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

all its vassals along the Rhine? Yes? So what are you doing here? On the other side of Europe, fighting other people’s fights? Surely you have fights of your own? You have big friends too, that can help you, don’t you? Like Louis, and his Bourbon cousin in Madrid, and the Pope, although I do not understand why he continues to support a pretender king who refuses Mass.’

Which was all true. And not just for the Scots. The strife was not just Scot against Englishman, no matter how much it was dressed up that way. Across all the British lands, from Ireland and the West Country to Cumbria and Northumberland, entire tracts of the Midlands, there were people who believed there was a fight still to be fought, to put a Stuart back on the throne instead of those wee German lairdies. And yes, Dorothea was right again; they had powerful friends. The quarrel between the Bourbons in France and Spain that had once thwarted James’ attempted flight to join his brother in Madrid had long since been patched up. Louis might only be lukewarm yet, but the Spanish court was fully behind the Stuarts. Peter I, Tsar of all the Russias, had been an ally while alive, and the King of Sweden, too. And, of course, the Pope. First one, then when he’d died, his successor. Both had stood four-square behind the pretender’s claim. James too, had often wondered why. Given James Francis Edward’s religion now. But then, maybe under this pretender king the Catholic church would no longer be totally banished from those islands where it once held hegemony, and that was why two Popes had kept faith, and kept financing.

But not that James cared. Not anymore. He only had this to say in reply to Dorothea’s question; why was he here, in Poland?

‘Things are different in my land. Those whose job it should be to protect us, have all the cunning of a deaf and blind sow, and the level of their watchfulness depends on who is wafting the deepest purse under their snouts.’

She had liked that answer, and had made an appreciative moue. ‘So the soldier of fortune’s soul is not so jaded,’ she said, ‘that it can no longer recognise injustice.’

He’d liked hearing those words about himself; although admitting it to his new self made him feel uncomfortable. So instead he went back to picking over what he always went back to, when he was thinking about Dorothea; the kiss the king had told her to give him. Nothing had felt less like duty. But then, nothing had followed its promise. He knew he could pick over that one for ever and still be no wiser.

So he snuggled down deeper into the coat, and tightened the muffler he had around his head and ears beneath his hat, and stretched his mittened fingers inside his huge leather riding gauntlets. No ships on the vast grey nothingness today. He touched Estelle’s flank as she walked along, and turned her. It was time now to head back to the fortress and its blazing hearth fires; time to go back to the hunkering down and the waiting.

*

It was late afternoon when James, accompanied by one of his squadron officers, Poinatowski, who had performed so well during their skirmish with the Russian hussars, and James’ aide, Casimir, were rowed into the city from a landing on the west bank of the Mottlau, across the river and up one of the waterways that flowed into the centre of Danzig. The entrance into the city was through a line of low, bluff stone bastions, between two overhanging fortified gatehouses from which were suspended an intimidating chain-linked barrier of floating logs. This waterway not only led to numerous wharves in the city centre, but supplied the substantial moat into which the continuous star-shapes of the bastion works were sunk.

James admired the defiant solidity of these walls, and as they passed, their improbable thickness. Even the heaviest siege cannon could blast away here until judgement day and barely chip them. He had been summoned by General von Bittinghofen, who was now commanding the city’s defences, and he had asked Poinatowski to come with him because he wanted him to put his ear to the ground and get a feel for the defending garrison and a sense as to how things were going. And Poinatowski, being a Pole, was obviously suited to keeping his ear to the ground. Also, he was fluent in a most elegant, diplomatic French, useful when it came to explaining Polish things to James.

The air froze their breath, and the snow, now largely dirty on the streets, was held in ridges and drifts by its frozen crust. From one of the central wharves, the party trudged to where the general kept his headquarters in a large three-storey merchant’s town house.

Pyotr Poinatowski had become something of a permanent fixture by James’ side since the dragoons had been posted to garrison Weichselmünde. To look at, he was every inch the Polish nobleman. Tall and dark and in possession of those distinguished high cheek bones so typical of the Slav people – so it had come as no surprise when James learned, but not from Pyotr himself, that his father had been castellan of Poland’s almost mythical Wawel Castle in the south eastern city of Kraków. But those were not the main reasons James had decided to keep him close. It was because he had proved to be a sharp, witty, companionable young man, who obviously had a firm grip of cavalry tactics and knew his men. He also seemed to know everything about the politics of Poland, and everything about everyone who played them.

It was Pyotr who had told him all about Dorothea, and her uncle, the Duke of Courland.

‘He’s here in Danzig, and has been for some time,’ Pyotr said. When James had pressed him further, he’d replied with