Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles (68 page)

“I know how the system works, thank you, Sharpe,” Wellesley said coldly. He read off each letter to decipher the hidden message, then finally lowered the newspaper. “You were employed on some obscure business for Sir David Baird, am I right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Lord Pumphrey was entangled in the affair, yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He woke me in London to ask my opinion of you, Sharpe.”

“He did, sir?” Sharpe could not hide his surprise.

“The message is in French, Sharpe,” the General said, carefully folding the paper, “and so far as I can see, it instructs their agents in the city to obey the Crown Prince’s instructions to burn the fleet. I imagine General Cathcart will be interested.” Wellesley thrust the folded paper back to Sharpe. “Take it to him, Sharpe. It looks as if your business is unfinished. Can you still sit on a horse?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You never did it well. Let us pray you have learned better.” He turned to one of his aides. “You will arrange for Lieutenant Sharpe to go north now. Right now! Madame? You are a diplomat, so I must leave you inviolate.”

“Such a pity,” Madame Visser said, clearly entranced by Sir Arthur.

Captain Dunnett seethed, Murray smiled and Madame Visser just shook her head at Sharpe.

Who blew her a kiss.

Then rode north.

T
HE DINNER
was held in one of the big houses in Copenhagen’s suburbs, a house very similar to the one where Skovgaard had lost his two teeth. A dozen men sat about the table that was presided over by General Sir William Cathcart, tenth Baron Cathcart and commander of His Britannic Majesty’s army in Denmark. He was a heavyset and gloomy man with a perpetual look of worry that was being exacerbated by the thin, intense man sitting to his right. Francis Jackson was from the Foreign Office and had been sent to Holstein to negotiate with the Crown Prince long before Cathcart’s forces had left Britain. The Danes had refused Jackson’s demands and now he had come to Copenhagen to insist that Cathcart bombard the city. “I don’t like the notion,” Cathcart grumbled.

“You don’t have to like it,” Jackson said. He peered at the lamb and turnips on his plate as if trying to work out precisely what he had been served. “We must just do it.”

“And swiftly,” Lord Pumphrey supported Jackson. The small, birdlike Pumphrey was seated to Cathcart’s left, thus completing the Foreign Office’s encirclement of the General. His lordship had chosen a white coat edged with gold braid that gave him a vaguely military look, though it was spoiled by the beauty spot that had been fixed to his cheek again. “The weather will become our enemy soon,” he said. “Is that not true, Chase?”

Captain Joel Chase of the Royal Navy, seated at the table’s far end, nodded. “The Baltic becomes very adverse in late autumn, my lord,” Chase answered in his rich Devonshire accent. “Fogs, gales, all the usual nuisances.” Chase had been invited ashore to dine with Cathcart, a courtesy that was extended every night to some naval officer, and he had brought his First Lieutenant, Peel, who had drunk too much and was now fast asleep in his chair. Chase, who had taken care to sit beside Sharpe, now leaned toward the rifleman. “What do you think, Richard?”

“We shouldn’t do it,” Sharpe said. He was sitting far enough from Cathcart for his comment to go unheard.

“We will, though,” Chase said softly. The tall, fair-haired naval Captain commanded the
Pucelle
, the ship on which Sharpe had served at Trafalgar and he had greeted Sharpe with obvious delight. “My dear Richard! How good to see you. And I am so very sorry.” The two men had not met since Grace’s death and it had been aboard Chase’s ship that Grace and Sharpe had loved so passionately. “I did write,” Chase had told Sharpe, “but the letter was returned.”

“Lost the house,” Sharpe said bleakly.

“Hard, Richard, hard.”

“How are things on the
Pucelle
, sir?”

“We struggle by, Richard, struggle by. Let me think, who will you recall? Hopper’s still my bosun, Clouter thrives with a few fingers missing and young Collier has his lieutenant’s exams next month. He ought to pass so long as he doesn’t confuse his trigonometry.”

“What’s that?”

“Tedious stuff that you forget the day after the lieutenant’s exam,” Chase said. He had insisted on sitting next to the rifleman even though seniority should have placed him much closer to Lord Cathcart. “The man’s a bore,” he told Sharpe, “cautious and boring. He’s as bad as the Admiral. No, not quite. Gambier’s a Bible-thumper. Keeps asking if I’ve been washed in the blood of the Lamb.”

“And have you?”

“Bathed, sluiced, washed, drenched and soaked, Sharpe. Reeking of blood.” Chase had smiled, now he listened to the conversation at the table’s far end before leaning close to Sharpe again. “The truth is, Richard, they don’t want to assault the city because it’s too well walled. So we’ll unleash the mortars. Not much choice. It’s either that or have you fellows assault a breach.”

“There are women and children inside,” Sharpe protested too loudly.

Lord Pumphrey, who had been responsible for bringing Sharpe to the dinner, overheard the comment. “There are women, children and ships, Sharpe, ships.”

“Aye, but will there be any ships?” Chase asked.

“There had better bloody be ships,” Sir David Baird growled.

Cathcart ignored Baird, staring instead at Chase whose question had raised alarm around the table. Jackson, the senior diplomat, pushed a gristly scrap of lamb to one side of his plate. “The Danes,” he said, “will surely be reluctant to burn their fleet. They’ll wait till the very last minute, will they not?”

