Sharpe's Prey

by Bernard Cornwell

“You know what your father does?”

  She nodded. “I’ve helped him in the last few years. Since Mother died. He corresponds, Lieutenant, that is all. He corresponds.”

  “With folk in Europe and in Britain.”

  “Yes.” She stared at the British fleet. “He does business all over the Baltic and all through the north German states, so he has scores of men who write to him. If a French column of artillery passes through Magdeburg then he will know within a week.”

  “And he tells the British?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dangerous work,” Sharpe said.

  “Not really. His correspondents know how to write safely. That’s why I help my father, because his eyes are not so good as they were. Some of the best ones send him newspapers. The French do not mind newspapers going to Denmark, especially if they are from Paris and full of praise for the Emperor, but if you open the paper and hold it against the window you can see that someone had pushed a pin hundreds of times through the pages. Each pinprick is under a letter and I just read the letters off in order and that is the message.” She shrugged. “It is not so dangerous.”

  “But the French know who he is now,” Sharpe said. “They want to know who writes to him, who sticks those pins in the newspapers. They want to stop the messages and your father can give them the names. So it is dangerous.”

  Astrid said nothing for a while. She gazed at a gunboat that was being rowed out of the harbor. There was a heavy boom made from chained logs protecting the entrance, but it had been hauled aside to let the gunboat pass. The ship had a tall mast on which a sail was furled, but the small wind was against the ungainly craft and so a score of oarsmen were pulling on long sweeps to crawl out of the channel. The boat had an ugly bill of a bow on which two heavy and very long-barreled cannons were mounted. Twenty-four-pounders, Sharpe guessed. Guns that could fire a long way and hit hard, and there were a score of other gunboats tethered against the far quay where powder and shot were being unloaded from carts. Other boats were bringing food into the city. “I hoped the danger was past,” Astrid said after a long while, “now that the French are gone. But at least it stops life being dull.”

  “Is life dull?” Sharpe asked.

  She smiled. “I go to church, I do the accounts and I look after Father.” She shrugged. “It must sound very dull to you.”

  “My life’s become dull,” Sharpe said, thinking of his job as a quartermaster.

  “You!” She was teasing him, her eyes bright. “You are a soldier! You climb chimneys and kill people!” She gave a shudder. “Your life is much too exciting.”

  Sharpe stared at the gunboat. The rowers, stripped to the waist, were hauling hard, but the boat was making little progress. He could see the tide rippling against the piers of the jetty and the gunboat was fighting the flood, but the oarsmen pulled on as though every burning muscle would help turn back the British. “I’m thirty years old,” he said, “and I’ve been a soldier for fourteen years. Before that I was a child. I was nothing.”

  “No one is nothing,” Astrid protested.

  “I was nothing!” Sharpe sounded angry. “I was born into nothing, raised into nothing, expected to do nothing. But I had a talent. I can kill.”

  “That is not good.”

  “So I became a soldier and I learned when to kill and when not to kill. I became something, an officer, but now they don’t want me. I’m not a gentleman, see? I’m not like Lavisser. He’s a gentleman.” He knew he had sounded jealous and angry and was embarrassed. He had forgotten, too, the reason for being with Astrid and he guiltily turned and looked at the folk taking the summer air on the fort’s esplanade, but no one appeared to be taking any undue notice of the two of them. No Frenchmen were lurking and there was no sign of Barker or Lavisser. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said.

  “Sorry, why?”

  “Tide has turned,” Sharpe said, changing the subject and nodding at the gunboat. “Those lads are making some progress now.”

  “We must make some progress too,” Astrid said, standing. Then she laughed. “You make me feel very rich.”

  “Rich? Why?”

  “To have a manservant carrying the basket! Only the folk living on Amaliegade and Bredgade can afford such luxuries.” They walked westward, skirting the moat of the vast citadel until they came to a poorer quarter of the city, though even here the houses were neat and clean. The single-story homes had been built to a pattern, were brightly painted and in good repair. “This is the sailors’ quarter,” Astrid told Sharpe. “Nyboder, it is called. They all have ovens! One oven for every two houses. It is nice, I think.”

  “Very nice.”

