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

by Bernard Cornwell

  Both armies waited. Two redcoat regiments were in line, the guns were laid, and the Danes were showing no sign of retreat. Captain Dunnett walked to the right of his line. “You know what to do, Lofty.”

  “Skin ’em alive, sir,” Filmer said.

  “Keep your head!” Dunnett called to the men. “Aim properly!” He was about to add some more encouragements, but just then a shrill whistle sounded in short urgent blasts. “Forward!” Dunnett shouted.

  The greenjackets were spread right across the British front so that both battalions would have the benefit of their rifles. They walked forward and Filmer’s men kicked down a low fence that divided a meadow from a field dotted with shocked wheat. The light companies of the 43rd and 92nd advanced with the riflemen, a scatter of red coats among the green. The skirmishers stayed well clear of the road for that was where the British guns would fire.

  Sharpe climbed the shallow slope and saw the Danish skirmishers double forward from their positions. These were regular soldiers, not militia, and their white crossbelts showed against pale-blue coats. The Danes spread along the hillside, waiting for the British skirmishers to come within range.

  “Bloody boots,” Sergeant Filmer said to Sharpe. The sole of the Sergeant’s right boot had just come loose and was flapping. “They were a bloody new pair too, sir! Bloody boots.”

  A whistle blast checked the skirmishers. They had only advanced a hundred paces, but now they knelt among the shocked wheat. They were far out of musket range, but well within a rifle’s killing distance. Sharpe watched a Danish officer holding on to his hat as he ran down the slope. “They haven’t got enough skirmishers,” he said. Even if the British had not deployed rifles still the enemy had sent too few men forward, which meant, perhaps, that they were relying on the efficiency of their battalion volleys, but only the British army trained with live ammunition, and Sharpe doubted that these Danish regulars could match the redcoats shot for shot. Poor bastards, he thought.

  “We’ll skin ’em alive, sir.” Filmer tore the sole clean off his boot and pushed it into a pocket. He looked up the slope then cocked his rifle. “Skin ’em alive.”

  The British guns fired.

  It had been as though both armies had been holding their breath. Now the smoke jetted and swelled above the road as the round shot screamed up the hill. The gunners were already sponging out the barrels as Sharpe saw a scrap of black turf arcing through the sky close to the Danish flag, then heard the whistle blasts again. “Right, lads,” Filmer shouted, “put the bastards down!”

  The greenjackets took the Danes by surprise. The enemy’s skirmishers had been waiting for the British to advance into range, but suddenly the bullets were whistling about them and men were being plucked backward.

  “Aim for the officers!” Filmer shouted. “And don’t be hurried! Aim proper!”

  The riflemen knew exactly what to do. They fought in pairs. One man aimed and fired, then the other protected the first as he reloaded. The Danish skirmishers were recovering from their surprise and coming downhill to get within musket range, but they were too few and the closer they came the faster they were hit. The rifles, unlike the smoothbore muskets, had sights and many of the riflemen wore merit badges because they were expert marksmen. They aimed, fired and killed and the Danes were being hit hard at a range no man would have thought to be lethal. Filmer just watched. “Good boys,” he muttered, “good boys.” The redcoat skirmishers were firing now, but it was the rifles that were doing the damage.

  “It works, Lofty!” Sharpe called.

  “Bloody well does, sir!” Filmer answered cheerfully.

  The enemy officer who had been holding his hat was on the ground. A man ran to him and was struck by two bullets. Riflemen called targets to each other. “See that big dozy bugger with a limp?”

  Sharpe was oddly surprised by the noise. He had been in bigger battles than this, far bigger, but he had never realized just how loud it was. The ear-pounding blows of the field guns were overlaid by the crack of the rifles and the brutal coughing of muskets. And that was only the skirmishers. None of the main battalions had so much as fired a volley, yet Sharpe had to shout if he wanted Filmer to hear him. He knew he was sympathizing with the Danes. Most of them, the overwhelming majority of them, would never have been in a battle and the noise alone was an assault on the senses. It was hammering and echoing, unending, crashing gouts of dirty smoke riven with red fire and over it, like a descant, the screams of the wounded and dying. The round shot blasted great lumps of earth from the crest, ripped a Danish cannon wheel to splinters and took a man’s head in an explosion of blood.

