Sharpe's Prey

“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,” Kilmer 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 Koge’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 faraway carbines. Some of the Danish dead were wearing wooden clogs. Scores of prisoners were being escorted northward. At noon the marching 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!” Du

Du

“Into the street!” Du

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, ru

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!” Du

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.

Du

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. “Vygard,” he said proudly.

The name took a moment to register, then Sharpe looked at the old man. “This is Herfolge?” he asked, nodding toward the village.

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

Lavisser’s grandfather’s house. Vygard.

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 Vygard.