Bernard Cornwell Box Set: Sharpe's Triumph , Sharpe's Tiger , Sharpe's Fortress

by Bernard Cornwell

  He held the pistol at arm’s length and it took the Frenchman at least two seconds to register his presence and by then the gun was just three feet from his head. Sharpe motioned with his left hand. “Put the gun down, Monsewer.” He spoke softly.

  The man looked as if he was about to shout.

  “Please,” Sharpe said. “Make a noise so I can kill you, please.” He was still smiling.

  The Frenchman shook slightly. There was something about the eyes of the green-jacketed man that told him death was hovering very close in this comfortable parlor and so, sensibly and very slowly, he laid his own pistol on the floor. Astrid and the servants were staring wide-eyed. Sharpe kicked the Frenchman’s pistol across the polished floorboards. “Down,” he told the man, indicating what he meant with his left hand.

  The man lay on his belly, anxiously twisting his head to see what Sharpe was doing. “I wouldn’t watch, miss,” Sharpe said to Astrid, then put a finger to his mouth to show that she should be silent.

  He had a problem now. The Frenchman had seen Sharpe put the finger to his lips and must have realized that noise was his best friend, which meant Sharpe was unwilling to shoot him because the sound of the pistol would bring the other intruders into the parlor. The man took a deep breath and Sharpe, desperate, kicked him brutally hard in the throat. He hurt his foot, for he had no boots, but he hurt the Frenchman even more. Astrid gasped and the man began to choke as he clutched his gullet and his feet drummed on the floor. Sharpe dropped on the man’s back to hold him still. He needed to make the man senseless, but that would take a deal of violence and must inevitably make more noise. Skovgaard’s expensive pistols, though deadly, were not heavy enough to use as clubs. The Frenchman, catching his breath, tried to heave Sharpe off his back so Sharpe hit him hard, bouncing the man’s skull off the floorboards, but he still tried to twist Sharpe off. Sharpe hit him again, this time so hard that the man went momentarily still and so gave Sharpe a chance to put the pistol down. He took out his folding knife and pulled out the blade. “Eyes closed, miss,” he said grimly.

  “What . . .”

  “Shhh,” Sharpe said. “Tell the others to close their eyes. Quick now.”

  Astrid whispered something in Danish as Sharpe felt the man tense under him. The Frenchman was about to make another effort to dislodge Sharpe, but the rifleman stabbed once with the short-bladed knife. It only took one thrust, right into the base of the skull, and the Frenchman gave a surprisingly strong spasm and then seemed to sigh. That was the only noise he made and there was remarkably little blood. Sharpe pulled the dead man’s collar up to conceal the wound, wiped the knife clean on the corpse’s coat, then stood. “You can open your eyes now,” he said.

  Astrid stared at Sharpe, then at the dead man.

  “He’s just sleeping,” Sharpe said. He picked up the man’s pistol. It was a clumsy thing compared to Skovgaard’s sophisticated weapons, but it was loaded and gave him three shots. Four men and one woman left. “Are there any guns in this room?” Sharpe asked Astrid.

  She shook her head.

  He knelt by the corpse and searched its clothes, but the man had no other weapons. So, three shots and five targets. He went to the door and put his ear to the wood. He could hear voices. Then he heard the sound of a key turning in a lock, there was a pause and sudden feet on the hall floor. Sharpe waited a heartbeat, then eased the parlor door open an inch.

  “He’s gone!” Barker said.

  “He can’t have gone.” That was Lavisser’s voice.

  “He’s gone!” Barker insisted.

  Sharpe imagined Lavisser glancing at the shutters. That opportunely open window could only be explained by Sharpe’s otherwise inexplicable absence. “Look outside,” Lavisser said, “and be careful.”

  The woman spoke, using French, then Lavisser talked in Danish. There was a pause, then Skovgaard, for it could be no one else, gave a shout that turned into a terrible groan and a yelp of pain. Astrid gasped and Sharpe whipped round and put his finger to his lips.

