The Baltic Gambit

by Dewey Lambdin

  “A good beginning, Kapitan Lewrie?” Rybakov jovially enquired.

  “A splendid beginning, sir . . . my lord,” Lewrie told him as he took a seat at the other end of the table. Another cup of coffee was set before him, along with a plate of scrambled eggs speckled with bacon crumbles, diced onion, and melted cheese. With it was a piping-hot heap of shredded fried potatoes, and a goodly slice of the roast beef on which they’d dined the night before. On a separate, smaller plate lay two thick slices of buttered toast, and the jam pot was close by.

  Lewrie rubbed his hands together, to warm them as much as welcome his breakfast, before spreading jam on his bread. He took a first bite, tastebuds tingling in anticipation, and looked up at Rybakov for a second.

  Dammit, this’ll get tryin’, Lewrie thought, feeling irked that anyone shared his table. Captains of His Majesty’s warships were, by dint of authority, required to live apart from the rest of their crews and officers; inviting them in for a meal only so often, and spending the bulk of their time at sea in enforced isolation. Frankly, there were times that one could relish such isolation, and this was one of them. It was rare that Lewrie had anyone in for breakfast, and he was used to eating by himself as the ship’s day began. Now, here was this interloper that Admiralty and Foreign Office had foisted off on him!

  A sip of very hot coffee, a forkful of eggs, then a bite of the roast beef, sauced with a bit of potatoes, a second bite of bread, and he could almost dismiss the nobleman’s presence, if he made it plain he was concentrating on his victuals, and wanted to be left in peace.

  “I was just thinking, Kapitan Lewrie . . . ,” Rybakov began to say.

  Burn in Hell! Lewrie silently fumed.

  “I am hungry,” Count Levotchkin complained, emerging at last from his sleeping space, and stumbling towards the table. He looked like Death’s Head on a Mop-Stick, and his elegant clothing was rumpled.

  “Bonjour, cher cousin,” Count Rybakov cheerily greeted him, reverting to a Russian aristocrat’s preferred French.

  “You ate without me?” Levotchkin petulantly groused as he reeled into a chair with a dizzy thump. “We are moving? At sea? Damn. You, boy,” he said, snapping fingers at Pettus. “I will have what the Kapitan is having. First, fetch me tea.”

  Pettus got a squinty, clench-mouthed look, and Lewrie, recalling why he’d been sacked by his last employers, worried that the tea might end in Levotchkin’s hair. He gave Pettus a warning look.

  “You rose late, Anatoli,” Rybakov gently chid him. “Yes, we are at sea . . . on our way, at last. You slept through it? Amazing.”

  “I’ll send word to the galley,” Lewrie offered, “though, I fear there’ll be a delay, if the galley fires’ve been curbed. And you’ll have to supply my cook with the makings. Whitsell, run tell Nettles he’s another breakfast to prepare, and the goods are on the way.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “My tea!” Levotchkin demanded, head in both hands. He looked round for his manservant. “Sasha, tea, davai. Vite vite!” he snapped.

  The big, burly bald manservant went to the side-board, poured a cup, and placed it before his master. But . . . just before he did so, he peered long and hard at Lewrie, as if undergoing an epiphany; not a glad one, from the way he frowned. As Count Levotchkin was having his first restorative sip, Sasha bent down to whisper in his ear, all the while with his eyes glued on Lewrie, who was irked with such effrontery, and put down his utensils to glare back.

  “Mumble mumble London . . . argey-bargey Panton ooleetsa,” Lewrie could barely make out. “Hiss-hiss-whisper chi magazeena . . .”

  Ooleetsa that’s ‘street,’ chi, that’s ‘tea,’ Lewrie translated from his thin stock of Russian words in his head; but what the Hell’s a magazeena?

  “Buzzle-muzzle Strand . . . ,” Sasha imparted in a raspy whisper as Count Levotchkin stiffened and sat up straighter. “Da, ya oovyerin,” the bruiser assured his master. Whatever the Devil that last meant, Count Levotchkin turned his head to glower at Lewrie, as well, eyes as wide as a first-saddled colt . . . just before his face turned to stone, and his eyes slitted. The sides of his fine nose pulsed in and out to each audible angry breath as his visage paled, his cheeks reddened.

  Panton Street, the Strand, tea whatever . . . Oh, shit! Lewrie at last put together; The little bastard’s set his beast t’lurkin’ after Tess, and put two and two t’gether. Saw us at the tea and pastry shop. Maybe that’s what a magazeena is.

