Sharpe's Prey

The big gate was locked. He glanced up and saw spikes on top of the gate and glints of light on the wall’s coping. There was glass embedded, there, but householders never did the job properly and Sharpe simply went to the house next door and found their gate unlocked. The party wall had no glass on its coping and a convenient store shed gave him access to the top of the wall. He climbed, paused and stared into Lavisser’s backyard.

It was empty. There was a stable and coach house, then a short flight of steps leading into the house, which was dark as pitch. He dropped over the wall and unbolted Lavisser’s back gate to give himself an escape route, then crouched by the stable and examined the house again. There was a dark hole under the stone steps and he suspected it led to the basement. He would start there, but first he stared up at the house again. The uppermost windows were not shuttered and three of them were cracked open, but no lights showed there except the flickering reflection of the fires on the glass. All was still and utterly quiet, yet suddenly his instincts were tight as a drum skin. There was something wrong. Three open windows? All open the same amount? And it had all been too easy so far and it was much too quiet. Those open windows. He stared up at them. They had been opened just enough to let muskets poke through. Were there men there? Or was he imagining things? Yet he sensed he was being watched. He could not explain it, but he was certain this was not nearly so easy as he had imagined.

The house no longer looked dark and vulnerable. It was a threat. One part of his mind told Sharpe he was imagining things, but he had learned to trust instinct. He was being watched, being stalked. There was one way to find out, he thought, and so he took the big gun off his shoulder, cocked it, and positioned himself so he could see only the right-hand window. If he was being watched then the man up there would be waiting for Sharpe to cross the yard, to be in the open space that would serve as a killing ground. But the man would also see death in the seven barrels of the big gun and Sharpe suddenly jerked the weapon up, aiming it at the window and he saw the spark of the flint deep in the room and then the cough of flame at the window sill and he was already rolling back into cover as a musket ball cracked against the brick just inches from his face. Two more guns fired almost immediately, venting smoke from the upper floors. A tile shattered on the stable roof, then a voice shouted and feet sounded on the stone stairs that led from the house. Sharpe leveled the pistol at the steps, fired, then saw more men spilling from the coach house. He dropped the pistol, leveled the seven-barreled gun and pulled the trigger.

The noise, in the confines of the yard, was like a cannon firing. The muzzle flames licked out six feet, filling the air with smoke that was wickedly tangled by ricocheting bullets. A man shouted in pain, but Sharpe was already at the back gate. He hauled it open, slipped into the alley and ran. Two musket balls followed him from the high windows and a few seconds later a pistol was discharged down the alley, but Sharpe was already out of sight. He ran to the front of the hospital where a crowd waited under the bas-relief of the Good Samaritan. Some of them, alarmed by the eruption of gunfire and seeing the big gun in Sharpe’s hand, shouted a question, but he dodged into another alley, ran to its end, turned and twisted down two more and then slowed to catch his breath. God damn it, but they had been ready for him. Why? Why would a man keep a close guard on his house when he was supposedly among friends?

He paused in a deep doorway. If anyone pursued him they had taken the wrong turning, for no one looked in this alley. Sharpe reloaded the seven-barreled gun, doing it by touch, hardly thinking about the powder and shot, instead wondering why Lavisser would have his house manned like a fortress. To protect the gold? Yet if men stood sentry night after night they soon became bored. They dozed. They thought about women instead of watching for enemies and the men in the Bredgade house had been alert, waiting, ready. So there was something new there, something that had made Lavisser very cautious.

And there had been something else new in this strange night. Something that had seemed funny at first, but now struck Sharpe as sinister. He rammed the last bullet home, put the ramrod in its hoops and set off southward. Off to his right the fires still roared and tired men worked the feeble pumps. Brewery carts brought barrels of water from the harbor, but the pumps were hardly touching the fires, though as the church clocks struck one it began to rain and the men fighting the fires at last began to dare feel hope.

