The Baltic Gambit

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Oh joy,” Lewrie griped, looking up from the chart to peer over the bows, and the hobby-horsing jib-boom and bow sprit for the island of Bornholm, still lost in the overcast and winter haze. By Mr. Lyle’s reckoning, it lay perhaps twenty sea-miles East. He was tempted to go as close as he dared to the passage between the isle and Sweden, but there were his passengers, and their diplomatic mission, to consider. Hardcastle’s assurance that the passage would not be usable for a few more weeks would have to do, for now.

  “Very well,” he reluctantly said, looking about for the officer of the watch, then trying to determine which of the swathed and muffled individuals that might be. “Mister Fox, sir?”

  “Aye, sir?” the wool-covered figure in a bright red muffler and knit wool cap replied, lowering the scarf to bare all his face.

  “We will alter course to Sou’east, and make more sail,” Lewrie directed. “All plain sail, first, then ‘all to the royals,’ perhaps.”

  “Directly, Captain,” Lt. Fox crisply replied. “Bosun, pipe ‘All Hands,’ then ‘Stations To Come About.’ ”

  By mid-day, as the last of Eight Bells chimed, they stood with sextants and slates ready, hoping for a peek at the sun, but that orb refused to appear clearly, veiling itself as a bright, vague smudge in a sky solidly clouded over. The best they could do was agree that the various chronometers still kept the same time, within half a minute of each other, and that it was Noon, indeed, when the day officially began aboard a ship at sea; not at Midnight, but at Noon Sights.

  “At least we see Bornholm, sir,” Lt. Farley said, lowering his telescope after a peek over the larboard beam, “and can reckon by its presence just where we are. Its southernmost tip, yonder, ’twixt . . . ah, Aakirkeby and, ah . . . Nekso? And who picks the names for foreign towns, I ask you? Can’t pronounce the half of ’em,” he muttered.

  “Do you concur, Captain Hardcastle?” Lewrie asked the civilian merchant master.

  “That it be, sir,” Hardcastle told them, chuckling. “Bless me, sirs, but you think they’re hard to say, you ought to see how they’re spelled in Swedish or Danish! All sorts of umlauts and hyphen strokes through the odd vowels. In Russian waters, it’s even worse, for they use the Cyrillic alphabet . . . the old Greek, and thank God for Anglicised British charts.”

  “Ice!” cried a main-mast lookout from the cross-trees. “Do ye hear, there? Broken ice, two points off the larboard bows! A mile or more off!”

  “You still wish to examine the ice, Captain Hardcastle?” Lewrie asked him.

  “We must, sir,” Hardcastle assured him.

  “Mister Fox, we’ll fetch-to, and lower a boat for Captain Hardcastle. Pass word for my Cox’n and boat crew,” Lewrie ordered.

  Thermopylae had been able to post about six or seven knots on the Sutherly winds, but now it was tossed away as the helm was put over and the sails trimmed to turn the frigate’s bows about, into the wind, with squares’ls backed to check her forward motion, and with fore-and-aft sails cupping and drawing wind to counter any sternward drive. A rowing boat, the cutter, was seized up, and, with the employment of the main course yard for a crane, hoisted off the cross-deck boat-tier beams and carefully lowered overside, then manned below the starboard entry-port. Captain Hardcastle and Midshipman Tillyard joined the boat crew and began to row off towards the ice floes, now clearly visible from the decks. Lewrie paced the quarterdeck, from taffrail to the hammock nettings, and back again, stopping now and then to peer out and drum impatient mittened fingers on the cap-rails, knowing that such was as slow as “church work,” as the saying went.

  “Pardons, sir,” Midshipman Plumb said by his side.

  “What?” Lewrie impatiently snapped.

  “Uhm . . . your man, Pettus, begs tell you that your dinner is ready, sir,” the boy reported, looking a tad daunted.

  “My pardons, Mister Plumb,” Lewrie apologised, “but the state of the ice in the Baltic matters a great deal for Admiral Parker, and Admiral Nelson, and I’m anxious t’know what they discover,” he added, jutting an arm at the slowly moving cutter. “Dinner, d’ye say? Hmm.”

  Proper Post-Captains did not fret; not where people could see them, they didn’t. They were to show the world glacial serenity, even in hurricanes, he chid himself.

