Sharpe's Prey

CHAPTER 9

The launch, instead of taking Sharpe to the Pucelle, carried him only as far as the Vesuvius, a bomb ship anchored much closer to the harbor mouth. Captain Chase was waiting aboard to the evident apprehension of the Vesuvius’s commander, a mere lieutenant, who was in awe of having a genuine post captain aboard his vessel. Sharpe and Collier, being officers, were formally whistled aboard at the bomb ship’s waist while the launch’s crew scrambled over the bows. “I thought we’d spend the day here,” Chase explained. “I’m sending my crew into the city with you, Sharpe, and it’s much less far to pull from here than from the Pucelle. I brought dinner with me.”

“And weapons, sir?”

“Hopper has your arsenal.”

Sharpe still had the rifle he had borrowed at Koge, but he had asked Chase for more weapons and Hopper had brought them from the Pucelle. There was a heavy cutlass, two pistols and one of the massive seven-barreled guns that Sharpe had used at Trafalgar. It was a naval weapon of stunning ferocity and limited usefulness. The seven barrels, each of a half-inch diameter, were clustered so they could be fired together, but the gun, which had been designed to fire down from the rigging onto an enemy deck, took an age to reload. Nevertheless, used once and used right, it was devastating. Sharpe hung the squat, heavy gun next to the rifle on his shoulder and strapped the cutlass round his waist. “Good to have a proper clade again. So you’re coming into the city, Hopper?”

“Captain wanted the best, sir,” Hopper said, then hesitated. “The lads and me, sir…”

“You’re the best,” Sharpe said.

“No, sir.” Hopper shook his head to indicate that Sharpe had misunderstood him. He was a huge man with a tarred pigtail and a skin smothered in tattoos, who now blushed. “Me and the lads, sir,” he said, shifting uncomfortably and unable to meet Sharpe’s gaze, “we wanted to say how sorry we were, sir. She was a proper lady.”

“She was.” Sharpe smiled, touched by the words. “Thank you, Hopper.”

“They were going to send you a gift for your child,” Chase told him a few moments later when the two men were ensconced in the Vesuvius‘s small after cabin. “They made a crib from some of the Pucelle’s timbers broken at Trafalgar. It was probably burned in the galley fire when they heard the news. Sad days, Richard, sad days. So. You’re ready for tonight?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Young Collier’s in charge of the landing party,” Chase said. “I wanted to go myself, but the Admiral refused me permission. The wretched man said I was too valuable!”

“He’s right, sir.”

“He’s a tedious bore, Richard, who should be in charge of some canting little chapel instead of a fleet. But Collier knows his business.” Sharpe was dubious that an officer as young as Collier should command the landing party, but Chase was blithely confident. The men, once ashore, were to go to the inner harbor and there board a ship. Any ship, Chase said, because once safely aboard they would hide on the lower decks. “Effectively the ships are laid up,” Chase explained, “which means no one’s aboard except possibly a few fellows who’ll light the fuses and you can wager ten years’ salary to a farthing that they’ll be wallowing in the officers’ quarters. Collier’s fellows can wait down below and the only risk, frankly, is if the Danes are doing any work aboard. One carpenter down in the ship’s well and we’ll have to start cutting throats.”

“When do you cut the fuses?” Sharpe asked.

“Collier will have to judge the moment,” Chase said, and the careless answer worried Sharpe even though it was none of his business. He was going into the city to hunt Lavisser while the cutting of the Danish fleet’s fuses was Collier’s responsibility and again Sharpe wondered if the young Midshipman was really the right man, but Chase would not abide any doubts. “He’ll do splendidly, Richard, just splendidly. Now, how about some dinner? I’ve brought chine, tongue and cold hog’s puddings.”

“Hog’s puddings?”

“Devonshire food, Sharpe, real food! I do like a hog’s pudding.”

Sharpe slept that afternoon, rocked into dreams by the small waves. When he woke it was a rainy dusk and the ship was alive with shouts, the sound of a capstan creaking and the shuffle of men’s feet. The ship, it seemed, was being adjusted. The two huge mortars in the Vesuvius’s belly were fixed, so to aim their shells the whole ship had to be pointed at the target and this was achieved by tightening or loosening the cables of four anchors that held the gun ship in a tensioned web. “There! No! Too far!” a midshipman shouted. “Larboard bow anchor let go two steps!”

“They must do it twice a day,” Chase said. “The tide affects it, I gather.”

“What are they aiming at?”

“That big fort.” Chase pointed toward the citadel that loomed above the small fishing pier where Sharpe hoped to land that night. “They’ll drop the bombs straight down its gullet. Shall we finish the tongue for supper? Then you’ll leave at midnight.”

The launch was being readied. The rudder pintles were greased so they would not squeak and the tholes, which held the oars, were wrapped in rags while the hull and oars were painted black with Stockholm tar. The launch crew looked like pirates for they were hung with weapons and all dressed in dark clothes. A Danish seaman from the Pucelle’s larboard watch had been made an honorary member of the launch crew for the expedition. “Can you trust the man?” Sharpe asked Chase.

“Trust him with my life, Richard. He’s been a Pucelle longer than I have. And Collier needs a fellow who can talk the language.”

The night fell. The clouds made it utter dark, so black that Sharpe wondered how the launch would ever find its way into the harbor mouth, but Chase reassured him. He pointed to a distant lantern that glowed a pale blue. “That’s hanging from one of the Pucelle’s yardarms and we’re going to put another lantern on the Vesuvius’s foremast, and as long as young Collier keeps the two lights in line then he’ll go straight as an arrow. The navy does try to anticipate these problems.” He paused.

“Would you very much mind, Richard, if I didn’t see you away? I’m feeling somewhat sickly. Just something I ate. I need sleep. Do you feel well?”

“Very.”

“I wish you joy, Richard,” Chase said, clapped his shoulder and walked aft.

It seemed a strangely abrupt farewell, and it did not seem right that Chase should be sleeping when the launch crew left, but Sharpe suspected Chase’s sickness was as much to do with nervousness as an upset stomach. Sharpe himself was nervous. He was about to try and pierce an enemy stronghold, and doing it in a launch that offered no hiding place if they were discovered. He watched Chase go to the after quarters, then went and waited in the Vesuvius’s well deck where the great mortars crouched and where Hopper and his men honed knives and cutlasses.

It seemed an age until Collier ordered the embarkation and then it took another long while for all the men, encumbered with their weapons and carrying bags of food and skins of water, to clamber down the bomb ship’s side into the tar-stinking launch. The men were oddly excited, almost giggly, so much so that Collier snapped at them to be quiet, then sensibly checked that none of them had loaded weapons for he feared the accidental discharge of a pistol or musket. Rain had started to fall. It was not heavy, merely an insistent drizzle that found its way down Sharpe’s upturned collar.

