Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles (71 page)

The ship was dark as a tomb. No one challenged them. They groped down companionways until they had reached the empty lower deck. And there, come like thieves in the night, they waited.

G
ENERAL
P
EYMANN
peered at the letter which had been brought to the city by two British officers under a flag of truce. The officers were waiting outside one of the gates for his answer.

The letter was in English and the General’s command of that language was not sufficient to understand the elaborate courtesies demanded by diplomacy so he gave the paper to Lavisser. “Perhaps you’d translate, Major?”

Lavisser read his translation aloud. He hurried through the flowery compliments, then slowed when he came to what was little more than a demand for the city’s surrender. “ ‘We, the undersigned, at this moment, when our troops are before your gates, and our batteries ready to open, do renew to you the offer of the same advantageous and conciliatory terms which were proposed through His Majesty’s ministers to your court.’ Nothing new there, sir,” Lavisser commented. “ ‘If you will consent to deliver up the Danish fleet, and to our carrying it away, it shall be held in deposit for His Danish Majesty, and shall be restored, with all its equipments, in as good a state as it is received, as soon as the provisions of the general peace shall remove the necessity which has occasioned this demand.’ It’s signed by both Admiral Gambier and General Cathcart, sir,” Lavisser said, tossing the letter down.

Peymann sat at the table and gazed gloomily at the letter. “They don’t say anything about bombarding the city?”

“Not in so many words, sir.”

“But will they?” Peymann demanded.

“They daren’t,” another aide answered. “They will earn the scorn of all Europe.”

“But if they do,” a third aide put in, “we shall have to endure. The fire brigades are ready.”

“What fire brigades?” Lavisser asked sarcastically. “There are just seven pumping engines in the whole city.”

“Seven? Only seven?” Peymann was alarmed.

“Two are being repaired, sir.”

“Seven isn’t enough!”

“Burn the fleet,” Lavisser suggested. “When they see the prize is gone, sir, they’ll go away.”

“We are here to protect the fleet,” Peymann said. “We will burn it if we must, but only at the very last moment.” He sighed, then gestured for a clerk to write a reply to the British demand. “My Lords,” he dictated, then thought for a moment. “We remain convinced that our fleet, our very own indisputable property, is as safe in His Danish Majesty’s hands as ever it can be in those of the King of England.” That, he thought, was very felicitous. Should he mention the possibility of a bombardment? He decided, on balance, that he should try to jog the British conscience. “Our master never intended any hostilities against yours,” he went on, “and if you are cruel enough to endeavor to destroy a city that has not given you the least cause for such treatment, then it must submit to its fate.” He watched the clerk write. “They won’t bombard,” he said, almost to himself. “They won’t.”

“They cannot,” an aide agreed.

“It would be barbarous,” another said.

“It will be a siege, I’m sure,” Peymann said, hoping he was right.

That would be the last thing that Chase and his men would want, for they must hide until the city surrendered and even the ever optimistic Chase did not believe their luck could hold through the weeks or months of a prolonged siege. Chase had only dared come into the city because he believed that the Danish surrender would come swiftly once the mortars began their work. “Mind you,” he told Sharpe in the morning, “we could probably live here for months. The bottom’s full of salt pork. There’s even some water barrels. A bit rank, but nothing worse than we usually drink.” Dawn had revealed that they were on board the largest ship in the Danish fleet, the 96-gun
Christian VII.
“She’s almost new,” Chase told Sharpe, “and beautifully built. Beautiful!” The ship had been emptied of her crew, guns and ammunition, though great canvas bundles of incendiaries had been placed throughout her decks with fuses leading up to the forecastle. There were no Danes aboard, though in the afternoon, when most of Chase’s bored men were sleeping, there was the thump of footsteps. The men, concealed in the forward magazine, took hold of their weapons while an alarmed Chase put a finger to his lips.

The footsteps came down to the deck immediately above them. There seemed to be two people, perhaps come to check the fuses or maybe to sound the ship’s well, but then one of the intruding couple laughed and sang a snatch of song. It was a woman’s voice and a moment later new sounds betrayed why the couple had come aboard. “If they fight as hard as they—” Collier whispered, but Chase silenced the Midshipman.

The couple eventually left and Chase’s men ate bread and hog’s puddings. “Florence sends the puddings to me,” Chase said, “and she tells me these ones are made from our very own pigs. Delicious, eh? So”—he cut another slice from the pale fat sausage—“what do you plan to do, Richard?”

“I have a man to hunt,” Sharpe said. And a woman to see, he added to himself. He had been tempted to go to Ulfedt’s Plads during the long day, but prudence had suggested he wait till dark.

Chase thought for a moment. “Why don’t you wait till the city surrenders?”

“Because he’ll be in hiding by then, sir. But I’ll be safe enough tonight.” Especially, Sharpe thought, if the bombardment began.

Chase smiled. “Safe?”

“When those shells begin to fall, sir, you could march the 1st Foot Guards stark naked through the city center and no one would notice them.”

“If they bombard,” Chase said. “Maybe the Danes will see sense first? Maybe they’ll surrender?”

“I pray so,” Sharpe said fervently, but he suspected the Danes would be stubborn. Their pride was at stake and perhaps they did not really believe the British would use their mortars and howitzers.

The sun came out that afternoon. It dried the rain-drenched city and glinted off the green copper roofs and cast filmy shadows from the smoke of the Danish guns. Those guns had hammered all day, churning the earth and fascines about the British batteries. The big naval guns, brought from the empty ships in the basin, were mounted
en barbette
, meaning there were not enough embrasures to protect them so the weapons were firing directly over the wall’s parapet and British gunner officers hungrily watched those pieces through their telescopes. Guns
en barbette
were easily destroyed.

