Sharpe's Prey

by Bernard Cornwell

  “They’ve got damn great mortars in their bellies,” Baird explained, then turned to look at the modest town. “A dozen well-manned bomb ships could wipe Harwich off the earth in twenty minutes,” the General said with unholy relish. “It will be interesting to see what they do to a city like Copenhagen.”

  “You would not bombard Copenhagen!” Captain Gordon sounded shocked.

  “I’d bombard London if the King demanded it,” Baird said.

  “But not Edinburgh,” Gordon murmured.

  “You spoke, Gordon?”

  “I remarked that time is getting short, sir. I’m sure Captain Lavisser and Lieutenant Sharpe should be embarking soon.”

  Their ship was a frigate, newly painted and moored closer to Felixstowe on the river’s northern bank. “She’s called the Cleopatra,” Baird’s aide said, and it was apparent that the frigate’s crew had seen the carriage’s arrival, for a ship’s boat was now pulling across the river.

  A score of officers from the tented camps had gathered lower down the quay and Sharpe saw some green jackets among the scarlet. He did not want to be recognized and so he hid himself behind a great pile of herring barrels and stared down at the mud where gulls strutted and fought over fish bones. He was suddenly cold. He did not want to go to sea, and he knew that was because he had met Grace on a ship. It was made worse because a country gentleman, come in his open carriage to see the ships, was telling his daughters which of the far fleet had been at Trafalgar.

  “There, you see? The Mars? She was there.”

  “Which one is she, Papa?”

  “The black-and-yellow one.”

  “They’re all black and yellow, Papa. Like wasps.”

  Sharpe stared at the ships, half listening to the girls tease their father and trying not to think of Grace teasing him, when a precise and high-pitched voice spoke behind him. “Are yon content, Lieutenant?”

  Sharpe turned to see it was Lord Pumphrey, the young and taciturn civilian who had spoken so little during the journey. “My lord?”

  “I first heard you were involved in this nonsense very late last night,” Pumphrey said softly, “and I confess your qualities were quite unknown to me. I apologize for that, but I am not very familiar with the army list. My father once thought I should be a soldier, but he concluded I was both too clever and too delicate.” He smiled at Sharpe who did not smile back. Lord Pumphrey sighed. “So I took the liberty of waking one or two acquaintances to discover something about you and they informed me that you are a most resourceful man.”

  “Am I, my lord?” Sharpe wondered who on earth he and Lord Pumphrey knew in common.

  “I too have resources,” Pumphrey went on. “I work for the Foreign Office, though, for the moment, I am reduced to serving as a civilian aide to Sir David. It quite opens one’s eyes, seeing how the military operate. So, Lieutenant, are you content?”

  Sharpe shrugged. “It all seems a bit abrupt, my lord, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Distressingly abrupt!” Pumphrey agreed. He was so thin and frail that it looked as though a puff of wind would blow him off the quay and dump him in the filth below, but that apparent weakness was belied by his eyes which were very intelligent. He took out a snuff box, snapped open its lid and offered some to Sharpe. “You don’t use it? I find it calming, and we rather need calm heads at present. This alarming excursion, Lieutenant, is being encouraged by the Duke of York. We at the Foreign Office, who might be expected to know rather more about Denmark than His Royal Highness, profoundly disapprove of the whole scheme, but the Duke, alas, has gained the support of the Prime Minister. Mister Canning wants the fleet and would rather avoid a campaign that will inevitably make Denmark into our enemy. He suggests, too, that a successful bribe will spare the Treasury the expense of such a campaign. These are cogent arguments, Lieutenant, do you not think?”

  “If you say so, my lord.”

  “Cogent indeed, and quite egregiously mudle-headed. It will all end in tears, Lieutenant, which is why the Foreign Office in its ineffable wisdom has attached me to the Danish expedition. I am deputed to pick up the pieces, so to speak.”

  Sharpe wondered why his lordship wore a beauty patch on his cheek. It was a woman’s affectation, not a man’s, but Sharpe did not like to ask. Instead he watched two gulls squabble over some fish offal in the mud under the quay. “You think it won’t work, my lord?”

  Pumphrey gazed at the ships. “Shall I just say, Lieutenant, that nothing I have heard suggests that the Danish Crown Prince is venal?”

  “Venal?” Sharpe asked.

