough causes to know this man had not been killed by the blow of Mrs. Graves’s slung stone. He had been smothered.
    Thoughtfully, Hoare left the morgue.
    â€œWhere is the man we captured with him?” he asked.
    The turnkey shrugged. “Dunno, sir. Some men of the town watch took un off just a few minutes past.”
    Leaving the town hall, Hoare retraced his steps. He arrived at Inconceivable, shoved her off, set sail, and set course for Portsmouth. The wind had backed into the east, and once again he could progress only with tack upon tack. He enlivened the trip by selecting a new name for his vessel from among the inventory in her bilges; she had left Portsmouth as Inconceivable but would return as Insupportable.
    It was then he discovered Inconceivable had been searched from stem to gudgeon. Hoare had installed a small armory in her forepeak. It included a one-pounder swivel or jingal, mountable into either of two sockets, one of which was set into her bows and the other dead aft; a Kentucky rifle; four pistols; a cavalry saber; a rapier; five grenades; several mantraps; a crossbow with twenty quarrels of various types; and powder and shot for the firearms. At considerable expense, Hoare had equipped the latter with the novel percussion caps.
    And now his deadly Kentucky gun was gone.

Chapter III
    B ARTHOLOMEW H OARE’S father, Joel Hoare, was of Viking stock. Joel brought that good name of his with him when he came south from the Orkneys as an orphan boy, and he had defended it successfully throughout his rise from ship’s boy and through the hawsehole to master’s mate, thence to post captain.
    Both Hoare sons had defended that good name with fists and feet again and again while still in their nonage. Bartholomew’s elder brother, John, had been badly injured in such an affray and still limped about the family property in Shropshire, debarred forever from the sea.
    Even before Captain Hoare had negotiated his younger son a post as midshipman in Centurion, 60, Bartholomew had run a jeering schoolmate through the thigh with a carving knife. Now, more than thirty years later, it was a foolhardy man who mocked that good name of Bartholomew Hoare’s; though thus far he had avoided killing a single opponent, he wounded at will with pistol, épée, or saber.
    As befitted the descendant of Vikings, Bartholomew was not only a warrior but also a masterly seaman. While still a midshipman, he had been the sole deck officer in the brig Beetle to survive the great tempest of September ’81, when a rogue sea swept her quarterdeck clean. That night he led her surviving crew in club-hauling the brig off the roaring rocks of the Isles of Shoals.
    Not only that; as young Hoare was working Beetle to Halifax under jury rig he had taken a small Yankee privateer by a ruse—her master had drained her crew into his English prizes—and he brought her into Halifax in modest triumph. The