Bernard Cornwell – 1807 09 Sharpe’s Prey

“I wish they weren’t.”

She sat on a bench facing the sea. “You look so like Nils,” she said.

“That must be hard.”

She nodded. “He was lost at sea. We don’t know how. He was a captain, you see? He called his ship the Astrid and he was carrying sugar from the West Indies. When he didn’t come home I thought perhaps his ship was being mended, but it wasn’t so. We heard he had sailed and then there was a big storm just a few days after. We waited, but he never came. But I used to see him every day. I would see a stranger in the street and think, that is Nils! He has come back, then the stranger would turn and it would not be Nils.” She was not looking at Sharpe as she spoke, but staring out to sea, and Sharpe wondered if she had come here in her early widowhood to look for her husband. “Then I saw yoU in the house”-she turned her big eyes on Sharpe-“and I knew it was Nils. For a moment I was so happy.”

“I’m sorry,” Sharpe said awkwardly. He knew how she felt, forever since Grace’s death he would see a dark-haired woman in the street and think it was Grace. He felt the same leap of the heart and knew the same dull ache that followed the disappointment.

Gulls cried above the harbor channel. “Do you think we’re really in danger?” Astrid asked.

“You know what your father does?”

She nodded. “I’ve helped him in the last few years. Since Mother died. He corresponds, Lieutenant, that is all. He corresponds.”

“With folk in Europe and in Britain.”

“Yes.” She stared at the British fleet. “He does business all over the Baltic and all through the north German states, so he has scores of men who write to him. If a French column of artillery passes through Magdeburg then he will know within a week.”

“And he tells the British?”

“Yes.”

“Dangerous work,” Sharpe said.

“Not really. His correspondents know how to write safely. That’s why I help my father, because his eyes are not so good as they were. Some of the best ones send him newspapers. The French do not mind newspapers going to Denmark, especially if they are from Paris and full of praise for the Emperor, but if you open the paper and hold it against the window you can see that someone had pushed a pin hundreds of times through the pages. Each pinprick is under a letter and I just read the letters off in order and that is the message.” She shrugged. “It is not so dangerous.”

“But the French know who he is now,” Sharpe said. “They want to know who writes to him, who sticks those pins in the newspapers. They want to stop the messages and your father can give them the names. So it is dangerous.”

Astrid said nothing for a while. She gazed at a gunboat that was being rowed out of the harbor. There was a heavy boom made from chained logs protecting the entrance, but it had been hauled aside to let the gunboat pass. The ship had a tall mast on which a sail was furled, but the small wind was against the ungainly craft and so a score of oarsmen were pulling on long sweeps to crawl out of the channel. The boat had an ugly bill of a bow on which two heavy and very long-barreled cannons were mounted. Twenty-four-pounders, Sharpe guessed. Guns that could fire a long way and hit hard, and there were a score of other gunboats tethered against the far quay where powder and shot were being unloaded from carts. Other boats were bringing food into the city. “I hoped the danger was past,” Astrid said after a long while, “now that the French are gone. But at least it stops life being dull.”

“Is life dull?” Sharpe asked.

She smiled. “I go to church, I do the accounts and I look after Father.” She shrugged. “It must sound very dull to you.”

“My life’s become dull,” Sharpe said, thinking of his job as a quartermaster.

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