  A ghost of a smile showed on his lordship’s face. “Nothing I have heard, Sharpe, suggests that the Crown Prince is a man amenable to bribery, and in consequence the Foreign Office is acutely concerned that the whole sorry affair might embarrass Britain.”

  “How?”

  “Suppose the Crown Prince is offended by the offer of a bribe and announces the attempt to the world?”

  “That doesn’t seem so bad,” Sharpe said dourly.

  “It would be clumsy,” Lord Pumphrey said severely, “and clumsiness is the grossest offense against good diplomacy. In truth we are bribing half the crowned heads of Europe, but we have to pretend it is not happening. But there’s worse.” He glanced behind to make sure no one was overhearing the conversation. “Captain Lavisser is known to be indebted. He plays steep at Almack’s. Well, so do many others, but the fact of it is worrying.”

  Sharpe smiled down at the birdlike Pumphrey. “He’s up to his ears in debt and you’re sending him off with a chest full of money?”

  “The Commander in Chief insists, the Prime Minister concurs and we at the Foreign Office cannot possibly suggest that the Honorable John Lavisser is anything other than scrupulously honest.” Pumphrey said the last word very sourly, implying the opposite of what he had just stated. “We merely must tidy things up, Lieutenant, when the enthusiasm has died down. Nasty thing, enthusiasm. And if things do turn out ill then we would appreciate that no one was to know what happened. We don’t want the Duke and the Prime Minister to look like complete fools, do we?”

  “We don’t, my lord?”

  Lord Pumphrey shuddered at Sharpe’s levity. “If Lavisser fails, Lieutenant, then I want you to bring him and the money out of Copenhagen to the safety of our army. We do not want the Danish government announcing a failed and clumsy attempt at a bribe.” He took a piece of paper from his pocket. “If you need assistance in Copenhagen then this man may provide it.” He held the paper out to Sharpe, then pulled it back. “I have to tell you, Sharpe, that I have worried greatly about revealing this name to you. The man is valuable. I devoutly hope you won’t need his help.”

  “What treason are you talking, my lord?” Baird demanded loudly.

  “I was merely remarking on the beauty of the scene, Sir David,” Lord Pumphrey observed in his high-pitched voice, “and noting to Lieutenant Sharpe the delicate tracery of the ships’ rigging. I should like a chance to depict the scene in watercolors.”

  “Good God, man, leave that to the proper bloody artists!” Baird looked appalled. “That’s what the idiots are for.”

  Lord Pumphrey pressed the piece of paper into Sharpe’s hand. “Guard that name, Lieutenant,” he said softly. “You alone possess it.”

  Meaning, Sharpe thought, that Lavisser had not been trusted with the man’s name. “Thank you, my lord,” he said, but Lord Pumphrey had already walked away for the Cleopatra’s launch had come to the jetty that gave access to the deep-water channel. The chest was being loaded into the launch’s belly and Baird held out a hand to Lavisser. “I’ll bid you farewell, God speed and good fortune,” Baird said. “I’ll allow I won’t mind if you fail, but there’s no point in real soldiers dying if a handful of gold can keep them alive.” He shook Sharpe’s hand. “Keep our guardsman alive, Sharpe.”

  The two officers did not speak as they were rowed out to the Cleopatra which, in her haste to use a favorable wind and tide, was already
hauling her anchor. Sharpe could hear the chant of the seamen as they tramped round the capstan and see the quivering cable shedding drops of water and lumps of mud as it came from the gray river. The top-men were aloft, ready to drop the high sails. Sharpe and Lavisser scrambled up the ship’s side to be met by the dutiful squeal of bosuns’ whistles and by a harassed lieutenant who hurried them aft to the quarterdeck while the hulking Barker carried the baggage down below and a dozen seamen hauled a line to bring the gold on deck. “Captain Samuels begs to be excused while we get under way,” the Lieutenant said, “and requests that you keep to the stern rail, gentlemen, until the sails are set.”

  Lavisser grinned as the Lieutenant hurried away. “Meaning that Captain Samuels don’t want us in the way while he makes a muck of getting under sail. And he’s under the eye of the Admiral, no less! Rather like setting the guard at Windsor Castle. I don’t suppose you’ve ever done that, Sharpe? Placed a guard at Windsor?”

  “I haven’t, sir,” Sharpe said.

