The Baltic Gambit

by Dewey Lambdin

  Lewrie lowered the telescope and compacted it back into itself, stuck it in a pocket of his fur coat, then leaned on the bulwarks most lubberly-like, as Thermopylae cleared Laeso by a wider and wider margin. And still the seals came on, off the starboard quarter, almost to amidships off the beam, with a stronger few swimming and leaping almost against the bows and the outer edge of the bow wave and wake. Sailors now released from the “Still” crowded the gangways to peer down at the seals, who now raised a chorus of barks that put everyone in mind of a pack of pups glad to see their owner return up the cottage lane, after a day’s absence at his labours. Great brown eyes wetly ashine under long lashes peered up at the frigate, whiskers on muzzles twitched in what seemed like joy as they barked. And, most eerily, a few of them half-rolled onto their sides to wave flippers at them!

  All eyes went to the new captain, who was smiling fit to bust as he waved back to them! A long moment more, and Thermopylae began to out-distance them and leave them behind to gambol and leap in their wake, and the seal pack turned away towards their rock beach. A gust of icy Arctic wind arose, keening in the rigging as the frigate, now on a broad reach instead of a “landsman’s breeze” from right aft, like the shriek of fast flying spirits. The rising wind brought a blizzard of thicker, fatter, softer snowflakes that blotted out the decks for another long minute, and, when it thinned, and the gust faded, there were no seals to be seen! As if they’d never been. Their barks from the beach on Laeso could still be heard, but . . .

  “Give it one turn of the half-hour glass, Mister Ballard, then come about to Sou-Sou’east again,” Lewrie ordered, still half lost in reverie, and pleasure. “There’s still the small isle of Anholt ahead, but we should be able to leave it well clear off our starboard. It is much smaller, is it not, Mister Lyle? Captain Hardcastle? Easier to miss, pray God?” Lewrie japed, in happy takings of a sudden after days of tension and reined-back strife. “The Sound, and the Narrows, round dawn tomorrow, do you gentlemen believe?”

  “Aye, sir,” Mr. Lyle said, while Capt. Hardcastle could only nod and gulp, still too awed to trust his voice, and Lewrie turned away to pace over to the larboard rails, now the windward side, and his alone for as long as he was on deck.

  “Seals don’t do that,” Hardcastle muttered. “I been past Laeso hundreds of times, and whenever the seals are present, they usually go ashore, t’get away from a ship passing too close to them.”

  “This was a rare occurrence, gentlemen?” Count Rybakov enquired, having enjoyed the seals’ appearance as only a pleasing happenstance.

  “Oh, rare, aye!” Capt. Hardcastle quickly affirmed. “Drawn out by the Captain, and his good cess.”

  “By Kapitan Lewrie?” Rybakov said, puzzled, with his brow knitted. “And what is this . . . cess?”

  “A good-luck blessing, so the tale goes,” the Sailing Master began to relate, though sounding dubious. “A funeral at sea, aboard the Captain’s first command, in ’94 . . .”

  “Hundreds of miles offshore in the Bay of Biscay, just after the Battle of the Glorious First of June,” Capt. Hardcastle stuck in, more superstitious than Lyle. “Seals came alongside, from nowhere, ’tis told by his Cox’n, and . . . took back the soul of the only lad killed . . . a selkie, and one of theirs, cursed by Lir, the old Celtic sea god who turned folks into seals ’cause they denied him, and doomed to live in the sea ’til they scream t’be people, again, Swim ashore and shed their hides on stormy nights, then live as men, or women, ’til they scream for a return to the sea, ’til the end of time.”

  “Seals seem to turn up in Captain Lewrie’s career, and some deem their appearances most fortunate,” Mr. Lyle faintly scoffed. “Likely, it is only coincidence, sir. Coincidence, and myth-making about a man who has had extreme good fortune, by superstitious sailors.”

  “Uncanny luck,” Hardcastle insisted. “One can’t deny that. The hands . . . do they believe their captain is blessed, his ship, and his crew that serves him shares in the blessing, well . . . who’s to talk ’em out of that, I ask you, Mister Lyle? Might as well say that Nelson is just having a string of dumb luck, and will let them down, soon as they put their trust in him, hah!”

  “Hardly the same thing, sir,” Mr. Lyle said with a sniff.

  “Well, it is nice to imagine that the appearance of those seals, whatever the reason for it, harbingers a successful voyage for us,” the bemused Count Rybakov said with a cheerful shrug.

