Hoare and the matter of treason

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Shall I lift you aboard, Miss Austen?" Bartholomew Hoare whispered with all his force into the cold, hazy morning air. Hoare had been deprived of his full voice eleven years ago when he was struck in the throat by a musket ball while defending His Majesty George Ill's plan. He saw the cloud of his breath blow away with the stiff breeze.

Now, although some years had passed since he had faced ocean weather, Hoare was still generally brown. It was his natural color. He was long, stringy, wiry, and, for the next few minutes, still a solitary, lonely widower.

"Thank you very kindly, sir," Miss Austen replied with some asperity, "but after all, with two brothers in the navy, I must already be quite familiar, must I not, with the process of boarding and leaving a ship upon visiting them, especially in harbor? And especially when, like this one, it is a very small ship?"

So saying, she withdrew her mitted hands from her muff, leaving it to dangle around her neck by its ribbon harness. She reached up, took hold of the handiest of the lanyards bracing down Royal Duke's shrouds, placed one leg in the entry port and hoisted herself easily out of the wherry. With her other hand, the one with the reticule dangling on the wrist, she reached out and grasped the hand that her host, the groom, extended her. The hood of her cloak, which she had drawn over her brown hair, presumably to guard its precious curl against the wind, fell back.

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