  “You do it perfectly, then some decrepit old fool who last saw action fighting against William the Conqueror informs you that Guardsman Bloggs has an ill-set flint in his musket. And for God’s sake stop calling me ‘sir,” Lavisser said with a smile. “You make me feel old, and that’s dreadful unkind of you. So what was on that piece of paper little William gave to you?”

  “Little William?”

  “Lord Pumps. He was a pallid little worm at Eton and he’s no better now.”

  “It’s just his address,” Sharpe said. “He says I should report to him when I get back.”

  “Nonsense,” Lavisser said, though he did not appear offended that Sharpe had lied to him. “If my guess is any good then it’s the name of a man in Copenhagen who might help us, a name, I might add, that the suspicious bastards at the Foreign Office refused to give me. Divide and rule, that’s the Foreign Office way. Aren’t you going to tell me the name?”

  “If I remember it,” Sharpe said. “I threw the paper overboard.”

  Lavisser laughed at that untruth. “Don’t tell me little Pumps told you to keep it secret! He did? Poor little Pumps, he sees conspiracy everywhere. Well, so long as one of us has the name I suppose it don’t matter.” He looked upward as the topsails were released. The canvas shook loudly until the seamen sheeted the sails home. Men slid down shrouds and scrambled along spars to loose the mainsails. It was all so very familiar to Sharpe after his long voyage home from India. Captain Samuels, heavy and tall, stood at the white line which marked off the quarterdeck from the rest of the flush-decked frigate. He said nothing, just watched his men.

  “How long a voyage is it?” Sharpe asked Lavisser.

  “A week? Ten days? Sometimes much longer. It all depends on Aeolus, our god of the winds. May he blow us swiftly and safely.”

  Sharpe grunted an acknowledgment, then just stared ashore where the herring smokers made a haze over the land. He leaned on the stern rail, suddenly wishing he was anywhere but at sea.

  Lavisser leaned on the rail beside him. “You ain’t happy, Sharpe,” the guardsman said. Sharpe frowned at the words, which struck him as intrusive. He said nothing, but was acutely aware of Lavisser so close beside him. “Let me guess.” The Guards Captain raised his eyes to the wheeling gulls and pretended to think for a while, then looked at Sharpe again. “My guess, Sharpe, is that you met Lady Grace Hale on shipboard and that you’ve not been afloat since.” He held up a cautionary hand when he saw the anger in Sharpe’s eyes. “My dear Sharpe, please don’t mistake me. I feel for you, indeed I do. I met the Lady Grace once. Let me see? It must be a dozen years or more ago and I was only a sprat of fifteen, but I could spot a beauty even then. She was lovely.”

  Sharpe said nothing, just watched Lavisser.

  “She was lovely and she was clever,” the Guards Captain went on softly, “and then she was married off to a tedious old bore. And you, Sharpe, forgive my being forward, gave her a time of happiness. Isn’t that something to remember with satisfaction?” Lavisser waited for Sharpe to respond, but the rifleman said nothing. “Am I right?” Lavisser asked gently.

  “She left me in bloody misery,” Sharpe admitted. “I can’t seem to shake it. And, yes, being on a ship brings it back.”

  “Why should you shake it?” Lavisser asked. “My dear Sharpe, may I call you Richard? That’s kind of you. My dear Richard, you should be in mourning. She deserves it. The greater the affection, the greater the mourning. And it’s been cruel for you. All the gossip! It’s no one’s business what you and Lady Grace did.”

  “It was everyone’s business,” Sharpe said bitterly.

  “And it will pass,” Lavisser said gently. “Gossip is ephemeral, Richard, it vanishes like dew or smoke. Your grief remains, the rest of the world will forget. They’ve mostly forgotten already.”

  “You haven’t.”

  Lavisser smiled. “I’ve been racking my brains all day trying to place you. It only came to me as we climbed aboard.” A rush of feet interrupted them as seamen came aft to secure the mizzen sheets. The great sail banged above their heads, then was brought under control and the frigate picked up speed. Her ensign, blue because the fleet’s commander was an Admiral of the Blue, flapped crisply in the evening wind. “The grief will pass, Richard,” Lavisser went on in a low voice, “it will pass. I had a sister who died, a dear thing, and I grieved for her. It’s not the same, I know, but we should not be ashamed of demonstrating our feelings. Not when it is grief for a lovely woman.”

  “It won’t stop me doing my job,” Sharpe said stoically, fighting off the tears that threatened.

