He sat down at the Polish gunner’s desk and began to write a note. ‘How would you like to own a horse?’ he asked. ‘She answers to Estelle and she likes apples. Take this to the officers’ farrier, and she’s yours.’ And he handed the dumbfounded young man the paper.
He’d miss Estelle, but where he was going, he couldn’t take her.
With the French army defeated, and the Russians about to take Weichselmünde fortress – for take it they must, with nary a soldier left to hold it – Danzig would become untenable, and the short unhappy reign of King Stanislas would come to an end.
Colonel James Lindsay was a soldier after all, not a cleaner, and what was about to unfold here was no longer a war, but a mess.
‘Sweden, I think,’ he said to himself. But as he stepped out onto the fortress’ jetty, into the mass of frantic scrabbling figures there, another thought hit him. One that stopped him in his tracks.
The Gräfin Dorothea von Kettler.
She must still be in Danzig. And the Russians still at the city gates.
James didn’t have to look very far into the future to know what the Gräfin Dorothea von Kettler’s fate would be. One way or another the Russians were going to enter Danzig, and when they did, Peter Lacy would execute the Tsarina Anna’s will, and the Gräfin Dorothea von Kettler’s flapping mouth would be silenced.
The bloody woman. What was she still doing there when he’d warned her? Stupid question, he knew.
James did not employ a rational chain of argument to arrive at his decision. How could he? There were no rational arguments for what he now did.
It did not take him long to find one of the fishing boats he did business with. They knew him to be a good customer; a gentlemen who never tried to haggle them out of their profits, and always had the time of day for a fellow, not to mention a few jokes and lots of gossip. At the first boat he asked, ‘Will you to take me up to Danzig?’ the skipper said, ‘Aye!’
Remarkable, when you considered all the other boats were heading out into the Baltic before what breeze there was changed, and the Russian fleet in the offing could enter the Mottlau, and start bombarding Weichselmünde.
It was only once he was under way that he had time to reflect on what he was doing. He was under no duty to this woman; he had no connection at all to her, save that of a brief travelling companion. She certainly had shown no consideration of him. Yet here he was embarked on a course that could easily cost him his life. He supposed it all came down to that pressure in his breast every time he thought of her.
An all-too-possible, alternative future was him bobbing happily away aboard this fishing smack, as it plied its way across the Baltic to Karlskrona and safety, while behind him, in a Russian-occupied Danzig, was her lifeless, garrotted body lying in a heap in some tawdry basement.
There was no breeze on the river; the fishermen had to pull mightily, through the narrow irrigation canals and shortcuts that cut across the big bend and brought them out opposite the city wall’s Mottlau bastion. The journey took him through the shattered rear areas of the right flank of Estaing de Sailland’s army. From where he sat on the bait-encrusted gunnels he could see how comprehensive the defeat had been. The mostly French battalions were now pressed right back against the riverbank, penned in by a ring of Russian infantry and guns. Small boats of all description swarmed back and forth across the river to the city, but there would never be enough of them to evacuate the French, or even to supply them. James’ little smack had to jostle to get under the river gate and into the city proper.
He directed the fishermen rowers up through the canals to the wharf nearest the old duke’s town house. Everywhere they looked on shore, people were busy. Their main occupation seemed to be stockpiling their basements. Before he stepped ashore, he passed the boat’s skipper a heavy purse, and promised him more if he’d only wait. Two hours at most.
The fishermen were grumpy in their nervousness now. All the good grace had gone. But they agreed.
15
A Future of Learning and Wisdom
She paced up and down in front of the mantelpiece as a caged bear does, awaiting its baiting.
The old duke was in his sitting room, and the servants they had left were nowhere to be seen. No chaperone for this meeting. But then, even James could see Dorothea was most definitely not at her provocative best. No inflaming décolletage, and her hair was un-powdered and merely pinned back; delicately done, but no confection, and no delicate waft of scent. She looked very self-contained and powerful, and throat-catchingly gorgeous.
‘Your great General von Bittinghofen is already negotiating to surrender the city to Lacy,’ she said airily, ‘so I shall, I’m sure, be a sub-clause in some treaty and therefore quite safe.’
James decided to forego pointing out von Bittinghofen was no longer his general, the contract having technically expired. Or that he doubted that her fate, or even that of the entire Courland dynasty, would feature at all in a simple ‘terms of surrender’.
‘I have a boat at the wharf,’ said James, repeating himself, still in measured tones. ‘It lacks a lady’s comforts, but it will, if you agree to step aboard, save your life, milady. So speed, milady. Speed, please.’
But she would