  “Mister Fox, you have the deck,” Lewrie called out over his shoulder as he tramped for the larboard gangway. “I will be dining in my cabins, ’til the boat returns. Send word when it does.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “A nice slab of last night’s sea-pie, sir,” Pettus told him as he helped him disrobe his winter garb. “Pity the Russian gentlemen didn’t fancy it much, but more for you, there is. A scalding-hot soup . . . beef broth, diced onion, melted cheese and crumbled biscuit, and Nettles fried you some lovely potato patties, with lots of crumbled bacon. The cats have got their share of that, sir, no fear.” Pettus cheerfully chattered away as Lewrie sat down at the table. A moment later, and there was a rum-laced, sweetened, and milked mug of coffee before him; even if it was goat’s milk. “Wine, too, sir?”

  “Think I’ll wait ’til supper for wine, today, Pettus,” Lewrie decided as he dug in with his fork. His hunger was alive, clawing at his innards, but he forced himself to go slow, as he’d forced himself to come below, and pretend to ignore the boat, and the ice. One very good reason to dally over his victuals was the absence of both of the Russian counts, and their servants; they had dined earlier, together, with Count Levotchkin coming out of his self-enforced exile aft, and thus avoiding having to dine with Lewrie, in proper manner, for once. The brief spell of privacy, free of Rybakov’s ever-cheerful prattle, was splendid!

  “Did Nettles whip up anything for dessert, Pettus?” he asked, once the last morsel had gone down his gullet, and the last warm sip of rum-laced coffee had been drunk.

  “Nought for dinner, sir,” Pettus answered, removing his plate. “Said he’s saving his best efforts for supper. But there’s jam and extra-fine biscuit I could fetch out.”

  “Sounds fine,” Lewrie told him, requesting a refill of coffee, minus the rum this time. All the while keeping one ear cocked for a call from the deck, the sound of the cutter bumping back alongside of the hull . . . and the ticking of the carriage clock that he kept on the side-board.

  Fretting and frowning, now he was in private, Lewrie went over to his desk and pretended to immerse himself in the minutiae of ship’s paperwork. Finally . . .

  “Midshipman Plumb, SAH!” the sentry called.

  “Enter!” Lewrie replied, a tad too eagerly and loudly, even to his ears.

  “Mister Fox’s respects, sir, and he says that the cutter is—” Plumb began.

  “Tell Mister Fox I will come to the quarterdeck, Mister Plumb.” Lewrie cut him off, going quickly for his furs.

  He trotted up the gangway ladder to the starboard entry-port, where Capt. Hardcastle and Midshipman Tillyard stood over a large wooden bucket.

  “Well, sirs?” Lewrie asked, striving for at least a shred of idle interest.

  “It’s rotten, sir,” Hardcastle said, kneeling down to lift out a slab, about the size of a serving platter, and about eight inches thick. The edges crumbled at his touch. Lewrie reached out to touch it, giving it a squeeze. At first it felt solid enough, but even as he applied moderate pressure, he could feel it flaking away, as if he could compress it into a slushy snowball, did he try harder.

  “Get a lot of it together, sir, and it’ll slow a ship down,” Hardcastle told him. “Where the floes are solid, not like these bits that’ve broken off, you’ll still have unbroken ice, about three feet or more thick, though there’ll be air bubbles underneath, where it’ll be half the thickness. Where it’ll first begin to break up, sir.”

  “I thought it would be flat and smooth, top to bottom,” Lewrie speculated aloud, putting out both hands to take the slab from Captain Hardcastle. It was still quite heavy; though, as he turned it over, he saw that the bottom of the slab was pebbly and pitted. Without wa
rning the slab broke in half, split right down the middle, and shattered on the oak decks of the starboard gangway. “Well, damn,” he muttered.

  “Up north on the Swedish coast, sir,” Hardcastle told him, “up at Karlskrona, it’ll still be solid, and three or four feet thick, as I said, but . . . won’t be long before it’s half that, and breaking up.”

  “And Kronstadt, and Reval?” Lewrie asked of the Russian ports.

  “Two or three weeks behind the Swedes, sir,” Hardcastle speculated with a grim expression. “It’s melting fast, even so.”

  “Mister Fox? Get way on her again. ‘All to the royals,’ and wring the last quarter-knot from this wind, long as it lasts,” Lewrie told him. “Soon as the cutter’s back on the tiers.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Get these Russians ashore soonest, Lewrie grimly told himself as he kicked some larger chunks of ice down the gangway; Reconnoiter Reval, for certain—don’t think we can get all the way t’Kronstadt if it melts out last—then dash back to Karlskrona t’smoak them out and . . . report to the Fleet. . . . if we can get back past Copenhagen and the Narrows . . . if the Danes let us!