  Count Levotchkin set his cup down in the saucer, both rattling to the shaking of his hands.

  “But, what is the matter, Anatoli?” Count Rybakov asked him in sudden concern. “You are ill? Should the ship’s doctor . . . ?”

  Levotchkin answered him in a babbling flood of furious Russian and French, mixed, neither of which Lewrie could follow. Rybakov had difficulty, too, so rushed did the younger man’s plaint spew out.

  “Shto?” Rybakov asked as Levotchkin paused for breath. “Viy oovyeryeni? Tojeh sama-yeh dyevooshka?”*

  “Da, ya oovyerin,” Levotchkin replied, snarling this time, and glaring daggers at Lewrie. “Sasha is certain, for he saw them. Him!” Levotchkin accused, lifting his chin to point up the table to his host. “My honour has been insulted, and he must answer for it. I must kill him.” He rose with a napkin in his right hand and began to advance on Lewrie, who shot his own chair back and stood ready to punch the fellow in the face if he dared issue a challenge with a napkin, not a glove.

  “Stoi!” Rybakov barked. “I forbid this, Anatoli! Sit down! Do nothing. Remember our mission!” Rybakov then launched into a tirade in Russian—no French which might be shared with anyone else this time—and went so far as to lay a restraining hand on Levotchkin’s right arm. “Obey me in this, Anatoli. Obey me!”

  Levotchkin uttered a growl of frustration, shaking off his kinsman’s hand. He threw the napkin at Lewrie, missing wide, then, to the astonishment of everyone, gave out a howl, an inarticulate bellow akin to the sound a hound might make over the corpse of its master.

  “I refuse to share these rooms with the man,” Levotchkin vowed. “I will not dine with him, drink with him, breathe the same air . . . !”

  That’ll save my spirit store, Lewrie inanely thought.

  “Anatoli, that would be imposs—” Rybakov chid him.

  “Damn him! Damn him to Hades!” Levotchkin cried, spinning on his heels and stomping aft to his partitioned-off bed-space, slamming the louvred slat door and making the flimsy deal and canvas partitions come nigh to collapsing like a tent.

  “Well,” Rybakov softly said in the immense silence. “Kapitan, I must apologise for my cousin’s manners, but . . . he feels that you give him great insult, over a young lady.”

  “Not quite a lady, no, my lord,” Lewrie said with a wry grin as he sat back down to resume his cooling breakfast. “The girl in question’s adenizen of ‘Mother’ Batson’s brothel, in Panton Street, for whom he took a fancy.”

  “A . . . prostitute?” Rybakov asked, looking appalled as he sat down in his own chair at the other end of the table. “A common whore?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call her ‘common,’ no, my lord,” Lewrie said, and laid out for Count Rybakov the entire scenario, from meeting Tess to the last morning in the Strand . . . perversions, included.

  “He was not set upon by thieves?” Rybakov mused aloud, eyebrows up in wonder. “No wonder he explained his wounds differently. But . . . he really treated the poor girl so badly?”

  “Afraid so, my lord,” Lewrie told him, dabbing his lips with a napkin after he’d eaten his last morsel, and asked Pettus for another cup of coffee. “She was afraid for her life. Had she known . . . had I known, that his man, Sasha, was lurking to discover who else might be sporting with her, or meeting her outside the establishment, I doubt she’d have ever dared step out the door, ’til she was sure that Count Levotchkin had left England.”

  “But he’s so devout!” Rybakov insisted. “Anatoli never misses a service, even in Lon
don, at the few Orthodox churches, no matter how mean the neighbourboods. He’s a pure son of Mother Russia . . . or so I thought. Lord, what will his mother say, or the young lady to whom he is affianced in Saint Petersburg? A young lady of one of the finest families in our aristocracy. He has such a promising future . . . a colonelcy in one of the most distinguished cavalry regiments, assured of a place at the Tsar’s court as soon as we return . . .”

  Knew it! Lewrie told himself; Devout, and a cavalryman. They’re sure t’be secret bastards, every time.

  “Happens in the best of families,” Lewrie commented. “Just look at our own aristocracy. The Earl of Sandwich, for instance . . . simply brilliant First Lord of the Admiralty, but a founding member of the Hell-Fire Club. Orgies in the old undercroft of his restored abbey at Medmenham, then preached in dominee clothes of a Sunday . . . to hundreds of cats his farm workers’d round up and herd into the chapel. Mostly against fornication,” he added with a droll expression.