  “My father was a sailor’s son. He grew up in that street, Svanegaden. He was very poor, you see?” She looked at him with big eyes, evidently trying to reassure him that she was no better born than himself. But Svanegaden, Sharpe thought, was a paradise compared to Wapping.

  “You reckon this is a poor area?” Sharpe asked.

  “Oh yes,” Astrid said seriously, “and I know about these things. Father is one of the Commissioners of the Poor and I help with the correspondence.”

  The orphanage was on the edge of Nyboder, close to the sailors’ cemetery where Astrid’s son was buried. Astrid tidied the little grave, then bowed her head and Sharpe wanted to embrace her when he saw the tears on her cheeks. Instead he stepped back, giving her privacy, and watched the gulls wheeling over the citadel’s ramparts. He thought of Grace and wondered what birds flew above her grave. She had been buried in a Lincolnshire church among her dead husband’s family and under a memorial tablet recording Lord William Male’s virtues. Sharpe imagined her spirit hovering over him. Would she approve that he was so drawn to Astrid? He turned and looked at the widow stooping over the tiny grave and knew he was falling in love. It was as though green shoots were coming from the hatred and fury that had obsessed him since Grace had died.

  Astrid stood and smiled at him. “Come,” she said, “you must meet the children.” She led him to the hospital where her son had died and Sharpe could hardly believe it was also an orphanage. It was nothing like Brewhouse Lane

  . There was no high wall or spiked gate, though the upper windows were all equipped with iron bars. “That is to stop the boys being daredevils,” Astrid explained. “Sometimes the older boys want to climb on the roof.”

  “So it’s not a prison?”

  “Of course not!” She laughed at the idea, and indeed the orphanage looked anything but a prison. The two-story building was painted white and built about a courtyard where flowers grew in neat beds. There was a small chapel with a pipe organ, a simple altar and a high stained-glass window that showed Christ surrounded by small, golden-haired children. “I grew up in a place like this,” Sharpe told Astrid.

  “An orphanage?”

  “A foundling home. Same thing. Wasn’t quite like this, though. They made us work.”

  “The children work here too!” she said sternly. “The girls learn to sew and the boys must learn to be sailors, see?” She had led him back into the courtyard where she pointed to a tall flagpole that was rigged like a ship’s mast. “The boys must learn to climb it, and the girls make all those flags.”

  Sharpe listened to the sound of laughter. “It wasn’t like this,” he said. A dozen children, all in gray dresses or breeches, were playing a complicated game of tag about the flagpole. Three crippled children and one idiot, a girl with her head cocked sideways who twitched and dribbled and made small mewing noises, watched from wicker chairs equipped with wheels. “They seem happy,” Sharpe said.

  “That is important,” Astrid said. “A happy child is more likely to be given a home by a good family.” She led him upstairs to where the hospital occupied two large rooms and Sharpe waited on the balcony while she delivered her food and he thought of Jem Hocking and Brewhouse Lane

  . He remembered Hocking’s fear and smiled.

  “Why are you smiling?” Astrid asked as she came back to
the balcony.

  “I was remembering being a child,” he lied.

  “So it was happy?”

  “No. They beat us too much.”

  “These children are beaten,” Astrid said, “if they steal or tell lies. But it is not frequent.”

  “They used to whip us,” Sharpe said, “till the blood ran.”

  Astrid frowned as if she was not sure whether to believe him. “My mother always said the English were cruel.”

  “World’s cruel,” Sharpe said.

  “Then we must try to be kind,” Astrid said firmly.

