“I pretended to be an American, sir.”
“What did you do?” Cathcart asked. “Spit tobacco juice everywhere?” He had made his name in the war of American independence and reckoned himself an expert on the erstwhile colonies.
“But even if our fellows can survive in the city,” Captain Chase said, “how do we get them inside?”
Francis Jackson, elegant in a black suit and white silk shirt, snipped the end from a cigar. “How do the Danes infiltrate their messengers into the city?”
“Small boats, close inshore, dark nights,” Chase said shortly.
“There’s a small jetty,” Sharpe said diffidently, “a small wooden pier by the citadel where people go to fish. It’s very close to the fort. Too close, maybe.”
“And right under the guns of the Sixtus Battery,” one of Cathcart’s aides observed.
“But a dark night?” Chase was suddenly enthusiastic. “Muffled oars. Blackened boat. Yes, why not? But why land at the pier? Why not row all the way in?”
“There’s a boom across the outer harbor,” Sharpe said, “and across the inner, but the pier’s outside the boom.”
“Ah. The pier it is, then.” Chase smiled, then looked down the table at Cathcart. “But we’d need the Admiral’s permission to send a launch, my lord, and might I suggest, with all the humility at my command, that this is a service best done by sailors? Unless, of course, you have soldiers who can find their way around a darkened ship at night?”
“Cite a verse from the Bible,” Lord Pumphrey observed quietly, “that justifies such an expedition and I am sure Lord Gambier will grant permission.”
One or two men smiled, the others wondered whether the prickly Admiral really would authorize such a gamble. “He’ll give permission when he knows his prize money depends on it,” Baird growled.
There was an embarrassed silence. Prize money, though much appreciated, was rarely acknowledged openly. Every senior officer, army and navy, stood to make a small fortune if the Danes refused to surrender, for then the ships would be prizes of war and worth real money.
“I suspect Lieutenant Sharpe should go with your sailors,” Lord Pumphrey suggested. “He has a certain knowledge of the city.”
“I’m sure we’d welcome him,” Chase said, then looked at his friend. “Would you come?”
Sharpe thought of Astrid. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“But if it were done,” Lord Pumphrey said, “then ‘twere well it were done quickly. Your fellows will be ready to open the bombardment in a day or two, will they not?”
“If we bombard,” Cathcart growled.
“We must,” Jackson insisted.
The argument returned to its old course, whether or not to bomb the city. Sharpe sipped port, listened to Copenhagen’s bells ring the hour, and thought of Astrid.
The devil lurched up the slope and stuck at the top. “For God’s sake push, you heathen bastards!” A sergeant, muddied to his waist, snarled at a dozen men. “Push!” The devil’s eight horses were whipped, the men heaved at the wheels and the devil threatened to slide down the heap of clay. “Put your bloody backs into it!” the Sergeant bellowed. “Push!”
“Much too painful to watch,” Lord Pumphrey said and turned his back. It was the morning after Cathcart’s dinner and his lordship was feeling distinctly fragile. He and Sharpe were on a dune not far from where the devil was stuck and his lordship had an easel on which a very small piece of paper was pinned. He also had a box of watercolor paints, a tumbler of water and a set of brushes with which he was making a picture of Copenhagen’s skyline. “I do thank the Lord I was never intended for the army,” his lordship went on, touching a brush to the paper. “So very noisy.”
The devil inched over the heap of clay and trundled down to the battery. It was a grotesquely heavy cart made for transporting mortars. The mortar carriage rode on the cart while the barrel was slung beneath the rear axle. The battery already possessed six long-barreled twenty-four-pounder guns that had been fetched ashore from a ship of the line; now it was being equipped with as many mortars.
They were evil looking weapons. Just metal pots, really, squat and fat and short. The carriage was a chunk of wood in which the pot was set so it was pointing high into the air with a wedge at its front to change the elevation, though most gunners preferred to adjust their weapon’s range by varying the amount of powder in the charge. Sharpe, watching the men maneuver the devil beneath the three-legged gin that would lift the heavy barrel off the ground and onto the carriage, tried to imagine the gun being fired. There would be no recoil, for the carriage had no wheels or trails and the gun was not being fired horizontally, so instead of leaping back the squat mass of wood and iron would simply try and bury itself in the earth. The mortars being assembled in this battery were all ten-inch weapons, not the biggest, but he imagined the smoking balls arcing high into the clouding sky and thumping down inside Copenhagen.
Lord Pumphrey must have guessed his thoughts. “These guns will be firing at the citadel, Sharpe. Does that assuage your tender conscience?”
Sharpe wondered if he should tell Pumphrey about the orphans in the city, then decided such a description would be wasted on his lordship. “General Cathcart doesn’t seem to want to bombard either, my lord.”
“General Cathcart will do what his political masters instruct him to do,” Pumphrey observed, “and in the absence of any Minister of the Crown he will have to listen to Mister Jackson whether he likes it or not.”
“Not to you, my lord?” Sharpe asked mischievously.
“I am a minion, Sharpe,” Pumphrey claimed, touching his brush to the paint and frowning at his picture. “I am a lowly figure of absolutely no importance. Yet, of course, I shall use whatever small influence I can muster to encourage Cathcart to bombard the city. Beginning tomorrow night, I hope.”
“Tomorrow?” Sharpe was surprised it would be so soon.
“Why ever not? The guns should be ready and the sooner it’s done the better so we can be spared this dreadful discomfort and return to London.” Pumphrey looked quizzically at Sharpe. “But why are you squeamish? Your reputation doesn’t suggest squeamishness.”
“I don’t mind killing men,” Sharpe said, “but I never had a taste for slaughtering women and children. Too easy.”
“Easy victories are the best ones,” Pumphrey said, “and usually the cheapest. And cheapness, you must remember, is the greatest desideratum of governments. I refer, of course, to their expenditure, not to their emoluments. If a man in government cannot become rich then he doesn’t deserve the privileges of office.” He flicked the brush across the top of the paper, smearing clouds out of the grayish paint. “The trouble is,” he said, “that I never know when to finish.”
“Finish?”
“Painting, Sharpe, painting. Too much and the painting will be heavy. Watercolor should be light, suggestive, nothing more.” He stepped back and frowned at the painting. “I think it’s almost there.”
Sharpe looked at the painting. “I think it’s very good, my lord.” He did, too. Pumphrey had wonderfully caught the city’s near magical look with its green spires and domes and red roofs. “I think it’s really good.”
“How very kind you are, Sharpe, how very kind.” Pumphrey seemed genuinely pleased, then shuddered as the Sergeant cursed the men hauling on the lines that would hoist the mortar barrel. There were now fifteen batteries ringing the city’s western edge, the closest ones hard against the protective canal, while offshore the British bomb ships were anchored in an arc facing the citadel and the Sixtus Battery which together guarded the harbor entrance. The Danish gun ships were staying home. In the first few days they had done serious damage to the Royal Navy’s gun ships, for they drew less water and carried heavier ordnance, but the establishment of British shore batteries had driven them away and the city was now effectively locked in a metal embrace.
The boom of the big guns was constant, but they were all Danish as the cannon on the city walls kept a steady fire on the closest British batteries, but the shots were burying themselves in the great bulwarks of earth- filled fascines that protected the guns and mortars. Sharpe, from his vantage point on the dune, could see the smoke wreathing the wall. The city’s copper spires and red roofs showed above the churning cloud. Closer to him, among the big houses and gardens, the earth was scarred by the newly dug British batteries. A dozen houses were burning there, fired by the Danish shells that hissed across the canal. Three windmills had their sails tethered against a blustering wind that blew the smoke westward and fretted the moored fleet that filled the sea
