“There are women and children inside,” Sharpe protested too loudly.
Lord Pumphrey, who had been responsible for bringing Sharpe to the dinner, overheard the comment. “There are women, children and ships, Sharpe, ships.”
“Aye, but will there be any ships?” Chase asked.
“There had better bloody be ships,” Sir David Baird growled.
Cathcart ignored Baird, staring instead at Chase whose question had raised alarm around the table. Jackson, the senior diplomat, pushed a gristly scrap of lamb to one side of his plate. “The Danes,” he said, “will surely be reluctant to burn their fleet. They’ll wait till the very last minute, will they not?”
“Last minute or not,” Chase said energetically, “they’ll still burn it and ships burn fast. Remember the Achille, Richard?”
“The Achille?” Pumphrey asked.
“French seventy-four, my lord, burned at Trafalgar. One minute she was fighting, next minute an incandescent wreck. Incandescent.” He pronounced each syllable cheerfully. “We risk a city full of dead women and children in return for a pile of damp ashes.”
Cathcart, Jackson and Pumphrey all frowned at him. Lieutenant Peel woke himself up by snoring abruptly and looked about the table, startled. “The message concealed in the newspaper,” Lord Pumphrey said, “is presumably addressed to Lavisser?”
“We can assume so,” Jackson agreed, crumbling a piece of bread.
“And it grants him permission from his French masters to carry out the Danish orders to deprive us of the fleet.”
“Agreed,” Jackson said carefully.
“The good news,” Cathcart intervened, “is that thanks to Mister”—he paused, unable to remember Sharpe’s name—“thanks to the Lieutenant’s watchfulness, we intercepted the message.”
Lord Pumphrey smiled. “We can be quite certain, my lord, that more than one copy was sent. It would be usual in such circumstances to take such a wise precaution. We can also be certain that, because Monsieur and Madame Visser are protected by diplomatic agreement, they are free to send more such messages.”
“Precisely so,” Jackson said.
“Ah.” Cathcart shrugged and leaned back in his chair.
“And we shall look remarkably foolish,” Lord Pumphrey continued mildly, “if we were to capture the city and find, as Captain Chase so delicately phrases it, a pile of damp ashes.”
“Damn it, man,” Cathcart said, “we want the ships!”
“Prize money,” Chase whispered to Sharpe. “More wine?”
“But how to stop the ships being fired?” Pumphrey asked the table at large.
“Pray for rain,” Lieutenant Peel suggested, then blushed. “Sorry.”
General Baird frowned. “They’ll have their incendiaries ready,” he observed.
“You can explain that, Sir David?” Jackson asked.
“They’ll have stuffed the ships with incendiaries,” Baird said. “Canvas bales filled with saltpeter, mealed powder, sulphur, resin and oil”—Baird listed the ingredients with an indecent relish—“and once the fuses are lit those boats will be pure flames in three minutes. Pure flames!” He smiled, then used a candle to light a dark cigar.
“Dear God,” Jackson murmured.
“It probably isn’t sufficient then,” Lord Pumphrey spoke very judiciously, “to remove Captain Lavisser from the city?”
“Remove him?” Cathcart asked, startled.
Lord Pumphrey, so small and frail, drew a finger across his throat, then shrugged. “The message suggests that our renegade is the officer charged with delivering the order to burn the fleet, but alas, if he is absent then someone else will surely give the order.”
Everyone stared at the diminutive Pumphrey. Baird, approving the idea of killing Lavisser, smiled, but most of the other officers looked shocked. Jackson just shook his head sadly. “One devoutly wishes that such a simple solution would obviate our problem, but alas, the Danes will have other men ready to start a conflagration.” He sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “It will be a terrible defeat,” he mused, “if we were to come this far and lose the prize.”
“But, damn it, the Frogs won’t get the ships!” Cathcart protested. “That’s the point, ain’t it?”
“A most craven defeat,” Jackson said, ignoring the General’s words, “for all the King’s horses and all the King’s men to have come this far merely to provoke a bonfire. We shall be the laughingstock of Europe.” He made the last observation to Cathcart with the obvious insinuation that his lordship would be the butt of the joke.
