Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities Read Online Free Page A

family pride: a Graves needed no stranger’s help. So Hoare watched as she and the maid Agnes formed a seat with their crossed hands, slipped them under the doctor, and flung him into the air. He gripped two handles on the chaise with his powerful old arms and swung himself into its seat. He reached down and drew his wife up beside him.
    The maid Agnes attached the wheeled chair behind the chaise by an ingenious metal latch and reached up to her master. The doctor drew her, too, into the chaise and clucked to the cob between its shafts; the chaise and the chair trundled off in the light rain. Hoare was oddly sorry to see it go, glad to know he would be seeing the Graves couple again.

Chapter II
    W HEN A watchful manservant ushered him into the Graves drawing room that evening after a long walk up the cobbled High Street, Hoare saw two other guests had preceded him. Mrs. Graves introduced him to the lady, naming her as a Miss Austen, a friend visiting from Bath. Like every properly schooled gentlewoman, Miss Austen sat her chair as if it were an instrument of torture, her long back well away from the support it offered the slovenly. Save for a pair of piercing, inquisitive dark eyes, her appearance was even less remarkable than Mrs. Graves’s. Hoare made his leg and forgot her.
    The gentleman was another matter. He was of his height, and heavier. He might be a seasoned thirty or a well-preserved fifty; Hoare could make no closer guess. His figure was foursquare. Above his ruddy lipless face and low forehead sprang long, coarse black hair, which he wore clubbed in the old style. The skin was drawn as tight over his broad cheekbones as it would have been over the knuckles of a clenched fist. But for the eyes, as gray as his own, Hoare could have mistaken him for one of the Red Indians he had seen in the streets of Halifax.
    â€œLieutenant Bartholomew Hoare … Mr. Edward Morrow,” Dr. Graves said, nodding to each in turn. “I hardly know which of you takes precedence over the other, so I hope the affronted party will bear with the insult.”
    â€œOur host tells me you have visited the New World, sir,” Morrow said.
    â€œI have, indeed, sir,” Hoare replied, “and I regret the parting of our two countries more than I can say.”
    â€œWhy, our two countries are still one, Mr. Hoare; at least they were when I last heard from Montreal.” He pronounced the town’s name in the English manner.
    â€œI beg pardon, sir; I had understood you to be American,” Hoare said.
    â€œAnd have the king’s loyal subjects north of the Saint Lawrence no right, sir, to call themselves American? After all, some of us came to America before the Yankees did, while my mother’s ancestors were already standing on their native shores to welcome the first European invaders. A welcome which, by the by, many of both peoples lived to regret.”
    Hoare felt his ears burn. He had meant no offense. Was this formidable-looking man intent upon a quarrel?
    â€œPeace, Mr. Morrow, peace,” Mrs. Graves said. Her putty-colored silken gown flattered neither her coloring nor her figure. Perched erect as she was, on a round, squat, cushiony hassock, she looked even more like a partridge than she had that afternoon. A partridge at home at the foot of her pear tree, Hoare thought, keeping her eggs warm.
    â€œYou are certainly the person present who is most entitled to the honor of being an American,” she told Mr. Morrow, rising from her nest. She left no eggs behind her.
    â€œMr. Hoare,” Dr. Graves said, “I have a request to make of you. Would you permit me to auscult your throat?”
    â€œAus…?” Hoare had never heard the word before.
    â€œI beg pardon, sir. I detest the parading of professional arcana, as I fear so many of my calling are wont to do. Simply put, as I should have put it in the first place, I would like to listen to the noises your throat might