  The Rifles were pressing forward, going from shock to shock. Little fires left by wadding burned in the stubble. The redcoat skirmishers were adding their fire, but it was not needed. The Rifles were winning and the Danish light troops were going back to their line.

  “Forward!” Filmer called.

  “Two on the right!” Sharpe shouted.

  “See them! Maddox! Hart! Get those bastards!”

  The trails of the British field guns were gouging ruts in the road as the weapons recoiled. Smoke thickened until the gunners were firing blind, but still the shots seared home. The greenjackets could shoot at the Danish ranks now. They looked for officers as they had been trained to do, took aim, killed and looked again. The Danish ranks shifted uncomfortably, unprepared for this kind of distant fusillade. Then, in the hell of other noises, Sharpe heard the savage flare of the pipes and saw that the 92nd was advancing up the long slope. The British guns were still hammering the enemy center. The Danish guns had stayed silent, but now a great blossom of smoke showed at the hill top, but the sound was all wrong. A gun had exploded.

  “On! On!” Dunnett called. “Closer!” The 43rd was advancing now. There was to be nothing subtle here. The Welshmen and the Highlanders were in line and walking straight up the slope. They would march till they were in musket range, then loose a volley and fix bayonets. “Keep killing them!” Dunnett shouted. “Keep killing! I want their officers dead!”

  A riderless horse galloped along the front of the blue-coated Danish troops. Men were being thrown back from the enemy ranks by rifle bullets and the file closers were pushing men to fill the gaps. The Rifles were working. God, Sharpe thought, but it was murder. His rifle was loaded, but he had not shot it.

  “Bring on the Frogs, eh, sir?” Filmer said. “Bring on the bloody Frogs!”

  Wellesley ordered his cavalry forward on the left flank beside the beach. They were German hussars and they streamed out of the dunes leaving a trail of dust, their drawn blades glittering, and the sight of them must have convinced the Danes that the position was lost, for, long before the advancing redcoat battalions came within range, they began to vanish from the crest. The firing died down as the targets vanished. There was a scatter of bodies higher up the field, but only one greenjacket was down. “Get his boots,” Filmer told a man. “It was Horrible Hopkins,” he told Sharpe, “smacked in the eye.”

  “Forward! Forward!” Wellesley’s voice rose sharp. The gunners were limbering up again. The German hussars had gone back to the line’s center, their mere presence having been enough to dislodge the enemy. The kilted Scots were already at the hill’s crest and the riflemen on the right of the road ran up to the skyline to see Køge ahead of them. Low roofs, chimneys, church spires and a mill. It could have been a town back home if the roofs had not been so red, but what caught Sharpe’s eyes were the entrenchments that scarred the fields at Køge’s edge. The Danes had not run away, they had merely pulled back into fortifications. The British infantry was hurrying on, but Danish cavalry was suddenly streaming out of the trenches and threatening to curl round the right-hand end of Wellesley’s line.

  There was a clamor of bugle and whistle calls. The 43rd stopped. It did not form square, though every man was half expecting the order. The riflemen, vulnerable to a cavalry charge, hurried back toward the protection of the Welshmen’s muskets, but then t
he German hussars appeared again, this time on the inland flank and the Danish horsemen, outnumbered, checked their advance. Sharpe, his rifle cocked ready to meet the cavalry charge, realized that Sir Arthur Wellesley must have anticipated the Danish maneuver and had his horsemen ready.

  The pipes started again and Sharpe saw that the 92nd was being sent straight at the entrenchments. They were not even waiting for the artillery, just marching forward to the beat of their drums and the wild music of the pipes. “Heathen bastards,” Filmer said in a tone of admiration.

  Sharpe was remembering Assaye, remembering the Highlanders marching so calmly into the heart of the enemy. The Danes, he reckoned, would have been unsettled by their swift retreat from the crest and now they were being presented with an impudent assault that reeked of confidence. They could see the British artillery unlimbering and knew that the second redcoat battalion was readying to follow the first, yet in all probability it would not be needed, for there was something utterly implacable about the Highlanders. They looked huge in their black fur hats as they advanced toward an angle of the trenches. The defenders far outnumbered them, but the trenches had been too hastily dug and the Scotsmen were attacking one salient corner so that their massed musketry could drown a small portion of the defenses with fire. The men farther down the trenches were too far away to help. “They’re going to run,” Sharpe said.