The launch was crowded. It usually had a crew of a dozen men, but now held fifteen. They had embarked over the side of Vesuvius that lay farthest from the city and, at Collier’s order, the men now rowed a few strokes to take them clear of the bomb ship. The great oars were silent in the tholes, though once they were a few yards from the Vesuvius Collier ordered the men to stop rowing. “The tide will take us in,” he whispered to Sharpe. There was no need to whisper for they were still more than half a mile from the shore, but already they were feeling vulnerable.

The launch drifted. Every now and then the stroke or bow side oars would pull a brief correction to keep the pale-blue lanterns in line. The blue was very pale, almost white, and Sharpe, twisting about on the rear thwart, marveled that the men could distinguish those two lamps from all the other lights in the fleet. Most of the time the crew stayed still and silent, listening for the telltale splashes and creaks that would betray the presence of a Danish guard boat. There was bound to be at least one enemy boat patroling the harbor boom to prevent just such an incursion as this one by the Pucelle’s darkened launch.

A few lights burned in the city, their reflections glimmering long and shakily on the black water. A wind gusted cold out of the east, splashing small waves against the launch. Sharpe shivered. He could smell the harbor now, its water made rank by all the sewage and rot that was penned up by the long quays. A small flame flared and died on the ramparts of the citadel and Sharpe supposed it was a sentinel lighting a pipe. He turned to see that the lanterns of the British fleet now looked very far away and were blurred by the rain, then a hiss from the launch’s bows made everyone go still. Sharpe heard a splash nearby and the groan of an oar in its rowlock. An enemy guard boat was close and Sharpe waited, scarce daring to breathe, but the next splash was fainter. He thought he saw a flash of white water from an oar, but he could not be certain. Collier and his men were bending low as if they might hide from the patroling enemy in the dark of the sea’s surface.

A reddish glow now showed above the citadel’s ramparts, cast by the lanterns in its central courtyard. The launch was drifting faster now, carried in by the fierce tide. Sharpe could not see the pier and he tried not to think of the big Danish guns in the embrasures above him. Just one barrel, loaded with canister, could turn the launch into a mess of bloodstained kindling. The first of the city clocks struck one.

Then the launch bumped into an obstacle. Sharpe gripped the gunwale, sticky with its coating of tar. His first thought was that they had drifted into the boom, or perhaps struck a rock, then he realized that the bow men were clambering out of the launch. They had reached the pier, guided unerringly by the blue leading lights. He heard thumps as the big bags of food and ammunition were heaved upward. “We’ll just leave the boat here,” Collier whispered, “let it drift.”

Sharpe groped his way forward, then scrambled awkwardly up to the wooden staging which smelt of fish. “So where now, Richard?” a low voice asked him.

Sharpe turned, astonished. “Sir?”

“Shh.” Captain Chase grinned in the dark. “Admiral Gambier thinks I’m ill, but I couldn’t possibly let these lads come without me.” His lads were all grinning. They had known the Captain was coming, which was why they had been so excited when they left the Vesuvius. “So where to, Richard?” Chase asked.

“You shouldn’t be here, sir,” Sharpe said fiercely.

“Not you too, for God’s sake. Besides, a little late to tell me, don’t you think?” Chase was wearing his uniform, but now draped a boat cloak over his shoulders. “Lead on, Richard, lead on.”

Sharpe took them along the pier, always aware of the huge guns not a hundred paces away, then left down the path where he had walked with Astrid. Their boots seemed loud. Then, not twenty paces from the pier, a voice challenged from the garden where a battery of field guns had been placed behind fascines.

Chase’s Danish seaman answered. There was a brief laugh from the darkness, then another rattle of words. The other seamen had stopped, hands on weapons, but the tone of the exchange was reassuring and Chase led them on. “What did you tell him?” the Captain asked when they were clear of the battery.

“The truth,” the man said. “I told him we were British sailors come to capture the fleet.”

“You did?” Chase sounded alarmed.

“My mother said I’d go to hell if I lied, sir. Then I told him our boat had sprung a leak and we were walking back. He thinks we’re the guard-boat crew.”

Chase chuckled. There was just enough light seeping from lamps in the city to cast a damp shine on the road beside the harbor quay, which was heaped with barrels of food stockpiled for a siege. “Does this strike you as damned odd, Richard?” Chase asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“My God, we’re in an enemy fortress!” Chase peered down alleys, plainly disappointed that there was so little to see. The city seemed asleep, not just the civilians, but the garrison too. There was an innocence here, Sharpe thought. Copenhagen might be under siege, yet still the city wanted to carry on with its ordinary life. No one wanted war and Sharpe sensed that the folk perversely believed it would go away if they ignored it. All that Denmark asked was to be left in peace while Europe went mad, but the Danes had ships and so they must have war whether they liked it or not.

They passed the Amalienborg Palace. There must have been sentriesthere, but none challenged the group of men whose footsteps echoed from the palace walls. A cat squealed somewhere and rats skittered in the dark. The quay, which had been almost empty on the day the Crown Prince had left for Holstein, was now crowded with moored craft, most of them merchantmen that had taken refuge from the British fleet. The wind slanted the persistent rain through their high rigging. “I keep thinking I shall wake up and discover this is a dream,” Chase said.

“We’re not at the inner harbor yet,” Sharpe warned. Surely the Danes would guard their fleet? Yet the bridge had no sentries. The masts and rigging of the warships tangled the dark, dimly lit by a brazier that glowed outside a guardhouse that stood close to the two half-built ships on the slipways. Sharpe assumed it was a guardhouse, for there was a small covered booth for a sentry, but the booth was empty.

Chase led them down the stone quay that separated the inner and outer harbors. It was suddenly all ridiculously easy. The Danes had packed their fleet into the basin, gunwale to gunwale, and the bows of the warships touched the quay so that their bowsprits soared above the stones. Chase gestured at the very first ship and his men, with a practiced ease, scrambled into the netting rigged under the beakhead. Then, one by one, they vanished inside the bows. Sharpe waited till the last bundle had been passed up, then followed more clumsily.

The ship was dark as a tomb. No one challenged them. They groped down companionways until they had reached the empty lower deck. And there, come like thieves in the night, they waited.

General Peymann peered at the letter which had been brought to the city by two British officers under a flag of truce. The officers were waiting outside one of the gates for his answer.

The letter was in English and the General’s command of that language was not sufficient to understand the elaborate courtesies demanded by diplomacy so he gave the paper to Lavisser. “Perhaps you’d translate, Major?”

Lavisser read his translation aloud. He hurried through the flowery demand for the city’s surrender. “‘We, the undersigned, at this moment, when our troops are before your gates, and our batteries ready to open, do renew to you the offer of the same advantageous and conciliatory terms which were proposed through His Majesty’s ministers to your court.” Nothing new there, sir,” Lavisser commented. “’If you will consent to deliver up the Danish fleet, and to our carrying it away, it shall be held in deposit for His Danish Majesty, and shall be restored, with all its equipments, in as good a state as it is received, as soon as the provisions of the general peace shall remove the necessity which has occasioned this demand.’ It’s signed by both Admiral Gambier and General Cathcart, sir,” Lavisser said, tossing the letter down.

