Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles (55 page)

He threw away the pistol. It had not been loaded and its ammunition must have been with its rider, so Sharpe tossed it into the ditch where he had hidden the saddle and walked on north. He hurried now, using the last vestiges of the fog to cover his escape. By midmorning, when the sun at last burned the mist away, Sharpe had gone to earth in a ditch from where he could just see his pursuers. They were far off, staring across the fields. He watched them for an hour or more, until at last they abandoned the search and rode inland.

Sharpe waited in case another man had been left behind. He was getting hungry, but there was nothing he could do about that. The sky was clouding over, threatening rain. Still he waited until he was certain there was no one looking for him, then he climbed from the ditch and walked through drab fields in a flat land. He kept the dunes to his right to make sure he was going north. He passed white-painted farms with red-tiled roofs and big barns, crossed earth roads and waded wide drainage ditches and, in the afternoon, just as it began to rain, he had to cut deep inland to skirt a fishing village. He splashed through a stream and threaded through a wood of oak and ash to find himself in the park of a vast mansion with two lofty towers. The windows were shuttered and a dozen men, their heads protected from the rain by hoods of sacking, were scything the big lawn. He walked along the edge of the park, climbed a wall and was back in the drab fields, though ahead of him the sky was smeared with a haze of smoke, evidence of a town, and he prayed it was Copenhagen, though he sensed that he was still far to the south. He could only judge the distance by the time it had taken the
Cleopatra
to sail down the coast and he reckoned the city was probably a two- or three-day walk.

The town, though he did not know it, was Køge. He smelt it before he saw it. There was the familiar reek of a brewery and the pungent odor of smoking fish that made his hunger even more acute. He thought of going into the town to beg or steal food, but when he came close to Køge’s southern edge he saw two men in dark uniforms standing beside the road. They were sheltering from the rain as best they could, but when a carriage rattled along the road they stopped it and Sharpe saw one of them climb onto the step and peer through the window. The man saw nothing suspicious, jumped down and made a brief salute. So they were searching for someone and Sharpe knew who it was. Lavisser had made him into a hunted man.

He told himself he had endured hunger before and so he struck inland again. The rain fell harder as night descended, but it hid him as he walked and walked, always keeping the smell of the town and its scatter of dim lights on his right-hand side. He crossed a major road, followed a track northward, then crossed more fields. His boots were clogged with mud, his clothes were soaked and the pack was biting into the small of his back and his shoulders. He walked till he could not endure another pace, then he slept in a wood where he was woken by a heavy rain that thrashed the trees just before dawn. His belly ached and he was shivering. He remembered the bedroom he had shared with Grace, its fireplace and the wide windows that led to a balcony. He had been careless, he now knew, in thinking that idyll could last forever. He had sold his Indian jewels and used the money to make a haven while the lawyers bickered over her dead husband’s will, but then Grace died and the same lawyers pounced like weasels on the property Sharpe had bought. He had put the house in Grace’s name, saying that she needed the safety of her own home while he soldiered abroad, and that quixotic gallantry had lost him everything. Worse, he had lost her. Grace, he thought, Grace, and the self-pity swept over him so that he tipped his face to the rain as if it could wash away his tears.

Bloody fool, he told himself. Be useful. Pull yourself together. The woman is dead and you do not help her memory by collapsing. Get up, he told himself, walk. Sniveling and feeling sorry for himself would do nothing. Be useful. He got up, pulled on the pack and went to the wood’s edge.

And there his fortune changed. A farm lay just a hundred yards away. It had a long low white-painted house, two barns, a windmill and a dairy. It looked prosperous and busy. Two men were driving a big herd of cattle toward the dairy while a dozen laborers gathered in the yard. All had haversacks slung on their shoulders and Sharpe reckoned that was dinner; bread and cheese, perhaps. He watched from the wood’s edge. The rain eased. Most of the men went westward with a small cart laden with spades and forks, but three vanished inside the smaller of the two barns. Sharpe waited, hunger biting. The bigger barn had wide-open doors. Get inside there, he reckoned, and he could scout the rest of the farm, maybe even sneak into the kitchen or dairy to steal food. He never once thought of the guineas in his pack. He could have bought food, but his instinct was not to show himself. Live as he had learned to live before he met Grace.