General Baird signaled a waiter to bring the decanter of port. “Will the ships be fully manned?” he demanded.
No one answered, but most looked to Chase for an answer. The naval Captain shrugged as if to suggest he did not know. Sharpe hesitated, then spoke up. “The sailors have been added to the garrison, sir.”
“So how many men are left aboard?” Baird demanded.
“Two or three,” Chase opined. “The ships aren’t in danger where they are, so why have crews aboard? Besides, I’m sure they’re en flûte.”
“They’re what?” Baird asked.
“En flûte, Sir David. Their guns will have been taken ashore to add to the garrison’s ordnance, so their gunports are empty like a flute’s fingerholes.”
“Why didn’t you damn well say so?”
“And ships en flûte,” Chase went on, “won’t need crews, or nothing more than a couple of fellows to keep an eye on the mooring lines, pump out the bilges and be ready to light the fuses.”
“A couple of fellows, eh?” Baird asked. “Then the question is, I suppose, how do we get a few of our fellows into the inner harbor?” Cathcart just stared at him wide-eyed. Jackson sipped port. “Well?” Baird inquired belligerently.
“I was there last week,” Sharpe said. “Walked in. No guards.”
“You can’t send men into the city! They won’t last an hour!” Cathcart protested.
“Sharpe did,” Lord Pumphrey said in his delicately high voice. He was staring at the chandelier, apparently fascinated by a lengthening strand of wax that threatened to drip into the dessert bowl. “You lasted a good few days, didn’t you, Sharpe?”
“You did?” Cathcart stared at Sharpe.
“I pretended to be an American, sir.”
“What did you do?” Cathcart asked. “Spit tobacco juice everywhere?” He had made his name in the war of American independence and reckoned himself an expert on the erstwhile colonies.
“But even if our fellows can survive in the city,” Captain Chase said, “how do we get them inside?”
Francis Jackson, elegant in a black suit and white silk shirt, snipped the end from a cigar. “How do the Danes infiltrate their messengers into the city?”
“Small boats, close inshore, dark nights,” Chase said shortly.
“There’s a small jetty,” Sharpe said diffidently, “a small wooden pier by the citadel where people go to fish. It’s very close to the fort. Too close, maybe.”
“And right under the guns of the Sixtus Battery,” one of Cathcart’s aides observed.
“But a dark night?” Chase was suddenly enthusiastic. “Muffled oars. Blackened boat. Yes, why not? But why land at the pier? Why not row all the way in?”
“There’s a boom across the outer harbor,” Sharpe said, “and across the inner, but the pier’s outside the boom.”
“Ah. The pier it is, then.” Chase smiled, then looked down the table at Cathcart. “But we’d need the Admiral’s permission to send a launch, my lord, and might I suggest, with all the humility at my command, that this is a service best done by sailors? Unless, of course, you have soldiers who can find their way around a darkened ship at night?”
“Cite a verse from the Bible,” Lord Pumphrey observed quietly, “that justifies such an expedition and I am sure Lord Gambier will grant permission.”
One or two men smiled, the others wondered whether the prickly Admiral really would authorize such
a gamble. “He’ll give permission when he knows his prize money depends on it,” Baird growled.
There was an embarrassed silence. Prize money, though much appreciated, was rarely acknowledged openly. Every senior officer, army and navy, stood to make a small fortune if the Danes refused to surrender, for then the ships would be prizes of war and worth real money.
“I suspect Lieutenant Sharpe should go with your sailors,” Lord Pumphrey suggested. “He has a certain knowledge of the city.”
“I’m sure we’d welcome him,” Chase said, then looked at his friend. “Would you come?”
Sharpe thought of Astrid. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“But if it were done,” Lord Pumphrey said, “then ’twere well it were done quickly. Your fellows will be ready to open the bombardment in a day or two, will they not?”
“If we bombard,” Cathcart growled.
“We must,” Jackson insisted.
The argument returned to its old course, whether or not to bomb the city. Sharpe sipped port, listened to Copenhagen’s bells ring the hour, and thought of Astrid.