  “You reckon so?” Filmer was not sure.

  “One volley and the bayonet,” Sharpe said, “then the whole lot will bugger off.”

  The Danes opened fire. They had lost their artillery, but their musketry was heavy. “Close up! Close up!” Sharpe heard the familiar litany of battle. “Close up!” The Scots appeared to ignore the fire, but just walked toward the smoke-rimmed piles of earth. A few bodies lay behind the battalion. Yellow ribbons fluttered from the pipes.

  “Halt!” The 92nd stopped dead.

  “Present!” It seemed that every man took a slight turn to his right as the muskets came up into their shoulders.

  “Fire!” One volley. One blast of foul-stinking smoke.

  “Fix bayonets!”

  There was an odd silence in which Sharpe could hear the click of the bayonets being locked onto smoking muzzles.

  “Forward!” The line moved into their own smoke, showed again beyond the ragged cloud. “Charge!”

  The Scotsmen, released, gave a cheer and Sharpe saw defenders scrambling from trenches and fleeing south. The air was suddenly alive with bugles and whistles.

  “Don’t let them go to earth!” Wellesley shouted at the 43rd’s commanding officer. There were more troops appearing in the west and a Welsh officer called a warning, but the newcomers were the Germans under General Linsingen. Cavalrymen broke away from Linsingen’s columns to start the pursuit.

  “Bloody hell,” Filmer said, “that was quick.”

  “Rifles!” a voice shouted. “Companies in column. On the road!”

  The greenjackets, like every other man in Wellesley’s army, had been hoping they could go into the town where there was food, liquor and women, but only two companies went with the Highlanders to clear Køge’s streets while the rest were ordered south behind the scavenging cavalry. They marched for an hour, passing corpses left in the fields by the marauding horsemen and listening to the occasional crackle of far-away carbines. Some of the Danish dead were wearing wooden clogs. Scores of prisoners were being escorted northward. At noon the march-ing column approached a village and found they had at last caught up with the cavalry. The German horsemen had dismounted because a rearguard of the enemy was stubbornly defending a church and graveyard. The horsemen were firing carbines and pistols at too long a range and wasting their bullets against stone walls that were wreathed with smoke from Danish muskets.

  “It’ll be a job for us,” Sergeant Filmer said, “just you wait.”

  And wait they did. The battalion’s senior officers wanted to gauge how many of the enemy were in the small village, and that took time. The riflemen lay in a field, smoking pipes or sleeping. Sharpe walked up and down. Every once in a while a musket would fire from the church or from one of the nearby houses, but the cavalry had pulled back out of range and the balls whistled uselessly overhead. Most incongruous of all was a group of civilian horsemen who were evidently watching the whole confrontation from a safe distance. They looked like the local gentry come to see a battle, though for much of the early afternoon they saw nothing, but then Sir Arthur Wellesley and his staff arrived and there was a flurry of shouts, whistle blasts and sergeants’ curses.

  “Told you it would be our job,” Filmer said. He squinted at the church. “Why can’t they just bugger off? Silly bastards have lost, ain’t they?”

  The greenjackets spread into a skirmish line then advanced until they were a hundred paces from the makeshift fortress. “Fire!” Dunnett shouted at his company and the rifle bullets cracked on stone. Sharpe watched the church, the closest cottages and graveyard wall and could see no answering musket smoke.

  Dunnett must have seen the same. “Two Company! Forward! Forward!” Dunnett shouted and led his men to the churchyard wall, paused a second, then vaulted over. The riflemen followed, conscious that they were being watched by the civilian horsemen and by General Wellesley. Men crouched behind the gravestones, but it seemed the Danes had left. “Got bored waiting for us,” Filmer said.

  “Into the street!” Dunnett called. The other companies were wrapping round the village, while the cavalry, mounted again, was following.

  Sharpe walked round the side of the church to find himself in a small, neat village. A score of men were at the far end of the street, running away. “Encourage them!” Dunnett shouted and some of his riflemen ran to the center of the street, knelt and fired a farewell volley at the fugitives.

