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

It had taken an age thundering his sabre hilt off the door to gain entry to the house. She’d known who was banging; he’d seen her face at a window looking down at him with an expression he could not read through the mullions. But she took her time unbolting.

She had already known the battle over the river had been lost, that surrender of the city was inevitable. Not to surrender would invite its sack. It was a custom of war. If a besieging army had to take any fortified bastion by storm, it was understood that once through the breach, that army’s commander would give his soldiers a day and night of licence. A bounty, if you like, for all the blood they would have paid for the victory. Because storming a bastion was always a bloody affair. Certainly, the Russians’ one previous attempt at taking Danzig’s walls had been most bloody, and that had been repulsed.

Everybody in the city knew that defeat on the Westerplatte meant no-one would be coming to relieve them. Better to surrender the city than have it taken, and then handed over to an army of blood- and loot-crazed soldiers for a day and a night, while they slaked themselves.

And in that mayhem, what an opportunity for a tsarina’s loyal servants to rid her of a tiresome gräfin of no significance, said James.

But there was going to be no mayhem, said Dorothea. And so no danger. What there would be however, was an opportunity.

That was how she’d been goading James for the past half hour.

‘You seem determined to go down with your dynasty,’ he said.

‘We shall not be going down, chevalier! Let me explain the ways of diplomacy in a civilised world. The city will be surrendered, yes, but that is when the talking will begin. For this war to end, and wars always end, there will negotiations and then a treaty. Stanislas will have to abdicate, but it is not automatic that Augustus will succeed. Not if there is another, legitimate contender …’

‘There is no other contender,’ James interrupted. ‘Legitimate or otherwise.’

‘Oh, but there is … and we both know who it is!’

‘There is no other,’ said James, all too aware of whom she meant. ‘There never was. I have tried to tell you that. The man you refer to does not seek the crown of Poland.’

‘Then he must be made to!’ hissed Dorothea, stamping her foot. ‘His wife must make him, for the sake of her country, and my duchy!’

James paused for a moment to reflect on the likelihood of mad, resentful, Polish Clementina ever making her husband do anything. Dorothea was clutching at a fantasy. That fantasy had to cease now if he were to get her out the door and out of the city. Bloody woman!

‘You are clutching at something that is past, milady,’ he said, sitting down to emphasise he meant to be heard. ‘The Russians will not hear you. Neither will James Stuart. The tsarina wants Courland back in her gift, and this war has been her opportunity. Not only is no-one listening, you have become an irritant. More than an irritant, to the tsarina. If you really want to do something for your people now, don’t throw your life away. Live instead, to fight another day, with new weapons, on another battlefield.’

‘What are you talking about, you tiresome man?’

‘You come from a world where power is its own currency. If you have it, it is always there. You do not have to go to it, or wait while it is summoned. It is at your fingertips to exercise or contest. What is yours, what you believe history says should be yours, or that which you simply covet. You snap your fingers and you are in the game. How could the world be any other way? But you, Gräfin Dorothea, do not have any real power in this game. You merely strut through the corridors of power bartering in the crumbs from its table. You talk of your people, but how does your game bring in their harvests or prevent rampaging armies passing like locusts across their land? You do not change or influence the machinations of these great despots; you are merely a counter in their game. Those are the rules, and always have been. But the world does not have to be that way. A wind of change is blowing. This is an age in which natural philosophers are proving the natural world is not governed by man’s dogma or superstition, but by natural laws – that can be proved by measurement, that are observable. Our human dark age of myth and magic is debunked forever – instead of spells, there is mathematics. And if we have now proved the natural world is governed by science, then might not the life of mankind be also? Might the lives of men one day be governed by reason and not obscurity, by law and justice and not the random exercise of inherited despotism or crude force of arms?’

‘You are a dreamer, chevalier, and I am not even sure of what it is you dream,’ she said.

‘Great men are pondering upon just such questions all across Europe,’ said James. ‘Whether by philosophical inquiry we might plumb the very nature of man and by so doing, design laws and societies that channel our better character to the greater good of all. I know some of these men. I correspond with them. And what I am proposing to you is, do not die today, Dorothea, and let me introduce you to their thought, so you might regroup and renew the struggle for your Courland, but this time better armed, with new, irrefutable arguments instead of just intrigue.’

‘La!’ she said. ‘Great men, indeed! And great their great thoughts! What nonsense. Men are nothing but instinct. And base, at that.’

‘Really? Man is