THE DEVIL lurched up the slope and stuck at the top. “For God’s sake push, you heathen bastards!” A sergeant, muddied to his waist, snarled at a dozen men. “Push!” The devil’s eight horses were whipped, the men heaved at the wheels and the devil threatened to slide down the heap of clay. “Put your bloody backs into it!” the Sergeant bellowed. “Push!”
“Much too painful to watch,” Lord Pumphrey said and turned his back. It was the morning after Cathcart’s dinner and his lordship was feeling distinctly fragile. He and Sharpe were on a dune not far from where the devil was stuck and his lordship had an easel on which a very small piece of paper was pinned. He also had a box of watercolor paints, a tumbler of water and a set of brushes with which he was making a picture of Copenhagen’s skyline. “I do thank the Lord I was never intended for the army,” his lordship went on, touching a brush to the paper. “So very noisy.”
The devil inched over the heap of clay and trundled down to the battery. It was a grotesquely heavy cart made for transporting mortars. The mortar carriage rode on the cart while the barrel was slung beneath the rear axle. The battery already possessed six long-barreled twenty-four-pounder guns that had been fetched ashore from a ship of the line; now it was being equipped with as many mortars.
They were evil-looking weapons. Just metal pots, really, squat and fat and short. The carriage was a chunk of wood in which the pot was set so it was pointing high into the air with a wedge at its front to change the elevation, though most gunners preferred to adjust their weapon’s range by varying the amount of powder in the charge. Sharpe, watching the men maneuver the devil beneath the three-legged gin that would lift the heavy barrel off the ground and onto the carriage, tried to imagine the gun being fired. There would be no recoil, for the carriage had no wheels or trails and the gun was not being fired horizontally, so instead of leaping back the squat mass of wood and iron would simply try and bury itself in the earth. The mortars being assembled in this battery were all ten-inch weapons, not the biggest, but he imagined the smoking balls arcing high into the clouding sky and thumping down inside Copenhagen.
Lord Pumphrey must have guessed his thoughts. “These guns will be firing at the citadel, Sharpe. Does that assuage your tender conscience?”
Sharpe wondered if he should tell Pumphrey about the orphans in the city, then decided such a description would be wasted on his lordship. “General Cathcart doesn’t seem to want to bombard either, my lord.”
“General Cathcart will do what his political masters instruct him to do,” Pumphrey observed, “and in the absence of any Minister of the Crown he will have to listen to Mister Jackson whether he likes it or not.”
“Not to you, my lord?” Sharpe asked mischievously.
“I am a minion, Sharpe,” Pumphrey claimed, touching his brush to the paint and frowning at his picture. “I am a lowly figure of absolutely no importance. Yet, of course, I shall use whatever small influence I can muster to encourage Cathcart to bombard the city. Beginning tomorrow night, I hope.”
“Tomorrow?” Sharpe was surprised it would be so soon.
“Why ever not? The guns should be ready and the sooner it’s done the better so we can be spared this dreadful discomfort and return to London.” Pumphrey looked quizzically at Sharpe. “But why are you squeamish? Your reputation doesn’t suggest squeamishness.”
“I don’t mind killing men,” Sharpe said, “but I never had a taste for slaughtering women and children. Too easy.”
“Easy victories are the best ones,” Pumphrey said, “and usually the cheapest. And cheapness, you must remember, is the greatest desideratum of governments. I refer, of course, to their expenditure, not to their emoluments. If a man in government cannot become rich then he doesn’t deserve the privileges of office.” He flicked the brush across the top of the paper, smearing clouds out of the grayish paint. “The trouble is,” he said, “that I never know when to finish.”
“Finish?”
“Painting, Sharpe, painting. Too much and the painting will be heavy. Watercolor should be light, suggestive, nothing more.” He stepped back and frowned at the painting. “I think it’s almost there.”
Sharpe looked at the painting. “I think it’s very good, my lord.” He did, too. Pumphrey had wonderfully caught the city’s near magical look with its green spires and domes and red roofs. “I think it’s really good.”
