“A spade?”
“You’ve got three dead bodies in the house. Where I come from we bury them.”
“But… ” Astrid began to protest, but her voice trailed away.
“That’s right, miss,” Sharpe said, “if you can’t explain them, hide them.”
It took him most of what remained of the night, but he dug a shallow trench in the soft soil by the back wall of the garden and laid the three Frenchmen inside. He patted the earth down and covered it with some bricks he found beside the carriage house.
And then, in a gray and weary dawn, he slept.
Eleven miles north of Ole Skovgaard’s house was the insignificant village of Vedb‘k. It lay on the sea, halfway between Copenhagen and the fortress at Helsingor. The village held a handful of houses, a church, two farms and a small fleet of fishing boats. Tarred sheds lined the beach where nets hung to dry on tall poles and the burning charcoal of the herring smokers shimmered the air above the sand.
Work started early in Vedb‘k. There were cows to be miled and fishing boats to be hauled down to the sea, yet this morning, at dawn, no one worked. The herring fires were dying and the people of the village were ignoring their duties and standing instead on the low grassy ridge that backed the beach. They said little, but just stared seaward.
Where a fleet had appeared in the night. Closest to the beach were gun brigs and bomb ships that had moored so their great cannons and mortars could threaten any Danish troops who might appear on the shore. Beyond those small ships were frigates and, farther out still, the great ships of the line, all of them with their gunports open. There was no enemy threatening the fleet, but the guns were ready.
Between the ships of the line and the frigates was moored a host of transport ships around each of which was a smaller fleet of tenders, launches and longboats that nuzzled the bigger hulls like so many suckling pigs. Horses were being slung out of holds and lowered into the boats. No one in Vedb‘k had ever seen so many ships, not at one time. At least a dozen of the village men had been sailors, yet even they had not seen such a fleet, not in Copenhagen, London, Hamburg or in any other great port.
Someone began ringing the church bell as an alarm, but the pastor hurried back into the village to silence it. “We have already sent a messenger,” he told the enthusiastic bell-ringer. “Sven has ridden to Horsholm.” There was a police barracks in Horsholm, though what use the police would be the pastor did not know. They could hardly arrest a whole army, though doubtless they would send a warning to Copenhagen.
Folk from Horsholm and from the lesser villages nearby were already coming to Vedbask to see the ships. The pastor worried that the spectators might resemble an army and he did his best to disperse them. “Jarl! Your cows are lowing. They must be milked.”
“I have girls to do that.”
“Then find them. There is work to do.”
But no one moved. Instead they watched as the first small boats headed for the shore. “Will they kill us?” a woman asked.
“Only the ugly ones,” someone answered and there was nervous laughter. The man who had made the bad joke had been a sailor and he had a great telescope that he had propped on his wife’s shoulder. He could see a field gun being lifted out of a ship’s belly and slung on a whip into one of the bigger launches. “Now they’re sending a cannon to shoot Ingrid,” he announced. Ingrid was his mother-in-law and as big as a Holstein cow.
A young lieutenant in the blue uniform of the Danish militia arrived on horseback. He was the son of a wheelwright in Sandbjerg and the only shots he had ever heard fired had been volleys of musketry emptied in the sand dunes as the militia practiced. “If you are going to fight them,” the pastor said, “then perhaps you should go down onto the beach. Otherwise, Christian, take off your jacket so they don’t realize you are a soldier. How is your mother?”