Sharpe's Prey

Sharpe unlocked Skovgaard’s door. Astrid heard him and came from the office with her black sleeves protected from ink by white cotton sheaths. She looked alarmed at the sight of Hopper and Clouter, for both were huge men, but they snatched off their straw hats and tugged their forelocks.

“They’re staying here today,” Sharpe told her.

“Who are they?”

“Friends,” Sharpe said. “I need them to get your father out. But I can’t do it until the bombardment starts again. Is there somewhere they can sleep?”

“The warehouse,” Astrid suggested. She told Sharpe she had sent the workers away when they had arrived just after dawn. She had promised the men their wages, but said her father wanted them to help look for survivors among the burned houses. She had then ordered the maids to clean the long-neglected attics, while she had gone to her father’s office and pulled out the big ledgers. “There is never time to check the figures properly,” she told Sharpe once Clouter and Hopper were settled in the empty warehouse, “and I know he wants it done.” She worked in silence for a while, then Sharpe saw an inked entry in one of the columns suddenly dissolve as a tear splashed on it. Astrid cuffed her face. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked.

“We don’t know.”

“And it will have been painful.”

“We don’t know,” Sharpe said again.

“We do,” she said, looking up at him.

“I can’t go back there till the bombardment starts,” Sharpe said bleakly.

“It is not your fault, Richard.” She put the quill down. “I am so tired.”

“Then go and rest. I’ll take the boys something to eat.”

She went upstairs. Sharpe found bread, cheese and ham, then ate with Hopper and Clouter. Aksel Bang rattled the door in the yard, but went silent when Sharpe growled that he was in a killing mood.

It was almost midday when Sharpe went upstairs. He opened the bedroom door silently to find thick curtains drawn and the room dark, yet he sensed Astrid was awake. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“For everything,” he said, “everything.” He sat on the bed. Despite the dark he could see her face and the astonishing gold of her hair on the pillow.

He thought he ought to explain exactly who Hopper and Clouter were, but when he began she just shook her head. “I thought you would never come upstairs,” she said.

“I’m here,” Sharpe said.

“Then don’t leave.”

“Never,” he promised.

“I have been so lonely,” Astrid said, “since Nils died.”

And I, Sharpe thought, since Grace. He hung his cutlass on a chair and eased off his boots. A cold wind spat rain from the east and drifted smoke from the city’s ruins. The guns on the walls fired on and Sharpe and Astrid, eventually, slept.

The guns on the city’s western walls fired all day. They fired till the rain falling on their barrels turned to instant vapor. Shot and shell ploughed into the British batteries, but the earth-filled fascines soaked up all the violence and behind their screens and parapets the British gu

The city smoldered. The last flames were put out, but embers glowed deep in ruined houses and churches, and every now and then those embers would spark the fuse of an unexploded bomb and the blast would rattle the city’s windows and folk would duck into doorways and wait for the next missile to fall. They would peer anxiously skyward and see that no fuses left smoke trails in the sky. There was just silence.

General Peyma

“Hundreds,” was the bleak answer.

“Can they live on the ships?”

“Not if we have to burn the fleet,” an aide answered. “It could take hours to get folk ashore.”

“The churches are coping,” another aide said, “and if you order it, sir, the university will open its doors.”

“Of course it must! Of course it must!” Peyma

“Four thousand?” an aide estimated. “Five, perhaps?”

“And how many do they have left?” That was the question. When would the British guns run out of ammunition? For then they would have to wait for more to be fetched from England, and by then the nights would be longer and perhaps the Crown Prince would come from Holstein with an army of regular troops that would vastly outnumber the British force. This misery, Peyma

Major Lavisser, his face drawn and somber, picked his way across a spill of fallen bricks. He stopped to pick up a child’s petticoat that had somehow escaped the flames, then threw it away. “I’m late for duty, sir,” he said to Peyma

“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 Peyma

“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,” Peyma