Bernard Cornwell – 1807 09 Sharpe’s Prey

Sharpe swerved back to the beach. He could hear hoofbeats and knew the other dragoons would soon be in full pursuit. Once across the dunes and on the beach he turned south and kicked the horse into a gallop. Sharpe clung on for dear life, the pack bouncing against his right thigh and the saber scabbard clanging like a cracked bell. He rode past the jumble of hoofprints where he and Lavisser had come ashore, then turned inland again. He was riding in a circle, hoping that the changes of direction would confuse his pursuers. He crossed the dunes, let the horse find its own way over the ditch, then curbed it in the field. He listened, but could hear nothing except his horse’s harsh breathing.

He kicked the beast on. He crossed two more ditches, then turned northward again until he came to the rutted track where he turned west, then north again where a path branched away between windbent trees. His instinct told him he had lost his pursuers, but he doubted they would have given up the chase quite yet. They would be looking for him and, as the sun rose, the fog began to thin. The horse would be a liability soon, for Lavisser and his companions would be searching for a horseman in this flat, featureless landscape and so, reluctantly, Sharpe slid out of the saddle. He unbuckled the girth and took the saddle off the beast, then slapped its rump to drive it into a pasture. With any luck the other horsemen would simply see a grazing horse, not an abandoned cavalry mount.

He threw away the pistol. It had not been loaded and its ammunition must have been with its rider, so Sharpe tossed it into the ditch where he had hidden the saddle and walked on north. He hurried now, using the last vestiges of the fog to cover his escape. By midmorning, when the sun at last burned the mist away, Sharpe had gone to earth in a ditch from where he could just see his pursuers. They were far off, staring across the fields. He watched them for an hour or more, until at last they abandoned the search and rode inland.

Sharpe waited in case another man had been left behind. He was getting hungry, but there was nothing he could do about that. The sky was clouding over, threatening rain. Still he waited until he was certain there was no one looking for him, then he climbed from the ditch and walked through drab fields in a flat land. He kept the dunes to his right to make sure he was going north. He passed white-painted farms with red-tiled roofs and big barns, crossed earth roads and waded wide drainage ditches and, in the afternoon, just as it began to rain, he had to cut deep inland to skirt a fishing village. He splashed through a stream and threaded through a wood of oak and ash to find himself in the park of a vast mansion with two lofty towers. The windows were shuttered and a dozen men, their heads protected from the rain by hoods of sacking, were scything the big lawn. He walked along the edge of the park, climbed a wall and was back in the drab fields, though ahead of him the sky was smeared with a haze of smoke, evidence of a town, and he prayed it was Copenhagen, though he sensed that he was still far to the south. He could only judge the distance by the time it had taken the Cleopatra to sail down the coast and he reckoned the city was probably a two- or three-day walk.

The town, though he did not know it, was Koge. He smelt it before he saw it. There was the familiar reek of a brewery and the pungent odor of smoking fish that made his hunger even more acute. He thought of going into the town to beg or steal food, but when he came close to Koge’s southern edge he saw two men in dark uniforms standing beside the road. They were sheltering from the rain as best they could, but when a carriage rattled along the road they stopped it and Sharpe saw one of them climb onto the step and peer through the window. The man saw nothing suspicious, jumped down and made a brief salute. So they were searching for someone and Sharpe knew who it was. Lavisser had made him into a hunted man.

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