Bernard Cornwell – 1807 09 Sharpe’s Prey

“Will you?”

He nodded. The question, he thought, was not would he, but could he? Could he live here? Could he deal with a querulous Ole Skovgaard, with a strange language and the stifling respectability? Then Astrid rested her head on his shoulder and he knew he did not want to lose her. He sat silent, watching the dark suffuse the window, and he thought of Lord Pumphrey’s confidence that the next few years would bring enough war to guarantee promotion and he reflected that he had never proved himself as an officer. He had shown he was a soldier, but he was still floundering as an officer. A company of greenjackets, he thought, and a French enemy to be humbled, that was a dream that would be worth pursuing. But a man must make choices, and that thought made him squeeze Astrid’s fingers.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Sharpe said, and he saw Christ’s dark-blue robe turn purple and His white eyes flash livid red. You must be dreaming, he thought, then the colors faded to darkness again and he heard the thump and he instinctively put his arms around Astrid and covered her body with his as the bomb exploded beyond the window and the stained glass, all its blues and golds and scarlets and greens, shattered into a thousand shards that screamed through the chapel. Smoke boiled after it, and then there was silence broken only by the skittering of broken glass across the chapel floor. It was like an indrawing of breath.

Before the other bombs began to fall.

The British had fired close to five thousand bombs on the first night of the bombardment and they had watched the fires rage beyond the walls and had been certain that another night of pain would persuade the Danes to surrender the city. They fired far fewer bombs the second night, a mere two thousand, thinking that would be sufficient to satisfy the garrison’s honor, but in the morning, when the smoke covered the city like a pall, no message came from the city, the Danish flag still flew above the citadel and the guns on the shot-scarred ramparts opened a defiant fire. So now, on the third night, they would drown Copenhagen in fire. All day they had replenished the magazines, hauling wagon after wagon of bombs to the batteries, and as soon as darkness fell the great guns began their battering until the very ground seemed to throb with the hammering of the mortars and the recoil of howitzers. The sky flickered with fuse traces and was tangled with smoke trails.

The gunners had changed their aim, planning to devastate new areas of the city. Bombs and carcasses rained onto the cathedral and the university, while other shells reached deeper into the maze of streets to punish the defenders for their stubbornness. The bomb ships quivered with each discharge and rocket trails whipped fire across the clouds. The seven engines did their best. The teams of men pumped the long handles to spurt sea-water on the flames, but as new fires sprang up so the men deserted the machines to go and protect their families. The streets were overwhelmed by panicked refugees. Bombs cracked down, the flames roared, walls collapsed, the city burned.

General Peymann stood on the citadel wall and watched the fires spring up in a dozen places. He saw spires and steeples outlined by fire, saw them fall and watched the sparks spew in pillars of red through which the bombs crashed down. Pigeons, woken from their nests, flew about the flames until they fell burning. Why, Peymann wondered, did they not fly away? A rocket struck the cathedral’s dome and bounced up into the sky where it exploded just as a bomb crashed though the dome’s tiles. The whole of Skindergade was alight, then a carcass broke through the roof of Skovgaard’s warehouse on Ulfedt’s Plads and the sugar caught fire. The flames spread with brutal speed, making the district as bright as day. A school in Suhmsgade that had become a home for refugees was struck by three bombs. The shops on Frederiksborggade and in Landemaerket were burning and Peymann felt an immense and impotent anger as he watched the destruction. “Is Major Lavisser here?” the General asked an aide.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *