The gunners had changed their aim, planning to devastate new areas of the city. Bombs and carcasses rained onto the cathedral and the university, while other shells reached deeper into the maze of streets to punish the defenders for their stubbornness. The bomb ships quivered with each discharge and rocket trails whipped fire across the clouds. The seven engines did their best. The teams of men pumped the long handles to spurt sea-water on the flames, but as new fires sprang up so the men deserted the machines to go and protect their families. The streets were overwhelmed by panicked refugees. Bombs cracked down, the flames roared, walls collapsed, the city burned.
General Peymann stood on the citadel wall and watched the fires spring up in a dozen places. He saw spires and steeples outlined by fire, saw them fall and watched the sparks spew in pillars of red through which the bombs crashed down. Pigeons, woken from their nests, flew about the flames until they fell burning. Why, Peymann wondered, did they not fly away? A rocket struck the cathedral’s dome and bounced up into the sky where it exploded just as a bomb crashed though the dome’s tiles. The whole of Skindergade was alight, then a carcass broke through the roof of Skovgaard’s warehouse on Ulfedt’s Plads and the sugar caught fire. The flames spread with brutal speed, making the district as bright as day. A school in Suhmsgade that had become a home for refugees was struck by three bombs. The shops on Frederiksborggade and in Landemaerket were burning and Peymann felt an immense and impotent anger as he watched the destruction. “Is Major Lavisser here?” the General asked an aide.
“I saw him a few moments ago, sir.”
“Tell him to burn the fleet.”
“Burn it?” The aide was horrified, for such an order meant that Peymann knew the city could not hold.
“Burn the ships,” Peymann said grimly, flinching as a flight of bombs crashed into the university. The British, he realized, were not short of bombs. They were unleashing hundreds onto a city that could either surrender or be obliterated. The distillery opposite Skovgaard’s warehouse was struck and the stills exploded blue fire that ran like burning quicksilver down alleys and gutters. Even from the citadel’s walls Peymann could hear screams in the streets. “Tell Major Lavisser to light the fuses quickly!” he called after the aide. He hoped that the British, seeing the fleet burning, would stop their terrible bombardment, though he knew it would be at least an hour or two before the ships could be fired because hundreds of refugees had gathered around the inner harbor in the certain knowledge that the British would not aim their mortars at the district where the fleet was stored, and those folks would have to be persuaded to move away before the fierce heat of the burning ships made the area untenable.
The aide ran down the firestep to the scorched courtyard, but found no sign of Major Lavisser. The General’s orderly said he thought the Major had gone to Bredgade and so the aide followed, but as he left the citadel a bomb landed five paces behind him and the shattering case broke his spine and threw him into the moat. The university was on fire, its library making a roaring sound as the flames devoured the shelves. The city’s separate fires were joining now, becoming higher and brighter, larger and fiercer. “Come,” the General gestured to the rest of his aides, “we shall do what we can.” There was little he could do for the city had no defense against this horror, but he could not just watch. There were people to be rescued and survivors to be comforted.
The bomb ships were throwing their shells over the citadel and one crashed into the orphanage chapel to splinter the roof and explode among the organ pipes. Astrid screamed as flames began to flicker from the organ’s shattered casing. Sharpe took her hand and dragged her into the courtyard. “The children!” she shouted.
“We’ll get them out,” Sharpe said, but where? He stood under the flagpole and stared up at the sky. The bombs, he thought, were going just to the south of the orphanage, which meant the graveyard to the north might be the safest place. “The cemetery!” he shouted to Astrid. “Take them to the cemetery!” She nodded just as a bomb slammed into the courtyard to make a small crater in which it sat malevolently, smoke hissing from its burning fuse until Hopper stepped to it and plucked the burning match clean out of the plug. “I’m going to the Captain, sir!”
Sharpe almost called Hopper back, but there were plenty of adults to help rescue the children and so he let the big man go. He ran into the building and found Clouter beside Ole Skovgaard’s bed. “There’s a cemetery that should be safe,” he told Clouter. “Take him there. Can you carry the bed as well?”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“The cemetery’s that way.” He pointed, then dropped his rifle and seven-barreled gun in a corner. “Then come back and help with the children,” he shouted after Clouter.
Someone was ringing the orphanage bell as though people needed any warning. The chapel was burning and another bomb had exploded in the kitchens so that the whole building was now lurid with flame. There were screams as another bomb crashed into a dormitory. The children were panicking. Sharpe ran up the outer stairs and shouted in his sergeant’s voice at a score of screaming children who were jostling on the balcony at the stairhead. They knew no English, but they froze, more scared of him than of the flames and noise. “You!” He grabbed a girl. “Downstairs. You next!” He made them go in single file down the stairs. More adults were coming to help and Sharpe ran into the burning dormitory. Two children were plainly dead, their small broken bodies laced with blood, but a third was crouching, screaming, her hands tight over her bloodied face and Sharpe picked her up and carried her to the balcony where he pushed her into a woman’s arms. The fire in the kitchens had broken through the roof, but no more bombs had come, though a dozen or more exploded just to the south where a row of houses was burning.
Astrid had been directing people into the sailors’ cemetery, but now ran back through the gate’s archway and up the stairs. “There are still the cripples,” she told Sharpe.
“Where?”
She pointed to a corner room and Sharpe ran round the open balcony to find six terrified children in their beds. Clouter had come back to the courtyard and Sharpe simply carried the children out to the balcony one by one and threw them down to the seaman who caught and handed them to other adults who had come to help. Sharpe tossed the last child down just as a bomb splintered through the remnants of the chapel and exploded in its doorway to slash metal fragments and slivers of wood across the yard. No one was touched. Sharpe had blood on his back where scraps of the stained glass window had slit through his coat and jacket, but he was unaware of it. “Is that all?” he shouted to Astrid over the thump of bombs and the sound of fire.
“That’s all!”
The last of the children had been carried to the graveyard and Clouter was alone in the courtyard. “Get out!” Sharpe shouted to him, then he took Astrid’s hand and led her around the balcony toward the stairhead. The burning dormitory was like a furnace as he passed, then a bomb crashed through the outside staircase, splintering its steps. A carcass followed, hissing tongues of white fire in the courtyard. Sharpe pulled Astrid into the main landing and ran down the inside stairs to find Clouter in the small hallway. “I told you to get out.”
“Came to get this,” Clouter said, brandishing Hopper’s seven-barreled gun. Sharpe picked up his own weapons. Tiles were clattering into the courtyard as more bombs hit the building, and he hoped to God the gunners were not shifting their aim northward for then the cemetery would be under fire. “All we have to do now,” he told Clouter, “is look after Mister Skovgaard.” The orphanage shuddered as two new bombs exploded. A child’s doll, its hair burning bright, skidded across the smoke-filled yard as Sharpe led Astrid and Clouter toward the gate, then he suddenly twisted to his right and shouted a warning.