Peymann sat at the table and gazed gloomily at the letter. “They don’t say anything about bombarding the city?”

“Not in so many words, sir.”

“But will they?” Peymann demanded.

“They daren’t,” another aide answered. “They will earn the scorn of all Europe.”

“But if they do,” a third aide put in, “we shall have to endure. The fire brigades are ready.”

“What fire brigades?” Lavisser asked sarcastically. “There are just seven pumping engines in the whole city.”

“Seven? Only seven?” Peymann was alarmed.

“Two are being repaired, sir.”

“Seven isn’t enough!”

“Burn the fleet,” Lavisser suggested. “When they see the prize is gone, sir, they’ll go away.”

“We are here to protect the fleet,” Peymann said. “We will burn it if we must, but only at the very last moment.” He sighed, then gestured for a clerk to write a reply to the British demand. “My Lords,” he dictated, then thought for a moment. “We remain convinced that our fleet, our very own indisputable property, is as safe in His Danish Majesty’s hands as ever it can be in those of the King of England.” That, he thought, was very felicitous. Should he mention the possibility of a bombardment? He decided, on balance, that he should try to jog the British conscience. “Our master never intended any hostilities against yours,” he went on, “and if you are cruel enough to endeavor to destroy a city that has not given you the least cause for such treatment, then it must submit to its fate.” He watched the clerk write. “They won’t bombard,” he said, almost to himself. “They won’t.”

“They cannot,” an aide agreed.

“It would be barbarous,” another said.

“It will be a siege, I’m sure,” Peymann said, hoping he was right.

That would be the last thing that Chase and his men would want, for they must hide until the city surrendered and even the ever optimistic Chase did not believe their luck could hold through the weeks or months of a prolonged siege. Chase had only dared come into the city because he believed that the Danish surrender would come swiftly once the mortars began their work. “Mind you,” he told Sharpe in the morning, “we could probably live here for months. The bottom’s full of salt pork. There’s even some water barrels. A bit rank, but nothing worse than we usually drink.” Dawn had revealed that they were on board the largest ship in the Danish fleet, the 96-gun Christian VII. “She’s almost new,” Chase told Sharpe, “and beautifully built. Beautiful!” The ship had been emptied of her crew, guns and ammunition, though great canvas bundles of incendiaries had been placed throughout her decks with fuses leading up to the forecastle. There were no Danes aboard, though in the afternoon, when most of Chase’s bored men were sleeping, there was the thump of footsteps. The men, concealed in the forward magazine, took hold of their weapons while an alarmed Chase put a finger to his lips.

The footsteps came down to the deck immediately above them. There seemed to be two people, perhaps come to check the fuses or maybe to sound the ship’s well, but then one of the intruding couple laughed and sang a snatch of song. It was a woman’s voice and a moment later new sounds betrayed why the couple had come aboard. “If they fight as hard as they—” Collier whispered, but Chase silenced the Midshipman.

The couple eventually left and Chase’s men ate bread and hog’s puddings. “Florence sends the puddings to me,” Chase said, “and she tells me these ones are made from our very own pigs. Delicious, eh? So”—he cut another slice from the pale fat sausage—”what do you plan to do, Richard?”

“I have a man to hunt,” Sharpe said. And a woman to see, he added to himself. He had been tempted to go to Ulfedt’s Plads during the long day, but prudence had suggested he wait till dark.

Chase thought for a moment. “Why don’t you wait till the city surrenders?”

“Because he’ll be in hiding by then, sir. But I’ll be safe enough tonight.” Especially, Sharpe thought, if the bombardment began.

Chase smiled. “Safe?”

“When those shells begin to fall, sir, you could march the 1st Foot Guards stark naked through the city center and no one would notice them.”

“If they bombard,” Chase said. “Maybe the Danes will see sense first? Maybe they’ll surrender?”

“I pray so,” Sharpe said fervently, but he suspected the Danes would be stubborn. Their pride was at stake and perhaps they did not really believe the British would use their mortars and howitzers.

The sun came out that afternoon. It dried the rain-drenched city and glinted off the green copper roofs and cast filmy shadows from the smoke of the Danish guns. Those guns had hammered all day, churning the earth and fascines about the British batteries. The big naval guns, brought from the empty ships in the basin, were mounted en barbette, meaning there were not enough embrasures to protect them so the weapons were firing directly over the wall’s parapet and British gunner officers hungrily watched those pieces through their telescopes. Guns en barbette were easily destroyed.

The British mortars squatted in their beds. Their shells had their fuses already cut. All that was needed now was a decision to use them.

The sun sank across Zealand to leave a flaming sky. The last ray of the sun shone on a white-crossed Danish flag that hung from the tallest of the city’s mast cranes. The flag glowed, then the earth’s shadow engulfed it and another day was gone. The Danish guns stopped firing and their smoke slowly dissipated as it drifted westward. In the church of Our Savior, which had a handsome staircase winding outside its soaring spire, a prayer meeting called on God to spare the city and to imbue General Peymann with wisdom. General Peymann, oblivious of the prayers, sat down to a supper of pilchards. Three babies, born that day in the Maternity Hospital that lay between Bredgade and Ameliegade, slept.

One of their mothers had the fever and the doctors wrapped her in flannel and fed her a mixture of brandy and gunpowder. More brandy and barrels of akvavit were being drunk in the city’s taverns which were full of sailors released from their duties on the walls. The city’s seven fire engines, great metal tanks mounted on four-wheeled carts with monstrous double-levered pumps on their tops, sat waiting at street corners. Another prayer meeting, this one in Holman’s Church, the sailors’ shrine, beseeched that the fire engines would not be needed, while in the arsenal on Tojhusgade the last refurbished muskets were handed out to the newest volunteers of the militia. If the British made a breach and assaulted the city then those brewery workers and clerks, carpenters and masons, would have to defend their homes. On Toldboden, in a small shop beside the Customs House Quay, a tattooist worked on a sailor’s back, making an intricate drawing of the British lion being drowned by a pair of Danish seamen.

“There are rules of war,” General Peymann told his supper guests, “and the British are a Christian nation.”

“They are, they are,” the university chaplain agreed, “but they’re also a very disputatious people.”

“But they will not treat women and children as combatants,” Peymann insisted. “Not Christian women and children. And this is the nineteenth century!” the General protested. “Not the Middle Ages.”

“These are very fine pilchards,” the chaplain said. “You get them from Dragsteds, I assume?”

In fifteen British batteries and on board sixteen bomb ships and in ten launches that had been specially fitted to hold smaller mortars, the officers consulted their watches. Rockets, launched from triangular frames, were set up beside the land batteries. It was not quite dark yet, but dark enough to conceal the batteries from the watchers on the city wall who did not see the heavy fascines protecting the long guns being dragged aside.

