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.'
He 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 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