The British mortars squatted in their beds. Their shells had their fuses already cut. All that was needed now was a decision to use them.

The sun sank across Zealand to leave a flaming sky. The last ray of the sun shone on a white-crossed Danish flag that hung from the tallest of the city’s mast cranes. The flag glowed, then the earth’s shadow engulfed it and another day was gone. The Danish guns stopped firing and their smoke slowly dissipated as it drifted westward. In the church of Our Savior, which had a handsome staircase winding outside its soaring spire, a prayer meeting called on God to spare the city and to imbue General Peymann with wisdom. General Peymann, oblivious of the prayers, sat down to a supper of pilchards. Three babies, born that day in the Maternity Hospital that lay between Bredgade and Amaliegade, slept. One of their mothers had the fever and the doctors wrapped her in flannel and fed her a mixture of brandy and gunpowder. More brandy and barrels of akvavit were being drunk in the city’s taverns which were full of sailors released from their duties on the walls. The city’s seven fire engines, great metal tanks mounted on four-wheeled carts with monstrous double-levered pumps on their tops, sat waiting at street corners. Another prayer meeting, this one in Holman’s Church, the sailors’ shrine, beseeched that the fire engines would not be needed, while in the arsenal on Tojhusgade the last refurbished muskets were handed out to the newest volunteers of the militia. If the British made a breach and assaulted the city then those brewery workers and clerks, carpenters and masons, would have to defend their homes. On Toldboden, in a small shop beside the Customs House Quay, a tattooist worked on a sailor’s back, making an intricate drawing of the British lion being drowned by a pair of Danish seamen.

“There are rules of war,” General Peymann told his supper guests, “and the British are a Christian nation.”

“They are, they are,” the university chaplain agreed, “but they’re also a very disputatious people.”

“But they will not treat women and children as combatants,” Peymann insisted. “Not Christian women and children. And this is the nineteenth century!” the General protested. “Not the Middle Ages.”

“These are very fine pilchards,” the chaplain said. “You get them from Dragsteds, I assume?”

In fifteen British batteries and on board sixteen bomb ships and in ten launches that had been specially fitted to hold smaller mortars, the officers consulted their watches. Rockets, launched from triangular frames, were set up beside the land batteries. It was not quite dark yet, but dark enough to conceal the batteries from the watchers on the city wall who did not see the heavy fascines protecting the long guns being dragged aside.

The clouds were breaking and the first stars showed above the city.

A linstock glowed red in a forward battery.

“They threaten to behave abominably,” General Peymann averred, “and hope we believe the threat. But common sense and humanity will prevail. Must prevail.”

“Christianity must prevail,” the university chaplain insisted. “A direct attack on civilians would be an offense against God himself. Is that thunder? And I thought the weather was clearing.”

No one answered and no one moved. It had sounded like thunder, but Peymann knew better. A gun had fired. It was far off, but the sound was heavy, the gut-pounding percussion of a heavy-caliber mortar. “God help us,” the General said softly, breaking the silence about his table.

The first bomb arced upward, its burning fuse trailing a thin red line of sparks and a tenuous trail of smoke. It was a signal, and from all around the city’s western edge and from the boats moored in the sound the other mortars fired. Howitzers slammed back on their trails to send their shells after the mortar bombs.

The burning fuses of the bombs reached up, red sparks curving in the night.

The gunners were reloading. The first bombs looked like livid shooting stars. Then, as they began their shrieking fall, the bomb trails converged. God had not shown mercy, the British possessed none and Copenhagen must suffer.

T
HE FIRST
bomb broke through a roof with a cascade of splintering tiles, drove down through a plaster ceiling and lodged on an upper landing where, for an instant, it lay with a smoking fuse. Then, bumping and smoking, it rolled down a flight of stairs to lodge on a half landing. No one was in the house.

For a moment it seemed the mortar shell would not explode. The fuse burned into the hole of the wooden plug and the smoke just died away. Flakes of plaster dropped from the shattered ceiling. The bomb, a thirteen-inch black ball, just lay there, but the fuse was still alive, burning down through the last inch of saltpeter, sulphur and mealed powder until the spark met the charge and the bomb ripped the top story apart just as the other bombs of the first salvo came crashing down into the nearby streets. A seven-year-old girl, put to bed without supper for giggling during family prayers, was the first of the city’s inhabitants to die, crushed by an eleven-inch mortar shell that burst through her bedroom ceiling.

The first fires began.

Eighty-two mortars were firing. Their range was adjusted by varying the amount of powder in the charge and the gunners had specified the quantities of the different batteries to make sure the bombs all fell in the same areas of the city. In the north they were dropping the missiles into the citadel’s interior, while to the south the bombs were crashing into the streets closest to the wall. The crews of the fire engines trundled their heavy machines toward the first fires, but were obstructed by people trying to escape the bombs. A thirteen-inch shell cracked into a crowd, miraculously touching no one. Its fuse glowed red and a man attempted to extinguish it with his boot, but the bomb exploded and the man’s foot, trailing blood, arced over the screaming street. There was blood and flesh on the house fronts. Families tried to carry their valuables away from the threatened area, further congesting the alleys. Some folk took refuge in the churches, believing there would be sanctuary from the enemy in sacred walls, but the churches burned as easily as the houses. One bomb exploded in an organ loft, scattering pipes like straws. Another killed ten people in a nave. Some bombs failed to explode and lay black and malevolent where they fell. An artist, hurriedly assembling paper, pencils and charcoal, had a smaller shell plunge through his roof and lie smoking next to his unmade bed. He picked up the chamber pot, which he had still not emptied from the night before, and upended it on the missile. There was a hiss as the fuse was extinguished, then a vile stink.