The Baltic Gambit l-15

by Dewey Lambdin

  "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 they did not see how his face clouded. "I will say this and no more, and let there be an end to such." He paused for a long moment, carefully choosing his words, so he would not be guilty of the same violation. "Captain Lewrie has ever had a… mercurial streak. You, sirs, have no idea of how many parts is Captain Lewrie made."

  *P B Q ›*= almost time.

  *ya idysodar charochko = (roughly) you son of a whore mother.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Uncannily, the winds, perhaps the sea gods, turned perverse to Thermopylae once clear of the Gulf of Finland. A Sou'Westerly gale sprang up and blew for days of spitting snow, sleet, icy rains, and stinging spray, forcing the frigate to tack away Sutherly to claw off the maze of isles and shoals of southwest Finland; "short-boarding" to the West-Nor'west for a single watch, to gain enough sea-room for a "long Board" on the opposite tack round South by East for two watches, each leg bashed out "close-hauled" under reduced sail, with the coasts of the Russian-occupied provinces of Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland a dreaded risk before the bows. Even after the storm blew itself out, they still relied on Dead-Reckoning, with no clear idea of where they were, and the sun hidden behind a continual low overcast. Even Capt. Hardcastle, experienced as he was in the Baltic, could not even hazard a guess. And when all concurred that they might be near the 56th line of latitude, and could finally steer West, a Westerly wind arose that smacked them square in the face, forcing them to short-tack their way along the 56th Latitude (perhaps), with the rocky coast of Sweden off their starboard side… somewhere out there in the haze and morning fogs.

  To everyone's amazement, the wind at last went round to the Nor'west and the skies cleared, so that, a little after dawn of the twenty-eighth of March, they found themselves within two leagues of a tiny archipelago of wee, barren islets off Sweden. Capt. Hardcastle was beside himself in joy, for he recognised them.

  "We are at the Sou'east corner of Sweden, sir!" Capt. Hardcastle exclaimed, "just about to enter the Hanц-Bukten. That means we're not fifteen miles from the main channel to their naval port of Karlskrona!" he said with an urgent jab at the chart pinned to the traverse board.

  "Let's stand in closer ashore, then, Mister Ballard, and 'smoak' 'em out," Lewrie exulted. "Do what we came for, by God!"

  Which they did, fetching-to within two miles of the entrance to look the place over with their strongest telescopes, discovering that the Swedes, too, had readied their fleet for war, with masts set up and yards crossed, with sails bent on. Well, part of their fleet, for they could only espy ten ships of worth that appeared ready for sea, none of the powerful First or Second Rates, with all but one looking as short and bluff as older Third Rate 64s, and three of the readied ships were frigates!

  "Don't seem to have their hearts in it, do they, sir?" Lewrie commented to Lt. Ballard after he'd come down from the fighting top of the main-mast. "The Swedes could've put over twenty-five ships to sea, were they of a mind. So I heard from earlier accounts of naval action in the Baltic."

  "I'm sure I do not know why so few, sir," Ballard replied, his lips pursed. He showed a remarkable lack of curiosity in the matter. "I suppose we should be grateful."

  "They're still iced in," Lewrie informed him.

  "Good, sir," from Ballard.

  "No one's blastin', burnin', or, choppin' them a channel out," Lewrie further said. "Must be a lack o' peasants, yonder."

  Arthur Ballard nodded, feeling prompted to respond somehow.

  "A lot of ice-skatin' bears in the entrance channel, though."

  "Sir?" Lt. Ballard asked with a raised brow, as if he'd only been half-listening.

  "Never mind, Mister Ballard," Lewrie said with a wave of his hand, though he was fuming inside. "Do you launch the cutter and send them to the edge of the ice, for samples. Perhaps Captain Hardcastle may employ his expertise with such, and tell us how much longer they will be cooped up in harbour."

  "Very good, sir!" Ballard said, perking up with a clear order, and a duty to perform.

  And damn yer eyes, Arthur Ballard! Lewrie thought, highly irked, and just about ready to call his conduct Mute Insubordination; What's got into him? he asked himself for the thousandth time.

  From then on, the fickle weather and winds turned more benign. As they stood away from Karlskrona, the Westerlies backed Nor'westerly, so they could run with the wind on Thermopylae's starboard quarter to sail South of Bornholm Island. And, once they had Bornholm abeam, the winds swung right round to the North, allowing them a long beam reach towards Denmark, even close-reaching at West by North, then "beating" to weather at West-Nor'west as they closed the coast, and the sun made its appearance just often enough over the next four days to give them a much more accurate position to plot, each Noon.

  Towards sundown of that last evening, both Mr. Lyle and Capt. Hardcastle could agree that the land that smeared the forrud horizon was the point below Kioge Bay, a large anchorage below Copenhagen.

  So now we'll see if the war's started while we were away, Lewrie grimly told himself, lowering his telescope and compacting it, segment by segment, with slow clicks; and if we'll get out of the Baltic, back to the Fleet… wherever the Devil they are… in one piece!

  "Time to tack, sir?" the Sailing Master prompted.