  “Pray God, indeed, sir,” Capt. Hardcastle agreed.

  “Ah, but to which god?” Mr. Lyle said with a mild snicker. “The Great Jehovah, or old Lir?”

  Count Rybakov tipped his beaver hat to them and paced slowly aft to the taffrails, puffing away on his cigar and squinting against the snow that swirled around him. As urbane and cosmopolitan as he appeared to the world, as educated and refined, and trained from birth to fit easily into any royal court in the world, yet he was Russian, a child of the Orthodox Church, and still able to be mesmerised by the rituals, the incense, and the grandeur of its chants and hymns. Superstition in signs and omens lurked close under his polished, cynically witty skin, and the significance of the seals’ uncanny eagerness to swim out to the frigate . . . to greet one of their own? . . . put a shiver up his spine.

  He turned his back to the blowing snow, hunched deep in his furs and drawing on his cigar, finding himself hoping that the seals’ omen meant a swift and safe return to Russia, and the Tsar’s court.

  “Chort,” he muttered, frowning of a sudden. If this Englishman Lewrie was blessed by seals, protected . . . ! What would these Angliski sailors’ selkies do to anyone who threatened their favourite?

  And what fur was Anatoli’s overcoat and shapka?

  Seal.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The ship is at Quarters, sir,” Lt. Ballard reported, once the last noisy rumbles and thuds had died away. Decks were sanded, water butts between the guns were full; seamen’s chests and stowage bags had been struck down to the orlop, along with all the deal and canvas partitions, captain’s and officers’ furniture. The Misdshipmen’s mess on the orlop had been converted to a surgery.

  The 18-pounders of both batteries had been run in, un-bowsed from the gun-port sills, and the ports ready to be lowered. Captains and quarter-gunners had selected the truest, roundest shot from among the balls stowed in the thick rope shot-garlands, or the shot-racks by the hatchways. Tompions had been removed from the muzzles, and powder charges had been rammed down to the breeches, followed by shot and wadding.

  Gun tools had been fetched up from the racks over the tables in the mess, the tables swung up against the overheads, and flint-lock strikers fetched from the magazines. The arms chests had been opened, and muskets, pistols, and cutlasses were ready to hand. The boarding pike racks round the bases of the masts had been un-locked and un-chained, making them ready to grab.

  Sailors serving the guns had bound their neckerchiefs over their ears to preserve their hearing, and most had stuffed oakum into their ears, as well. Officers and Warrants had dressed, in the wee hours of the pre-dawn, in their cleanest clothing, exchanging their usual linen or cotton shirts and stockings for silk, which was easier to draw from wounds.

  HMS Thermopylae was ready for battle, no matter how out-gunned they might be by the monster cannon of Kronborg Castle; ready to sell their lives dearly, should Thermopylae be dis-masted, crippled, and captured. She would not go down without a fight.

  “Very well, Mister Ballard,” Lewrie replied, fingers of his left hand flexing on the hilt of his hanger.

  “Sorry, sir . . . they don’t care much for their basket,” Pettus apologised as he emerged from the great-cabins with both cats “bagged” at last, on his way to the orlop where he would assist the Surgeon, Mr. Harward, and his Mates, should it come to it.

  “They’ll get used to you, Pettus,” Lewrie called down to him from the cross-deck hammock nettings of the quarterdeck, “and let you shove ’em in, as meek as baa-lambs.”

  H
e thumped the top of the nettings to assure himself that they were tight-packed with rolled-up sailors’ hammocks and bedding, passed through the ring-measure that required them to be as snug as sausages. Cross the forrud edge of the quarterdeck, down the bulwarks from bow to stern on each beam, the snugly packed iron stanchions and nettings might stop lighter shot, grape, and langridge, or flesh-flaying clouds of wood splinters from hits. The Marines, in full red kit for a rare once unless posted as sentries, could shelter behind them and fire their muskets at enemy sea soldiers, not out in the open like the Army did, and shoulder-to-shoulder.

