nodded, satisfied with the promise, and walked away. His pockets were heavy with gold. Chase and his men would become rich this day, and doubtless Lord Pumphrey would skim a share before he returned the gold to the Treasury, but Sharpe, despite the weight in his pockets, would not be rich.
Nor would he stay in Denmark. Ole Skovgaard had forbidden his daughter to marry the Englishman. Sick as Skovgaard was, he had summoned the force to utter the refusal and Astrid would not disobey him. Now, when Sharpe came to the big house in Vester Faslled, she looked close to tears. “He will not change his mind,” she said.
“I know.”
“He hates Britain now,” she said, “and he hates you, and he says you are not a Christian and I cannot… “ She shook her head, unable to go on, then frowned as Sharpe took lumps of blackened gold and handfuls of coins distorted by heat from his pockets. “You think that will change his mind?” Astrid asked. “Money will not persuade him.”
“It’s not for him. Nor for you, unless you want it,” Sharpe said as he took the last guinea and added it to the rest on the harpsichord. The house had been a billet for British officers during the bombardment and the fine wooden floor was marked with boot nails and the rugs were smeared with dried mud. “You said you wanted to rebuild the orphanage,” Sharpe said, “so now you can.”
“Richard!” Astrid tried to push the gold back to him, but he would not take it.
“I don’t want it,” he said. He did want it, he wanted it badly, but he had stolen enough guineas in the last month and, besides, he wanted Astrid’s dream to come true even more than he wanted this gold. “Give it to the children,” he said, and then she just wept and he held her.
“I cannot go against my father’s wishes,” she said at last. “It would not be right.”
“No,” he said, and he did not really understand her obedience but he did understand that it was important to her. He stroked her hair. “Someone told me this was a very respectable society,” he said, “and I reckon I wouldn’t have fitted. I’m not godly enough, so maybe it’s for the best. But one day, who knows, perhaps I’ll come back?”
He walked away, going through the nearby cemetery where a great pit was being dug for the fire-shrunken dead.
That night, in Amalienborg Palace, Lord Pumphrey carefully took part of the gold and stored it in his valise. The remaining gold—he reckoned it was worth about nine thousand pounds—would be returned to the Bank of England and the Honorable John Lavisser could conveniently be blamed for all that was missing. “You could let Sharpe take it back,” he told Sir David Baird next day.
“Why Sharpe?”
“Because I want him out of Copenhagen,” Pumphrey said.
“What’s he done now?”
“What he has done,” Pumphrey said in his precise voice, “is exactly what I asked him to do, and he has done it exceedingly well. I commend him to you, Sir David. But among the things I asked him to do was to keep two people alive, which he did, only it is no longer in His Majesty’s interest that they should live.” Pumphrey smiled and drew a delicate finger across his throat.
Baird raised a cautionary hand. “Tell me no more, Pumphrey. I don’t want to be privy to your dirty world.”
“How very wise you are, Sir David. But remove Sharpe quickly, if you would be so kind. He has an inconveniently gallant soul and I don’t want to make an enemy of him. He could be useful to me again.”
The city still spewed smoke when Sharpe left. Autumn was in the air, brought by a cold wind from Sweden, but the sky was clear, spoiled only by the great feathered smear of smoke that drifted across Zealand. The smoke stayed in Sharpe’s sight even when the city vanished beneath the Pucelle’s horizon. Astrid, he thought, Astrid, and at least he no longer thought only of Grace, and he was still confused, except he did now know what he was doing. He was going back to the barracks, back to his quartermaster’s duties, but at least with the promise that he would not be left behind when the regiment next sailed to war. And there would be war. France was beneath that smoke-filled horizon and she was the mistress of all Europe now, and until France was beaten there would be no peace. It was a soldier’s world now, and he was a soldier.
Chase joined him at the stern rail. “You’ve got some leave coming, haven’t you?”
“A month, sir. I’m not due at Shorncliffe till October.”
“Then you’ll come to Devon with me. It’s time you met Florence, a dear soul! We can go shooting, perhaps? I won’t take a refusal, Richard.”
“Then I won’t offer you one, sir.”
“There, look! Kronborg Castle.” Chase pointed at the green copper roofs that shone in the sunset. “Know what happened there, Richard?”
“Hamlet.”
“My God, you’re right.” Chase tried to hide his surprise. “I asked young Collier when we were coming the other way and he didn’t have the first idea!”
“Did he die?”
“Who? Collier? Of course not, he’s right as rain.”
“Hamlet, sir.”
“Of course he died. Don’t you know the play? Maybe you don’t,” Chase added in a hurry. “Not everyone does.”
“What’s it about?”
“A fellow who can’t make up his mind, Sharpe, and dies of indecision. A lesson to us all.”
Sharpe smiled. He was remembering Lavisser’s fulsome friendliness when they had sailed past Kronborg, and how Lavisser had quoted some words from the play, and how Sharpe had liked the guardsman then. And he remembered how tempted he had been on the burning balcony. Part of him had wanted to take Lavisser’s friendship, to take the gold and the opportunity and the adventure, but in the end he had pulled the trigger because he had to live with himself. Though God alone knew where that would take him.
Night fell. The smoke of a broken city vanished in the dark.
And Sharpe sailed home, a soldier.
Historical note
