“You, sir?”
“Lord Cathcart’s in charge,” Baird allowed, “but he’s an old woman. I’ll be there, Sharpe, and God help the Danes if I am. And your friend Wellesley”-he said the name sourly-“is tagging along to see if he can learn something.”
“He’s no friend of mine, sir,” Sharpe said. It was true that Wellesley had made him into an officer, but Sharpe had not seen the General since India. Nor did he relish any such meeting. Grace had been a cousin of Wellesley’s, a very distant cousin, but disapproval of her behavior had spread into the furthest reaches of her aristocratic family.
“I’m your friend, Mister Sharpe,” Baird said wolfishly, “and I don’t mind admitting I want you to fail. A fight in Denmark? I could relish that. No more talk of a man who can only fight in India.” The bitterness was naked. Baird felt he had been unfairly treated in India, mostly because Wellesley had been offered the preferments that Baird believed he deserved. No wonder he wanted war, Sharpe thought.
They reached Harwich in the evening. The fields surrounding the small port were filled with tented camps while the damp pastures were crammed with cavalry and artillery horses. Guns were parked in the town streets and were lined wheel to wheel on the stone quay where, beside a small pile of expensive leather baggage, a man as tall and broad as Baird stood waiting. The man was dressed in servant’s black and Sharpe at first took him to be a laborer wanting a tip for carrying the baggage onto a boat, but then the man bowed his head to Lavisser who clapped him familiarly on the shoulder. “This is Barker,” Lavisser told Sharpe, “my man. And this is Lieutenant Sharpe, Barker, who has replaced the unfortunate Willsen.”
Barker turned a flat gaze on Sharpe. Another thug, Sharpe thought, a hardened, scarred and formidable thug. He nodded at the servant who did not return the greeting, but just looked away.
“Barker was a footpad, Sharpe,” Lavisser said enthusiastically, “before I taught him manners and morals.”
“Don’t see why you need me,” Sharpe said, “if you’ve got a footpad on your side.”
“I doubt I do need you, Sharpe,” Lavisser said, “but our masters insist I have a protector, so come you must.” He gave Sharpe another of his dazzling smiles.
A small crowd had gathered on the quay to gape at the fleet of great warships that lay in the river’s mouth, while transports, frigates and brigs were either anchored or moored nearer the small harbor where a falling tide was exposing long stretches of mud. Closest to the quay were some ungainly ships, much smaller than frigates, with low freeboards and wide hulls. “Bomb ships,” Gordon, Baird’s nephew, remarked helpfully.
“They’ve got damn great mortars in their bellies,” Baird explained, then turned to look at the modest town. “A dozen well-manned bomb ships could wipe Harwich off the earth in twenty minutes,” the General said with unholy relish. “It will be interesting to see what they do to a city like Copenhagen.”
“You would not bombard Copenhagen!” Captain Gordon sounded shocked.
“I’d bombard London if the King demanded it,” Baird said.
“But not Edinburgh,” Gordon murmured.
“You spoke, Gordon?”
“I remarked that time is getting short, sir. I’m sure Captain Lavisser and Lieutenant Sharpe should be embarking soon.”
Their ship was a frigate, newly painted and moored closer to Felixstowe on the river’s northern bank. “She’s called the Cleopatra,” Baird’s aide said, and it was apparent that the frigate’s crew had seen the carriage’s arrival, for a ship’s boat was now pulling across the river.
A score of officers from the tented camps had gathered lower down the quay and Sharpe saw some green jackets among the scarlet. He did not want to be recognized and so he hid himself behind a great pile of herring barrels and stared down at the mud where gulls strutted and fought over fish bones. He was suddenly cold. He did not want to go to sea, and he knew that was because he had met Grace on a ship. It was made worse because a country gentleman, come in his open carriage to see the ships, was telling his daughters which of the far fleet had been at Trafalgar.