“How very kind you are, Sharpe, how very kind.” Pumphrey seemed genuinely pleased, then shuddered as the Sergeant cursed the men hauling on the lines that would hoist the mortar barrel. There were now fifteen batteries ringing the city’s western edge, the closest ones hard against the protective canal, while offshore the British bomb ships were anchored in an arc facing the citadel and the Sixtus Battery which together guarded the harbor entrance. The Danish gun ships were staying home. In the first few days they had done serious damage to the Royal Navy’s gun ships, for they drew less water and carried heavier ordnance, but the establishment of British shore batteries had driven them away and the city was now effectively locked in a metal embrace.
The boom of the big guns was constant, but they were all Danish as the cannon on the city walls kept a steady fire on the closest British batteries, but the shots were burying themselves in the great bulwarks of earth-filled fascines that protected the guns and mortars. Sharpe, from his vantage point on the dune, could see the smoke wreathing the wall. The city’s copper spires and red roofs showed above the churning cloud. Closer to him, among the big houses and gardens, the earth was scarred by the newly dug British batteries. A dozen houses were burning there, fired by the Danish shells that hissed across the canal. Three windmills had their sails tethered against a blustering wind that blew the smoke westward and fretted the moored fleet that filled the sea lanes to the north of Copenhagen. Over three hundred transport ships were anchored there, a wooden town afloat. The Pucelle was one of the closest big ships and Sharpe was waiting for its launch to come ashore so that tonight, if the clouds thickened to obscure the moon, they could try to enter the city. He looked at the spires again and thought of Astrid. It was odd that he could not conjure her face to his memory, but nor could he ever see Grace in his mind’s eye. He had no portrait.
“The Danes, of course, might just surrender now,” Pumphrey said. “It would be the sensible thing to do.” He was touching little smears of lighter green to highlight the city spires.
“I’ve learned one thing as a soldier,” Sharpe said, “which is that the sensible thing never gets done.”
“My dear Sharpe”—Pumphrey pretended to be impressed—“we’ll make a staff officer of you yet!”
“God forbid, my lord.”
“You don’t like the staff, Sharpe?” Pumphrey was teasing.
“What I’d like, sir, is a company of riflemen and to do some proper fighting against the Frogs.”
“You’ll doubtless get your wish.”
Sharpe shook his head. “No, my lord. They don’t like me. They’ll keep me a quartermaster.”
“But you have friends in high places, Sharpe,” Pumphrey said.
“High and hidden.”
Pumphrey frowned at his picture, suddenly unhappy with it. “Sir David will not forget you, I can assure you, and Sir Arthur, I think, keeps an eye on you.”
“He’d like to see me gone, my lord,” Sharpe said, not hiding his bitterness.
Lord Pumphrey shook his head. “I suspect you mistake his customary coldness toward all men as a particular distaste for yourself. I asked him for an opinion on you and it was very high, Sharpe, very high. But he is, I grant you, a difficult man. Very distant, don’t you think? And talking of distance, Lady Grace Hale was an extremely remote cousin. I doubt he cares one way or the other.”
“Were we talking of that, my lord?”
“No, Sharpe, we were not. And I do apologize.”
Sharpe watched as the mortar was lowered into its carriage. “What about you, my lord?” he asked. “What’s a civilian doing as an aide to a general?”
“Offering sound advice, Sharpe, offering sound advice.”
“That’s not usual, is it, my lord?”
“Sound advice is very unusual indeed.”
“It’s not usual, is it, my lord, for a civilian to be given a place on the staff?”
Lord Pumphrey shivered inside his heavy coat, though the day was not particularly cold. “You might say, Sharpe, that I was imposed on Sir David. You know he was in trouble?”
“I heard, sir.”
Baird’s career had suffered after India. He had been captured by a French privateer on his way home, spent three years as a prisoner, and on his release was sent as Governor to the Cape of Good Hope where he had foolishly allowed a subordinate to make an unauthorized raid on Buenos Aires, a whole ocean away, and the disastrous foray had led to demands for Baird’s dismissal. He had been exonerated, but the taint of disgrace still lingered. “The General,” Lord Pumphrey said, “has all the martial virtues except prudence.”
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles Page 57
