By My Sword Alone by David Black (ebook reader ink TXT) 📕

on storming us off the march ... that we can expect them before the evening gun … that the city is doomed.’

James let his words hang in the air. Then, quietly, but with great precision, he addressed the marquis. ‘M’sieur Chapuis marched his force against a single regiment of Saxon line infantry, established behind prepared positions. Unfortunately, his tactics in the ensuing engagement did not reach beyond exchanging musketry with them at close range. I say “unfortunately”, because M’sieur Chapuis brought with his force no planking to traverse the ditch before the Saxon position, so that his men might attack it once their volleys were discharged, nor short ladders so that his soldiers might ascend the Saxons’ earthen palisade once across the ditch, nor sacks of grenadoes they might throw to keep the Saxons’ heads down while effecting such manoeuvres. As for M’sieur Chapuis being left to march to his death, I can assure the marquis that when I saw M’sieur Chapuis yesterday evening, he was still very much alive. And as for what the Saxons might be doing now, as we speak … I rather think they are drinking coffee, as safe behind their earthworks as they were yesterday before M’sieur Chapuis so rudely disturbed them.’

James went on to deliver his short account of what he knew to von Bittinghofen’s nearest staff officer. The glum aide thanked him for his duty, especially for his independent interpretation. It accorded entirely with the official dispatch, which had landed within the hour. James accepted a stiff tot of warming local eau de vie from the functionary, and for a moment they both gazed silently into a peat hearth fire, the insipid flames of which seemed to be drawing cold air into the room more efficiently than it was heating it.

When he returned to his lodgings there was a letter waiting for him. For an excited heartbeat he thought it might be the one he was expecting from David Hume. But the envelope bore the Stuart seal instead. The dwindling reserves of combustibles in the city as a result of the siege meant a fire in every room was a luxury no longer possible. So he sat down without shedding his topcoat, or mitts, poured himself a stiff brandy from his personal flask, and began to read.

It was the usual turgid prose James had come to expect from the palazzo; dry and devoid of any intimacy one might expect from a liege lord to his trusted confidant. After all the usual inquiries after health came the litanies of disappointments; how he, his king, had been expecting to hear James’ analysis of events in Poland, the real news behind the bland diplomatic communiqués. Had any negotiations between Stanislas and the Russians taken place? And how was Augustus of Saxony faring in extending his rule as king, since the Russians installed him as their choice at that elaborate coronation in Krakow? Was anyone discussing a compromise candidate, even at this late stage, who might be agreeable to both sides and who could put an end to the fighting? And if not, was anyone even prepared to discuss such an option?

Although it did not specifically betray a definite stance on the part of the Stuart court, or set out any instructions to him, James thought the letter remarkably frank in its questions. An uninvited third party to this correspondence could draw all manner of conclusions from what the writer wanted to know.

A dull weight descended upon James. All those decisions made during his journey to Poland, his determination never to look back, to never again put his trust in princes or submit to being the useful idiot, and still the past dragged on him. He let his fingers feel the smoothness of the paper, imagining how the man who would be King of Great Britain must have held it, to approve it before signing. No ordinary document, but a letter of supplication from a sovereign to his subject; a king begging his servant for service, playing on his loyalty, seeking to use the better parts of him. He folded the letter and placed it in a box he never bothered to lock. Experience had taught him that anyone who would want to read the letter’s contents had probably done so already.

11

Encounters with Russian Generals

James lay in the long, reedy grass, peering down towards a huge, primeval carpet of birch trees that seemed to stretch from observable horizon to horizon, and at a substantial road of packed, dusty earth that snaked along its edge.

Along the road trotted several troops of Russian cuirassiers, their white tunics bright beneath the highly-burnished steel of their breastplates. The spring rains had come and gone so the going beneath the horses’ hooves was free of the rutted mire puddles of even a few days ago, and the column kicked up myriads of little clouds as it passed. They weren’t the first heavy cavalry detachment he’d seen that morning.

The previous night he had led two squadrons of his Dzików on another cavalry sweep along this corridor between the Mottlau river and the sea. They were now several leagues to the east of Danzig, towards Fort Sommerschanz, which had, finally, recently fallen to repeated Russian assaults. However, that he and his Dzików had managed to patrol out this far was testament to the fact that the Russian encirclement of the city was not quite complete. And from the number of Russian patrols he’d seen every time he’d probed this far east, it appeared they were all too aware of the gap; which was why they were using a regiment of cuirassiers to try and stop the hole.

James wasn’t looking to fight this imposing-looking lot of hard nuts; he was after booty first and foremost, and failing that, to disrupt any new workings being thrown up in support of the siege, like supply dumps, or new tracks being laid to carry besieging