Stamp forward with the left foot, reversing the musket to smash the brass butt plate into Sasha's broad nose, making him 'spout claret' in a fresh, red stream, and go cross-eyed!
Before his hands could get a grip on the man-ropes, the stout rope stays of the main-mast shrouds, or the bulwarks, Sasha teetered on the lip of the entry-port, arms flailing backwards in circles for balance, one foot behind him hoping for something solid that was not there. He over-balanced and went over the side backwards, roaring like a bear that had lost its grip in a tall tree, and was crashing to earth through the branches. Head and shoulders down, boot heels brushing the hull, there was a meaty thud, then a great splash as Sasha hit the gig, then the icy sea.
'Yob tvoyemat!' Count Levotchkin shrieked.
'Oh, my Lord!' Lt. Eades croaked as he and many others dashed to the bulwarks to peer over. Lewrie took out his pocket handkerchief and swung the Marine's musket barrel-down. He dipped the handkerchief into a gun-tub of slushy, half-iced-over water, and thorougly cleaned Sasha's blood from the butt-plate and buttstock, then went to the Marine from who'd he'd taken it, and handed it back.
'Thankee for the loan, Private… Leggett, is it?' he said in much calmer takings, almost as casually as if he'd merely taken it to inspect it, and had found no fault.
'Uh, aye sir… Leggett, sir,' the stunned Marine stammered. 'Uhm… thankee fer cleanin' it, sir.'
'Get him! There he is! Haul him in! Quick, there!' a babble of voices cried instructions and encouragements, to which Lewrie paid no heed as he rinsed his handkerchief in the frigid water butt. Once somewhat clean and wrung out, Lewrie looked up to see Lt. Ballard goggling at him, deeply frowning.
'What, Mister Ballard?' Lewrie asked. 'The son of a bitch tried t'murder me, at his lily-livered master's orders. You've a problem with that?'
'Where might one begin, sir?' Arthur Ballard gravelled, almost too disgusted to speak, his normally placid features a'twist in a grimace, and untypical emotion in his voice; as if he gazed upon a rotting pile of entrails and offal, aswarm with fat flies. 'It was murder on your part, sir, and I-'
'Arthur, he had it coming,' Lewrie pointed out.
'Do not presume to… excuse me, sir,' Ballard said, choking back whatever objections he had before he became openly insubordinate to a senior officer. His face turned stony, his eyes indifferent and hooded. 'I'll say no more for now, Captain Lewrie,' he said, turning away to return to the quarterdeck from the gangway.
'Bastard's a goner, sir,' Lt. Farley came back from the bulwarks to report, with a hasty doff of his hat. 'Bashed his head in when he struck the stempost of the gig, then went under. Drowned, it appears, sir. That, or the ice-cold water finished his business. Serves him right, might I say, sir. God only knows what treachery foreigners are capable of!'
'Get your dirk back, Mister Tillyard?' Lewrie enquired, looking about the deck to his saviours. 'Stout lad, and quick thinkin', t'tug me out of his reach. Thankee.'
'My pleasure, sir,' Midshipman Tillyard said, trying to come over all modest, as befitted British heroes.
'Lieutenant Eades, sir… my commendations to Private Leggett, Sergeant Crick, and Private… him, there,' Lewrie continued with his praise. 'Private Degan? Aye, and your quick actions sir. Lopped off his thumb, was it?'
'Aye, sir,' Lt. Eades replied, more prone to preening than Tillyard, and all but buffing his fingernails on his red coat. 'Fellow was perspiring, as cold as it is. I should have twigged to that, but put it down to his efforts to carry the last of our passengers' dunnage.'
'No matter, Lieutenant Eades… you did for him,' Lewrie said with a grin. 'Thankee. Mister Ballard?'
'Sir?' the First Officer replied from the quarterdeck, turning to face Lewrie with his hands behind his back.
'Soon as the gig's back alongside, we'll rig the boats for towing astern,' Lewrie instructed. 'We've spent enough time close ashore what might soon become a hostile country. Once everyone is inboard, haul us in to short stays and get the ship under way. I wish us t'be as far west of Kronstadt as possible by the end of the First Dog.'
'Very good, sir,' Lt. Ballard crisply replied, as though nought had passed between them.