“Last minute or not,” Chase said energetically, “they’ll still burn it and ships burn fast. Remember the
Achille
, Richard?”

“The
Achille
?” Pumphrey asked.

“French seventy-four, my lord, burned at Trafalgar. One minute she was fighting, next minute an incandescent wreck. Incandescent.” He pronounced each syllable cheerfully. “We risk a city full of dead women and children in return for a pile of damp ashes.”

Cathcart, Jackson and Pumphrey all frowned at him. Lieutenant Peel woke himself up by snoring abruptly and looked about the table, startled. “The message concealed in the newspaper,” Lord Pumphrey said, “is presumably addressed to Lavisser?”

“We can assume so,” Jackson agreed, crumbling a piece of bread.

“And it grants him permission from his French masters to carry out the Danish orders to deprive us of the fleet.”

“Agreed,” Jackson said carefully.

“The good news,” Cathcart intervened, “is that thanks to Mister”—he paused, unable to remember Sharpe’s name—“thanks to the Lieutenant’s watchfulness, we intercepted the message.”

Lord Pumphrey smiled. “We can be quite certain, my lord, that more than one copy was sent. It would be usual in such circumstances to take such a wise precaution. We can also be certain that, because Monsieur and Madame Visser are protected by diplomatic agreement, they are free to send more such messages.”

“Precisely so,” Jackson said.

“Ah.” Cathcart shrugged and leaned back in his chair.

“And we shall look remarkably foolish,” Lord Pumphrey continued mildly, “if we were to capture the city and find, as Captain Chase so delicately phrases it, a pile of damp ashes.”

“Damn it, man,” Cathcart said, “we want the ships!”

“Prize money,” Chase whispered to Sharpe. “More wine?”

“But how to stop the ships being fired?” Pumphrey asked the table at large.

“Pray for rain,” Lieutenant Peel suggested, then blushed. “Sorry.”

General Baird frowned. “They’ll have their incendiaries ready,” he observed.

“You can explain that, Sir David?” Jackson asked.

“They’ll have stuffed the ships with incendiaries,” Baird said. “Canvas bales filled with saltpeter, mealed powder, sulphur, resin and oil”—Baird listed the ingredients with an indecent relish—“and once the fuses are lit those boats will be pure flames in three minutes. Pure flames!” He smiled, then used a candle to light a dark cigar.

“Dear God,” Jackson murmured.

“It probably isn’t sufficient then,” Lord Pumphrey spoke very judiciously, “to remove Captain Lavisser from the city?”

“Remove him?” Cathcart asked, startled.

Lord Pumphrey, so small and frail, drew a finger across his throat, then shrugged. “The message suggests that our renegade is the officer charged with delivering the order to burn the fleet, but alas, if he is absent then someone else will surely give the order.”

Everyone stared at the diminutive Pumphrey. Baird, approving the idea of killing Lavisser, smiled, but most of the other officers looked shocked. Jackson just shook his head sadly. “One devoutly wishes that such a simple solution would obviate our problem, but alas, the Danes will have other men ready to start a conflagration.” He sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “It will be a terrible defeat,” he mused, “if we were to come this far and lose the prize.”

“But, damn it, the Frogs won’t get the ships!” Cathcart protested. “That’s the point, ain’t it?”

“A most craven defeat,” Jackson said, ignoring the General’s words, “for all the King’s horses and all the King’s men to have come this far merely to provoke a bonfire. We shall be the laughingstock of Europe.” He made the last observation to Cathcart with the obvious insinuation that his lordship would be the butt of the joke.

General Baird signaled a waiter to bring the decanter of port. “Will the ships be fully manned?” he demanded.

No one answered, but most looked to Chase for an answer. The naval Captain shrugged as if to suggest he did not know. Sharpe hesitated, then spoke up. “The sailors have been added to the garrison, sir.”

“So how many men are left aboard?” Baird demanded.

“Two or three,” Chase opined. “The ships aren’t in danger where they are, so why have crews aboard? Besides, I’m sure they’re
en flûte.”

“They’re what?” Baird asked.

“
En flûte
, Sir David. Their guns will have been taken ashore to add to the garrison’s ordnance, so their gunports are empty like a flute’s fingerholes.”

“Why didn’t you damn well say so?”

“And ships
en flûte
,” Chase went on, “won’t need crews, or nothing more than a couple of fellows to keep an eye on the mooring lines, pump out the bilges and be ready to light the fuses.”

“A couple of fellows, eh?” Baird asked. “Then the question is, I suppose, how do we get a few of our fellows into the inner harbor?” Cathcart just stared at him wide-eyed. Jackson sipped port. “Well?” Baird inquired belligerently.

“I was there last week,” Sharpe said. “Walked in. No guards.”

“You can’t send men into the city! They won’t last an hour!” Cathcart protested.

“Sharpe did,” Lord Pumphrey said in his delicately high voice. He was staring at the chandelier, apparently fascinated by a lengthening strand of wax that threatened to drip into the dessert bowl. “You lasted a good few days, didn’t you, Sharpe?”

“You did?” Cathcart stared at Sharpe.

“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.”