Astrid was shivering, though it was hardly cold. “Those men,” she said falteringly.
“The same men as before,” Sharpe said, “and they’ve got the house in Bredgade tight as a prison.”
“What are they doing to him?”
“Asking him questions,” Sharpe said. And he did not doubt that the questions would eventually be answered, which meant that those answers had to stay in Copenhagen. The list of names had to be kept from the French, but that meant getting into the house on Bredgade and Sharpe could not do that without help.
He put his hands on Astrid’s shoulders. “I’m going out again,” he told her, “but I’ll be back, I promise I’ll be back. Stay here. Can you keep the warehouse closed? And don’t let Aksel out.”
“I won’t.”
“He’ll be weeping on you. He’ll be claiming he’s thirsty or hungry or dying, but don’t listen. If you or the maids open that door he’ll jump on you. That’s what he wants.”
“He just wants money,” she said bitterly.
“He wants you, love. He thinks that if your father vanished then you’d cling to him. He wants you, the warehouse, the money, everything.” He hefted the seven-barreled gun. “Keep the house locked,” he warned her. “No one comes or goes except me. And I’ll be back.”
It was almost dawn. The fires were going out slowly, though the fiercest of the blazes still lit a darkness in which no bombs fell, just a greasy ash that dropped like black snow in the dying night. Houses burned white hot and the water spurted by the feeble pumps was turned to steam that joined the thick smoke smearing the sky all across Zealand. Water was scarce for the city’s supply had been cut and the pumps had to wait for barrels to be fetched from the harbor and that took time, yet slowly the clanking pumps and the small rain contained the fires. The tired men could smell roasted flesh in the embers. Coffins were laid in the streets, while the hospitals were filled with whimpering people.
Sharpe headed toward the harbor.
To give John Lavisser hell.
CHAPTER 10
Captain Joel Chase scarcely dared believe his luck. All night his men had scrambled from ship to ship and found not a living Danish soul aboard the great warships. The fleet had been stripped of its seamen who had been sent to serve the great guns on the city walls, stand guard on the ramparts or carry water to the fire pumps. Chase had worried that perhaps the laid-up ships were being used as dormitories for the crews, but there were no slung hammocks and Chase realized that no sailor would be allowed to live aboard in case some fool should drop a speck of glowing tobacco near a fuse. The crews had evidently been billeted in the city and the Danish fleet had become the kingdom of rats and of Chase’s men, who worked in the dark to sever fuses and dump incendiaries overboard. Where the incendiaries were on open decks, easily visible to a casual inspection, they were left, but the bundles on the lower decks were eased through gunports and lowered to the harbor’s stinking water.
Sharpe came back to the inner harbor just before dawn. A small mist drifted through the fleet’s rigging as he crouched under the forepeak of the Christian VII. “Pucelle!” he hissed, “Pucelle!”
“Sharpe?” It was Midshipman Collier who, with two men, was serving as Chase’s picket.
“Help me aboard. Where’s the Captain?”
Chase was in the captain’s cabin on board the Skiold where, in the small light of a shielded lantern, he combed through the charts of the Baltic. “Extraordinary detail, Richard! Far better than our own. See this shoal off Riga? Not even marked on my charts. Tommy Lister, a splendid fellow, almost lost the Naiad on that shoal and the fools in Admiralty swore it wasn’t there. We’ll take these. You’ll have a brandy? This captain does himself well.”
“What I want,” Sharpe said, “is two or three men.”
“When people say two or three,” Chase said, pouring the brandies, “they usually mean four or five.”
“Two will do,” Sharpe said.
“And for what?” Chase asked. He sat on the cushioned bench under the stern window and listened to Sharpe. The city clocks struck four and a thin gray light began to show at the Skiold’s stern windows as Sharpe finished. Chase sipped his brandy. “So let me summarize,” he said. “There is a man, this Skovgaard, who may or may not be alive, but whose rescue would be in Britain’s best interest?”