“Because they’re all mad.”
“It is wrong,” she said fiercely. “I cannot believe it’s happening. It is awful! I must leave Father a message.” She vanished into the warehouse office for a moment, then reappeared wearing a coat and hat. She locked the front door and then, as though they were old friends, put her arm though his. “Come,” she said, leading him toward the hellish red glow and snarling noise of the fire. “I should be angry with you.”
“I’m angry with them,” Sharpe said.
“Don’t they know there are women and children here?”
“They know.”
“Then why?” She asked it fiercely.
“Because they don’t want your fleet filled with Frenchmen trying to invade England.”
“We would burn the fleet before the French took it. Before you take it as well,” Astrid said, then gripped his arm tightly as three bombs exploded in quick succession. “If the fire is near the hospital,” she explained, “we have to fetch the children out. You will help?”
“Of course.”
The sound of the bombs grew louder as they neared the citadel. The missiles were hurtling down into the Danish fort and turning its center into a cauldron. The small nearby streets were untouched by the bombardment and were full of people who stared at the reddened smoke boiling out of the citadel’s walls. The children’s hospital was untouched. Astrid took Sharpe inside, but no help was needed, for a sozen other women had come to soothe the children who were now gathered in the dispensary listening to a story. Sharpe stayed in the courtyard, half hiding in the shadows under the balcony, and he was still there when a half-dozen Danish officers came through the orphanage’s arched gate. They were led by an elderly, heavyset man in a dark cloak and a gilded cocked hat. It seemed he had come to check whether the hospital was damaged, nothing more. Some of his aides looked curiously at Sharpe for he still had the two guns on his shoulders and his greatcoat was plainly not a Danish uniform, but they seemed reassured when Astrid came back to the courtyard and joined him. “That is General Peymann,” she whispered.
The General was talking with the hospital’s warden while his aides stood beneath the mast-rigged flagpole. Lavisser was not among them. “Ask him where Lavisser is,” Sharpe said to Astrid.
“I can’t do that!”
“Why not? Tell him you want to congratulate Lavisser for changing sides.”
Astrid hesitated, then did what Sharpe wanted. One of the aides accosted her and clearly wanted to know who Sharpe was, for he glanced at the rifleman as he spoke. Astrid told him something, then curtseyed to General Peymann who took off his hat and bowed to her. A long conversation followed and Sharpe had just enough experience of the city to understand they would be discussing common acquaintances, but at last it ended, the General bowed again and then led his men back into the street. “I told them you were from the American ship in the harbor,” Astrid said.
“Is there an American ship in the harbor?”
“The Phoebe from Baltimore.”
“And what else were you talking about?”
“His wife’s cousin is married to our pastor’s uncle,” she told him, then saw she was being teased. “I asked him about Lavisser,” she said, “and he is not on official duty tonight, but the General thinks he will be helping to put out the fires.” She took Sharpe’s arm and led him into the street where the women stood in front of their houses watching the fires and the falling bombs. They gasped when a carcass arched overhead. The sphere’s contents had already caught fire and it spun as it flew, spewing great spirals of flame so that it looked like an enraged flying dragon as it plunged toward the citadel. Astrid flinched as a ready magazine in the fort exploded. A constellation of sparks seared up into the night, streaking the smoke livid. The sky stank of powder, the smell as thick as on any battlefield. The Danish guns on the walls were firing back, adding their noise and smoke to the night. Astrid took Sharpe into the sailors’ graveyard where her small son was buried. “My father said that if the English bombed the city he would never work for England again.”