The clouds were breaking and the first stars showed above the city.

A linstock glowed red in a forward battery.

“They threaten to behave abominably,” General Peymann averred, “and hope we believe the threat. But common sense and humanity will prevail. Must prevail.”

“Christianity must prevail,” the university chaplain insisted. “A direct attack on civilians would be an offense against God himself. Is that thunder? And I thought the weather was clearing.”

No one answered and no one moved. It had sounded like thunder, but Peymann knew better. A gun had fired. It was far off, but the sound was heavy, the gut-pounding percussion of a heavy-caliber mortar. “God help us,” the General said softly, breaking the silence about his table.

The first bomb arced upward, its burning fuse trailing a thin red line of sparks and a tenuous trail of smoke. It was a signal, and from all around the city’s western edge and from the boats moored in the sound the other mortars fired. Howitzers slammed back on their trails to send their shells after the mortar bombs.

The burning fuses of the bombs reached up, red sparks curving in the night.

The gunners were reloading. The first bombs looked like livid shooting stars. Then, as they began their shrieking fall, the bomb trails converged. God had not shown mercy, the British possessed none and Copenhagen must suffer.

The first bomb broke through a roof with a cascade of splintering tiles, drove down through a plaster ceiling and lodged on an upper landing where, for an instant, it lay with a smoking fuse. Then, bumping and smoking, it rolled down a flight of stairs to lodge on a half landing. No one was in the house.

For a moment it seemed the mortar shell would not explode. The fuse burned into the hole of the wooden plug and the smoke just died away. Flakes of plaster dropped from the shattered ceiling. The bomb, a thirteen-inch black ball, just lay there, but the fuse was still alive, burning down through the last inch of saltpeter, sulphur and mealed powder until the spark met the charge and the bomb ripped the top story apart just as the other bombs of the first salvo came crashing down into the nearby streets. A seven-year-old girl, put to bed without supper for giggling during family prayers, was the first of the city’s inhabitants to die, crushed by an eleven-inch mortar shell that burst through her bedroom ceiling.

The first fires began.

Eighty-two mortars were firing. Their range was adjusted by varying the amount of powder in the charge and the gunners had specified the quantities of the different batteries to make sure the bombs all fell in the same areas of the city. In the north they were dropping the missiles into the citadel’s interior, while to the south the bombs were crashing into the streets closest to the wall. The crews of the fire engines trundled their heavy machines toward the first fires, but were obstructed by people trying to escape the bombs. A thirteen-inch shell cracked into a crowd, miraculously touching no one. Its fuse glowed red and a man attempted to extinguish it with his boot, but the bomb exploded and the man’s foot, trailing blood, arced over the screaming street. There was blood and flesh on the house fronts. Families tried to carry their valuables away from the threatened area, further congesting the alleys. Some folk took refuge in the churches, believing there would be sanctuary from the enemy in sacred walls, but the churches burned as easily as the houses. One bomb exploded in an organ loft, scattering pipes like straws. Another killed ten people in a nave. Some bombs failed to explode and lay black and malevolent where they fell. An artist, hurriedly assembling paper, pencils and charcoal, had a smaller shell plunge through his roof and lie smoking next to his unmade bed. He picked up the chamber pot, which he had still not emptied from the night before, and upended it on the missile. There was a hiss as the fuse was extinguished, then a vile stink.

A score of fires started. The fiercest broke up through the roofs as more bombs hammered down into the flames. The British had begun to fire carcasses now, hollow shells designed to burn rather than explode. The heaviest, fired from the big thirteen-inch mortars, weighed as much as a man and were stuffed with saltpeter, sulfur, antimony and pitch. They burned with a furnace-like intensity, the fire seething out of holes bored in their metal shells and no mere fire pump could quench such horrors. There was still a vestige of evening light in the watercolor sky through which the fuses of the plunging bombs left threads of smoke. The threads wavered, mingled in the wind and vanished, only to be renewed as more bombs and carcasses fell. Then the threads were touched with red as flame blossomed out of the thicker, boiling smoke that churned up from a city of cratered cobbles, broken rafters and burning homes. Scraps of shell casing whistled in city streets. The first fire came and the western edge of the city was ringed by the noise and flaring lights of the batteries. The bomb ships shuddered as their mortars fired, each flash illuminating the chain rigging with a deep red light shrouded in smoke. The British long guns fired at the wall, their targets conveniently outlined by the glare of the city fires, while the rockets flared and hissed to carry their explosive heads in wild trajectories that plunged indiscriminately into city streets.

Sharpe walked into the city. He carried the rifle on one shoulder and the seven-barreled gun on the other, but no one took any particular notice of him. Men were running toward the fires, families were fleeing them and the whole city reverberated to the thump of the bombs. Sharpe was going to Skovgaard’s warehouse because he did not know what else he could do. There was little point in visiting Bredgade for he was certain Lavisser would be with his General or else on the city walls, and Sharpe did not know how to find him.

So Lavisser could live an extra day and Sharpe would go to Astrid. It was what he wanted, what he had been thinking of all day as he waited in the stinking and dark lower deck of the Danish warship. Sharpe could not be certain that Astrid would welcome him while British bombs were shaking the city, but instinct told him she would be pleased. Her father would almost certainly be disapproving, while Aksel Bang would seethe, but to hell with them both.

It was dark now, but the city was lit red. Sharpe could hear the crackle and roar of flames punctuated by the crash of bombs falling through rafters and floors, and by the belly-punching blows as the powder charges exploded. He saw a fallen rocket skidding up a street, spewing sparks and terrifying a horse that was dragging barrels of sea-water from the harbor. A spire was outlined in red and surrounded by smoke. Sharpe became momentarily lost in the tangle of alleys, then smelt the gin distillery and followed his nose to Ulfedt’s Plads which was well clear of the district where the bombs were falling. He knocked hard on Skovgaard’s door, just as he had on the first night he had arrived in Copenhagen.

He heard a window thrown up and he stepped back. “Mister Skovgaard!” he shouted.

“Who is it?” It was Astrid who answered.

“Astrid!”

There was a pause. “Lieutenant Sharpe?” There was disbelief in her voice, but no disapproval. “Is it you?” she asked. “Wait!” Sharpe’s instinct had been right because she smiled when she opened the door, but then she frowned. “You should not be here!”

“I am.”

She stared at him for a heartbeat, then turned down the hall. “I will get a coat,” she said as she went to a cupboard. “My father is not here. He went to a prayer meeting with Aksel, but I wanted to go to the orphanage and I promised Father I wouldn’t go alone. Now you’re here.” She smiled at him a second time. “Why are you here?” @@@

“I think you English are as mad as you are cruel. I must find a key.” She found the front door key. “Why are you bombing us?”

