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

by Bernard Cornwell

  Midshipman Collier knocked on the cabin door, then entered without waiting to be bidden. “Sorry to interrupt, sir, but it looks like there’s a pumping party beating the bounds.”

  “Then we’d best be moving,” Chase said.

  “Pumping party?” Sharpe asked.

  “Ships leak, Richard!” Chase said cheerfully, getting to his feet. “Can’t just leave ’em floating here. They’ll all end up in the mud. So they’re sending fellows to pump all the bilges. It won’t take them long, but we should still hide.”

  “Won’t they find your cut fuses?”

  “They’ll notice nothing. We took care. Thank you, Mister Collier. Everyone back to the rat hole!” Chase scooped up the charts and smiled at Sharpe. “Will Hopper and Clouter be enough for you?”

  Sharpe hardly believed his ears for a second. “Hopper and Clouter, sir?”

  “I’m not sure I approve, Richard, but I do trust your judgment. And those two are my best fellows so they should keep you out of harm’s way. But do bring them back alive, I beg you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “There’s nothing else you need?”

  “Quick fuse, sir.”

  “Plenty of that!” Chase said brightly.

  It was past eight in the morning when Sharpe left. The pumping party was working its way down the row of bigger ships, but none of the Danes noticed the three men drop through the Christian VII’s hawsehole onto the quay. All three were armed. Hopper had another seven-barreled gun, two pistols and a cutlass, while Clouter had a boarding axe and two pistols. They crossed the bridge and no one remarked on them. Just a fortnight before, an armed man received curious glances in Copenhagen, but now a British rifleman and two British seamen could carry enough ordnance to fillet a company and be ignored. Nor was the sight of two pigtailed men, one with a face covered in tattoos and the other black, unusual, for Copenhagen was well used to sailors. It was simply thought they were going to the walls where the remaining Danish guns had opened fire on the British batteries. A few folk wished Sharpe and his companions good morning and received grunts in reply.

  Sharpe unlocked Skovgaard’s door. Astrid heard him and came from the office with her black sleeves protected from ink by white cotton sheaths. She looked alarmed at the sight of Hopper and Clouter, for both were huge men, but they snatched off their straw hats and tugged their forelocks.

  “They’re staying here today,” Sharpe told her.

  “Who are they?”

  “Friends,” Sharpe said. “I need them to get your father out. But I can’t do it until the bombardment starts again. Is there somewhere they can sleep?”

  “The warehouse,” Astrid suggested. She told Sharpe she had sent the workers away when they had arrived just after dawn. She had promised the men their wages, but said her father wanted them to help look for survivors among the burned houses. She had then ordered the maids to clean the long-neglected attics, while she had gone to her father’s office and pulled out the big ledgers. “There is never time to check the figures properly,” she told Sharpe once Clouter and Hopper were settled in the empty warehouse, “and I know he wants it done.” She worked in silence for a while, then Sharpe saw an inked entry in one of the columns suddenly dissolve as a tear splashed on it. Astrid cuffed her face. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked.

  “We don’t know.”

  “And it will have been painful.”

  “We don’t know,” Sharpe said again.

  “We do,” she said, looking up at him.

  “I can’t go back there till the bombardment starts,” Sharpe said bleakly.

  “It is not your fault, Richard.” She put the quill down. “I am so tired.”

  “Then go and rest. I’ll take the boys something to eat.”

  She went upstairs. Sharpe found bread, cheese and ham, then ate with Hopper and Clouter. Aksel Bang rattled the door in the yard, but went silent when Sharpe growled that he was in a killing mood.

  It was almost midday when Sharpe went upstairs. He opened the bedroom door silently to find thick curtains drawn and the room dark, yet he sensed Astrid was awake. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For everything,” he said, “everything.” He sat on the bed. Despite the dark he could see her face and the astonishing gold of her hair on the pillow.

  He thought he ought to explain exactly who Hopper and Clouter were, but when he began she just shook her head. “I thought you would never come upstairs,” she said.

