Dewey Lambdin
The Baltic Gambit
(Lewrie – 15)
This one is for one of my greatest fans,
my mother,
EDDA ALVADA ELLISON LAMBDIN
August 22, 1916-May 24, 2007
She might've fudged a couple of years off her birth
year, though-most of the Ellison sisters did.
Bold Knaves thrive without one grain of Sense,
But good Men starve for want of Impudence.
– JOHN DRYDEN
PROLOGUE
Perge, Ira, perge et magna meditantem opprime, congredere manibus ipsa dilacera tuis;
Then on, my wrath, on, and crush this plotter of big things; close with him, thyself rend him in pieces with thine own hands.
– LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA,
HERCULES FURENS, 75-76
CHAPTER ONE
A bloody awful day for 't," Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby commented as the hired coach-and-four clattered and swayed to a stop on the cobblestones before the steps leading up to the Old Bailey. With a wince and a sniff, he sampled the weather, sticking his head out of the right-hand side door window into the cold.
"Arr," his son, Captain Alan Lewrie, Royal Navy, idly replied. Lewrie, it must here be pointed out, was a tad hung over, after a sleepless night in his rooms at the Madeira Club, a sedate lodging for gentlemen not too far away from the Old Bailey, at the corner of Duke Street and Wigmore Street. His father, the old reprobate, leaned back to gather his walking stick and cloak, allowing Lewrie a view of the building. "Oh, Lord," Lewrie whispered.
Epiphany Sunday of the new year of 1801 had been on the fifth of January, and Hilary Term for King's Bench trials had, therefore, waited to open on Monday the sixth, with all the pomp, majesty, and circumstance of which England was capable, designed over the centuries to impress upon all Crown subjects, the innocent and the guilty alike, the terribleis gucir and implacable inevitability of Justice and Law.