The noise, in the confines of the yard, was like a cannon firing. The muzzle flames licked out six feet, filling the air with smoke that was wickedly tangled by ricocheting bullets. A man shouted in pain, but Sharpe was already at the back gate. He hauled it open, slipped into the alley and ran. Two musket balls followed him from the high windows and a few seconds later a pistol was discharged down the alley, but Sharpe was already out of sight. He ran to the front of the hospital where a crowd waited under the bas-relief of the Good Samaritan. Some of them, alarmed by the eruption of gunfire and seeing the big gun in Sharpe’s hand, shouted a question, but he dodged into another alley, ran to its end, turned and twisted down two more and then slowed to catch his breath. God damn it, but they had been ready for him. Why? Why would a man keep a close guard on his house when he was supposedly among friends?
He paused in a deep doorway. If anyone pursued him they had taken the wrong turning, for no one looked in this alley. Sharpe reloaded the seven-barreled gun, doing it by touch, hardly thinking about the powder and shot, instead wondering why Lavisser would have his house manned like a fortress. To protect the gold? Yet if men stood sentry night after night they soon became bored. They dozed. They thought about women instead of watching for enemies and the men in the Bredgade house had been alert, waiting, ready. So there was something new there, something that had made Lavisser very cautious.
And there had been something else new in this strange night. Something that had seemed funny at first, but now struck Sharpe as sinister. He rammed the last bullet home, put the ramrod in its hoops and set off southward. Off to his right the fires still roared and tired men worked the feeble pumps. Brewery carts brought barrels of water from the harbor, but the pumps were hardly touching the fires, though as the church clocks struck one it began to rain and the men fighting the fires at last began to dare feel hope.
Sharpe unlocked Skovgaard’s door. He very much doubted that Skovgaard was at home, and Astrid, he hoped, was sleeping. He went to the kitchen and rooted in the dark for a lantern and a tinderbox. He found both, then carried the light to the warehouse where he discovered Aksel Bang still snoring on his makeshift bed of empty sacks. Sharpe put the lantern and the seven-barreled gun down, then lifted Bang off the sacks, shook him like a terrier killing a rat and flung him hard against a crate of cloves. Bang yelped with pain and blinked up at Sharpe.
“Where is he, Aksel?” Sharpe asked.
“I do not know what you are saying! What is happening?” Bang was still waking up.
Sharpe stepped toward him, lifted him again and slapped his lugubrious face hard. “Where is he?”
“I think you are mad!” Bang said.
“Maybe,” Sharpe said. He thrust Bang against the crate and held him with one hand while he searched the Dane’s blue uniform pockets. He found what he had dreaded in the coat’s tail pockets. Guineas. The golden cavalry of Saint George; new, shining and fresh from the Mint. Sharpe put the coins on the crate one by one while Bang just whimpered. “You bastard,” Sharpe said. “You sold him out for twenty guineas, didn’t you? Why didn’t you make it thirty pieces of silver?”
“You are mad!” Bang said and made a grab for the coins.
Sharpe hit him a stinging blow on the jaw. “Just tell me, Aksel.”
“There is nothing to tell.” A trickle of blood ran down Bang’s long chin.
“Nothing! You go to a prayer meeting with Skovgaard and come back without him? You’re drunk as a judge and you’ve got a pocketful of gold. You think I’m a fool?”
“I trade for myself,” Bang said, wiping the blood from his lips. “Mister Skovgaard approves. I sold some things.”
“What things?”
“Some coffee,” Bang declared, “coffee and jute.”
“You do take me for a bloody fool, Aksel,” Sharpe said. He drew out his pocket knife.