  “I’m here,” Sharpe said.

  “Then don’t leave.”

  “Never,” he promised.

  “I have been so lonely,” Astrid said, “since Nils died.”

  And I, Sharpe thought, since Grace. He hung his cutlass on a chair and eased off his boots. A cold wind spat rain from the east and drifted smoke from the city’s ruins. The guns on the walls fired on and Sharpe and Astrid, eventually, slept.

  THE GUNS on the city’s western walls fired all day. They fired till the rain falling on their barrels turned to instant vapor. Shot and shell ploughed into the British batteries, but the earth-filled fascines soaked up all the violence and behind their screens and parapets the British gunners stacked more ammunition for the mortars.

  The city smoldered. The last flames were put out, but embers glowed deep in ruined houses and churches, and every now and then those embers would spark the fuse of an unexploded bomb and the blast would rattle the city’s windows and folk would duck into doorways and wait for the next missile to fall. They would peer anxiously skyward and see that no fuses left smoke trails in the sky. There was just silence.

  General Peymann toured the damaged streets, shuddering at the sight of gaunt scorched walls and at the smell of roasted flesh buried in ash. “How many homeless?” he asked.

  “Hundreds,” was the bleak answer.

  “Can they live on the ships?”

  “Not if we have to burn the fleet,” an aide answered. “It could take hours to get folk ashore.”

  “The churches are coping,” another aide said, “and if you order it, sir, the university will open its doors.”

  “Of course it must! Of course it must!” Peymann watched as a group of sailors dragged charred rafters aside to retrieve a body. He did not want to know how many were dead. Too many. He knew he must visit the hospitals and he dreaded it, but it was his duty. For now, though, he must prepare the city for more horror, and he ordered that the breweries must donate their largest casks which should be placed at street corners and filled with seawater. The British had somehow cut the city’s fresh water supply, which meant the fire pumps were ever running short, but the casks would help. Or he hoped they would help. In truth he knew it was a futile gesture, for the city had no real protection. It just had to endure. He walked the ruined streets, edging between the fallen piles of masonry and the smoking ruins that had been Studiestræde, Peder Huitfeldts Stræde, St Peters Stræde and Kannikestræde. “How many shells did they use last night?”

  “Four thousand?” an aide estimated. “Five, perhaps?”

  “And how many do they have left?” That was the question. When would the British guns run out of ammunition? For then they would have to wait for more to be fetched from England, and by then the nights would be longer and perhaps the Crown Prince would come from Holstein with an army of regular troops that would vastly outnumber the British force. This misery, Peymann thought, could yet be turned to victory. The city just had to survive.

  Major Lavisser, his face drawn and somber, picked his way across a spill of fallen bricks. He stopped to pick up a child’s petticoat that had somehow escaped the flames, then threw it away. “I’m late for duty, sir,” he said to Peymann. “I apologize.”

  “You had a long night, I’m sure.”

  “I did,” Lavisser said, though it had not been spent in fighting fires. He had employed the dark hours by questioning Ole Skovgaard and the memory gave him satisfaction, though he was still worried
by the unexplained visitor who had wounded two of his men in the yard. A thief, Barker reckoned, probably a soldier or sailor using the bombardment as an opportunity to plunder the rich houses on Bredgade. Lavisser had worried at first that it might have been Sharpe, but had persuaded himself that the rifleman was long gone back to the British army. Barker was proba-bly right, merely a thief, though a well-armed one.

  General Peymann stared up at a shattered church tower where a single bell was suspended from a blackened beam on which a pigeon perched. The remnants of the church pews gave off a choking smoke. A child’s leg protruded from the embers and he turned away, revolted. It was time to visit the hospitals and though he did not want to face the burn victims, he knew he must. “You’re on duty tonight?” he asked Lavisser.

  “I am, sir.”

  “What you might do,” the General suggested, “is find a vantage point. The spire of the Exchange, perhaps? Or the mast crane in Gammelholm? But somewhere safe. I want you to count the bombs as well as you can.”