“Because they’re all mad.”

“It is wrong,” she said fiercely. “I cannot believe it’s happening. It is awful! I must leave Father a message.” She vanished into the warehouse office for a moment, then reappeared wearing a coat and hat. She locked the front door and then, as though they were old friends, put her arm though his. “Come,” she said, leading him toward the hellish red glow and snarling noise of the fire. “I should be angry with you.”

“I’m angry with them,” Sharpe said.

“Don’t they know there are women and children here?”

“They know.”

“Then why?” She asked it fiercely.

“Because they don’t want your fleet filled with Frenchmen trying to invade England.”

“We would burn the fleet before the French took it. Before you take it as well,” Astrid said, then gripped his arm tightly as three bombs exploded in quick succession. “If the fire is near the hospital,” she explained, “we have to fetch the children out. You will help?”

“Of course.”

The sound of the bombs grew louder as they neared the citadel. The missiles were hurtling down into the Danish fort and turning its center into a cauldron. The small nearby streets were untouched by the bombardment and were full of people who stared at the reddened smoke boiling out of the citadel’s walls. The children’s hospital was untouched. Astrid took Sharpe inside, but no help was needed, for a sozen other women had come to soothe the children who were now gathered in the dispensary listening to a story. Sharpe stayed in the courtyard, half hiding in the shadows under the balcony, and he was still there when a half-dozen Danish officers came through the orphanage’s arched gate. They were led by an elderly, heavyset man in a dark cloak and a gilded cocked hat. It seemed he had come to check whether the hospital was damaged, nothing more. Some of his aides looked curiously at Sharpe for he still had the two guns on his shoulders and his greatcoat was plainly not a Danish uniform, but they seemed reassured when Astrid came back to the courtyard and joined him. “That is General Peymann,” she whispered.

The General was talking with the hospital’s warden while his aides stood beneath the mast-rigged flagpole. Lavisser was not among them. “Ask him where Lavisser is,” Sharpe said to Astrid.

“I can’t do that!”

“Why not? Tell him you want to congratulate Lavisser for changing sides.”

Astrid hesitated, then did what Sharpe wanted. One of the aides accosted her and clearly wanted to know who Sharpe was, for he glanced at the rifleman as he spoke. Astrid told him something, then curtseyed to General Peymann who took off his hat and bowed to her. A long conversation followed and Sharpe had just enough experience of the city to understand they would be discussing common acquaintances, but at last it ended, the General bowed again and then led his men back into the street. “I told them you were from the American ship in the harbor,” Astrid said.

“Is there an American ship in the harbor?”

“The Phoebe from Baltimore.”

“And what else were you talking about?”

“His wife’s cousin is married to our pastor’s uncle,” she told him, then saw she was being teased. “I asked him about Lavisser,” she said, “and he is not on official duty tonight, but the General thinks he will be helping to put out the fires.” She took Sharpe’s arm and led him into the street where the women stood in front of their houses watching the fires and the falling bombs. They gasped when a carcass arched overhead. The sphere’s contents had already caught fire and it spun as it flew, spewing great spirals of flame so that it looked like an enraged flying dragon as it plunged toward the citadel. Astrid flinched as a ready magazine in the fort exploded. A constellation of sparks seared up into the night, streaking the smoke livid. The sky stank of powder, the smell as thick as on any battlefield. The Danish guns on the walls were firing back, adding their noise and smoke to the night. Astrid took Sharpe into the sailors’ graveyard where her small son was buried. “My father said that if the English bombed the city he would never work for England again.”

“Whatever he does,” Sharpe said, “he’s still in danger. The French want his list of names.”

“Aksel looks after him,” Astrid said.

“Then he’s in far more danger than he realizes,” Sharpe said.

Astrid smiled at that. “You don’t like Aksel?”

“No. Do you?”

“No,” Astrid confessed, “but this morning my father suggested I marry him.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. She was silent for a few seconds, flinching as a succession of big shells cracked apart in the citadel. Each explosion flashed livid light on the smoke and threw shadows from the gravestones. Sharpe could hear the scraps of shattered casing striking on the citadel’s walls or whistling overhead to rattle on the roofs of Nyboden’s small houses. “It’s the warehouse,” Astrid said at last. “If my father dies then I will inherit and he does not think a woman can run the business.”

“Of course you can run it,” Sharpe said.

“And he would like to know that the business is safe before he dies,” she went on as though Sharpe had not spoken. “So he wants me to marry Aksel.”

“Marry someone else,” Sharpe said.

“It has not been so long since Nils died,” Astrid said, “and I have not wanted anyone. Except Nils.” She still had her arm in his elbow, though they were not walking anymore, but instead were standing under a tree as though its branches would shelter them from the bombs that whistled overhead. “It would be beautiful,” Astrid went on, “if it were not so sad.” She was talking of the northern sky which was lit by the intermittent flashes of mortars aboard the bomb ships. Each discharge flooded the night like crimson summer lightning and the flaring displays flickered one after another, filling the sky. “It is like the winter lights,” she said.

“So will you marry Aksel?”

“I want Father to be happy,” she said. “He has not been happy for a long while.”

“A man who loves his business more than his daughter,” Sharpe said, “doesn’t deserve to be happy.”

“He has worked hard,” Astrid said as though that explained everything.

“And it will all be for nothing if he stays here,” Sharpe warned her, “because the French will come after him.”

“What else can he do?” Astrid asked.

“Move to Britain,” Sharpe said. “His old friends in the Foreign Office want that.”

“They do?”

“So they tell me.”

Astrid shook her head. “After this? No, he will not go to Britain. He is a loyal Dane.”

“And you?”

“Me?”

“You must have relatives in Britain?”

Astrid nodded. “My mother’s sister lives in Hampshire. I visited a long time ago. It was very nice, I thought.”

“Then go to Hampshire,” Sharpe said. A piece of shell tore through the branches above them. Birds were singing, disturbed from their sleep by the noise.

“And what would I do in Hampshire?” Astrid asked.

“This,” Sharpe said, and kissed her. For a heartbeat she seemed to resist, then he realized it was merely her surprise, for then she put her arms about him and returned the kiss with an astonishing ferocity. They kissed again, then she put her head on his shoulder and said nothing, but just clung to him for a long while. Six more bombs fell. The flames were now showing above the citadel’s walls, then a shell struck a second ready magazine and Astrid shuddered in Sharpe’s arms as the whole city physically trembled.

“I could not go to England,” Astrid said softly, “not while Father lives.” She pulled herself back so she could look up into his eyes. “You could come here?”

“It’s a good place,” Sharpe said. What was left of it.

“You would be welcome,” she said. Her face, serious-eyed, was lit by the flames. “You really would be welcome.”

“Not by Aksel,” Sharpe said with a smile.

“No, not by Aksel.” She smiled back. “I should go home,” she said, but did not move. “Would you really stay here?”