  He walked her home. Bang scowled when they came through the door and Ole Skovgaard, seeing his daughter’s happiness, gave Sharpe a suspicious look. “We must find Danes to protect us,” Skovgaard told his daughter that evening, but men were needed in the militia, and the militia was busy throwing up the new outworks in the suburbs and so, reluctantly, and mostly at his daughter’s urging, Skovgaard allowed Sharpe to stay on in Ulfedt’s Plads. On Sunday the rifleman went with the household to church where the hymns droned, the sermon was interminable and Sharpe fell asleep until Aksel Bang dug an indignant elbow in his ribs. Next morning Sharpe escorted Skovgaard to a bank and in the afternoon he accompanied Astrid back to the orphanage, and then to a sugar warehouse on Amager, the small island on which the eastern half of Copenhagen was built. They crossed a lifting bridge which spanned the narrowest part of the harbor and walked past the vast boom which protected the inner haven in which the endangered Danish fleet was stored. Sharpe counted eighteen ships of the line and as many frigates, brigs and gunboats. Two great ships were under construction in the yard, their great hulls rearing on the slipways like half-clothed skeletons of wood. These ships were Napoleon’s last hope of invading Britain, which was why the British were in Denmark and the French were poised across the Holstein frontier. Sailors were busy taking the great guns from the ships of the line and ferrying them ashore where they would be added to the artillery already on the city’s walls.

  After Astrid had delivered a bill of sale to the sugar warehouse she led him to the seaward ramparts where they climbed to the firestep between two giant bastions. The wind ruffled the water and lifted the fair hair at Astrid’s neck as she gazed northward to where the masts of the British fleet looked like a thicket on the horizon. “Why are they staying to the north?”

  “Takes time to land an army,” Sharpe said. “Lots of time. It’ll be a day or two before they come here.”

  The dull boom of a gun sounded flat in the warm afternoon. Sharpe stared eastward and saw a smudge of gray-white smoke rise from the distant sea. The smoke drifted on the wind to reveal the low hull of a gunboat, then a second gunboat fired to make a new white cloud. The gunboats were strung across the wide channel that ran past the city and a ship had sailed into their clutches. A third gunboat fired, then a cluster of shots hammered like thunder across the sun-touched waves. Sharpe took the telescope from his pocket, extended the tubes and saw the trapped ship’s sails shudder as her captain turned into the wind. Then her flag, a British ensign, came down from the mizzen.

  “What is it?” Astrid asked.

  “A British merchantman,” Sharpe said. The skipper must have come from deep in the Baltic and probably had no idea that his country was at war with Denmark until the gun ships had pounced. The Danish boats, low in the water, had ceased firing as the British ship furled her sails.

  He gave the telescope to Astrid who steadied it on the wall. “What happens now?” she asked.

  “They bring it in. She’s a prize.”

  “So we are at war?” She sounded incredulous. The British army might have landed, the city might be raising a militia and building forts, yet still war had been unimaginable to her. Not in Denmark, and certainly not against Britain.

  “We’re at war,” Sharpe said.

  On their way back to Ulfedt’s Plads they made a detour to see the big houses in Bredgade. It was easy enough to spot which house belonged to Lavisser’s grandfather, for a small crowd was waiting outside for a glimpse of their new hero. Women carried flowers and someone had hung a Danish flag from the lantern above the front door. Sharpe stood on the street’s far side and gazed up at the windows, but there was no sign of the renegade. Lavisser had effectively vanished, as though the night at Skovgaard’s house had never happened. Yet Lavisser and his French allies would be back, Sharpe was sure of it.

  Next day the city was filled with the news that the British were at last marching south. It was that same day that Sharpe came back from the orphanage to discover Aksel Bang was now in uniform. He wore a plain blue coat with tarnished silver buttons and a single silver bar on each shoulder. “I am a lieutenant in the militia,” Bang said proudly. He carried an ancient sword with a black cloth-covered scabbard. A half-dozen men, all with muskets, lounged in the warehouse shadows. They were elderly men, the remnants of Skovgaard’s workforce, who had all joined the militia with Bang. “They are stationed here,” Bang said, “because this is now an official food store for the city. We are on guard. And now that we have muskets we can provide protection for Mister Skovgaard.”

  Sharpe looked at the six men. “Properly trained, are they?”

  “We shall give a good account of ourselves,” Bang said confidently. “There is something else, Mister Sharpe.”

  “Go on.”

  “You are English, yes?”

  “Go on.”

  Bang shrugged. “You are an enemy. Out of loyalty to Mister Skovgaard. I have done nothing about it, but it cannot continue. I shall have to arrest you.”

  “Now?” Sharpe smiled.

  “If you do not leave the city, yes. I am an officer now. I have responsibilities.”