  Lavisser was puzzled. He also suspected that counting bomb flashes was a demeaning duty. “Count them, sir?” he asked with as much asperity as he could muster.

  “It is important, Major,” Peymann said emphatically, “for if they fire fewer bombs tonight, we’ll know they’re running out of ammunition. We’ll know we can endure then.” And if they fire more, he thought, but he shied away from that conclusion. A message had been smuggled into the city from the Crown Prince which insisted that the city hold, so Peymann would do his best. “Count the bombs, Major,” he said, “count the bombs. As soon as the firing starts, count the bombs.” There was a chance that the bombardment might be renewed during the day, but Peymann doubted it. The British were using the night. Perhaps they believed the darkness increased the terror of the bombardment, or perhaps they hid their deeds from God, but tonight, Peymann was sure, they would start their mischief again and he must judge from the intensity of their bombardment how long they could keep going. And Copenhagen must endure.

  “WHAT DO I do with Aksel?” Sharpe asked Astrid that afternoon.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Kill him.”

  “No!” She frowned in disapproval. “Can’t you just let him go?”

  “And he’ll have soldiers back here in ten minutes,” Sharpe said. “He’ll just have to wait where he is.”

  “Till when?”

  “Till the city surrenders,” Sharpe said. Another night like the last, he reckoned, and Copenhagen would give in.

  And what then, he wondered? Would he stay? If he did, then he would be joining a nation that was Britain’s enemy and France’s ally, and suppose they wanted him to fight? Would he take off the green uniform and put on a blue one? Or would Astrid go to Britain? And what would he do then, except fight and so strand her in a strange country? A soldier should not marry, he thought.

  “What are you thinking?” Astrid asked.

  “That it’s time to get ready.” He bent and kissed her, then pulled on his clothes and went down to the yard. The city had the horrid smell of spent powder and a thin veil of smoke still smeared the sky, but at least the rain had stopped. He took bread and water to Bang who watched him sullenly but said nothing. “You’ll stay here, Aksel,” Sharpe told him, “till it’s all over.”

  He relocked the makeshift prison door, then woke Hopper and Clouter. The three of them squatted in the yard where they made new fuses for three of the unexploded bombs. The wooden fuse plugs had to be extracted, the old failed fuse stubs pushed out of the holes in the plugs, and the new quick match inserted. “When we get inside,” Sharpe told them, “we kill everyone.”

  “Maids too?” Hopper asked.

  “Not women,” Sharpe said, “and not Skovgaard, if he’s alive. We go in, we find him and we get out, and we kill all the men. We’re not going to have time to be particular.” He trimmed the quick fuse, leaving a tiny stub so that the bomb would explode within seconds of being lit.

  “How many of the bastards?” Clouter asked.

  Sharpe did not know. “Half a dozen?” he guessed. “And I reckon they’re Frogs, not Danes.” He had been wondering who shot at him the previous night, and he had concluded that the French must have left men behind when their embassy went south. “Or they might be Danes who’ve signed up for the Frogs,” he added.

  “Same thing,” Hopper said, using his shoe to hammer the wooden plug back into the bomb. “But what are they doing here?”

  “They’re spies,” Sharpe said. “There’s a dirty secret war being fought all across Europe and they’re here to kill our spies and we’re here to kill them.”

  “Is there extra pay for killing spies?” Clouter asked.

  Sharpe grinned. “I can’t promise it, but with any luck you’ll get as much gold as you can carry.” He looked up at the sky. Dusk was close, but the late summer twilight would linger for a time. They must wait.

  There was an air of exhaustion over the city. The British batteries were masked and silent. The Danish guns fired on, but slowly, as if they knew their efforts were being wasted on fascines and earthworks. Some howitzers had been brought from the battered citadel and placed behind the wall and their gunners tried to loft shells into the closest British batteries, but no one could see what effect the shots were having.

