“You!” She was teasing him, her eyes bright. “You are a soldier! You climb chimneys and kill people!” She gave a shudder. “Your life is much too exciting.”
Sharpe stared at the gunboat. The rowers, stripped to the waist, were hauling hard, but the boat was making little progress. He could see the tide rippling against the piers of the jetty and the gunboat was fighting the flood, but the oarsmen pulled on as though every burning muscle would help turn back the British. “I’m thirty years old,” he said, “and I’ve been a soldier for fourteen years. Before that I was a child. I was nothing.”
“No one is nothing,” Astrid protested.
“I was nothing!” Sharpe sounded angry. “I was born into nothing, raised into nothing, expected to do nothing. But I had a talent. I can kill.”
“That is not good.”
“So I became a soldier and I learned when to kill and when not to kill. I became something, an officer, but now they don’t want me. I’m not a gentleman, see? I’m not like Lavisser. He’s a gentleman.” He knew he had sounded jealous and angry and was embarrassed. He had forgotten, too, the reason for being with Astrid and he guiltily turned and looked at the folk taking the summer air on the fort’s esplanade, but no one appeared to be taking any undue notice of the two of them. No Frenchmen were lurking and there was no sign of Barker or Lavisser. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said.
“Sorry, why?”
“Tide has turned,” Sharpe said, changing the subject and nodding at the gunboat. “Those lads are making some progress now.”
“We must make some progress too,” Astrid said, standing. Then she laughed. “You make me feel very rich.”
“Rich? Why?”
“To have a manservant carrying the basket! Only the folk living on Amaliegade and Bredgade can afford such luxuries.” They walked westward, skirting the moat of the vast citadel until they came to a poorer quarter of the city, though even here the houses were neat and clean. The single-story homes had been built to a pattern, were brightly painted and in good repair. “This is the sailors’ quarter,” Astrid told Sharpe. “Nyboder, it is called. They all have ovens! One oven for every two houses. It is nice, I think.”
“Very nice.”
“My father was a sailor’s son. He grew up in that street, Svanegaden. He was very poor, you see?” She looked at him with big eyes, evidently trying to reassure him that she was no better born than himself. But Svanegaden, Sharpe thought, was a paradise compared to Wapping.
“You reckon this is a poor area?” Sharpe asked.
“Oh yes,” Astrid said seriously, “and I know about these things. Father is one of the Commissioners of the Poor and I help with the correspondence.”
The orphanage was on the edge of Nyboder, close to the sailors’ cemetery where Astrid’s son was buried. Astrid tidied the little grave, then bowed her head and Sharpe wanted to embrace her when he saw the tears on her cheeks. Instead he stepped back, giving her privacy, and watched the gulls wheeling over the citadel’s ramparts. He thought of Grace and wondered what birds flew above her grave. She had been buried in a Lincolnshire church among her dead husband’s family and under a memorial tablet recording Lord William Male’s virtues. Sharpe imagined her spirit hovering over him. Would she approve that he was so drawn to Astrid? He turned and looked at the widow stooping over the tiny grave and knew he was falling in love. It was as though green shoots were coming from the hatred and fury that had obsessed him since Grace had died.
Astrid stood and smiled at him. “Come,” she said, “you must meet the children.” She led him to the hospital where her son had died and Sharpe could hardly believe it was also an orphanage. It was nothing like Brewhouse Lane. There was no high wall or spiked gate, though the upper windows were all equipped with iron bars. “That is to stop the boys being daredevils,” Astrid explained. “Sometimes the older boys want to climb on the roof.”
“So it’s not a prison?”