"Russia has already had one ogre such as he… Ivan the Terrible," Mr. Oglesby intoned with a grim nod. "Thankfully, the Russians did away with him, though I cannot help but imagine that his death was but a temporary respite. An absolute monarch will, sooner or later, turn monstrous, if only to preserve his seat on the throne… which is so rewarding and pleasing."
"Well, with luck, perhaps his nobles will treat this Tsar Paul as they did their Ivan the Terrible," Lt. Follows said with a laugh. "Oh, I know… lиse majestй and all that," he partly retracted not a tick after, but still with a merry air, "yet… he's not our King…"
"Thank God," Midshipman Oglesby piped up.
"… and perhaps the new'un might take years before he goes as mad as his predecessor, ha ha!" Lt. Follows suggested. "Unless insanity runs in the Romanov family."
"Peter the Great was sane," Mr. Oglesby pointed out, "though I can't recall why his heirs weren't suitable to rule, and Russia ended with a German girl on the throne. After the Dowager Tsarina died, and Catherine got rid of her useless idiot of a husband, no one could say that Catherine the Great ever evinced the slightest sign of madness. Her son, though… well," he said, finishing his latest cup of tea, and dragging out his pocket-watch. "Good Lord, lads, we were to meet the wife in the Strand by twelve. We must go, else she'll be wroth with us… me, more to the point. You will pardon us do we depart, Captain Lewrie?"
"It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintances, sirs, and a most enlightening conversation, for which I thankee," Lewrie said as they all rose and made their parting salutations.
After they'd bustled out the door in overcoats and boat-cloaks, Lewrie decided that he might as well pay his reckoning, too, and hunt up his own mid-day meal. Stultifying, and as earnest, as dinner conversation at the Madeira Club could be, with so many gentlemen who had made their fortunes in Trade sharing stock tips and complaints about workers, prices, and goods, the club did lay a good table, and could boast of a wine cellar that even Almack's, White's, or Bootle's might envy. There was also the realisation that said table, said wine list, was included in his weekly fee, which his father had arranged for him, which was about a quarter less than the others were charged-in some instances, being kin to the old lecher had its advantages!
Was his pace quick enough, he could just make it back in time for a glass of something warming before the dining room door opened!
Though, as he maintained a brisk stride back up Orchard Street to Wigmore Street, Lewrie could not help recalling a late-night talk with that devious old rogue Zachariah Twigg nearly two years before, when his legal troubles were just beginning to come home to roost…
Twigg's grand scheme did not care a whit for the abolition of slavery, though many of the reformers thought him an ally against the "peculiar institution," did not care if thousands of planter families in the West Indies were impoverished should slavery be outlawed in the British Empire, along with the slave traders and shipping interests in West Country seaports. What Twigg intended was to cripple any threat to Great Britain from slave-driving nations, with his own country and its abolition of slavery the shining example; the United States of America, for one, whose economy, treasury, and power was based on agricultural exports, mostly reaped by slave labour. Create a rebellion as bloody as Saint Domingue, or Haiti, or whatever they were calling it, these days, and America might even fracture in twain, with one of the halves forced to ally itself with Great Britain against the other half, perhaps even see the error of its ways and rejoin the Empire someday!
No matter how much blood might be shed in servile revolts and civil war, no matter how many hundreds of thousands perished! And… hadn't Russia come up, that night? What had Twigg cold-bloodedly said? That, if Russia ever turned its insatiable appetite for conquest westward, and set its massive peasant conscript armies on the march, those "white slaves," the serfs, could be turned against the nobility and the landowners, against the Tsar himself, and all the Cossacks in the world could not put down the revolution, the civil wars 'tween the warlords that would ensue, in the Holy names of Abolition and Freedom!
Russia now seemed a foe. And what was Twigg up to in the face of that? It wasn't just the nip in the air that made Lewrie shiver!
CHAPTER SEVEN
There was a warming pea soup, served with a pleasant hock; then Dover sole with boiled potatoes and carrots; the salad course was nothing worth much, in the dead of winter, but the roast pigeons, accompanied by more potatoes, carrots, and peas, was succulent, and complemented by a promising Beaujolais. Cheese, sweet biscuit, and the port, some of the house's famed namesake, a Portuguese Madeira, finished off the meal, which, despite the victuals, was nothing but a litany of bad, sad, gloom, and the portent of utter ruin.
Some of Lewrie's fellow lodgers, while not strictly so deep in Trade that they kept a shop and handled money directly, had all taken "flyers" on the Exchange, had invested in stocks and bonds beyond the safe and sane Three Percents and the Sinking Fund as a repository for their "New-Made Men" profits, and the Northern League recently formed round the shores of the Baltic, their Armed Neutrality, and the threat of an expanded war, had many of them shivering like a dog that was trying to pass a peach pit… as an American naval officer had so vividly said to Lewrie a few years back.
"The Tsar is so demented he could be committed to Bedlam," said one who had invested heavily in naval stores.
"They don't have one," an Army officer in mufti rejoined.
"Well, they should," the civilian fellow reiterated. "And that King Christian of Denmark's not a whit better. How else explain why the Danes joined Russia in this pact?"
"Same as the Swedes, old man," said another near the head of the long table. "It's fear of what Russia would do, did they not sign on."
"King Christian's in Bedlam, of a sorts, already," the Army officer snickered. "Called his royal apartments. Soon as the Danes ousted King George's sister, Caroline Matilda, and chopped the head off her lover… what the Devil was his name, their Prime Minister, then?"
"Struensee," a much older gentleman told them between bites of his meal, "Johann Friedrich Struensee, and one of the biggest fools of the age. I remember it well. A feather-brained German, besotted with Voltaire, Rousseau, and all those pagan French reformers. Turned all Denmark inside-out before they did for him and his cronies. Imagine, a commoner German running an entire country, and fathering bastards on a queen! He'd all but buried King Christian in a dungeon before he was deposed. Mind now, the Danish king needed to be put in a dungeon, for he was a vicious lunatick."
"So their Crown Prince, the Regent, is really Struensee's illegitimate 'git'?" a member asked. "Egad!"
"They say not, but he ain't insane like the old king, so…," the old gentleman lasciviously hinted. "They shuffled off the little princess… They were sure Struensee quickened her, and Crown Prince Frederick was the only male heir."
"The Swedes, though," Lewrie posed.
"Beaten to a pulp by Russia, their northern empire lost back in the seventeen-twenties," the Army fellow offered. "Swedish Pomerania gone, Polish provinces, and Finland, too. Fear, again, sir. Why they even attempted to fight the Russians again in '87 is beyond me."
"But what about Prussia signing on?" another asked.
"Fear of Russia, again," the Army officer said with a shrug. "Perhaps a fear of France, too, after Napoleon gave them a drubbing. Better to crouch in Russia's shadow than stand out in the open, alone. And, since, as Captain Lewrie here will tell you, the Prussians don't have much of a navy, nor much of a merchant marine, either, it's no skin off their nose. Ain't that right, sir?"