Sharpe's Prey

by Bernard Cornwell

  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 the
y 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 O
le 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.