  Skovgaard shouted again. It was the sound men made on the battlefield when they were wounded and did not want to scream. It was involuntary, a wordless exhalation of pain. Sharpe pointed at Astrid. “Stay here,” he said firmly, then pulled open the parlor door. Barker was probably in the garden by now, so that left four targets and three shots. What had Baird called him? A thug. So he would be a thug now, and a damned good one. He crossed the hall and saw that the study door was ajar. He dared not push it open further for the hinges squealed so badly, but he wished he could see more of what was going on in the study. He could just make out that Skovgaard had been tied to the chair behind his desk on which stood a lantern, and in its light Sharpe could see that the front of Skovgaard’s nightshirt was drenched in blood. Then he saw a man lean forward and force the Dane’s mouth open. The man held a pair of pliers. They were making him talk.

  A second man came into view to help keep Skovgaard’s mouth open. The Dane tried to clamp his jaws shut, but the second man used a knife to force his teeth apart. The woman spoke. Skovgaard shook his head and the pliers’ jaws closed on one of his teeth. Skovgaard groaned and made a huge effort to shake his head, but one of the men struck him hard across the skull. Then the Dane moaned as the pliers began to exert pressure.

  Sharpe fired at the man wielding the pliers.

  He used one of Skovgaard’s rifled pistols and it was as accurate as it was beautiful. He had expected the long-rifled barrel to give the gun a heavy kick and so he had aimed a little low, but the weapon was so exquisitely balanced that it hardly quivered. It jetted smoke halfway across the study as the ball struck the man in his neck. A jet of blood fountained up over Skovgaard’s desk. Sharpe dropped the gun, plucked Skovgaard’s second pistol from his belt and pushed the door fully open. The man who had been holding Skovgaard’s head was quick, incredibly quick, and he was already bringing up a pistol and so Sharpe, who had reckoned to take Lavisser with his second shot, fired at him instead. Smoke thickened in the room, shrouding Sharpe’s targets, but he had the third pistol in his grip now and he aimed it at Lavisser, who had seized the woman’s hand and was pulling her toward the open window. Sharpe fired. The Frenchman’s heavy pistol kicked like a mule and made far more noise than the expensive guns. He heard the crash of breaking glass.

  Someone squealed in pain, then Lavisser and the woman disappeared into the night. Smoke writhed about the room as Sharpe ran to Skovgaard’s side. The Dane stared in astonishment, blood trickling down his long chin. Sharpe ducked down behind the desk so that he offered no target to anyone in the garden. The second man he had shot was lying against the wall, twitching, and his pistol was on the floor. Sharpe picked the weapon up, then hurled the lantern into the fireplace. The lamp glass shattered and the study was plunged into darkness.

  He went to the window, knelt and peered into the garden. He could see no one, so he closed the metal shutters and put the bar into place. Lavisser, it seemed, had fled. The three shots, coming in such quick succession, must have convinced him that he was up against more than one man.

  “Mister Sharpe?” Skovgaard said from the darkness. His voice was slurred.

  “Aren’t you glad Britain sent an aging lieutenant?” Sharpe asked savagely. He crossed to the desk and leaned on it so his face was close to Skovgaard. “And damn you, you bloody fool.” He spat the words. “Damn you to bloody hell and all the bloody way back, but I was not sent to kill the Crown Prince.”

  “I believe you,” Skovgaard said humbly. His voice was thick because of the blood in his mouth.

  “And that was your hero Lavisser, you fat-headed bastard.”

  Sharpe, still angry, went to the parlor. “Your father needs water and towels,” he told Astrid curtly, then picked up the lamp and went back to the study.

  There were shouts outside the house. The coachmen and stable boys had evidently been woken by the shots and were now asking for reassurance from Skovgaard or his daughter. “Are those the two men
who were with you earlier?” Sharpe asked Skovgaard who was still tied to the chair.

  Skovgaard jerked his head toward the shutters. “That is them,” he said indistinctly.

  “Are they guards?”

  “A coachman and a groom.”

  Sharpe cut Skovgaard free and the Dane went to the window to reassure the men outside while Sharpe knelt beside the wounded Frenchman, except he was a dead man now. He had bled to death. Sharpe swore.

  Skovgaard frowned. “Lieutenant . . .”

  “I know, you hate base language and after what you did to me I don’t give a bugger. But I hoped this one was alive. He could have told us who was with Lavisser. But the bastard’s dead.”

  “I know who they were,” Skovgaard said bitterly, then his daughter came into the room and screamed when she saw her father. She ran to him and he clasped her to his bloodied nightgown and patted her back. “It’s all right, dearest.” Skovgaard spoke in English, then he saw the sooty marks on the big rug. His eyes widened and he stared, first at the black footprints, then at Sharpe. “Is that how you escaped?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good God,” Skovgaard said faintly. A maid had brought water and towels and Skovgaard sat at the desk and rinsed his mouth out. “I only had six teeth left,” he said, “and now there are just four.” Two bloody teeth lay on the desk next to his ivory false teeth and the broken lenses of his reading spectacles.

  “You should have listened to me when I first came here,” Sharpe growled.

  “Mister Sharpe!” Astrid chided him.

  “It’s true,” her father said.

  Astrid turned a troubled gaze on Sharpe. “The man in there”—she gestured toward the parlor—“He’s still sleeping.”

  “He’s not going to wake up,” Sharpe said.

  “Three dead?” Skovgaard sounded incredulous.

  “I wish it had been five.” Sharpe put the two good pistols on the desk. “Your guns,” he said. “I was going to steal them. Why didn’t you keep a pair in your bedroom?”

  “I did,” Skovgaard said, “only they took Astrid first. They said they’d hurt her if I didn’t come out.”

  “So who were they?” Sharpe asked. “I know one is your patriotic Lavisser. But the others?”

  Skovgaard looked weary. He spat a mix of blood and spittle into a bowl, then smiled wanly when a maid brought him a robe that he wrapped about the bloody nightshirt. “The woman,” he said, “is called Madame Visser. She is at the French embassy. Ostensibly she is merely the wife of the ambassador’s secretary, but in truth she seeks information. She collates messages from throughout the Baltic.” He hesitated. “She does for the French, Lieutenant, what I do, what I did, for the British.”

  “A woman does that?” Sharpe could not hide his surprise, earning a reproachful look from Astrid.

  “She is very clever,” Skovgaard said, “and without mercy.”

  “And what did she want?”

  Skovgaard rinsed his mouth out again, then patted his lips with a towel. He tried to put in his false teeth, but his raw gums were too painful and made him wince. “They wanted names from me,” he said, “the names of my correspondents.”

  Sharpe paced the room. He felt frustrated. He had killed three men and wounded a fourth if the blood on the small rug by the shutters was any indication, but it had all happened too quickly and his anger was still high, still unslaked. So Lavisser was in French pay? And Lavisser had almost given Britain’s Baltic spymaster to the enemy, except that a rifleman had been waiting. “So what now?” Sharpe asked Skovgaard.

  The Dane shrugged.

  “You tell the authorities about this?” Sharpe nodded toward the dead men behind Skovgaard’s desk.

  “I doubt anyone would believe us,” Skovgaard said. “Major Lavisser is a hero. I am a merchant and you are what? An Englishman. And my erstwhile affection for Britain is well known in Denmark. If you were the authorities who would you believe?”

  “So you’ll just wait for them to try again?” Sharpe asked.

  Skovgaard glanced at his daughter. “We shall move back to our house in the city. It will be safer there, I think. The neighbors are closer and it is next to the warehouse so I don’t have to travel. Much safer, I think.”

  “Just stay here,” Sharpe suggested.

  Skovgaard sighed. “You forget, Lieutenant, that your army is coming. They will lay siege to Copenhagen and this house lies outside the walls. Within a week, I suspect, there will be British officers quartered here.”

  “So you’ll be safe.”

  “If Copenhagen is to suffer,” Skovgaard said with a trace of his old asperity, “then I will share it. How can I look my workmen in the face if I leave them to endure a siege alone? And you, Lieutenant, what will you do?”

  “I’ll stay with you, sir,” Sharpe said grimly. “I was sent to protect someone from the French, and it’s you now. And Lavisser’s still living. So I’ve work to do. And to start I need a spade.”

