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

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Mister Bang?” Lavisser asked, stuffing money into his coat pocket.

  “The fellow who sold us Skovgaard,” Barker reminded him.

  The padlock was prized from the door and a startled Aksel Bang stumbled into the waning daylight. He was nervous and indignant, and so bewildered that he was hardly able to talk sense and so, to calm him down, Lavisser ordered the maids to make some tea, then he took Bang upstairs and settled him in Skovgaard’s parlor where Bang told how Lieutenant Sharpe had come back to the city and how Bang had tried to arrest him. The story was a little tangled there, for Bang was unwilling to admit how easily he had been overpowered, but Lavisser did not pursue the details. Bang did not know how many men were helping Sharpe, but he had heard their voices in the yard and knew there must be at least two or three.

  “And Mister Skovgaard’s daughter was helping these Englishmen?” Lavisser asked.

  “Not willingly, not willingly,” Bang insisted. “She must have been deceived.”

  “Of course.”

  “But her father, now, he was always on the English side,” Bang said vengefully, “and he made Astrid help him. She didn’t want to, of course, but he made her.”

  Lavisser sipped his tea. “So Astrid knows as much as her father?”

  “Oh yes,” Bang said.

  “She knows the names of her father’s correspondents?” Lavisser asked.

  “What he knows,” Bang said, “she knows.”

  “Does she now,” Lavisser said to himself. He lit a candle, for dusk was darkening the room. “You did well, Lieutenant,” he said, careful to flatter Bang by using his militia rank, “when you handed Skovgaard to the police.”

  A small doubt nagged Bang. “Lieutenant Sharpe said that it was you who had taken Skovgaard, sir.”

  “He said what?” Lavisser looked astonished, then unleashed his charming smile. “Of course not! I have no authority in that area. No, Mister Skovgaard was taken for questioning by the police, but, alas, he escaped. The confusion of the bombing, you understand? And our problem is that Lieutenant Sharpe and his English helpers are somewhere in the city. They may already have rescued Mister Skovgaard. General Peymann thought we would find them here, but alas.” He shrugged. “I suspect they are hiding, but you, Lieutenant, know Mister Skovgaard better than anyone.”

  “True,” Bang said.

  “And who knows how they are deceiving Astrid?” Lavisser asked in a worried tone.

  “They are deceiving her!” Bang said angrily, and spilled out his resentment of Sharpe. The Englishman, he said, had promised Astrid he would stay in Denmark. “And she believes him!” Bang said. “She believes him! He has turned her head.”

  And a pretty head it was too, Lavisser thought, and filled with knowledge that he needed. “I fear for her, Lieutenant,” he said gravely, “I truly do.” He stood and stared out of the window so that Bang would not see his amusement. So Sharpe was in love? Lavisser smiled at that realization. The darkening sky was banded in black cloud and soon, he thought, the first bombs would start falling unless the British had exhausted their stocks, in which case the city would be spared until more could be fetched from England. “They are doubtless holding poor Astrid as a hostage”—he turned back to Bang—“and we must find them.”

  “They could be anywhere,” Bang said helplessly.

  “Mister Skovgaard was injured by a bomb when he escaped,” Lavisser lied smoothly. “He needs a doctor, we think, but he’s not in any of the hospitals.”

  Bang shook his head. “His doctor lives in Vester Fælled.”

  “And he certainly can’t have gone there,” Lavisser said, “so where would he hide? What is it?” He had been alarmed by a sudden wide-eyed look on Bang’s face.

  But Bang was smiling. “Mister Skovgaard needs medical help?” he asked. “Then I know where they are.”

  “You do?”

  “You will give me a gun?” Bang asked eagerly. “I can help you?”

  “I should expect nothing less from a loyal Dane,” Lavisser said unctuously.

  “Then I shall take you to them,” Bang said.

  For he knew exactly where they were.

  To the west a red flash lit the sky and the first bomb climbed into the dark.

  Then the other guns hammered, their discharge ringing the city with flame-shot smoke.

  And the bombs were falling again.

  CHAPTER 11

  SHARPE SPENT MUCH OF the day in a cramped storeroom above the arch of the orphanage gateway. He told Hopper and Clouter he was watching for Lavisser, but he did not really expect to see the renegade. He was thinking instead. Thinking about leaving Britain, thinking about Grace and about Astrid. Thinking about the army and about Wapping, and while he brooded, Hopper and Clouter took turns standing guard near Ole Skovgaard’s bed, which had been placed under the inside stairs because the orphanage was so crowded with folk made homeless by the bombardment. A Danish flag hung across the small space to make it private and the two seamen were there, not to protect the patient against Lavisser, but rather from the intrusion of children excited by the bombardment and its upheavals. Astrid tended her father, or else helped calm the children.

  Hopper brought Sharpe some bread and cheese toward evening and the two men ate in the storeroom, which had a small barred window looking down the street toward the houses of Nyboden. “He’s sleeping,” Hopper said, meaning Ole Skovgaard. Skovgaard’s fingers had been splinted and his wounds bandaged. “He ain’t sleeping well,” Hopper went on, “but he won’t for a while, will he?” He pushed a jug of water toward Sharpe. “I was thinking, sir, that either Clouter or me ought to go and see Captain Chase.”

  Sharpe nodded. “He’ll be worrying.”

