expectant, wolfish smiles.
'Summon all hands, sir?' Acting-Lieutenant Sealey asked.
'Not just yet, Mister Sealey,' Lewrie countered, 'for we don't know if the situation has changed all that much. What we do know is, gentlemen, that early this morning, one of our scouting cutters spoke a Prussian trading brig, which gave them a copy of a German newspaper… in which it was reported that the Tsar… the mad, despotic bugger… has been assassinated.'
He had to hold up a cautioning hand to still the officers' glee.
'The new Emperor of All the Russias is Crown Prince Alexander, a lad not much older than Mister Furlow, here,' Lewrie went on. 'And, we know what a fire-eater is Furlow, so the new Tsar may be even worse. God only knows will he continue his late father's nonsense of an Armed League of the North, now we've thrashed the Danes, and run the Swedes back to port with their tails 'tween their legs. I assume he's heard o' those events by now, same as we've had news of his father's demise.'
'How, sir?' Lt. Farley pressed. 'When?'
'Accordin' t'this, he was strangled in his bed-chambers,' Lewrie told him, 'in the grand palace at Saint Petersburg, the night of…' he referred to the note, 'the night of the twenty-fourth of March.'
'Not two days after we landed those Russian emissaries, by God!' Lt. Fox marvelled. 'My word, what a turn of events!'
'Deuced favourable turn of events, for us, sirs,' the Sailing Master, Mr. Lyle, chortled.
Damme, it was! Lewrie realised, stunned; Oh Christ, have we… have I, been part of regicide? Rybakov, Levotchkin, and… Twigg!
Why else had it been so important for Count Rybakov, that shit Levotchkin, to hasten to Yarmouth in such a tear, escorted down from London by Thomas Mountjoy, his old clerk, sent by the Foreign Office? Mountjoy, whose mentor in Secret Branch was, who had been recruited and trained by, Zachariah Twigg, who'd once said that to spare Europe of Russian imperial ambitions would ignite class warfare and terror, civil war and peasant serf rebellion, no matter how many millions of people died.
And, how best t'force the Russians out of the League of Armed Neutrality but t'scrag the insane bastard behind it all, the Tsar! he furiously thought… furious at himself for being fooled into a role in it, if it indeed was an English scheme. A 'peace mission,' mine arse! Ye wish peace? Kill the leader who wants a war, Lewrie thought.
He shook his head in mute anger as he paced the deck. He had always been Zachariah Twigg's gun-dog, for bloody years, and in all of his dealings with the bloody-handed schemer, had never been told all the truth. There was the possibility that it was the Russians who had approached the Foreign Office, not the other way round, and asked for help,… which would explain why it was that Thomas Mountjoy had been so eager to foist his emissaries off on Lewrie, and wash Government's hands, not even taking the risk of 'un-official presence' in the Baltic.
A simple task, oh, and drop these people off, why don't you, on yer way? Countin' me too simple t'puzzle it out 'til much too late, the arrogant old schemin' bastard! And I didn't! he ruefully thought.
He couldn't imagine the new Prime Minister, Addington, hatching such a plan; not if he was so hen-headed as to contemplate negotiating a peace treaty with France right after smashing Denmark and capturing the last French-held outpost in the Caribbean! No, it smacked more of the former Prime Minister, William Pitt, the Younger, or Henry Dundas, the former Secretary of State for War.
Once set in motion, though, and if Addington didn't know about it…! Lewrie realised. The current crop of buffoons, the Earl of Elgin, the Duke of Portland, Lord Hawkesbury at the Foreign Office itself, or Lord Hobart would never have had the nerve… so perhaps England hadn't had a hand in it!
Who's t'say the old Tsar was such an insane terror, the Russians did him in, Lewrie f J›It's happened to Tsars before, and it's not like he didn't give 'em hellish-good cause t'be rid of him. Like the old sayin'… 'Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown'?
'Pipe 'All Hands,' then, sir?' Lt. Farley prompted.
'My pardons, Mister Farley, but I was just composin' my thoughts on how best to phrase it,' Lewrie lied, forcing himself to perk up and sound eager. 'Pipe 'All Hands,' aye.'
Capt. Alan Lewrie, RN, took himself a contemplative pace about the deck, head down and his hands in the small of his back as the Bosun, Mr. Dimmock, and his Mate, Pulley, fweeped away on their silver calls, and Thermopylae's people not on watch came boiling up from below in a thunderous roar of feet, both shod and bare, on companionway ladders.
