The carriage bearing the ox emblem sped through the streets of Milan. Dark clouds filled the sky above the city; it looked as though it was about to rain.
Pentecost came fifty days after Easter, usually in April or May. Only then was the Adriatic Sea calm enough for commercial navigation.
But for warships, weather was not an absolute constraint. Napoleon had encountered a storm on his way to Egypt, and it was precisely that storm that prevented Nelson and HMS Victory from finding his trail.
It was said that HMS Victory's hull had been sheathed in copper. This not only protected the British oak hull from seawater corrosion, but also kept out "shipworms."
Shipworms were not actually worms, but marine creatures. They gnawed at ship timber and bored holes into hulls. Yet unlike termites, they did not feed on wood. Once they had bored into a ship, they used the holes as their homes and sailed along with it.
Because Minister for Magic Evangeline had once been suspected of taking part in the Crimean War, wizarding scholars had also analyzed the conflict. In truth, as early as 1830, during Wellington's Cabinet, the situation in Transcaucasia had already become grave. Russia had then controlled Persia and Turkey. Five years earlier, in 1825, Alexander I had died suddenly. He left behind no male heir, and the throne passed to his third younger brother, Nicolas I.
After Paul I's death, Alexander I had seemingly abandoned his plans and turned instead toward Siberia and Alaska. In 1830, the Polish uprising broke out, and the hawks in Wellington's Cabinet considered it an excellent opportunity. The Russian Empire had always used the protection of merchants and travelers as an excuse to expand continuously. If one drew a map of its trading ports, one would find