  "Aye," Lewrie decided aloud. "Though there's not much room for us to make a board over towards Sweden. We'll not weather the Holland Deep on short tacks. Might have to come to anchor and wait for a wind shift."

  "Don't see us towing the ship up the Sound with our boats, aye, sir," Mr. Lyle said with a glimmer of dry humour, hands in the sma
ll of his back and rocking on his shoe heels. "Not if the Danes object to us tweaking their noses a second time. Perhaps Captain Hardcastle's two-knot current to carry us along, but against a Northerly-"

  "Deck, there!" a lookout shouted down through cupped hands with a phlegmy rasp from too many days of foul weather, and evenings below decks in damp, sodden clothing, clammy bedding, and the close, airless fug of close quarters. "Ships, ahead! War-ships! Three points off the starb'd bows! Anchored, with ridin' lights an' taffrail lanthorns lit!"

  "God help us, if the Danes have got their ships out," Mr. Lyle whispered, scrambling for a telescope.

  "Mister Furlow?" Lewrie called for one of the Midshipmen of the watch. "Aloft with you, and report."

  "Aye-aye, sir!" Furlow replied, dashing for the weather shrouds of the main-mast. Lewrie extended his own glass and crossed over to the starboard side, to the mizen-mast stays, and clambered atop one of the quarterdeck carronades, then to the top of the bulwarks, with one arm lopped through the stays. Yes, there were ships to the North near what he took for the entrance to the King's Deep, East of Amager Island and perhaps sheltering under the Danish batteries there. One or two of them stood out like whales compared to the rest; big, towering three-deckers of the First or Second Rates; most definitely warships.

  No, Lewrie told himself; not under Amager Island. They're just off the lower tip of the Middle Ground, outside the reach of the guns ashore. Whose, dammit? Do the Danes have that many? Do they own any First Rate three-deckers?

  "Sir!" Midshipman Furlow shouted down from his perch atop the cross-trees, above the main mast fighting top. "Our flags, sir! Blue Ensign on the biggest, Red on another! They're our fleet, sir!"

  "Very good, Mister Furlow!" Lewrie shouted upwards, collapsing his telescope again, and hopping down as spryly as he suddenly felt. "Mister Ballard, Stations to come about to the larboard tack, and we will short-tack to join our ships, yonder. Have my gig and boat crew ready, soon as we come to anchor. I'll row over to the flagship and report."

  "Aye-aye, sir."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Lewrie? Where the Devil have you sprung from?" Capt. Thomas Foley of HMS Elephant, the Third Rate 74 that flew Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson's flag, exclaimed in wonder as HMS Thermopylae's captain gained the starboard gangway and took his salute. "Greenland, by the look of it," Foley wryly commented as he took in Lewrie's swaddling furs. "I was amazed, when you made your private signal and number… joining us from the South?"

  "Captain Foley, sir," Lewrie replied with a sheepish smile, and doff of his cocked hat, which was one of the few items visible marking him as an officer of the Royal Navy; or an Englishman, for that matter. "Just returned from a reconnaisance of the Russian and Swedish harbours, sir. And, some diplomatic tosh. The Admiral is aboard Elephant? Last I heard at Yarmouth Roads, he was to have a First Rate."

  "Shifted his flag to a vessel of lesser draught, for this Danish business, sir," Foley said, thankfully feeling not a whit insulted that Lewrie might be making a back-handed disparagement of his ship.

  "I must report to him, Captain Foley. Is he busy?" Lewrie asked.

  "Frightfully," Foley replied, "Lord Nelson even now is dictating the orders for our attack on the Danes."

  "Then I don't s'pose what we'll face once we've settled them is done matters that much at the moment," Lewrie said, slumping with disappointment. He'd imagined a grand welcome, with hearty congratulations all round, a toast drunk in his honour, perhaps even some light applause upon his dashing entrance and his less-than-dire discoveries. "D'ye think I should call upon Sir Hyde?" he asked, wondering if he'd get a better reception there. After only getting a new active commission by "the skin of his teeth," Lewrie had hoped that his duties up the Baltic might turn at least a few heads, and restore his reputation with Admiralty.

  "Oh, Lord, don't do that, Lewrie!" Capt. Foley cynically scoffed. "Admiral Parker has quite enough on his plate, at the moment, worrying about the Danes! I gather," Foley said, leaning closer to impart his inside information, "that whenever the subject of the Russians arises, Sir Hyde is like to come down with the ague, and the vapours."

  "Hmm?" Lewrie gawped, his head cocked over in confusion.

  "In any event, it would take you the better part of the night to reach HMS London," Foley breezed off, "for Admiral Parker, with eight ships of the line, is now anchored off the Northern end of the Middle Ground, above Copenhagen and the Three Crowns fortress. Lord Nelson, with Rear-Admiral Graves in Defiance, command here. We're to sail in against the Danes and take them on from the South, as soon as we get a favourable slant of wind. We've twelve of the line, altogether, with Captain Riou and the frigates and lesser ships. Best we forward your written report to Sir Hyde, and your frigate remain here, sir. Every warship is welcome, and, I am bound, that Captain Riou will find your Fifth Rate and its artillery doubly welcome."