“I will,” Sharpe said.

She frowned. “I don’t know you, though, do I?”

He kissed her again, tenderly this time. “You know me,” he told her.

“We must trust the heart, yes?”

“Trust the heart,” Sharpe said and she smiled, then laughed. She pulled him away from the tree.

“I really don’t know you,” she said. She was holding his hand as they walked. “But you are like Nils. He swore terribly!”

“A Dane? Swearing?”

She laughed. “He made me laugh too.” She swung on Sharpe’s hand, suddenly unable to contain a joy that bubbled in her despite the city burning around her. “And you?” she asked. “You have never been married?”

“No.”

“Not even close?”

“Close enough,” he said, and he told her about Grace and that tale brought them near to Ulfedt’s Plads, and when the story was told Astrid stopped and hugged him. “I think,” she said, “we both need some happiness.”

“Your father won’t be happy,” Sharpe said. “He doesn’t like me. I’m not religious enough for him.”

“Then you must tell him you are searching for God,” Astrid said. She walked on a few paces, flinching as more bombs shook the night. “It isn’t just religion,” she went on. “Father thinks any man will take me away from him, but if I tell him you are staying here then he might not be angry.”

“I will stay here,” Sharpe said and was amazed that a decision that would change his life should be taken so easily. Yet why not, he wondered. What waited for him in England? He could return to Shorncliffe, but he would be a quartermaster again, despised by men like Dunnett because he had been born in the wrong place. And he liked Copenhagen. The folk were tediously pious, but that seemed a small price to pay for the happiness he wanted. And had he not considered working for Ebenezer Fairley in Britain? So why not work for Ole Skovgaard in Denmark and take his daughter into the bargain? And with a little luck he could bring a pile of golden English guineas to this new life.

A dim light shone from the windows of the house in Ulfedt’s Plads. “Father must be home,” Astrid said. The house and warehouse were safe, for they lay far enough from the great fires that burned in the city’s west and in the citadel. Astrid unlocked the door, offered Sharpe a wry smile as if to say she knew they must endure some hostility from her father, then pulled him over the threshold. “Papa!” she called. “Papa!”

A voice answered in Danish, then a light appeared at the top of the stairs to cast wavering shadows from the balustrade, but it was not Ole Skovgaard who carried the lantern. It was Aksel Bang. The Dane was wearing his shabby uniform and had a musket slung on his shoulder and a sword at his side. He seemed to be reproving Astrid as he came downstairs, then he saw Sharpe and his eyes widened in disbelief. “Lieutenant!”

Sharpe nodded, said nothing.

“You should not be here!” Bang said sternly.

“Everyone’s saying that tonight,” Sharpe said.

“Mister Skovgaard would not want you here! He will be angry.”

“Then Mister Skovgaard can tell me that himself,” Sharpe said.

“He will not be back tonight,” Bang said. “He is helping with the fires.”

“And you’re not watching him?” Sharpe asked.

“He’s safe,” Bang said. “He has other men with him.”

Astrid tried to reduce the tension between the two men. “We shall make tea,” she said. “You like tea, Richard?”

“I love tea,” Sharpe said.

Bang had seen the look on her face as she spoke to Sharpe and he stiffened. “You must not go into the yard,” he told Astrid.

“Why not?”

“When I came back there were men who had collected unexploded bombs. English bombs.” He spat the last two words at Sharpe. “They wanted somewhere safe to put them, so I let them use the yard. In the morning we must pull their fuses out.”

“Why would I go to the yard?” Astrid asked. She edged past Bang, who still glared at Sharpe. Sharpe followed and, as he pushed past the recalcitrant Dane, he smelt gin on his breath. Aksel Bang drinking? It was extraordinary what a bombardment would do.

They went to the parlor where Astrid rang a bell to summon a maid and Sharpe crossed to the window and pulled aside the curtains to stare at the burning city. The cathedral’s dome reflected the flames that roared skyward from the black walls of broken houses. The sky pulsed with gun flashes, was laced by the red threads of falling fuses and crazed by the fierce trails of rockets. A church bell, incongruous among the turmoil, struck the half-hour and then Sharpe heard the musket lock click.

He turned. Bang, pale-faced, was pointing the musket at Sharpe’s breast. It was an old gun, smoothbore and inaccurate, but at three paces even a drunken Bang could not miss. “Aksel!” Astrid cried in protest.

“He is English,” Bang said, “and he should not be here. The authorities should arrest him.”

“You’re the authorities, are you, Aksel?” Sharpe asked.

“I am in the militia, yes. I am a lieutenant.” Bang, seeing that Sharpe was calm, became more confident. “You will take the two guns from your shoulder, Mister Sharpe, and give them to me.”

“You’ve been drinking, Aksel,” Sharpe said.

“I have not! I do not take strong liquor! Miss Astrid, he lies! The truth is not in him.”

“Gin’s in you,” Sharpe said. “You’re reeking of it.”

“Do not listen to him, Miss Astrid,” Bang said, then jerked the musket. “You will give me your guns, Lieutenant, then your saber.”

Sharpe grinned. “Don’t have a lot of choice, do I?” He took the seven-barreled gun from his shoulder with deliberate slowness, holding it well clear of the trigger to show he meant no mischief. The bombs echoed about the city, their explosions rattling the windows. Sharpe could smell the powder smoke, which was like the stench of rotten eggs. “Here,” he said, but instead of tossing the gun he threw it with all his force. Bang flinched and before he recovered Sharpe had taken two paces, pushed the musket barrel aside and buried his right foot in Bang’s groin.

Astrid screamed. Sharpe ignored her. He pulled the musket from Bang’s unresisting hand and kicked him again, this time in the face so that the Dane flew backward to thump onto the floor. Sharpe picked him up by the lapels and dumped him in a chair. “You want to play soldiers,” he told Bang, “then learn to fight first.”

“I am doing my duty,” Bang said through gritted teeth.

“No, Aksel, you’re swilling in gin.” Sharpe took away the man’s sword and quickly searched Bang for other weapons. There were none. “Bloody hell, man, I’m not here to fight you or Denmark.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To stay,” Sharpe said.

“This is true,” Astrid said earnestly, “he will stay.” She was standing at the door where she had ordered a maid to make tea.

Bang looked from Astrid to Sharpe and then, pathetically, began to cry. “He’s rare drunk,” Sharpe said.

“He does not drink,” Astrid insisted.

“He took a bellyful tonight,” Sharpe said. “You can smell it on him. He’ll be throwing up soon.”

Sharpe half carried and half led Bang downstairs and put him to bed on a pile of empty sacks in the warehouse. Back upstairs, in the parlor, he turned Bang’s musket upside down and rapped it smartly on the floorboards. The ball and powder, after a moment’s reluctance, simply fell out. “Poor Aksel,” Astrid said, “he must have been frightened.”