  The night before, Thermopylae had come to anchor in Swedish waters, bows pointing Northerly to best and second bower, just a bit South of the long, narrow peninsula that marked the deep inlet named the Koll, for Lewrie had no wish to try to skulk through the Narrows in the dark. And he wished to measure the rate of the outflow from the Baltic that they would face in the morning, after nigh a week of Northerly winds to slow it. He had pored over his charts once more, in private, without Hardcastle or Lyle, and scribbling on a blank sheet of paper, estimating the strength of the next day’s winds, and Thermopylae’s possible speed “over the ground” in varying circumstances . . . and, how long his frigate would be under fire in that one-and-three-quarter-mile oval of vulnerability. With the ship safely anchored, the chip-log streamed from the bow had shown only a two-knot current that night, and with any luck (and his fingers crossed) Lewrie estimated that they might make at least five or six knots South. The simple mathematics was stark, though; that meant seventeen to twenty minutes under fire, if the Danes were feeling particularly bellicose, if the Swedes decided to join in, as they had vowed to when the Armed Neutrality was formed . . . as they had so long ago when Denmark, Sweden, and Danish Norway had been referred to as “The Three Crowns.”

  The mood of the ship had been sombre, the crew on the gun-deck singing to the accompaniment of fiddle and fife, or the strains of Liam Desmond’s uilleann lap-pipes; “Admiral Hosier’s Ghost,” “The False Young Sailor,” “Spanish Ladies,” “One Morning in May,” all the lachrymose and sad dirges they knew. Oh, Desmond had struck up some lively tunes, but it hadn’t sounded as if they’d rise to them, not full-voiced and eager as they usually might. There was no rhythmic thud of dancing to the horn-pipes, chanteys, or “stamp and goes.”

  Wonder if there’s any horn-pipes of gloom? Lewrie had wondered.

  Supper with Count Rybakov had been a sullen affair, too; thankfully without Count Levotchkin’s presence, for both of them had more on their minds than sparkling and witty conversation. Count Rybakov had pressed him for more lore about selkies, Lir, and the particular instances when seals had appeared to him, but that subject was simply too eerie a matter on the possible eve of battle. The highlight, if one could call it that, occurred when Rybakov had expressed curiosity about Lewrie’s Kentucky Bourbon whisky, and Lewrie had, in turn, had to taste several varieties of vodka, including a Polish version flavoured with buffalo grass. Neither had come away with a favourable opinion of the other’s “tipple.”

  “And do you believe in this . . . cess of yours, Kapitan Lewrie?” Count Rybakov had finally asked.

  “Believe?” Lewrie had gloomed. “No, not really, my lord. That would make me a heathen, though I will admit that there’ve been times that the presence of seals made me wonder. Eerie as it is, whenever they’ve turned up, I’ve been . . . thankful for the warning. There’s an host of mysteries that happen at sea, so . . . ,” he had concluded with a shrug.

  By the first bell of the Evening Watch, at 8:30 P.M., both of them were more than ready to turn in. Thankfully (again) Count Levotchkin had dined alone in his sleeping-space, had picked over the reconstituted “portable” vegetable soup, the roast chicken and boiled potatoes and the last of the fresh-baked bread, and had washed it all down with more wine, more champagne, and at least half a bottle of vodka, and had babbled, muttered, fumed, and fussed himself to an early slumber matching their own, sparing everyone but for his manservant, Sasha.

  Two Bells of the Forenoon chimed from the foc’s’le belfry, a terse ding-ding, as Thermopylae sailed along with a steady breeze from the East-Nor’east on her larboard quarters, the snow gales gone, and replaced by a mostly cloudy morning, with only a brief glimmer of sunlight now and then. She was under all plain sail, with two reefs in her forecourse to aid the fore tops’l in lifting her bows, so she did not “snuffle” too deeply, and slow her progress. Her main course was fully spread, a peaceful thing to an outside observer, for a main course sail would only be brailed up for combat, so it would not catch fire from the discharge of her own guns, if fully deployed. Not that it could not be fully reefed in a moment, should it prove necessary!

  Lewrie looked up to assure himself that the anti-boarding nets were rigged, but not yet hauled aloft; and to assure himself that all yards had been re-enforced with chain slings to hold them aloft, should halliards and lifts be shot away, to keep them from plunging down to the deck and smothering the gun crews, cannon, and ports in canvas and rope rigging.

  Looking forrud, then aft, he noted that their largest flags of the new Union pattern were flying; one from the truck of the foremast, and the largest aft from the spanker. The Danes could not mistake her nationality, nor accuse them of trying to sneak past Kronborg Castle by employing a dishonourable false flag.