  “Of course it won’t,” Lavisser said fervently, “nor, I trust, will it stop you from enjoying the fleshpots of Copenhagen. They are meager and few, I can assure you, but such as they are we shall enjoy.”

  “I can’t afford fleshpots,” Sharpe said.

  “Don’t be so dull, Richard! We’re sailing with forty-three thousand of the government’s guineas and I intend to steal as many of them as I decently can without getting caught.” He smiled so broadly and with such infectious enjoyment that Sharpe had to laugh. “There!” Lavisser said. “You see I shall be good for you!”

  “I hope so,” Sharpe replied. He was watching the Cleopatra’s rippling wake. The tide was ebbing and the wind was out of the west so that the anchored ships presented their sterns to the frigate’s quarterdeck. The ugly bomb ships sat low in the water. One was called Thunder, another Vesuvius, then there was Aetna with Zebra close by. The frigate sailed so close to Zebra that Sharpe could look down into her welldeck which was stuffed with what looked like coils of rope, put there to cushion the shock of the two great mortars that squatted in the ship’s belly. The mortars were capped with tompions, but Sharpe guessed they threw a shell about a foot across and, because the flash of their firing would blast up into the air to lob the bombs in a high arc, the forward stays of the Zebra were not made of hemp, but of thick chain. Another eight guns, carronades by the look of them, were mounted aft of the mainmast. An ugly vessel, Sharpe thought, but a brute with massive teeth, and there were sixteen of the bomb ships moored or anchored in the river, along with a host of gun brigs that were shallow-draft vessels armed with heavy cannon. These were not ships designed to fight other ships, but to hammer targets ashore.

  The Cleopatra was picking up speed now as the crew trimmed the big sails. She leaned to larboard and the water began to gurgle and seethe at her stern. The dusk was drawing in, shadowing the big seventy-fours that were the workhorses of the British fleet. Sharpe recognized some of the ships’ names from Trafalgar: the Mars, the Minotaur, the Orion and the Agamemnon, but most he had never seen before. The Goliath, belying her name, was dwarfed by the Prince of Wales, a 98-gun monster which flew the Admiral’s pennant. A gunport opened at the Prince of Wales’s bow to return the salute that the Cleopatra was firing as she passed. The sound of the guns was huge, the smoke thick and the tremor of the cannon, even though they were unshotted, shook the
deck beneath Sharpe’s feet.

  Only one ship, another seventy-four, lay beyond the Prince of Wales. She was a good-looking ship and Sharpe had learned enough in his voyage home from India to recognize that she was French-built, one of the many ships that had been captured from the enemy. Water gushed from her pumps as the Cleopatra sailed by and Sharpe looked up to see men pausing in their work to watch the sleek frigate pass. Then the Cleopatra left the seventy-four behind and Sharpe could read the gold-painted name scrolled across her stern. Pucelle. His heart leaped. The Pucelle! His own ship, the ship he had been aboard at Trafalgar and which was captained by his friend, Joel Chase, though whether Chase was still a captain, or aboard the Pucelle or even alive, Sharpe did not know. He just knew that he and Grace had known happiness on board the ship that had been named by her French builders for Joan of Arc, La Pucelle or the virgin. He wanted to wave at the ship, but it was too far for him to recognize anyone aboard.

  “You’re welcome, gentlemen.” Captain Samuels, dark-faced, gray-haired and scowling, had come to greet his guests. “Lieutenant Dunbar will show you your quarters.” He frowned at Sharpe, who had turned to stare at the Pucelle again. “You find my remarks tedious, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I was aboard that ship once.”

  “The Pucelle?”

  “Didn’t she take the Revenant at Trafalgar, sir?”

  “What if she did? There were easy pickings at that battle, Lieutenant.” The envy of a man who had not sailed with Nelson was naked in Samuels’s voice.

  “You were there, sir?” Sharpe asked, knowing it would needle the Captain.

  “I was not, but nor were you, Lieutenant, and now you will show me the courtesy of remarking my words.” He went on to tell them the rules of the ship, that they were not to smoke aboard, not to climb the rigging and that they must salute the quarterdeck. “You will take your meals in the officers’ mess and I’ll thank you not to get in the crew’s way. I’ll do my duty, God knows, but that doesn’t mean I must like it. I’m to put you and your damned cargo ashore by stealth and that I’ll do, but I’ll be glad to see the back of you both and get back to some proper sailoring.” He left them as abruptly as he had come.