  "I have a copy for Admiral Parker with me," Lewrie told Foley, groping into the canvas despatch bag slung over his shoulder. "If you would be so kind as to have it sent on, Captain Foley. I've another for Lord Nelson, though none for Rear-Admiral Graves."

  "You'll need your orders from Lord Nelson, in any event, sir," Capt. Foley decided, summoning a lieutenant to his side, and ordering that he should signal an officer from one of the lighter vessels to come aboard and bear the report to the Vice-Admiral. "Will you come aft with me to Lord Nelson's quarters for something warming, sir?" Foley kindly offered, once that business was done.

  "Most thankfully, sir," Lewrie eagerly responded.

  In HMS Elephant's great-cabins under the poop deck, Lewrie was shown into "the presence" of Vice-Admiral of the Blue Lord Nelson who, at that moment, was lying in his bed-cot, propped up by several pillows and dictating to several clerks and lieutenants, all scribbling away as he spoke. A cabin servant with unruly black hair and pug-face features was scuttling round like a mother hen, offering another quilt to spread atop the other bed covers, and Nelson's chequered overcoat. Hot drink steamed on a brazier, for the side-board, and every stick of furniture but for the bed-cot and some portable writing desks had been struck to the orlop already. And, in contrast to Lewrie's frigate, where those Franklin stoves had been re-rigged and stoked, now she was securely at anchor, Elephant's great-cabins were perishing cold, and but dimly lit.

  "Captain Lewrie, of the Thermopylae frigate, is come, my lord," Foley said in a soft voice, unwilling to intrude too loudly.

  "Lewrie? That scoundrel?" Lord Nelson exclaimed in his squeaky high voice, peering querulously at the new arrivals with his one good eye, and a slim, almost girlish hand over the blind one, as if it yet pained him. "Yours is the Fifth Rate that came to anchor just after full dark, sir?"

  "It is, my lord," Lewrie replied. "Fresh come from the Baltic."

  "The Russians?" Nelson snapped, looking ill and impatient. "You were the one Lord Saint Vincent ordered to scout them out? How many?"

  "One First Rate, three Second Rates, and twelve Third Rates, at Reval, along with three more I took for Sixty-Fours or lesser, sir," Lewrie rattled off from memory. "Nine frigates, two Third Rates still stripped to a gant-line, and bomb vessels at Kronstadt, my lord. And, as of a week ago, still iced in… though the Russians have thousands of people choppin', burnin', and blastin' a single channel. It's the same with the Swedes at Karlskrona, my lord. Three frigates, only one Third Rate, and six Sixty-Fours or Fifty-Eights with their masts set up and yards crossed… and they're still iced in, too."

  "Ah!" Lord Nelson said with a long, pleased sigh, reclining on the pillows and looking up at the overhead with a smile.

  If he ain't half-dead a'ready, he's doin' a hellish-good imitation, Lewrie thought as he undid his fur coat. In his brief experience with Nelson in the Mediterranean in '95 and '96, at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in '97, the man had always struck him as a frail sort, as pale and wan as a consumptive most of the time; he was barely a couple of inches over five feet tall, damned near as short as the Reverend William
Wilberforce, and it was only combat, or the prospect of coming action, that livened Nelson up like an old horse "feagued" with a plug of ginger up its fundament to fool an unwary buyer.

  "Some more hot tea a'comin', sir," the ill-featured manservant fussed, all but lifting his master's shoulders and putting the mug to his lips like an invalid. He cast Lewrie a ferocious scowl, as if he had barged his way into the privacy of the sick-bed. "Nigh-boilin hot from the brazier, sir. Drink it down now, 'fore it cools."

  Damme, it must be a midget reunion, Lewrie thought, figuring the cabin servant was not a quim-hair taller than Nelson.

  "A copy of Captain Lewrie's written report has just this minute been sent along to Vice-Admiral Parker, my lord," Captain Foley said.

  "Oh Lord, that'll put the wind up him," Nelson moaned between sips of his steaming-hot tea.

  Don't I get any? Lewrie silently groused; It's freezin' in here.

  "Sir Hyde simply will not contemplate their existence," Nelson petulantly griped. "Or, that meeting them in battle and defeating them is the principal aim of this expedition, of our orders! It was all I could do to convince the man to enter the Sound at all, and dare the guns of Kronborg Castle. For days, we dithered, Sir Hyde thinking we should come at Copenhagen through the Great Belt passage, which would have taken weeks. Most dilatory, when the main thing is to go right at them, before any of the Baltic powers get their entire fleets out to sea, and combined."

  "Now, don't fret yourself, sir," the wee manservant gently chid him, "for we're here, and ready t'settle the Danes'is hash."

  "Thomas, you cosset me like a mother cat with her kittens," the Vice-Admiral said with a fond smile, relenting from his brief rant; a rant that had put colour in his cheeks. "Thomas Allen, Lewrie, my long-time 'man,' " Nelson explained. "Tea for Captain Lewrie, Thomas."

  "Aye, sir," Allen said, though he still kept a wary eye on the Eskimo-looking interloper.

  "Your weight of metal, Lewrie," Nelson demanded, looking healthier than he had a couple of minutes before.