The dairy herd was driven back to pasture and then no one moved in the farm for a while until two children, school bags swinging, walked down the lane. When they had gone from sight Sharpe broke cover and ran across the damp pasture, crossed a ditch and sprinted the last few yards into the big barn. He half expected a shout of protest or a dog to start barking, but he was unseen. He slipped through the doors to find a vast wagon loaded high with hay. A haversack, like the ones the laborers had been carrying, lay discarded on the wagon’s seat and Sharpe scooped it up as he climbed the vehicle’s high side which was a wooden grille designed to keep the hay in place. He scrabbled a hole for himself in the hay, took off his pack and greatcoat, then opened the stolen haversack to find bread, cheese, a big piece of ham, a sausage and a stone bottle which, uncorked, proved to hold ale.

He ate half the bread and all the cheese. He reckoned he could stay here for hours, but it was more important to reach Copenhagen and find Skovgaard. He was about to clamber out of the wagon when a strange clatter sounded beneath him. He went still. The clattering was loud, wood against stone. The sound puzzled Sharpe until he recognized it as footsteps. Wooden shoes, Sharpe finally realized, banging on the barn’s flagstones. Then a man’s voice shouted a protest, presumably for his stolen dinner, another man laughed, and Sharpe heard the heavy sound of hooves and the clink of chains. A team was being hitched to the haywain. The voices went on, and a woman said something soothing that provoked more laughter. It all seemed to take forever. Sharpe stayed where he was, half buried in the wagon’s high load.

Then, at last, the driver flicked his whip and the haywain eased forward as the horses took its vast weight on their harnesses. The wagon went out from the barn’s shadow and creaked and groaned and rattled as it gained speed over the yard. A man and a woman called what Sharpe presumed was a farewell.

The cloud was shredding so that strips of blue showed as the wagon lurched along a farm track. It was going inland and Sharpe was happy to let it carry him, but where would it go once it reached the road? He prayed it would turn north. He ducked down as more voices sounded, then peered from the hay to see that it was a group of men clearing a ditch who had called to the driver. A field of wheat grew beyond, very close to harvest.

The wagon turned north. It splashed through a deep ford, groaned up a slope and then the horses settled into a plodding walk on a well-surfaced road that was wide and empty. A drift of tobacco smoke came to Sharpe. The driver must have lit a pipe. So where was he going? Copenhagen seemed as good an answer as any for the city, like London, surely had an insatiable demand for hay, but even if the wagon was bound elsewhere it was going in the right direction and Sharpe burrowed deeper, settled himself and fell asleep.

He woke close to midday. The wagon, so far as he could judge, was still going northward through a gentle countryside of small villages with painted houses and plain churches, all with roofs of bright red tiles. The road was busier now, mostly with pedestrians who called out greetings to the driver. Another haywain ambled a half-mile behind. The road led directly toward a blur of dirty smoke on the horizon and that told Sharpe the wagon was heading for a city. He reckoned it had to be Copenhagen. But Lavisser, he warned himself, could have reached the city the day before.

Lavisser. How Sharpe was to revenge himself on Lavisser he did not know, but he would. The anger was in him again because he had been fooled by the guardsman’s attentive friendliness on the boat. Sharpe had believed the man’s sympathy and so revealed his own feelings, and all the while Lavisser had been plotting his death. So Lavisser would suffer. By God he would suffer. Sharpe would eviscerate the bastard and have him screaming. Sharpe might not know how he would do it yet, but he did know where. In Copenhagen.