“It’s hard if you’re not used to it,” Sharpe said, talking of the bombardment rather than the gin. He went to the window. The bombs were more sporadic now and he guessed the batteries were running out of ammunition. He saw a fuse streak the smoke cloud, heard the explosion and watched the flames roar hungrily. “It’ll stop soon,” he said, “and I’ll be going out.”

“You’re going out?”

Sharpe turned and smiled at her. “I’m not a deserter. I’ll write a letter to the British army and tell them they can have their commission back. Do it legal, see? But I’ve something to do first. And it’s English business, not Danish.”

“Major Lavisser?”

“If he’s dead,” Sharpe said, “then your father will be safer.”

“You’ll kill him?” Astrid seemed surprised.

“It’s my job,” Sharpe said, “for now.”

“For now?” Astrid wondered. “You mean you will stop killing soon?”

“Not much opportunity for killing here. I’ll have to find another sort of work, eh?”

But first he would find and kill Lavisser. The renegade was off duty tonight, but Sharpe doubted he was at home. He would be watching the fires and bombs, but he must eventually go back to his bed and Sharpe reckoned that was the time to find him. So Sharpe would be a housebreaker for Britain. He would wait for Lavisser in the Bredgade house, kill him when he returned and take the gold as a gift for his new life in Denmark.

The city clocks were striking midnight as he went down the stairs. He carried the two pistols and the seven-barreled gun, but he had left the rifle and cutlass upstairs. Bang was sleeping, his mouth open. Sharpe paused, wondering if the man would wake and decide to go into the city and find some soldiers who could help him arrest the Englishman who had so inconveniently returned, but he decided Bang was probably stupefied by the unfamiliar gin. He left him snoring, unlocked the front door with the key Astrid had given him, carefully locked it again, then turned north through streets smelling of battle. The bombs had ended, though the fires still blazed. He walked fast, following the directions Astrid had given him, but he still got lost in the shadowed alleys, then saw a crowd hurrying three wounded people northward and remembered she had told him that Bredgade was close to King Frederick’s Hospital. “You cannot mistake it,” she had told him. “It has a black roof and a picture of the Good Samaritan above the door.” He followed the wounded folk and saw the hospital’s black tiles shining in the flame light.

He went to the front of Lavisser’s house first. He doubted he could get in that way, and sure enough the windows were shuttered. The Danish flag celebrating Lavisser’s homecoming still hung from the lantern. He counted the houses, then doubled back into a wide alley that ran behind the rich houses. He counted again until he came to a gate that would let him into the backyard.

The big gate was locked. He glanced up and saw spikes on top of the gate and glints of light on the wall’s coping. There was glass embedded, there, but householders never did the job properly and Sharpe simply went to the house next door and found their gate unlocked. The party wall had no glass on its coping and a convenient store shed gave him access to the top of the wall. He climbed, paused and stared into Lavisser’s backyard.

It was empty. There was a stable and coach house, then a short flight of steps leading into the house, which was dark as pitch. He dropped over the wall and unbolted Lavisser’s back gate to give himself an escape route, then crouched by the stable and examined the house again. There was a dark hole under the stone steps and he suspected it led to the basement. He would start there, but first he stared up at the house again. The uppermost windows were not shuttered and three of them were cracked open, but no lights showed there except the flickering reflection of the fires on the glass. All was still and utterly quiet, yet suddenly his instincts were tight as a drum skin. There was something wrong. Three open windows? All open the same amount? And it had all been too easy so far and it was much too quiet. Those open windows. He stared up at them. They had been opened just enough to let muskets poke through. Were there men there? Or was he imagining things? Yet he sensed he was being watched. He could not explain it, but he was certain this was not nearly so easy as he had imagined.

The house no longer looked dark and vulnerable. It was a threat. One part of his mind told Sharpe he was imagining things, but he had learned to trust instinct. He was being watched, being stalked. There was one way to find out, he thought, and so he took the big gun off his shoulder, cocked it, and positioned himself so he could see only the right-hand window. If he was being watched then the man up there would be waiting for Sharpe to cross the yard, to be in the open space that would serve as a killing ground. But the man would also see death in the seven barrels of the big gun and Sharpe suddenly jerked the weapon up, aiming it at the window and he saw the spark of the flint deep in the room and then the cough of flame at the window sill and he was already rolling back into cover as a musket ball cracked against the brick just inches from his face. Two more guns fired almost immediately, venting smoke from the upper floors. A tile shattered on the stable roof, then a voice shouted and feet sounded on the stone stairs that led from the house. Sharpe leveled the pistol at the steps, fired, then saw more men spilling from the coach house. He dropped the pistol, leveled the seven-barreled gun and pulled the trigger.

The noise, in the confines of the yard, was like a cannon firing. The muzzle flames licked out six feet, filling the air with smoke that was wickedly tangled by ricocheting bullets. A man shouted in pain, but Sharpe was already at the back gate. He hauled it open, slipped into the alley and ran. Two musket balls followed him from the high windows and a few seconds later a pistol was discharged down the alley, but Sharpe was already out of sight. He ran to the front of the hospital where a crowd waited under the bas-relief of the Good Samaritan. Some of them, alarmed by the eruption of gunfire and seeing the big gun in Sharpe’s hand, shouted a question, but he dodged into another alley, ran to its end, turned and twisted down two more and then slowed to catch his breath. God damn it, but they had been ready for him. Why? Why would a man keep a close guard on his house when he was supposedly among friends?

He paused in a deep doorway. If anyone pursued him they had taken the wrong turning, for no one looked in this alley. Sharpe reloaded the seven-barreled gun, doing it by touch, hardly thinking about the powder and shot, instead wondering why Lavisser would have his house manned like a fortress. To protect the gold? Yet if men stood sentry night after night they soon became bored. They dozed. They thought about women instead of watching for enemies and the men in the Bredgade house had been alert, waiting, ready. So there was something new there, something that had made Lavisser very cautious.

And there had been something else new in this strange night. Something that had seemed funny at first, but now struck Sharpe as sinister. He rammed the last bullet home, put the ramrod in its hoops and set off southward. Off to his right the fires still roared and tired men worked the feeble pumps. Brewery carts brought barrels of water from the harbor, but the pumps were hardly touching the fires, though as the church clocks struck one it began to rain and the men fighting the fires at last began to dare feel hope.

Sharpe unlocked Skovgaard’s door. He very much doubted that Skovgaard was at home, and Astrid, he hoped, was sleeping. He went to the kitchen and rooted in the dark for a lantern and a tinderbox. He found both, then carried the light to the warehouse where he discovered Aksel Bang still snoring on his makeshift bed of empty sacks. Sharpe put the lantern and the seven-barreled gun down, then lifted Bang off the sacks, shook him like a terrier killing a rat and flung him hard against a crate of cloves. Bang yelped with pain and blinked up at Sharpe.

“Where is he, Aksel?” Sharpe asked.