  “Eight knots, sir!” Midshipman Privette cried from the taffrail. “Eight knots and an eighth, really!”

  “Six knots over the ground, then,” Lt. Ballard commented as he rocked on the balls of his boots; more-like mooed in a grim-lipped way.

  “Seventeen minutes,” Lewrie muttered under his breath. “Very well, Mister Privette,” he called out in a louder voice, to an unsuspecting world the epitome of calmness.

  “There’s Elsinore, sir,” Capt. Hardcastle pointed out as the old royal residence of Danish kings loomed up on their starboard bows. “Beyond, that’ll be Kronborg Castle.”

  “That’s a fortress, by God?” Lewrie marvelled. “I expected . . . something grimmer.”

  Kronborg Castle, formidable though it must be, looked more like a fairy castle, the sort of thing illustrated in a children’s book, or a large toy to spur the imagination of the kiddies in their playroom.

  It had four large, square bastions, with stout walls spanning the distances between them, all of red brick, not granite or limestone. Lighter-coloured, window-like apertures below the bastions and along the walls revealed a lower-storey casemate. Yet Kronborg sprouted spires and towers more like those rising from Muslim mosques, like minarets, and every steep roof was of copper; mostly gone verdigris green, but here and there as bright as a new-minted penny!

  It sat at the end of a long, low peninsula, atop a built-up earthen base, with shallow-angled embankments that led straight into the sea, to the beach, all covered in grass as green as the criquet pitch at Lord’s, and, overall, looked more like the country mansion of some incredibly wealthy, and eccentric, viscount, earl, or duke!

  “For what we’re about to receive . . .” Mr. Simms, the senior-most Quartermaster at the double-helm, whispered the old saw for steeling oneself to stand manful under the enemy’s first broadside.

  “Receive, Hell, Mister Simms,” Lewrie scoffed. “What, ye think it’s Christmas?”

  “Ship off the star-board bows, d’ye hear there?” a lookout in the main-mast cross-trees shouted down. “She be a brig! Anchored by the fort!”

  Everyone with access to a telescope raised it to look the brig over, Lewrie included. She lay quite near the shore, about a quarter-mile off from a substantial stone quay and landing, anchored from the bows and a single kedge astern, and though there was a thin skein of smoke from her, it was a single source, not the general haze arising from burning slow-match.

  “Galley smoke, I make it, sir,” Lt. Ballard said.

  “Ah ha!” Lewrie exclaimed as a fluke of wind close inshore at last swung round to match their own, baring the nature of the fla
g at her stern. “The ‘Post-Boy,’ by God! One of our mail packets!”

  Sure enough, the brig flew a red flag with a Union insignia in the canton, and the bulk of the fly covered by a large white square, in which a post-boy with a long trumpet astride a galloping horse was depicted.

  “We’re still talkin’ with the Danes, it seems,” Lewrie explained to the quarterdeck. “Mister Fox, Mister Farley!” he shouted down to the waist over the hammock nettings. “Draw shot from the starboard battery, quick as you can! Mister Tunstall . . . prepare to fire a salute to the castle. How many guns . . . anyone?” he asked, in a quandary.

  “Twenty-one for their king, sir?” Midshipman Sealey, their eldest, guessed with his fingers crossed.

  “I doubt he’s there in the castle,” Lewrie chuckled. “And their Crown Prince ain’t, either.”

  “There’s a Colonel Stricker, in command of Kronborg Castle, sir,” Capt. Hardcastle supplied. “What’d a Colonel rate?”

  “Uhm . . . fifteen, sir?” Midshipman Privette meekly piped up.

  “I do believe that a Colonel does merit fifteen guns in salute, sir,” Lt. Ballard gravely intoned, though there was, at last, some merriment in his dark eyes.

  “Fifteen it is, then,” Lewrie agreed, hoping that was the right number. “Mister Tunstall . . . fifteen-gun salute to the Colonel of the bloody fort! Soon as we’re abeam!”

  “Aye aye, sir!” the Master Gunner cried back, beyond puzzled by then. To fire a salute with blank charges would be to cede the enemy first honours, the carefully aimed first broadside should the fortress open upon them.

  “You will permit us to come to the quarterdeck, Kapitan?” Count Rybakov asked from the foot of the starboard gangway ladder. He had a somewhat sober Count Levotchkin with him, swaying like a scarecrow in a stiff breeze in a grain field, and looking pasty-sick.