  Sergeant Filmer took out his pipe. “Got blisters on my heel,” he said to Sharpe. “It’s Hopkins’s boots, see? They don’t fit.” He pushed tobacco into the clay bowl. “Kept their heads, the lads, didn’t they? Did bloody well, they—” He never finished the sentence but just pitched hard forward onto the dusty road where blood splashed on the broken white clay of his pipe.

  The shot had come from behind. Sharpe turned and saw smoke drifting from an opening in the church tower. A bell hung in the shadows.

  “Don’t just stand gaping!” Dunnett snarled at him. The Captain, like the rest of his company, had taken shelter between the cottages.

  Then a man showed in the tower, outlined against the bell. He raised a musket as Sharpe raised the rifle. Filmer had been shot in the back and Sharpe felt nothing as he squeezed the trigger. The bullet clanged against the bell, but it had gone clean through the man first. The musket dropped, clattering onto the roof of the church porch, then the body fell to thump onto red tiles and slide down into the graveyard. “You said something, Captain?” Sharpe asked as he fished a new cartridge from his pouch.

  Dunnett walked away. Sharpe finished loading the rifle then walked to the end of the street where a horse trough stood. He bent and drank. He splashed water on his face, then slung the rifle on his shoulder and stared southward. The ground fell gently away. Off to his left the sun winked a myriad reflections from the sea where a British warship’s sails were heaped white. Sharpe wondered if it was the Pucelle with his old friends aboard. Ahead of him the cavalry herded the fugitives, while to the right, about half a mile away in a small valley that was shaded by heavy trees, was a house that struck him as utterly beautiful. It was large, but not grand, low and wide, white-painted with big windows facing a carriage drive, a lake and a garden. Dark bushes had been trimmed into neat squares and cones. It looked comfortable and friendly, and for some reason Sharpe thought of Grace and felt the tears prick his eyes.

  An old man came from the nearest cottage. He looked nervously at the greenjackets, then decided they meant no harm and so walked to Sharpe’s side. He looked up into the rifleman’s face, nodded a greeting, then gazed at the house. “Vygârd,” he said proudly.r />
  The name took a moment to register, then Sharpe looked at the old man. “This is Herfølge?” he asked, nodding toward the village.

  “Ja, Herfølge,” the old man said happily, gesturing to the village, then pointed to the house. “Vygârd.”

  Lavisser’s grandfather’s house. Vygârd.

  And Lavisser had reached Copenhagen remarkably quickly, much too quickly for a man carrying a heavy chest of gold. And surely, Sharpe thought, Lavisser would not want the gold trapped in a city that might be captured by an enemy?

  “Tak,” he said fervently, “mange tak.”

  Many thanks. For he was going to Vygârd.

  CHAPTER 8

  VYGRD’S GATES WERE closed, but not locked. At first Sharpe thought the house was deserted, it was so quiet, then he realized no one would leave an empty house with its shutters open. Red roses grew between the windows. The front lawn was newly scythed, the smooth green marked where the blade’s tip had left almost imperceptible wide curves, and the afternoon air was filled with the scent of cut grass.

  He walked around the side of the house, past the large stables and coach house, through a flower garden that buzzed with bees, then under an archway cut from a box hedge and found himself on a wide lawn that sloped to a lake. In the middle of the grass, beneath a spreading white parasol, a dark-haired woman lay in a chair. She wore a white dress. A straw hat, decorated with a white ribbon, sat with a discarded newspaper, a handbell and a work basket on a small wicker table. Sharpe stopped, expecting her to challenge him or to call for the servants, but then realized she was asleep. It seemed extraordinary: a woman dreaming away the somnolent afternoon while, not a mile away, cavalrymen were rousting terrified fugitives from ditches and hedgerows.

  The back of the house was heavy with wisteria among which a white-painted door stood invitingly open. A basket of pears and crab apples lay on the threshold. Sharpe stepped over it into the cool of a long stone-flagged corridor hung with pictures of churches and castles. A rack held a dozen walking sticks and two umbrellas. A dog was sleeping in an alcove. It woke as Sharpe passed, but instead of barking it just thumped its tail on the floor.