“I do not know what you are saying! What is happening?” Bang was still waking up.

Sharpe stepped toward him, lifted him again and slapped his lugubrious face hard. “Where is he?”

“I think you are mad!” Bang said.

“Maybe,” Sharpe said. He thrust Bang against the crate and held him with one hand while he searched the Dane’s blue uniform pockets. He found what he had dreaded in the coat’s tail pockets. Guineas. The golden cavalry of Saint George; new, shining and fresh from the Mint. Sharpe put the coins on the crate one by one while Bang just whimpered. “You bastard,” Sharpe said. “You sold him out for twenty guineas, didn’t you? Why didn’t you make it thirty pieces of silver?”

“You are mad!” Bang said and made a grab for the coins.

Sharpe hit him a stinging blow on the jaw. “Just tell me, Aksel.”

“There is nothing to tell.” A trickle of blood ran down Bang’s long chin.

“Nothing! You go to a prayer meeting with Skovgaard and come back without him? You’re drunk as a judge and you’ve got a pocketful of gold. You think I’m a fool?”

“I trade for myself,” Bang said, wiping the blood from his lips. “Mister Skovgaard approves. I sold some things.”

“What things?”

“Some coffee,” Bang declared, “coffee and jute.”

“You do take me for a bloody fool, Aksel,” Sharpe said. He drew out his pocket knife.

“I have done nothing!” Bang glared at him.

Sharpe smiled and unfolded the blade. “Coffee and jute? No, Aksel, you were selling a soul, and now you’re going to tell me all about it.”

“I have told you the truth!” Bang declared indignantly.

Sharpe pushed him against the crate, then held the blade just under Bang’s left eye. “We’ll take this one first, Aksel. Eyeballs just pop out. It’s not even very painful at first. We’ll have the left one, then the right, and after that I’ll fill the sockets with salt. You’ll be screaming then.”

“No! Please!” Bang screamed now, and feebly tried to push Sharpe away. Sharpe pressed the cold blade into the flesh and Bang squealed like a gelded pig. “No!” he wailed.

“Then tell me the truth, Aksel,” Sharpe said, pressing harder. “I’ll exchange the truth for your eyes.”

The tale was not told straight for Bang desperately wanted to justify himself. Mister Skovgaard, he said, was a traitor to Denmark. He had been supplying news to the British and were not the British the enemies of Denmark? And Ole Skovgaard was a mean, tight-fisted man. “I have worked for him two years now and he has not raised my wages once. A man must have prospects, he must have prospects.”

“Go on,” Sharpe said. He tossed the knife into the air and Bang watched it circle and glitter, then gave a start when the handle slapped back into Sharpe’s hand. “I’m listening,” Sharpe said.

“It is not right what Mister Skovgaard was doing,” Bang said. “He is a traitor to Denmark.” He gave a small whimper, not because of anything Sharpe had done, but because Astrid, in a swathing green robe, had come down to the warehouse. Bang’s scream must have woken her and she was carrying Sharpe’s rifle, half expecting a thief, but now laid the weapon down and looked inquisitively at Sharpe.

“Aksel’s telling us a story,” Sharpe said, “of how he sold your father for twenty pieces of gold.”

“No!” Bang protested.

“Don’t piss on me!” Sharpe shouted, frightening Astrid as much as Bang. “Tell the damned truth!”

The damned truth was that a man had approached Bang and persuaded him that his patriotic duty was to betray Skovgaard. “For Denmark,” Bang insisted. He claimed to have agonized over his decision, but it seems the agony was helped by a promise of gold and when Skovgaard suggested that the two of them attend a prayer meeting Bang had let his new friend know where and when the prayers would be offered. A coach had been waiting beside the church and Skovgaard had been snatched from the street in an instant.

Astrid had gone pale. She just stared at Bang, scarce crediting what she heard. Sharpe put the knife close to Bang’s eye again. “So you sold him, Aksel, then celebrated with gin?”

“They said it would make me feel better,” Bang admitted sadly. “I did not know it was gin.”

“What the hell did you think it was? The milk of human kindness?” Sharpe was tempted to thrust the knife home, but instead he stepped back. “So you’ve given Astrid’s father to Lavisser?”

“I do not know Major Lavisser,” Bang insisted, as though that made his offense less heinous.

“That’s what you did,” Sharpe said. “I was there an hour ago and the house was guarded like a newly built outpost. You gave him to the French, Aksel.”

“I gave him to Danes!”

“You gave him to the French, you bloody fool. And God knows what they’re doing to him. They pulled two teeth before.”

“They promised me they would not hurt him.”

“You pathetic bastard,” Sharpe said. He looked at Astrid. “You want me to kill him?”

She shook her head. “No, no.”

“He bloody deserves it,” Sharpe said. But instead he took Bang out to the yard where there was a brick-built stable that had a solid door with a heavy padlock. Sharpe locked Bang inside, then investigated the handcart that had been placed beside the yard gate. Eight unexploded bombs lay on the cart. They were probably safe, but in the morning he would pull out the wooden fuse plugs and pour water into the charges just to make sure. He went back to the warehouse, pocketed the guineas, and then climbed the stairs. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Astrid was shivering, though it was hardly cold. “Those men,” she said falteringly.

“The same men as before,” Sharpe said, “and they’ve got the house in Bredgade tight as a prison.”

“What are they doing to him?”

“Asking him questions,” Sharpe said. And he did not doubt that the questions would eventually be answered, which meant that those answers had to stay in Copenhagen. The list of names had to be kept from the French, but that meant getting into the house on Bredgade and Sharpe could not do that without help.

He put his hands on Astrid’s shoulders. “I’m going out again,” he told her, “but I’ll be back, I promise I’ll be back. Stay here. Can you keep the warehouse closed? And don’t let Aksel out.”

“I won’t.”

“He’ll be weeping on you. He’ll be claiming he’s thirsty or hungry or dying, but don’t listen. If you or the maids open that door he’ll jump on you. That’s what he wants.”

“He just wants money,” she said bitterly.

“He wants you, love. He thinks that if your father vanished then you’d cling to him. He wants you, the warehouse, the money, everything.” He hefted the seven-barreled gun. “Keep the house locked,” he warned her. “No one comes or goes except me. And I’ll be back.”

It was almost dawn. The fires were going out slowly, though the fiercest of the blazes still lit a darkness in which no bombs fell, just a greasy ash that dropped like black snow in the dying night. Houses burned white hot and the water spurted by the feeble pumps was turned to steam that joined the thick smoke smearing the sky all across Zealand. Water was scarce for the city’s supply had been cut and the pumps had to wait for barrels to be fetched from the harbor and that took time, yet slowly the clanking pumps and the small rain contained the fires. The tired men could smell roasted flesh in the embers. Coffins were laid in the streets, while the hospitals were filled with whimpering people.

Sharpe headed toward the harbor.

To give John Lavisser hell.