“Tomorrow?” Sharpe was surprised it would be so soon.
“Why ever not? The guns should be ready and the sooner it’s done the better so we can be spared this dreadful discomfort and return to London.” Pumphrey looked quizzically at Sharpe. “But why are you squeamish? Your reputation doesn’t suggest squeamishness.”
“I don’t mind killing men,” Sharpe said, “but I never had a taste for slaughtering women and children. Too easy.”
“Easy victories are the best ones,” Pumphrey said, “and usually the cheapest. And cheapness, you must remember, is the greatest desideratum of governments. I refer, of course, to their expenditure, not to their emoluments. If a man in government cannot become rich then he doesn’t deserve the privileges of office.” He flicked the brush across the top of the paper, smearing clouds out of the grayish paint. “The trouble is,” he said, “that I never know when to finish.”
“Finish?”
“Painting, Sharpe, painting. Too much and the painting will be heavy. Watercolor should be light, suggestive, nothing more.” He stepped back and frowned at the painting. “I think it’s almost there.”
Sharpe looked at the painting. “I think it’s very good, my lord.” He did, too. Pumphrey had wonderfully caught the city’s near magical look with its green spires and domes and red roofs. “I think it’s really good.”
“How very kind you are, Sharpe, how very kind.” Pumphrey seemed genuinely pleased, then shuddered as the Sergeant cursed the men hauling on the lines that would hoist the mortar barrel. There were now fifteen batteries ringing the city’s western edge, the closest ones hard against the protective canal, while offshore the British bomb ships were anchored in an arc facing the citadel and the Sixtus Battery which together guarded the harbor entrance. The Danish gun ships were staying home. In the first few days they had done serious damage to the Royal Navy’s gun ships, for they drew less water and carried heavier ordnance, but the establishment of British shore batteries had driven them away and the city was now effectively locked in a metal embrace.
The boom of the big guns was constant, but they were all Danish as the cannon on the city walls kept a steady fire on the closest British batteries, but the shots were burying themselves in the great bulwarks of earth-filled fascines that protected the guns and mortars. Sharpe, from his vantage point on the dune, could see the smoke wreathing the wall. The city’s copper spires and red roofs showed above the churning cloud. Closer to him, among the big houses and gardens, the earth was scarred by the newly dug British batteries. A dozen houses were burning there, fired by the Danish shells that hissed across the canal. Three windmills had their sails tethered against a blustering wind that blew the smoke westward and fretted the moored fleet that filled the sea lanes to the north of Copenhagen. Over three hundred transport ships were anchored there, a wooden town afloat. The Pucelle was one of the closest big ships and Sharpe was waiting for its launch to come ashore so that tonight, if the clouds thickened to obscure the moon, they could try to enter the city. He looked at the spires again and thought of Astrid. It was odd that he could not conjure her face to his memory, but nor could he ever see Grace in his mind’s eye. He had no portrait.
“The Danes, of course, might just surrender now,” Pumphrey said. “It would be the sensible thing to do.” He was touching little smears of lighter green to highlight the city spires.
“I’ve learned one thing as a soldier,” Sharpe said, “which is that the sensible thing never gets done.”
“My dear Sharpe”-Pumphrey pretended to be impressed-“we’ll make a staff officer of you yet!”
“God forbid, my lord.”
“You don’t like the staff, Sharpe?” Pumphrey was teasing.
“What I’d like, sir, is a company of riflemen and to do some proper fighting against the Frogs.”
“You’ll doubtless get your wish.”
Sharpe shook his head. “No, my lord. They don’t like me. They’ll keep me a quartermaster.”
“But you have friends in high places, Sharpe,” Pumphrey said.
“High and hidden.”