CHAPTER 5
It was on the wide terrace of Kronborg Castle, at Helsingor, that the ghost of Hamlet’s father had stalked the night and now, under the quarter moon of another night’s sky, a score of big guns faced the narrow sea, their long barrels shadowed in the deep embrasures.
Beneath the terrace, in an arched crypt, two men pumped the handles of massive bellows to blast cold air into one of the fortress’s three furnaces. Other men, using long-handled cradles, tongs and pokers, rolled iron shot onto the coals which, in the fire’s deep heart, glowed white as the air hissed through the bellows’ iron nozzles. The furnace, hidden in the crypt so that its light would not glow on the fortress walls at night, was like a glimpse of hell. Red light flickered on the stone arches and glistened on the naked torsos of the men laboring about the roaring, seething incandescence.
The first six shot, each one an iron ball weighing twenty-four pounds, glowed red. “It’s hot, sir,” a sweat- soaked man shouted through the crooked passage that led from the furnace crypt.
“We’re ready!” an officer outside the crypt called up to the nearest battery.
The guns had already been charged with their bags of powder over which had been rammed thick layers of felt that had been soaked with water. The felt was there to stop the red-hot shot prematurely igniting the powder.
“Bring the shot!” a man shouted from the battery.
A dozen men manhandled the red-hot round shot onto their cradles. The cradles were like stretchers and, at their centers, were shallow iron dishes for holding the heated shot. “Quick now!” the officer said as the men hurried from the crypt and up the stone steps to the waiting guns. The round shot cooled quickly, losing their glow, but the officer knew the heat was deep in the iron’s heart and, when the great guns fired, the redness would come back. A thoroughly heated twenty-four-pound shot could cool for an hour and still retain enough fire in its belly to ignite wood. They were lethal against ships.
“Wait!” a new voice called. The commander of Kronborg Castle, a lieutenant-general who had been hastily summoned from his bed, hurried up the battery steps. He wore a tasseled nightcap and had a black woollen gown over his long nightshirt.
“The shot’s newly heated, sir,” the battery officer, a captain, pointed out respectfully as the furnacemen lowered the cradles beside the waiting barrels where the gunners had giant pincers ready to maneuver the shot into the cannons’ muzzles. The Captain wanted to ram the first six guns and hear the felt wadding hiss. He wanted to see the round shot glowing as they seared across the sea to leave six streaks of redness in the dark, but the fortress’s commander would not give the order to load. Instead the General climbed onto the lip of an embrasure and just gazed out to sea.
Countless ships were entering the channel. They looked ghostly in the night for their white sails were touched by the wan moonlight. They seemed motionless, for there was small wind this night. The General stared. There were hundreds of ships out there, far too many for his handful of guns, and those spectral vessels were bringing guns, horses and men to Denmark. Beyond the fleet, on the Swedish shore, a scatter of glimmering lights showed in the town of Helsingborg. “Have they fired on us?” he asked the Captain.
“No, sir,” the Captain said. The redness was fading on the waiting shot. “Not yet, sir.”
But just then a dull boom sounded from the distant fleet and the General saw a flash of red illumine one of the black-and-yellow hulls.
“Sir!” The Captain was impatient. He wanted his guns to pour their red heat into the dark bellies of the British fleet. He imagined that fleet burning, saw its sails writhing with flame and the sea shivering with fire.
“Wait,” the general said, “wait.”
Another gun fired at sea, but there was no trundling sound of round shot in the air and no splash of a falling shot. There was just the cannon’s dull boom fading in the night, then renewing itself as a third gun fired. “They’re making a salute,” the General said. “Return it. No shot.”
“We salute them?” The Captain sounded incredulous.
The General wrapped his nightgown tighter against the night’s chill, then stepped down from the embrasure. “We are not yet at war, Captain,” he said reproachfully, “and they are offering us a salute, so we shall return the compliment. Fifteen guns, if you please.”
The red-hot round shot cooled.
The ships ghosted southward. They carried an army that had come to crush Denmark.
And Denmark saluted it.
Sharpe could hear voices coming from the parlor across the hall, but the conversation was in Danish so he learned nothing, though he presumed Skovgaard was telling his daughter of Britain’s perfidy. A clock in the house struck ten and was followed by the cacophony of the city’s bells.
Light flared briefly under the small dining room’s door as Skovgaard or his daughter carried candles upstairs, then Sharpe heard the house shutters being closed and their bolts slammed home. Someone tested the door of the room in which he was imprisoned and, satisfied that it was securely locked, pulled the key from the door and walked away.
Sharpe had not been idle. He had explored the room to discover a bureau with drawers, but they held nothing useful, merely linens. He had groped for firedogs in the hearth, thinking he might use them to break down the door, but the fireplace was empty. He had tried the door, but it was solid, locked and immovable.
So now he waited.
Lavisser would kill him. Skovgaard might think the renegade guardsman was a hero, but Sharpe knew better. The Honorable John Lavisser was a thief and a killer. He was escaping from debt in England and it was no longer any wonder that the first man appointed to accompany Lavisser had died, because Lavisser had doubtless wanted a clean start in his new country. Sharpe was nothing but dirt to be swept out of his way.
And Skovgaard was no help. The Dane was dazzled by Lavisser’s patriotic gesture and absurdly impressed that Lavisser was a gentleman with royal connections. So get out of here, Sharpe thought. Get out before Lavisser brought Barker to do his dirty work.
But the dining room’s door was locked and its walls were solidly paneled. Sharpe had tried to lift the floorboards, but they were firmly nailed and he could get no purchase. Yet there was a way out.
He did not want to try. But escape was there, and he had no choice. Or a bad choice. He could wait till morning and then be handed over to Lavisser’s mercies. Or he could do what he feared to do.
Jem Hocking had once tried to sell the young Richard Sharpe to a chimney sweep, only Sharpe had run away. Sweeping was a death sentence. Some boys got trapped in chimneys and suffocated, while the rest were coughing up bloody scraps of their lungs long before they were full grown. So Sharpe had run away and he had never stopped running since, but now he must try and climb like a sweep. Be sure your sin will find you out. He thought of that text as he stooped into the wide hearth. It was clean, but he could smell the rank soot in the shaft above him. He pushed his hands up to find a brick ledge a couple of feet above the hearth’s throat. He did not want to do this. He was frightened of becoming trapped in the narrow black passage, but it was the only way out. Or rather he hoped it was a way out, but he could not be sure. It was possible that the chimney served only the one hearth, in which case it would become ever narrower and he would be blocked, but it was far more likely that this flue would join another. Go up this shaft, he told himself, then drop down the other. It will be easy, he tried to reassure himself, a ten-year-old could do it.
He hauled on the ledge with his hands and scrabbled with his boots to find some purchase on the tiled hearth. He slipped a couple of times, then managed to push and pull his way up through the chimney’s throat. The air stank, but this first bit was easy enough and he clambered onto the ledge and knelt there while he groped up again and felt the flue becoming narrower. The house was only a couple of years old but that had been long enough to leave a thick deposit of soot that crumbled under his fingers and fell into his hair and eyes. His mouth was full of it. He tried to spit, but half choked instead. He could hear the flakes of soot and clinker rattling down into the hearth. Suppose Skovgaard was still downstairs? Suppose someone lit a fire? Common sense told him that was unlikely, but the fear would not go away.
He tried to stand, but the chimney bellied in at the sides and at first he could not squeeze past the bulging bricks so he twisted sideways and tried again. He managed to force his way up into the black hole, but the