  Darkness came gently to the cloud-filled sky. The wind was chill from the east as the whole city waited. It seemed, for a time, as though there would be no bombardment this second night, but then a great flash seared across the western dark and a streak of red, thin as a needle scratch, climbed toward the clouds. The red scratch reached its topmost height and there hovered for a heartbeat before it began to fall.

  And then the other mortars fired, their sound joining to make a gigantic thunderclap that rolled about the city as the fuse trails whipped upward and the first bomb hurtled down toward the houses.

  “We can go,” Sharpe said.

  The three men walked through streets lit by distant fire. Sharpe could tell from the trails of the fuses that the bombardment was sparing the citadel this night, instead dropping its bombs close to the streets that had already been burned. The missiles from the fleet streaked overhead, while rocket traces, thick and glowing, curved above the rooftops. Sharpe, like his two companions, carried a thirteen-inch bomb in a leather bag hung from his shoulder. It was surprisingly heavy.

  He led Hopper and Clouter into the alley behind Lavisser’s house. It was black dark between the high close walls, though the backs of the big houses on Bredgade were reddened by the far-off flames. No bombs had touched this quarter of the city that lay near the royal palaces.

  Sharpe dropped his bomb beside the gate that led into Lavisser’s courtyard. Then he knelt, took out the tinderbox and struck the steel on flint. The charred linen glowed and he blew on it until it burst into flames that he touched to the quick fuse, then he ran back down the alley and crouched beside Hopper and Clouter. He could see the tiny red glow of the fuse, then it vanished and he lowered his head as he waited, but no explosion came and he wondered if the bomb had some other fault. Perhaps its powder was wet? “Bloody thing,” he snarled, looking up, and just then the bomb caught the fire and the alley was filled with screaming shards of metal that rattled and ricocheted from the brick walls. Flame and smoke boiled up, while Lavisser’s gate was ripped from its hinges and, propelled by a blast of heated smoke, slammed across the yard.

  “Yours, Hopper,” Sharpe said, and the three men ran to the smoky gateway and Sharpe again lit the tinder. Hopper held his bomb out, Sharpe put the fire to the fuse, then the bomb was rolled like a bowling ball into the courtyard’s center. The three men sheltered behind the wall. Someone shouted from the house. Sharpe suspected men were stationed in the carriage house and that they would be the first into the yard to investigate the first explosion, which was why he was sending them the second bomb. A voice shouted quite close, then Hopper’s bomb cracked the night apart, searing the alley with sudden flame li
ght and filling the yard with more thick smoke.

  Clouter was already at the gate with the third bomb. Sharpe struck the flint, blew on the charred linen and lit the fuse. He took the bomb from Clouter, stepped through the gate and ran a few paces into the smoke until he could just see where the steps went down to the basement entrance. The fuse hissed by his belly. He stopped, gauged the distance and heaved the shell over the remnants of the shattered gate. The bomb landed on the stones short of the steps, wobbled for a second, then toppled over. Hopper and Clouter had their backs against the stable wall. Both were staring up through the smoke. A musket fired from an upper window and the ball smacked into the cobbles beside Sharpe, who stepped back and almost tripped on a body. So someone had been caught by the second bomb. Then the third exploded, blasting its flame straight up the back of the house. Glass shattered in a dozen windows.

  “Come on!” Sharpe shouted. He had the rifle in his right hand as he ran down the steps and pushed through the ruins of the splintered door. He found himself in a kitchen lit by the flaming scraps of the blown door. No one was in sight. He jumped the burning wood, crossed the flagstone floor and pushed open the farther door to see a dark staircase going upward. Pistol shots sounded behind him and he snatched a glance to see that Clouter was firing up into the yard. “You need help?”

  “They’re dead!” Clouter said, then backed away from the doorway and started reloading. An oilcloth covering a table by the window had caught fire. Sharpe ignored it, running up the stairs instead. Hopper came with him. Sharpe pushed open the door at the top to find himself in a wide hallway. There was a man on the stairs above, but he turned and vanished before Sharpe could aim the rifle. Clouter came up from the kitchen and behind him the smoke thickened with alarming speed.