Lewrie hitched his shoulders before turning to go forward to the break of the quarterdeck to overlook his men in the frigate's waist, the hands assembled on the sail-tending gangways. The sun was shining in a mostly clear blue sky, and the Baltic glistened and heaved slowly and peacefully, a glittering steel-blue, with only here and there any specks of rotting ice. The wind stood in the Sou'west and, for once, actually felt almost temperate! There would be no more need for his reeky furs, except as a place for his cats to romp, and nap.
'Ship's comp'ny… off hats, and stand easy!' Lt. Farley bellowed. 'All hands assembled, sir.'
'Thankee, Mister Farley. Lads!' Lewrie began, with expectant faces looking back at him from HMS Thermopylae's 250 sailors, petty officers, Warrants, and boys. 'We've gotten a bit of good news…'
AFTERWORD
As one may see, we've come a long way in the conduct of trials since Alan Lewrie's appearance in court. As his barrister, Andrew MacDougall, Esq., told him in Troubled Waters, before his first court appearance, the first trial that lasted more than a single day didn't occur 'til 1794!-and yes, there was no such thing as cross-examination allowed; nor were there government prosecutors. A barrister could go both ways, depending on the wishes of his 'brief,' not client; Defence Counsel for one trial, then be hi J0;. #160;
The identity of Alan and Caroline's anonymous tormentor; it was a retired NYPD detective, living in Florida, who was the only one who nailed Theoni Kavares Connor as the culprit, years ago, for which I congratulate him, and I hope when he reads this, he'll enjoy a drink, with his friends buying, to reward his shrewdness, and insight into human nature. He's so sharp, they ought to throw in appetisers, too!
The Baltic Gambit depended heavily on three sources of research, two of which my friend Bob Enrione at CBS sent me: The Great Gamble: Nelson at Copenhagen by Dudley Pope, and, to a lesser extent, Naval Wars in The Baltic, 1522-1850 by R. C. Anderson, both of which, unfortunately, are long out of print, and it's a trusting soul who loaned them to me for over a year, once I'd mentioned that Lewrie might be going to the Baltic in the winter of 1801. The third, providing all the 'Dirt' on the King of Denmark, his queen the unfortunate Caroline Matilda, the daughter of King George III, and that earnest nut-job, her lover, and father of her bastard daughter, Johann Struensee. Oh, I know, people now prefer 'love child,' but they took bastardy and illegitimacy very seriously in those days, so bastard it'll be. As I said before, I'd rather be Historically Accurate than Politically Correct. I bought Royal Affair: George III and His Scandalous Siblings by Stella Tillyard locally. It's a very fun read, the prissiness of Jane Austen's novels bedamned; the eighteenth century and the first part of the nineteenth was 'warts and all,' 'balls to the wall,' and pretty randy, right through the Regency, before all of Wilberforce's moralising, and the influence of Jeremy Bentham, Hannah More, Priestley, and all the other 'Do Good' reformers led to the reigns of King William IV and Queen Victoria… even Jane Austen commented on how radically morals and mores had changed in her own life; what was tacitly accepted without a roll of anyone's eyes in her youth had become Crude, Lewd, and Common in her adulthood.
Vice-Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, and that infamous Signal Number 39; all newspaper quotes I cited were real, culled from Dudley Pope's The Great Gamble. What Lewrie did not witness, since he did not stay in Yarmouth Roads with the rest of the gathering fleet, was Sir Hyde's complete lack of urgency. The allotment of warships to Lord Nelson or Rear-Admiral Graves, and the Order of Sailing, had to be wrung out of him bare hours before the expedition set sail. Indeed, it took a very stiff note, what Harry Potter would call a 'howler,' from the Earl St. Vincent ('Old Jarvy') at Admiralty in London, to get the man to board his flagship, HMS London, leave his bride, Frances, his 'little batter pudding,' at the Wrestler's Arms, and 'pull his bloody finger out!'
The voyage from Yarmouth Roads to the Skaw, the top of Denmark, took longer than Lewrie's voyage, with a few odd, un-necessary jogs at Sir Hyde Parker's orders, with no communication between Nelson, Graves, or Sir Hyde about how they'd go at the Danes, or what was to be done with the fleet, did they get into the Baltic! It was
