The rifleman, well over six feet tall, feigned astonishment that he should be singled out. “Me, sir? I’m Pat Harper, sir, from Donegal.”
“What’s in that sack?”
Rifleman Harper turned an innocent expression on a sack that was lying against a cottage wall a few feet behind him. “Never seen it before in my life, Captain Dunnett, sir. Must have been left by one of the villagers, sir.”
Dunnett looked suspicious, but accepted the explanation. “You will stand guard here,” he told the men, “until we are relieved. If you apprehend any man trying to thieve anything you will arrest him and bring him to me so that we can have the pleasure of hanging him.”
Captain Dunnett walked on down the street, repeating the orders. Another rifleman looked at Harper. “What’s in the sack, Pat?”
“Three pullets, Cooper, and they’re dead and they’re also mine, and if you lay your thieving hands on them I’ll stuff their feathers down your gullet until you start shitting angels’ wings.” Rifleman Harper smiled.
“Where did you find them?”
“Where I looked for them, of course.”
“D’you see that girl?” a man called Harris said. They all turned to stare at a young woman with hair like fine-spun gold who was walking up the street. She knew she was being admired so lifted her head high and swung her hips as she strutted before the riflemen. “I think they shot me,” Harris said, “and I’ve gone to heaven.”
“We’re going to like it here, boys,” Harper said, “so long as they don’t hang us.”
“Ten to one you’ll be hanged, Harper.” It was Captain Murray, Harper’s company commander, who had appeared beside the house and now peered inside the sack.
“It’s not mine, Mister Murray,” Harper said, “whatever it is. And I wouldn’t tell you a lie, sir.”
“Perish the thought, Harper, perish the very thought, but I’ll still expect a cold leg of what’s not yours.”
Harper grinned. “Very good, sir.”
Three battalions were on the beach now. The first field guns, hitched to their horses, were going inland to the high ground and still more ships were ghosting in the light wind from the north. No shots had been fired and no one had offered any resistance. The first generals were ashore and their aides laid maps on the sand while a squadron of the 1st Light Dragoons led their unsteady horses into the village where a pump fed a long watering trough.
“Hey, missus!” A rifleman accosted a woman who just looked at him fearfully. “Tea?” the man said, displaying a handful of loose leaves. “You can boil water?”
Her husband, who had sailed aboard a Baltic trader that had made several voyages to Leith and Newcastle, understood. “Firewood costs money,” he grumbled.
“Here.” The rifleman offered a copper. “It’s good coin that! English money, none of your foreign rubbish. Tea, eh?”
So the riflemen had their tea, the high ground was secured and the British army was ashore.
CHAPTER 6
The clouds at last fled Copenhagen, leaving a rinsed blue sky. A late summer sun glossed the copper roofs and shimmered the harbor where scores of merchant ships, fearing the British fleet that had anchored ten miles to the north, had taken refuge.
The Amalienborg Palace lay west of the harbor. It was really four small palaces grouped about a courtyard and was gracious rather than grand, intimate instead of intimidating, and it was there, on an upper floor overlooking the harbor, that the Crown Prince made his farewells to the city’s notables. His Majesty was returning to Holstein. He had been in that southern province all summer, but had returned to Copenhagen when he heard that the British fleet had sailed for the Baltic. He had come back to encourage the citizens. Denmark, he said, did not want to fight. It had not started the quarrel and bore no ill will toward Britain, but if the British persisted in their outrageous demand to take the Danish fleet then Denmark would resist. And that, the Crown Prince knew, meant that Copenhagen must suffer, for it was in the capital’s secure inner harbor that the fleet was sheltered.
Yet the British, the Crown Prince insisted, could not succeed. It was late in the year to begin a siege. It would take weeks to make a breach in the great walls and even then there could be no certainty that an assault would succeed. Besides, long before any breach was practicable, the Prince would bring the Danush army back from Holstein and trounce the beseiging forces. “So the British will not attack the city,” the Prince said forcefully, “but merely threaten it. It is a bluff, gentlemen, a bluff. There is no time for a siege.”