Inferno

Chapter 94

Svane Reden, Copenhagen

All day the guns had remained silent in a fretful peace that lay ominously over the city. Frue Rosen came back to tell them excitedly that an important message had been sent to British Headquarters. Renzi’s heart lifted. Were the Danes going to bow at last to the inevitable?

The quiet lasted into the evening, and as the night drew in, he allowed himself a flicker of hope that reason had at last asserted itself.

As soon as it was fully dark he and Cecilia accompanied Hetty to the roof garden where they could take the open air without fear of discovery. All of Copenhagen was spread out before them.

Moonless, with cloud obscuring the stars, it was suitably sepulchral for any apocalypse that threatened, Renzi reflected.

Cecilia held his arm tightly, in thrall to the same baleful mood. Only the snip-snip of Hetty’s scissors and the whisper of night zephyrs disturbed them on their rooftop eyrie.

‘Nicholas – fireworks!’ Cecilia pointed to a rocket that had soared up and across, to explode with a dull thud in full view of where they stood. ‘Does this mean celebrations are starting?’

Renzi felt a lurch of premonition. It had been a signal rocket and it had come from the outer darkness of the British lines. In the next minutes the dogs of war would be unleashed – there was going to be-

As one, the guns opened up. Livid flashes played all along the lines, the menacing rumble and thunder of massed artillery unmistakable in its angry spite. From beyond the ramparts scores of guns joined in, until the entire periphery was alive with gun-flash.

It was a bombardment, but on a scale he’d never conceived. The air was filled with criss-crossing dull red lines tracing through the sky. He knew what it meant for he’d been present at Granville those years ago when mortars had been used against invasion barges. But that had been only two from bomb vessels. Here there were uncountable numbers hurling in an avalanche of death and destruction.

The first shells fell with a leaping flash and visceral crump among the streets and buildings below them, some in a flaring of unquenchable fire – carcasses, filled with a mixture that could not be extinguished. Here and there he could see the steady blaze of a house or shop afire – and sharp against the flames figures were in disciplined activity, firemen in heroic battle with the flames while all the time death came out of the sky.

But a new phenomenon thrust itself on his senses: a whining hiss that became rapidly louder – a missile with flame in its wake that streaked over and nosed down to vanish into a house. Seconds later from deep inside, the red glow of a fire grew while people spilled out of the door in panic, falling to the ground in their desperate flight from the nightmare.

From the bastions and ramparts Danish guns opened up, hitting back at the merciless barrage without the slightest chance of countering it, only adding to the insane sound and fury.

Nearby came a louder crash, followed by the smash of falling glass and screams. A mortar round had visited a house close by – and Renzi realised they themselves were exposed and vulnerable.

‘Down – get off the roof!’ he shouted, and pushed the dazed women to the stairway.

They hurried to the ground floor and huddled together in the drawing room. Renzi drew open the curtains a few inches. The darkness outside was shot through with flashes and the diabolical flickering red of fire.

Occasionally they felt the tremor of an explosion through the floor, and once there was the hideous flash and detonation of a shell outside a house opposite. Its entire front slowly collapsed in an appalling roar and up-welling of dust. Whitened victims emerged, staggering and falling.

A riderless horse raced by in stark panic, a child’s terror-stricken cries carrying clear above the madness. A dog barked witlessly, on and on.

The nightmare had only just begun.