Sharpe unlocked Skovgaard’s door. He very much doubted that Skovgaard was at home, and Astrid, he hoped, was sleeping. He went to the kitchen and rooted in the dark for a lantern and a tinderbox. He found both, then carried the light to the warehouse where he discovered Aksel Bang still snoring on his makeshift bed of empty sacks. Sharpe put the lantern and the seven-barreled gun down, then lifted Bang off the sacks, shook him like a terrier killing a rat and flung him hard against a crate of cloves. Bang yelped with pain and blinked up at Sharpe.

“Where is he, Aksel?” Sharpe asked.

“I do not know what you are saying! What is happening?” Bang was still waking up.

Sharpe stepped toward him, lifted him again and slapped his lugubrious face hard. “Where is he?”

“I think you are mad!” Bang said.

“Maybe,” Sharpe said. He thrust Bang against the crate and held him with one hand while he searched the Dane’s blue uniform pockets. He found what he had dreaded in the coat’s tail pockets. Guineas. The golden cavalry of Saint George; new, shining and fresh from the Mint. Sharpe put the coins on the crate one by one while Bang just whimpered. “You bastard,” Sharpe said. “You sold him out for twenty guineas, didn’t you? Why didn’t you make it thirty pieces of silver?”

“You are mad!” Bang said and made a grab for the coins.

Sharpe hit him a stinging blow on the jaw. “Just tell me, Aksel.”

“There is nothing to tell.” A trickle of blood ran down Bang’s long chin.

“Nothing! You go to a prayer meeting with Skovgaard and come back without him? You’re drunk as a judge and you’ve got a pocketful of gold. You think I’m a fool?”

“I trade for myself,” Bang said, wiping the blood from his lips. “Mister Skovgaard approves. I sold some things.”

“What things?”

“Some coffee,” Bang declared, “coffee and jute.”

“You do take me for a bloody fool, Aksel,” Sharpe said. He drew out his pocket knife.

“I have done nothing!” Bang glared at him.

Sharpe smiled and unfolded the blade. “Coffee and jute? No, Aksel, you were selling a soul, and now you’re going to tell me all about it.”

“I have told you the truth!” Bang declared indignantly.

Sharpe pushed him against the crate, then held the blade just under Bang’s left eye. “We’ll take this one first, Aksel. Eyeballs just pop out. It’s not even very painful at first. We’ll have the left one, then the right, and after that I’ll fill the sockets with salt. You’ll be screaming then.”

“No! Please!” Bang screamed now, and feebly tried to push Sharpe away. Sharpe pressed the cold blade into the flesh and Bang squealed like a gelded pig. “No!” he wailed.

“Then tell me the truth, Aksel,” Sharpe said, pressing harder. “I’ll exchange the truth for your eyes.”

The tale was not told straight for Bang desperately wanted to justify himself. Mister Skovgaard, he said, was a traitor to Denmark. He had been supplying news to the British and were not the British the enemies of Denmark? And Ole Skovgaard was a mean, tight-fisted man. “I have worked for him two years now and he has not raised my wages once. A man must have prospects, he must have prospects.”

“Go on,” Sharpe said. He tossed the knife into the air and Bang watched it circle and glitter, then gave a start when the handle slapped back into Sharpe’s hand. “I’m listening,” Sharpe said.

“It is not right what Mister Skovgaard was doing,” Bang said. “He is a traitor to Denmark.” He gave a small whimper, not because of anything Sharpe had done, but because Astrid, in a swathing green robe, had come down to the warehouse. Bang’s scream must have woken her and she was carrying Sharpe’s rifle, half expecting a thief, but now laid the weapon down and looked inquisitively at Sharpe.

“Aksel’s telling us a story,” Sharpe said, “of how he sold your father for twenty pieces of gold.”

“No!” Bang protested.

“Don’t piss on me!” Sharpe shouted, frightening Astrid as much as Bang. “Tell the damned truth!”

The damned truth was that a man had approached Bang and persuaded him that his patriotic duty was to betray Skovgaard. “For Denmark,” Bang insisted. He claimed to have agonized over his decision, but it seems the agony was helped by a promise of gold and when Skovgaard suggested that the two of them attend a prayer meeting Bang had let his new friend know where and when the prayers would be offered. A coach had been