Lewrie went to the shoreward bulwark to watch the gig pull for the town. Count Rybakov sat sullen and slumped on a thwart, looking deeply sad. Count Levotchkin sat on another, with Sasha's soggy body resting against his shins, and could have been weeping with his failure.
Wish it'd been him, not his man, Lewrie thought, feeling that the affair twixt him and that young fool would have to be finished, sometime in the future. Without Count Rybakov around the next time, or someone else as level-headed, and there would be no stopping that arrogant shit.
Lewrie raised his gaze. It was rapidly growing dark, as it did in such high latitudes; not even Five Bells of the Day Watch, and dusk was gathering, and with it, the cold and the wind. A wind from out of the Nor'east, a flesh- freezing wind from the North Pole, it felt like. An icy wind that perfectly matched Captain Lewrie's mood.
'Well, that was an exciting hour or so,' Lt. Farley muttered as he and the other officers conferred forward of the binnacle cabinet as Thermopylae sprinted Westward from the Gulf of Finland in the darkness. Lt. Farley was about to conclude his stint of watch-standing, and his good friend Lt. Fox was about to take over at the end of the Second Dog Watch. Lt. Eades was there, as well, for one of the gifts Count Rybakov had left behind was several boxes of cigars, which the Captain had passed on to the gun-room; though they couldn't smoke them below.
'Wonder who this Tess they spoke of is?' Lt. Fox said with a roll of his eyes. 'A cut above your run-of-the-mill seaport doxy, I'm bound. One might say she comes highly recommended, what? A Russian aristocrat… and the Captain, hmm?'
'Is he not married, though?' Lt. Farley pointed out.
'When did that ever stop a fellow?' Lt. Fox chuckled back.
'Now you are being crude, sir,' Lt. Ballard, standing with them, cautioned.
'One may only hope, Mister Ballard,' the irrepressible Lt. Fox rejoined.
'To be crude, sir?' Ballard snapped.
'To wangle an introduction, sir,' Fox cheekily explained.
'My word, but so far, this voyage has been bags more exciting than the whole past year, entire, under poor old Captain Speaks,' Lt. Farley said, changing the subject to something less risky.
'Just going to say,' Lt. Fox was quick to agree, puffing happily on his cigar.
'Uncanny, this,' the Sailing Master, Mr. Lyle, said by way of greeting, after a peek at the compass, and a report from the chip-log aft. 'She's clapping on seven and a half knots, even under reduced sail. By dawn, we should be well West of Reval, and exiting the Gulf of Finland. May we imagine that the Captain's seals whistled up this fortunate wind for us, gentlemen? For I cannot think of a better, and at just the right time, too.'
'Uncanny, indeed, Mister Lyle,' Marine Lieutenant Eades agreed. 'So many things about this voyage have been.'
'Just saying…,' Lt. Farley stuck in.
'Quick thinking, sir,' Lyle said to Eades. 'Thought you'd hack that Russian in half, for a moment.'
'Not for want of trying, Mister Lyle,' Lt. Eades was happy to explain, again. 'That hide coat of his, though… might as well have been plate steel, like knights of old, else I would've laid his backbone open.'
'All over a whore,' Mr. Lyle sourly commented, 'Well… ' Lyle slyly added, quickly glancing between his fellow officers.
'I believe Captain Lewrie's name of 'Ram-Cat' in the Fleet is not for his choice of pets, alone, hmm?'
'Must be hellish-fetching!' Lt. Fox most wistfully said.
'Ahem!' from the brooding Lt. Ballard. 'Your pardons, Mister Ballard,' Lyle said, 'but I was merely speculating that our new Captain is a man of many parts.'
'Just so, Mister Lyle,' Lt. Farley chimed in.
'A man of many parts, indeed.' Lt. Arthur Ballard coughed into his mittened fist, and cleared his throat in a pointed way, to silence further speculations. Discussing rumours about senior officers was simply not done, not even in the privacy of the gun-room, for it led to insubordination and undermined a commanding officer's authority, dignity, and proper discipline.
'You served under him before, Mister Ballard?' Lyle continued, undaunted. 'I thought you said you had. Dear God above, has he always been so… bold?'
That was a safer word than the one Lyle had first composed.
'Gentlemen,' Ballard said in the darkness, turned away from the dim illumination in the compass binnacle, so