  “A spade?”

  “You’ve got three dead bodies in the house. Where I come from we bury them.”

  “But . . .” Astrid began to protest, but her voice trailed away.

  “That’s right, miss,” Sharpe said, “if you can’t explain them, hide them.”

  It took him most of what remained of the night, but he dug a shallow trench in the soft soil by the back wall of the garden and laid the three Frenchmen inside. He patted the earth down and covered it with some bricks he found beside the carriage house.

  And then, in a gray and weary dawn, he slept.

  ELEVEN MILES north of Ole Skovgaard’s house was the insignificant village of Vedbæk. It lay on the sea, halfway between Copenhagen and the fortress at Helsingør. The village held a handful of houses, a church, two farms and a small fleet of fishing boats. Tarred sheds lined the beach where nets hung to dry on tall poles and the burning charcoal of the herring smokers shimmered the air above the sand.

  Work started early in Vedbæk. There were cows to be milked and fishing boats to be hauled down to the sea, yet this morning, at dawn, no one worked. The herring fires were dying and the people of the village were ignoring their duties and standing instead on the low grassy ridge that backed the beach. They said little, but just stared seaward.

  Where a fleet had appeared in the night. Closest to the beach were gun brigs and bomb ships that had moored so their great cannons and mortars could threaten any Danish troops who might appear on the shore. Beyond those small ships were frigates and, farther out still, the great ships of the line, all of them with their gunports open. There was no enemy threatening the fleet, but the guns were ready.

  Between the ships of the line and the frigates was moored a host of transport ships around each of which was a smaller fleet of tenders, launches and longboats that nuzzled the bigger hulls like so many suckling pigs. Horses were being slung out of holds and lowered into the boats. No one in Vedbæk had ever seen so many ships, not at one time. At least a dozen of the village men had been sailors, yet even they had not seen such a fleet, not in Copenhagen, London, Hamburg or in any other great port.

  Someone began ringing the church bell as an alarm, but the pastor hurried back into the village to silence it. “We have already sent a messenger,” he told the enthusiastic bell-ringer. “Sven has ridden to Hørsholm.” There was a police barracks in Hørsholm, though what use the police would be the pastor did not know. They could hardly arrest a whole army, though doubtless they would send a warning to Copenhagen.

  Folk from Hørsholm and from the lesser villages nearby were already coming to Vedbæk to see the ships. The pastor worried that the spectators might resemble an army and he did his best to disperse them. “Jarl! Your cows are lowing. They must be milked.”

  “I have girls to do that.”

  “Then find them. There is work to do.”

  But no one moved. Instead they watched as the first small boats headed for the shore. “Will they kill us?” a woman asked.

&
nbsp; “Only the ugly ones,” someone answered and there was nervous laughter. The man who had made the bad joke had been a sailor and he had a great telescope that he had propped on his wife’s shoulder. He could see a field gun being lifted out of a ship’s belly and slung on a whip into one of the bigger launches. “Now they’re sending a cannon to shoot Ingrid,” he announced. Ingrid was his mother-in-law and as big as a Holstein cow.

  A young lieutenant in the blue uniform of the Danish militia arrived on horseback. He was the son of a wheelwright in Sandbjerg and the only shots he had ever heard fired had been volleys of musketry emptied in the sand dunes as the militia practiced. “If you are going to fight them,” the pastor said, “then perhaps you should go down onto the beach. Otherwise, Christian, take off your jacket so they don’t realize you are a soldier. How is your mother?”

  “She’s still coughing. And sometimes there is blood.”

  “Keep her warm this coming winter.”

  “We will, we will.” The Lieutenant stripped off his uniform jacket.

  No one spoke as the first few launches neared the shore. The sailors at the oars had long pigtails showing under their tarred hats and their passengers were all in red uniforms and had big black shakos that made them seem very tall. One man was holding a flag, but because there was so little wind the banner just hung limply. The launches seemed to be racing each other for the honor of being first ashore. They heaved in the small waves close to the beach, then the first keel scraped on sand and the red-coated men were leaping over the side. “Form them up, Sergeant!”