“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 probably 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 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 tonight 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.