Sharpe's Prey

“We could go back to the ships?” Clouter suggested.

“You can if you want,” Sharpe said, “but I’ll stay.” He would stay because he knew Astrid would remain with her father and he would stay with Astrid.

Hopper began to reload one of the volley guns. “Did you see that nurse?” he asked.

“I think he wants to stay here, sir,” Clouter said with a grin.

“We can wait it out here,” Sharpe said. “And thank you, both of you. Thank you.” The bombs lit the sky. By morning, he thought, the Danes must surrender and the British army would come and Lavisser would hide, but Sharpe would find him. If he had to search every damned house in Copenhagen he would find him and kill him. And then he would have finished the job and he could stay here, stay in Denmark, because he wanted a home.

Next morning General Peyma

“They fired just under two thousand, sir,” Major Lavisser reported, “and that includes rockets.”

“And the night before?” Peyma

“Nearer five thousand,” an aide answered.

“They are ru

The superintendent of the King Frederick Hospital offered a sobering report. There were no more bed available, not even now they had taken over the Maternity Hospital next door, and there was a severe shortage of salves, bandages and fresh water, but he still expressed a cautious optimism. If the bombardment got no worse then he thought the hospitals would cope.

A city engineer reported that an old well in Bjornegaden was yielding copious amounts of fresh water and that three other abandoned wells, capped when the city began piping supplies from north Zealand, were to be opened during the day. The deputy mayor said there was no shortage of food. Some cows had died in the night, he said, but plenty were left.

“Cows?” Peyma

“The city needs milk, sir. We brought two herds into the city.”

“Then I think,” General Peyma

“And there was also damage here.” An aide leaned over the table and tapped Bredgade. “Major Lavisser’s house was destroyed, and the neighboring houses lost their roofs to fire.”

Peyma

“My grandfather’s house, sir.”

“Tragic!” Peyma

“We think it must have been a rocket, sir,” the first aide said. “It’s so far from the rest of the damaged streets.”

“I trust no one was hurt?” Peyma

“We fear some servants might have been trapped,” Lavisser answered, “but my grandfather, of course, is with the Crown Prince.”

“Thank God for that,” Peyma

“We must all share in the city’s suffering, sir,” Lavisser declared, a sentiment that brought murmurs of agreement about the table.

A naval pastor ended the council by thanking God for helping the city to endure its ordeal, for the manifold blessings that would doubtless flow from victory and begging the Almighty to shower His saving grace upon the wounded and the bereaved. “Amen,” General Peyma

A weak sun was shining through the pall of smoke that smothered the city when Lavisser emerged into the palace courtyard where Barker was waiting. “They prayed, Barker,” he said, “they prayed.”

“Do a lot of that here, sir.”

“So what do you make of it?”

Barker, while his master had been attending the council meeting, had done his best to explore the ruins of Bredgade. “It’s still too hot to get into, sir, and it’s a heap of rubble anyway. Smoking, it is, but Jules, he got out.”

“Only Jules?”

“He was the only one I found, sir. Rest are dead or in hospital, I reckon. And Jules swears it were Sharpe.”

“It can’t be!”

“He says three men came out the house, sir. Two were sailors and the other was a tall man, black hair and scar on the cheek.”

Lavisser swore.

“And,” Barker went on implacably, “the man with the scarred face was carrying Skovgaard.”

Lavisser swore again. “And the gold?” he asked.

“That’s probably still in Bredgade, sir. Melted, probably, but it’ll be there.”

Lavisser said nothing for a while. The gold could be salvaged and it could certainly wait, but he could expect no advancement from the French if he did not give them the list of names that had been so painfully extracted from Skovgaard. That list would open the Emperor’s largesse to Lavisser, make him Prince of Zealand or Duke of Holstein or even, in his most secret dreams, King of Denmark. “Did Jules say anything about the list?”

“He reckoned it was inside when the house burned, sir.”

Lavisser used the efficacious word. “All that work wasted,” he said. “Wasted!”

Barker stared up at the pigeons on the palace roof. He thought his own night had been wasted, for Lavisser had insisted he watch and count the falling bombs with him. Barker would have preferred to guard Bredgade, but Lavisser had instructed Barker to count the gun flashes from the fleet while Lavisser counted the shots from the land batteries. A real waste, Barker thought, for if he had been in Bredgade then Sharpe would have died and Skovgaard might still be revealing names. “We have to find Skovgaard again, sir,” Barker said.

“How?” Lavisser asked sourly, then answered his own question. “He has to be in hospital, doesn’t he?”

“At a doctor’s?” Barker suggested.

Lavisser shook his head. “All doctors were ordered to the hospitals.”

So Lavisser and Barker looked for Ole Skovgaard in Copenhagen’s hospitals. That search took them all morning as they went from ward to ward where hundreds of burn victims lay in awful pain, but Skovgaard was nowhere to be found. A morning wasted, and Lavisser was in a grim mood when he went to see what was left of Bredgade, but the house was a smoking ruin and the gold, if it was still there, was nothing but a molten mass deep in its cellars. But at least Jules, one of the Frenchmen left behind when the diplomats fled Copenhagen, was still in the undamaged coach house and Jules wanted his own revenge on Sharpe.

“We know where he is,” Barker insisted.

“Ulfedt’s Plads?” Lavisser suggested.

“Where else?”

“You, me and Jules,” Lavisser said, “and three of them? I think we must improve those odds.”

Barker and Jules went to watch Ulfedt’s Plads while Lavisser went to the citadel where General Peyma

Peyma