  Lewrie knew all there was to know about the Hell-Fire Club; his father, Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby, had been a member, too.

  “I will speak to him,” Rybakov offered, as if that might mollify the young hot-head. “Now I know the circumstances, I will point out to him the ludicrous cause for his grudge. Even so . . . for a few days, arrangements can be made to limit your contact with him?”

  “If he wishes to take the air on the quarterdeck, he’ll have to wait ’til I’m below,” Lewrie said, calmly stirring sugar into his cup. “If he doesn’t wish to dine with me, he can take his meals aft, in his little sleeping-space. I’ll not give up my cabins, my table, my chart-space, or my desk or day-cabin settee. Does he loathe me that much, he will just have to take pains to avoid me, my lord.”

  “You will not duel him,” Rybakov said; not a request.

  “That . . . will be up to him, my lord,” Lewrie evenly replied as he laid aside his spoon and lifted his cup. “Does he not heed you and accost me, issue a formal challenge, then . . . my own honour is put in question, and there can be but one answer.”

  “Sadly, I understand, Kapitan Lewrie,” Count Rybakov mournfully said, his face twisted up as grievous as a hanged spaniel.

  Outta the fryin’ pan, into the fire, Lewrie queasily thought as he took another sip of coffee, all outward calm to an impartial observer. Mine arse on a band-box, he’ll challenge me before we reach Russia, sure as Fate. Too damned proud an’ arrogant t’do else. Christ, am I t’die over a whore?

  He allowed a wee grin to lift his mouth for a second.

  Ev’rybody said I’d come to a bad end, he reminded himself.

  “Midshipman o’ th’ watch, SAH!” the Marine sentry by the door barked.

  “Come,” Lewrie bade.

  “The Second Officer’s duty, sir,” Midshipman Furlow announced, hat under his arm, “and I’m to tell you that the wind’s come more Westerly, fine on our larboard quarter, and he requests permission to alter course a point Northerly.”

  “My compliments to Mister Farley, and inform him to do so. I will come to the quarterdeck . . . just for the air, Mister Furlow,” he formally replied, grinning as he uttered his last thought.

  As he dressed for the cold, Lewrie could not help thinking that, could Thermopylae fly with the wings of Hermes the Messenger, and get to Russia by the next dawn, this voyage, this mission of his, would still feel like an eternity!

  *Da, ya oovyerin = Yes, I’m sure. Shto = What? Viy oovyereni? Tojeh sama-yeh dyevooshka? = You are sure? The same young woman?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Four days in blustery, grey weather, with the winds whipping cold and occasionally spitting rain, sleet, or fat flakes of snow, and HMS Thermopylae bowling along like a Cambridge coach, and they were shaving a low-lying coast to starboard, which emerged as ephemeral as mist, just round dawn.

  “Quite good, for dead reckoning,” Lewrie told Mr. Lyle, the Sailing Master, as the shore of the Danish island of Jutland appeared solid, at last. They had not been able to take sun-sights to determine their position, or their progress. “But . . . just how far along, Mister Lyle?”

  “I do believe we are beyond the cape East of Thisted, sir,” Lyle cautiously allowed, a mittened finger pointing along the chart pinned to the traverse board by the binnacle cabinet. “Do you concur, Captain Hardcastle?”

  “Indeed I do, Mister Lyle . . . Captain Lewrie,” the experienced merchant master said, bustling closer to the chart to employ his own finger. “That long coast, yonder, is called the Jammerbugt, and the port of Hirstals lies beyond our starboard bows, no more than fifty or sixty miles. Next day will see us off the Skaw, does the wind cooperate,” he added, moving his finger on to the mouth of the Kattegat, and the entrance to the Baltic.

  “Where we turn South,” Lewrie said. “Beyond that, sirs? What is your estimate of the time it’ll take to reach the narrows ’twixt Denmark and Sweden?”

  “Well, that’ll take much longer than the crossing, sir,” Capt. Hardcastle was quick to say, perhaps to take temporary precedence over a Navy Sailing Master. “The Baltic has no tides, but the currents—”

  “And when an outflowing current coincides with a Sutherly wind, sir”—Mr. Lyle was just as quick to trample his way back to dominance—“you face a ‘dead muzzler,’ and might as well anchor ’til one on the other changes.”

  “Not so bad in the Kattegat, sir,” Hardcastle rejoined, “as we would be in open waters, but more noticeable as we close with the Narrows ’tween Helsingør . . . the Bard’s Elsinore . . . and the Swedish side, and the forts at Helsingborg. That’s where the outflowing current will be strongest.”