  Getting in was the easy part, he realised; getting out of the Baltic would be the really tricky part!

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  What am I doin’ up here? Lewrie asked himself for the tenth time in five minutes as he steadied his most powerful telescope on the rat-lines of the upper shrouds in the main-mast fighting top. Swaddled in his furs, he was certain he resembled a shaggy cocoon wherein a larva slept, glued to a sturdy twig; it was certainly cold enough for him to adhere to any metal, did he grasp any without his woolen mittens.

  Going aloft had never been one of his favourite activities, not since his first terrors as a Midshipman, who was naturally expected to spend half his waking hours in the rigging, chearly “yo-ho-hoing” and scrambling about with the agility of an ape. Damn his dignity, but he had eschewed the backwards-leaning final ascent of the futtock shrouds, and taken the lubber’s hole, instead of clinging upside down like a fly on the overhead. All to take a gander at Kronstadt.

  He didn’t know quite what he’d expected when first learning his destination; Arctic glaciers and the entire Gulfs of Bothnia and Finland completely covered with vast sheets of ice several yards thick; littered with upwellings of ice like a boulder field, or a plain full of Celtic dolmens, a titanic Stonehenge.

  But the fact of the matter was that the Baltic Sea was fairly open, boisterous and rolling, as much an ocean as the Atlantic or the North Sea, with the ice confined to still, protected waters, harbours, and short friezes along the beaches.

  Thermopylae had scouted quite close to Reval, within a league of the naval port and its breakwater batteries, two days before, and had spotted the Russian navy preparing for war. They had counted the number of line-of-battle ships and frigates still locked in the ice, seen how many already had their masts set up and yards crossed, and the smoke from forges, barracks, shipwrights’ manufacturies, and what both Count Rybakov and Capt. Hardcastle had identified as the bakeries and smoke-houses where rations were being prepared.

  Even more ominously, they had all seen the hundreds, thousands of peasant workers out on the ice sheets afoot, chopping and chipping a channel wide enough for two large warships abreast, seen and heard the explosions as kegs of gunpowder were used to blast the thickest of the ice—or at least blow deep-enough craters, which the men with axes and shovels could attack, after.

  Now, here was the principal naval harbour of Russia’s Baltic Fleet, not three miles away, and it was the same story. Every now and then, an explosion spurted a dirty cloud of powder smoke aloft, along with a shower of ice chips (sometimes a serf along with it) behind the breakwater mole, or in the roads near the harbour entrance, the sound coming seconds later as a soft pillow-thump, and a tremor in the sea that thrummed through the frigate’s bones. But, just as at Reval, no one had tried a shot at them from those heavy 42-pounder cannon along the mole, or the harbour entrance bastions . . . no matter how infuriated the Russians might be by the sight of a British frigate, all flags flying, lying just beyond maximum range. It was uncanny, as if stiff final diplomatic letters declaring a state of belligerence had to be exchanged first. Or whenever the Russians could finally get those ships of the line to sea, sail West, and announce a state of war with their first broadsides.

  Lewrie tugged a mitten off with his teeth, reached into a pocket of his furs for pencil and paper, and quickly made notes on all he could see, then steeled himself for the descent to the deck once more.

  Why am I doin’ this? he asked himself again as he went through the lubber’s hole, with his booted heels fumbling for firm purchase on stiff, icy rat-lines.

  “Many ships, sir?” Lt. Ballard enquired, once he was down.

  “Rum, first,” Lewrie demanded. “Nigh-boilin’, if God’s just. Settle for tea or coffee, ’long as it’s hot!” His teeth chattered and his words slurred from the stiffness of his jaws.

  “Ah, that’s better . . . thankee, Pettus,” he said after a welcome swig of coffee from the ever-present black iron kettle. “The Russians’ main fleet is back at Reval, Mister Ballard,” he said, reading from his notes. “Here, I saw two un-rigged ‘liners’ . . . Third Rates, I make ’em. But there’s nine frigates with their masts and yards set up, and what looks t’be five or six bombs, along with God knows how many floating batteries for harbour defence . . . useless at sea. Oh, there’s several more Third Rates and larger in the graving docks, or on the stocks under construction . . . or would be, if it weren’t so bloody cold . . . but the real threat’s back West of here.”

  “They are chopping and blasting lanes through the ice here, as well, sir,” Lt. Ballard commented with a faint grunt of puzzlement and a frown. “Even though there is not much to get out to combine with the Reval ships? Odd.”

