A score of fires started. The fiercest broke up through the roofs as more bombs hammered down into the flames. The British had begun to fire carcasses now, hollow shells designed to burn rather than explode. The heaviest, fired from the big thirteen-inch mortars, weighed as much as a man and were stuffed with saltpeter, sulfur, antimony and pitch. They burned with a furnace-like intensity, the fire seething out of holes bored in their metal shells and no mere fire pump could quench such horrors. There was still a vestige of evening light in the watercolor sky through which the fuses of the plunging bombs left threads of smoke. The threads wavered, mingled in the wind and vanished, only to be renewed as more bombs and carcasses fell. Then the threads were touched with red as flame blossomed out of the thicker, boiling smoke that churned up from a city of cratered cobbles, broken rafters and burning homes. Scraps of shell casing whistled in city streets. The first fire came and the western edge of the city was ringed by the noise and flaring lights of the batteries. The bomb ships shuddered as their mortars fired, each flash illuminating the chain rigging with a deep red light shrouded in smoke. The British long guns fired at the wall, their targets conveniently outlined by the glare of the city fires, while the rockets flared and hissed to carry their explosive heads in wild trajectories that plunged indiscriminately into city streets.
Sharpe walked into the city. He carried the rifle on one shoulder and the seven-barreled gun on the other, but no one took any particular notice of him. Men were running toward the fires, families were fleeing them and the whole city reverberated to the thump of the bombs. Sharpe was going to Skovgaard’s warehouse because he did not know what else he could do. There was little point in visiting Bredgade for he was certain Lavisser would be with his General or else on the city walls, and Sharpe did not know how to find him.
So Lavisser could live an extra day and Sharpe would go to Astrid. It was what he wanted, what he had been thinking of all day as he waited in the stinking and dark lower deck of the Danish warship. Sharpe could not be certain that Astrid would welcome him while British bombs were shaking the city, but instinct told him she would be pleased. Her father would almost certainly be disapproving, while Aksel Bang would seethe, but to hell with them both.
It was dark now, but the city was lit red. Sharpe could hear the crackle and roar of flames punctuated by the crash of bombs falling through rafters and floors, and by the belly-punching blows as the powder charges exploded. He saw a fallen rocket skidding up a street, spewing sparks and terrifying a horse that was dragging barrels of sea-water from the harbor. A spire was outlined in red and surrounded by smoke. Sharpe became momentarily lost in the tangle of alleys, then smelt the gin distillery and followed his nose to Ulfedt’s Plads which was well clear of the district where the bombs were falling. He knocked hard on Skovgaard’s door, just as he had on the first night he had arrived in Copenhagen.
He heard a window thrown up and he stepped back. “Mister Skovgaard!” he shouted.
“Who is it?” It was Astrid who answered.
“Astrid!”
There was a pause. “Lieutenant Sharpe?” There was disbelief in her voice, but no disapproval. “Is it you?” she asked. “Wait!” Sharpe’s instinct had been right because she smiled when she opened the door, but then she frowned. “You should not be here!”
“I am.”
She stared at him for a heartbeat, then turned down the hall. “I will get a coat,” she said as she went to a cupboard. “My father is not here. He went to a prayer meeting with Aksel, but I wanted to go to the orphanage and I promised Father I wouldn’t go alone. Now you’re here.” She smiled at him a second time. “Why are you here?” @@@
“I think you English are as mad as you are cruel. I must find a key.” She found the front door key. “Why are you bombing us?”