  “And the very worst place to be reduced to a crawl,” Lewrie said with a grumble, rubbing a mittened hand on his unshaven chin, which rasped against the wool, “or come to anchor.”

  Damme, but that’s really narrow! Lewrie thought. He borrowed a divider from the binnacle cabinet and set its needle-sharp points upon the chart’s distance scale, then walked the divider from the Swedish side of the narrows to the Danish—he came up with a width of only two miles, plus eight hundred yards.

  “This bloody shoal right in the middle, sirs,” Lewrie asked his Sailing Master and civilian adviser, jabbing a finger at the long and skinny north-to-south shallows indicated smack-dab down the centre of the passage. “The, ah . . . Disken Shoal?” he made out from the smallish letters on the chart. “Might it force us to choose which side of the Narrows to take?”

  “Oh no, sir,” Capt. Hardcastle chuckled. “For though it can be a bother to the biggest, deepest-laden ships in the Baltic trade when the wind’s been blowing for a week or longer, stiff, mind, outta the South, most times even a First Rate could sail right down the middle of the Narrows, right atop it. Ye only draw about seventeen or eighteen foot, so you should have no problem with it.”

  “Uhm . . . perhaps, sir,” Mr. Lyle cautioned almost by reflex, or just to be contrary with a civilian’s opinion. “As he says, sir, with a following wind, several days of Nor’westerlies, there should be more than sufficient depth cross the Disken Shoal.”

  “Uhum” was Lewrie’s terse comment to that information; though he still fretted about the forts on the Swedish side, and the massive Kron-borg Castle on the Danish side of the Narrows, both built at the very narrowest points, designed to cooperate to close the strait with their artillery. It wouldn’t do, Lewrie thought, to voice open concerns about how heavy were the cannon on each shore, not before any of his officers or men. “For now, we’ll just have to hope for Northerly winds, and steer a . . . diplomatic . . . course right down the centre of the Narrows, gentlemen. Favouring neither side, hmm? Will both you men join me below in my cabins for a moment? Mister Fox, you have the deck.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” the Third Officer replied.

  “Now . . . about these damned forts,” Lewrie said in the relative warmth of his cabins, all three of them crowded into the small chart-space to pore over his own recently purchased copy of the chart they’d studied
on deck. “Have you ever had cause to visit Kronborg Castle, Captain Hardcastle? Seen their armaments?”

  “Oh, I’ve anchored under its foot a time or two, sir, but I’ve never had a tour of the place,” Hardcastle admitted, warming his hands round a china mug of hot coffee which Pettus had produced for them all. “Townfolk’ll tell anyone who asks, though, that they’ve over eighty or ninety heavy guns. Right proud of them, they are. An odd measure of metal, though, sir. . . . I believe they said they were thirty-six pounders, not thirty-twos. P’raps the Danish pound is greater than anyone else’s, or they just cast them to their own tastes.”

  “Let’s assume they’re roughly equal to a thirty-two pounder,” Lewrie allowed, picking his own divider from its velvet-lined box of navigational tools. “Range-to-random-shot for a thirty-two is about a mile and a half . . . ,” he muttered as he scribed two half-circles on the chart. “Assume the Swedes mount much the same calibre guns, too, so . . .”

  Damme, that ain’t pretty, he thought, for right in the middle of the Narrows, the overlap from Kronborg Castle and its Swedish equivalent formed a long, sharp-pointed oval where round-shot, perhaps even heated shot, could hammer Thermopylae from both sides, and no frigate ever launched was built to withstand a pummelling that massive; a lone frigate as good as opposed by an entire squadron of ships of the line!

  Turning the dividers up-and-down the Narrows, instead of right-to-left, he stepped off the distance from the northern end of the overlapping fire to the southern; one and three-quarter miles, all told.

  “Average speed of the outflowing current, Captain Hardcastle?” he asked.

  “Uhm . . . anywhere from two to four knots, sir, depending on the winds from the South, or thereabouts,” Hardcastle guessed.

  “So, with a followin’ wind, and two knots of current, say, we could make six knots ‘over the ground,’ ” Lewrie puzzled out, stepping off that assumed crawl. “Which’d mean we’d be under fire for at least twenty minutes, do the Swedes and the Danes refuse us passage. Can’t assume more than six knots, altogether, as anything more than whistlin’ in the wind.”