S
HARPE REACHED
the city as evening was falling. The wagon creaked through a district of lavish houses, each standing in its own wide garden, then skirted the end of what looked like a wide canal that protected the city’s walls. A causeway led over a smaller moat to one of the city’s gates, this one a massive pair of metal-studded doors set in a wide tunnel that led through the layered ramparts. The haywain stopped among a group of other carts and more elegant carriages. Voices sounded close. Sharpe suspected soldiers were searching all the traffic, but if so they were content merely to ask the driver some questions. None bothered to clamber up the wagon’s high sides and after a while the driver clicked his tongue, the horses took the wagon’s weight and the vehicle lurched on through the long dark tunnel to emerge into the heart of the city.

Sharpe, bedded down in the hay, could only see gables, roofs and spires. The sun was low in the west, gleaming on red tiles and green copper. The evening wind billowed a white curtain from a high window. He smelled coffee, then an organ sounded from a church, filling the air with great chords. Sharpe pulled on his greatcoat, took hold of his pack and waited until the wagon turned into a narrower street, then he climbed over the wooden trellis at the vehicle’s rear and dropped down to the cobbles. A girl watched him from a doorway as he tried to rid himself of the wisps of hay that smothered his clothes. A woman, leading a child by the hand, crossed the narrow street rather than go close by him and Sharpe, looking down at his muddied trousers, was not surprised. He looked like a tramp, but a tramp with a saber.

It was time to find Lord Pumphrey’s man so Sharpe buttoned his greatcoat and walked toward the wider street. It was almost dark, but it looked a prosperous city. Shopkeepers were shuttering their premises while yellow lamplight spilled from hundreds of windows. A giant wooden pipe hung above a tobacco shop; laughter and the clink of glasses came from a tavern. A crippled sailor, his pigtail thick with tar, swung on crutches down the pavement. Big carriages rolled briskly down a wide street where small boys swept the horse dung toward wooden holding boxes. It was like London, but not like London. Much cleaner, for a start. Sharpe gaped at a soaring spire that was formed by the entwined tails of four copper dragons. He also saw, more usefully, that every street and alley was clearly marked with a name. That was not like London where a visitor found his way by guesswork and by God.

An elderly man, bearded and carrying a bundle of books wrapped in string, saw Sharpe gaping up at the street name. He said something in Danish and Sharpe just shrugged. “Vous êtes Français?” the man asked.

“American,” Sharpe said. It did not seem wise to admit to being English at a time when a British fleet and army was sailing to assault Denmark.

“American!” The old man seemed delighted. “You are lost, perhaps?”

“I am.”

“You seek a hostel, yes?”

“I’m looking for a place called . . .” What the hell was it? “Elfins Platz?” he guessed. “A man called Ole Stoveguard?” He knew he had got the names wrong and sorted though his pockets for Lord Pumphrey’s scrap of paper. “Ulfedt’s Plads,” Sharpe read the unfamiliar name awkwardly. Two or three other passersby had stopped now, for it seemed that if someone was lost in Copenhagen then the citizens regarded it as their duty to offer help.

“Ah! Ulfedt’s Plads. It is a short walk,” the old man said, “but everything in Copenhagen is a short walk. We are not like Paris or London. Have you been to those cities?”

“No.”

“Washington, now, is that big?”

“Pretty big,” Sharpe said, who had no idea.

“Do all men carry swords in America?” The old man, not content with directing him to Ulfedt’s Plads, was now walking with him.

“Most of us,” Sharpe said.

“We have lost the habit in Denmark,” the old man said, “except for the soldiers, of course, and a handful of our aristocracy who think it is a badge of rank.” He chuckled, then sighed. “I fear, alas, we shall all have to wear swords soon.”

“You will? Why?”

“We are warned that the British are coming again. I pray it isn’t so, for I remember the last time when their Lord Nelson came. Six years ago! I had a son on the
Dannebroge
and he lost a leg.”

“I’m sorry,” Sharpe said awkwardly. He vaguely remembered hearing about Nelson’s attack on Copenhagen, but it had happened when he was in India and the news had not provoked much interest in the regiment.