  “What you’ve got, Aksel,” Sharpe told him, “is an itch in your breeches.” Yet Sharpe knew the man was right. He was surprised that no one had come to arrest him for it was surely no secret that Skovgaard had an Englishman in his house. Yet Copenhagen was so civilized, so ready to believe that no harm could come to it, that the authorities had tolerated him.

  Next morning, when Sharpe woke in the warehouse, he heard the distant crackle of musketry. It was far off, but unmistakable. And an hour later, when he was washing under the pump in the back yard, he heard the percussive thump of big guns firing. So the army had arrived at last. Ole Skovgaard, the swelling about his jaw much reduced, came into the yard and frowned at Sharpe. “I think you should leave us, Lieutenant.”

  “You feel safe with Aksel and his merry men?”

  “Safe from whom?” Skovgaard looked up into the sky where bands of white cloud stretched from east to west. “From my friends, the British?” he asked sarcastically.

  “From your new friends, the French.”

  “I shall stay here in the warehouse. And so will Astrid. Aksel and his men will be sufficient, I think.” Skovgaard listened to the distant gunfire for a few seconds. “Aksel is an officer now,” he went on, “and your presence is an embarrassment to him.”

  “I wonder why,” Sharpe said, thinking of Astrid.

  Skovgaard must have known what Sharpe was thinking, for he blushed slightly. “Aksel is a good Dane,” he said hotly, “and you are an enemy, Mister Sharpe.”

  “Enemy?” Sharpe pulled on his shirt. “I spent the last two afternoons playing tipcat with children in an orphanage. Is that what an enemy does?”

  Skovgaard frowned. “You are English and Aksel is right. You put me in a difficult position. You may keep the two pistols, but I insist you leave.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  For a moment Skovgaard looked angry, then he bowed his head as though he was thinking. “I have lost much in my life, Lieutenant.” He spoke surprisingly softly, still looking at the ground. “My wife, my son, my son-in-law and my grandson. God has punished me. I have pursued worldly goals, Lieutenant”-he looked up at Sharpe now-“preferring success to His will. Your country has rewarded me greatly in return for my help. That is how I could buy the house in Vester Fu
elled, but it is the fruit of sin. I am sorry, Lieutenant, but to me you represent evil. Your country’s desires, its actions, its ambitions, they are all wrong.”

  “You think the French-“

  “I think the French are as bad if not worse,” Skovgaard anticipated Sharpe’s words, “but it is my soul I must worry about. I shall put my faith in God, where it should have been all these months. This is a godly family, Lieutenant, it always has been, and you, I think, are not godly. I see... “ Skovgaard hesitated and frowned, then nerved himself to go on. “I see my daughter’s interest in you. That does not surprise me, for you resemble Nils, but you cannot be good for her.”

  “I-“ Sharpe tried to speak.

  “No!” Skovgaard again interrupted. “Tell me, Lieutenant, are you saved in Christ Jesus?”

  Sharpe stared at Skovgaard’s thin face, then sighed. “No.”

  “Then you will leave us, for this is a godly house and your presence disturbs us.”

  “You think God will protect you from Lavisser?”

  “He can do whatever He wishes, Lieutenant. He will hold us against all the world’s evils if it is His will.”

  “Then you’d better pray, Mister Skovgaard, you’d better bloody pray.”

  There was nothing to be done. Sharpe changed into his uniform which he covered with his greatcoat. He put the telescope into one pocket, the guineas into another, belted the saber about his waist and thrust the good pistols into the belt, then went down to the kitchen where Astrid had just served Aksel Bang with a dish of barley porridge. “So you leave us, I hear?” Bang said happily.

  “Isn’t that what you wanted, Aksel?”

  “We can manage without the English,” Bang said cheerfully.

  “You will have breakfast, Lieutenant?” Astrid asked Sharpe.

  “I just came to say goodbye.”

  “I shall come to the gate with you.” She took off her apron and, ignoring Bang who watched her like a dog eyeing a bone, led Sharpe into the yard. Sharpe had thought she meant she would see him to the warehouse’s back gate which opened onto Skindergade, but she must have meant one of the city gates for she walked into the street with him.