Sharpe's Prey

by Bernard Cornwell

  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 sentries there, 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?” L
avisser 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.