  “Just to let him know we’re still ticking,” Hopper said. “Doesn’t matter which of us goes, sir, but the Captain, sir, he’ll want to know what’s going to happen.”

  “If I knew, I’d tell you,” Sharpe said.

  “I thought we’d wait till the bombs start again, then go. No one takes a blind bit of notice when the bombs are dropping.”

  Sharpe gazed down the street where a lame sweeper was brushing litter toward a wheelbarrow. “What we do,” Sharpe said, “really depends on what the Danes do. On whether they surrender or not.”

  “Have to drop a few more bombs than we did last night,” Hopper said scathingly. “It’s no good annoying them, is it? You have to bloody hurt them.”

  “If they surrender,” Sharpe said, “then there isn’t a problem. We’ll just take Mister Skovgaard to a British surgeon. But if they don’t surrender . . .” He left the thought unfinished.

  “Then we’ll be dodging this Captain Lavatory?”

  Sharpe nodded. “Though I think we’re safe enough here.”

  Hopper nodded. “So when it’s dark, sir, and the bombs start up, I’ll sneak back to the Captain.”

  “Tell Captain Chase I’ll stay here till Mister Skovgaard can be moved.” Sharpe did not know what else he could do. He knew he should hunt Lavisser down, but guarding Ole Skovgaard now seemed the more important task. “And when it’s all over, Hopper, you, me and Clouter are going to go digging in that house. There ought to be forty-three thousand melted guineas somewhere under the ashes.”

  “Forty-three thousand?”

  “Give or take a handful.”

  Hopper whistled. “Captain Lavatory will already be digging though, won’t he?”

  “It’ll still be too hot,” Sharpe said.

  “So pray the buggers surrender, eh?” Hopper stared down the shadowed street. “Look at that silly bugger! Sweeping up a bombed city! You should get some sleep, sir, you look like a rag.” He frowned at the small storeroom. “You ain’t got room to make a proper cot in here, sir, why not go to the chapel? It’s quiet enough there.”

  “Wake me before you leave.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  It was quiet in the chapel, though Sharpe could not sleep. He sat at the very back in a white-painted pew and st
ared at the stained glass window above the simple altar. It was getting darker outside and the details of the window were obscured, but the golden hair of the children and Christ’s silver halo showed up brightly. There were words scrolled around the halo, but they were in Danish so he could not read them.

  He heard the door open and turned to see that Astrid had come to join him. “You look very thoughtful,” she said.

  “I was just wondering what those words say,” Sharpe said, “up on the window.”

  Astrid peered up at the dark glass. “Lader de små Born,” she read, “komme til mig.”

  “I’m none the wiser.”

  “Let the little children come to me,” she translated. “It’s from the Gospels.”

  “Ah.”

  Astrid smiled. “You sound disappointed.”

  “I thought it might be ‘Be sure your sin will find you out.’ ”

  “So you do have some religion?”

  “Do I?”

  She took his hand and held it silently for a while, then she sighed. “Why would anyone hurt another man so much?”

  “Because it’s war,” Sharpe said.

  “Because the world is cruel,” Astrid said. She stared up at the window. Christ’s halo and eyes were piercing white, the rest was darkening. “From now on,” she said, “he will be half blind, toothless and never able to hold a pen again.” She squeezed Sharpe’s hand. “And I will have to look after him.”

  “Then I’ll have to look after you, won’t I?”

  “Will you?”

  He nodded. The question, he thought, was not would he, but could he? Could he live here? Could he deal with a querulous Ole Skovgaard, with a strange language and the stifling respectability? Then Astrid rested her head on his shoulder and he knew he did not want to lose her. He sat silent, watching the dark suffuse the window, and he thought of Lord Pumphrey’s confidence that the next few years would bring enough war to guarantee promotion and he reflected that he had never proved himself as an officer. He had shown he was a soldier, but he was still floundering as an officer. A company of greenjackets, he thought, and a French enemy to be humbled, that was a dream that would be worth pursuing. But a man must make choices, and that thought made him squeeze Astrid’s fingers.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Sharpe said, and he saw Christ’s dark-blue robe turn purple and His white eyes flash livid red. You must be dreaming, he thought, then the colors faded to darkness again and he heard the thump and he instinctively put his arms around Astrid and covered her body with his as the bomb exploded beyond the window and the stained glass, all its blues and golds and scarlets and greens, shattered into a thousand shards that screamed through the chapel. Smoke boiled after it, and then there was silence broken only by the skittering of broken glass across the chapel floor. It was like an indrawing of breath.

  Before the other bombs began to fall.

  THE BRITISH had fired close to five thousand bombs on the first night of the bombardment and they had watched the fires rage beyond the walls and had been certain that another night of pain would persuade the Danes to surrender the city. They fired far fewer bombs the second night, a mere two thousand, thinking that would be sufficient to satisfy the garrison’s honor, but in the morning, when the smoke covered the city like a pall, no message came from the city, the Danish flag still flew above the citadel and the guns on the shot-scarred ramparts opened a defiant fire. So now, on the third night, they would drown Copenhagen in fire. All day they had replenished the magazines, hauling wagon after wagon of bombs to the batteries, and as soon as darkness fell the great guns began their battering until the very ground seemed to throb with the hammering of the mortars and the recoil of howitzers. The sky flickered with fuse traces and was tangled with smoke trails.

  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 fire 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 Landemærket 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 quick-silver 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 folk 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.