  “They most-like want those frigates out,” Lewrie decided aloud, gulping down more hot coffee. “I would.”

  In Reval, they’d seen twelve Third Rate 74s, three 100-gunned vessels of the Second Rate, and one huge First Rate, which the Naval List had named the Blagodat, of 130 guns. There were also three more warships slightly smaller than Third Rates, more of the sort of vessel employed by Baltic powers and the Dutch, which might mount anywhere from sixty to seventy guns. Still, mercifully iced in so solidly that horse-drawn sledges and working-parties on foot had done the ferrying and stowing instead of barges, sheer hulks, and hoys.

  “Not as dire as I thought, Arthur,” Lewrie said with a relieved smile, and a quick glance upward to where he had clung in shuddery terror. He looked back just quick enough to see Lt. Ballard wince at the use of his Christian name, and purse his lips in distaste.

  What is his problem? Lewrie thought, vexed, and that, too, was for the hundredth time, this voyage. He keeps that up, I’ll start considerin’ him in the ‘hate Lewrie’ club.

  “Mister Lyle, sir,” Lewrie said, turning away to consult with the Sailing Master. “Where might we land our ‘live lumber’ best?”

  Soon be rid of ’em! Lewrie exulted inside; Thankee, Jesus!

  “Well, it appears there’s less than a half-mile to a quarter-mile of ice off the shores hereabouts, sir,” Mr. Lyle opined as he and Lewrie bent over the smaller-scale chart of the Kronstadt and St. Petersburg approaches. “We could row them to the edge, have them send for a coach.”

  “Too close to Kronstadt,” Lewrie objected, “and we’ve trailed our colours to ’em already. I expect their army’s astir like an anthill. Uhm . . . what about here, on the north shore? This little port town of . . . Sestroretsk? I doubt it’s ten miles from Saint Petersburg, by road,” he said, pinching fingers together against the distance scale of the chart, and placing them against the map. “There’s even a road from there to the capital . . . and if Peter the Great left anything behind, it’s probably a good’un, too. Mister Ballard?”

  “Sir?”

  “Get us underway, course Nor’east, for
this piddlin’ wee town here on the chart,” Lewrie ordered. “We’ll land our diplomats there, and be shot of ’em.”

  Lewrie went below to his great-cabins and found that his guests had already packed up their essentials, and looked eager to leave his company, as well. Off Reval, Lewrie had considered dropping them off at another wee place on the coast called Paldiski, but Count Rybakov (damn his genial, urbane soul!) had demurred, saying that it would be more than a week before they could reach St. Petersburg by troika and that he must seek out someplace closer.

  “Ah, Kapitan!” Count Rybakov exclaimed upon seeing him, “There is good news? You have chosen a place to land us?”

  “Sestroretsk, cross the bay on the north shore, my lord,” Lewrie told him, stripping his furs off for a while. They stank like badgers, and had begun to itch him something sinful. “Far away from any of your country’s forts or garrisons, but within mere miles of your destination.”

  “I know of it, and the road to Saint Petersburg is quite good, even by troika” Rybakov replied, as pleased as if Lewrie had presented him with King George’s keys to the Tower of London, and all of its treasures. “No wolves, either, ha ha!” he laughed, snapping fingers in glee. “We are within hours of home, Anatoli. Is it not splendid?”

  “At last,” Count Levotchkin agreed, with the first sign of any real enthusiasm he’d evinced since first coming aboard. He’d dressed for the occasion in a new bottle-green suit, top-boots, and a striped yellow waist-coat and amber-gold neck-stock. And, for the first time since he’d come aboard Thermopylae, he even looked sober!

  “We must express our gratitude to Kapitan Lewrie for our swift, and safe, passage, Anatoli,” Count Rybakov insisted, looking round the great-cabins at their separate piles of luggage and chests, over which their manservants, Fyodor and Sasha, still fussed. There were three piles, Lewrie noticed, the third the largest by far, and mostly made up of crates and middling-sized kegs. “We bought far too much before sailing, Kapitan Lewrie, and . . . what is the sense of taking vodka or Russian brandy ashore with us? Like how you Angliski say, ‘carrying coals to Newcastle,’ ha ha?” the nobleman chortled most cheerfully. “Caviar, pickled delicacies . . . all so available in Saint Petersburg, and for much less. We leave it to you as our gift, Kapitan,” he said with his arms wide, and a smile on his phyz worthy of a doting papa, “in recognition of the great service you do us, in the cause of peace for all our peoples.”