By My Sword Alone David Black (best story books to read txt) 📖

They were riding out onto the white, flat peninsula of Westerplatte, which jutted out into the equally flat, grey Baltic, stretching grey upon grey until it merged with the featureless grey sky on an indeterminate line that was the horizon. Everywhere was dull, bleak, dead, cold. This ride was a ritual now, since he’d received word from Stanislas’ court and headquarters in the city of Danzig itself, that their cause was shortly to be reinforced by ships of the French navy.

The garrison James commanded at Weichselmünde, a stout, modern, star-shaped fortress built to the design of the famous French military engineer, Vauban, of course had outlying posts on the Westerplatte, to monitor all shipping entering the Mottlau river and to act as a warning tripwire against anyone attempting to force the river in men-o’-war. But James liked to ride out anyway, every day, to take in the lay of the land, to show his men in the posts they were not forgotten and to break the daily monotony of fortress life. And to breathe fresh air, no matter how cold.

He and the Dzików dragoons had been at Weichselmünde since October, sent to secure the approaches to Danzig from the sea. Since then, not even a Russian patrol had sought to disturb their idyll.

Not so upriver. A force of about 12,000 Russian infantry and cavalry had encamped in the countryside to the south west several weeks previously. There had been a number of probing attacks towards Danzig, but no attempt had yet been made to invest the city properly. Stanislas’ current royal capital was as yet not under siege.

In fact, after their hasty quitting of Warsaw in September when Stanislas and his 2,500-strong ‘army’ had marched away the day after he had won the vote, the Russians had displayed little urgency in trying to topple him militarily from his throne. There had been no pursuit whatsoever, so that the retreat to Danzig had been entirely uneventful. The only thing that had chased them was the news the Russian general, Peter Lacy, had reconvened the electoral sejm, but this time with only pro-Russian Polish nobles, and voted in the big, fat Elector of Saxony, Frederick Augustus II, as the new king of all the Poles instead.

It was this delay by the Russians that had allowed Stanislas’ military commander, General von Bittinghofen, to review the state of the walls that surrounded the city and reinforce its defences. It had also allowed him to raise a substantial number of locals to form militias that would bolster the 4,500 regular troops he now had under his command. It was at that time von Bittinghofen had issued his special orders to the Colonel Chevalier Lindsay, ‘Take your dragoons to Weichselmünde and be our eyes on the sea!’

At least it had got him out of the usual sink of muddle-headedness and sycophancy that all courts, and headquarters, seemed eventually to become. But it also meant he saw no more of Dorothea. Irritating and dangerous woman though she was, he regretted this state of affairs, as he’d enjoyed being irritated by her and it had been a long time since he’d encountered a woman who made him feel as though he was playing with fire.

He smiled to himself as he thought about her and snuggled down into de Valençay’s sable coat. James had never been so thankful for a gift as he was now, with all that voluminous fur around him, and the fact that Dorothea had been jealous of it, coveted it – burying her face in it and moaning with pleasure when she first laid eyes on it – that made him smile about her even more.

He’d paid her coach many visits during the march north from Warsaw.

‘You’ll like the north,’ she’d said to him, on the journey. ‘You’ll probably know half the merchants in Danzig, and be relatives with half the bandits in the countryside around.’

James remembered asking her why she always talked in riddles.

‘Where is the riddle? They are all your people. You Scots. You’ve been coming here for 300 years, with your swords, offering to fight our wars for us for money, and when the wars were over, not going home. The ones who were too lazy to live by trade and barter just stole and robbed. In fact, they were probably the more honest of you. Scots, Scots, everywhere, with your drinking and your heretic, democratic church!’

And she’d been right. Well, the bit about the, ‘Scots, Scots, everywhere …’ In Danzig he’d heard more than a little Scots brogue amongst its merchant class, and there was even a Presbyterian minister and a kirk. The accusation of banditry, however, he could not talk to; suffice to say there appeared to be no Scots bandits on this coastline.

And then, in her more wistful moments, she’d even told him about her lands.

‘We are really a German people, rather than Slav,’ she’d mused, only half paying attention to him in the jolting coach, half back in her own forests. ‘Our lands were called Livonia until they were partitioned by war. The usual carving up by the victors. The duchy is all we have left, from the Daugava River to the Baltic. The duchy itself is barely 200 years old, and has always been a vassal to someone. The Poles … the Swedes at one time … the Austrians, through those whelps of the House of Wettin in Saxony … but mostly the Russians. And most of the time we ignore the vassalage, but we never forget the strength of our neighbours and the ease with which they could do us harm. We von Kettlers, always watchful, always cunning in the protection of our people.

‘What about you? You are a small land with a big neighbour? A neighbour with big friends to help it, too. Like the Holy Roman Empire and