Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles (73 page)

A voice answered in Danish, then a light appeared at the top of the stairs to cast wavering shadows from the balustrade, but it was not Ole Skovgaard who carried the lantern. It was Aksel Bang. The Dane was wearing his shabby uniform and had a musket slung on his shoulder and a sword at his side. He seemed to be reproving Astrid as he came downstairs, then he saw Sharpe and his eyes widened in disbelief. “Lieutenant!”

Sharpe nodded, said nothing.

“You should not be here!” Bang said sternly.

“Everyone’s saying that tonight,” Sharpe said.

“Mister Skovgaard would not want you here! He will be angry.”

“Then Mister Skovgaard can tell me that himself,” Sharpe said.

“He will not be back tonight,” Bang said. “He is helping with the fires.”

“And you’re not watching him?” Sharpe asked.

“He’s safe,” Bang said. “He has other men with him.”

Astrid tried to reduce the tension between the two men. “We shall make tea,” she said. “You like tea, Richard?”

“I love tea,” Sharpe said.

Bang had seen the look on her face as she spoke to Sharpe and he stiffened. “You must not go into the yard,” he told Astrid.

“Why not?”

“When I came back there were men who had collected unexploded bombs. English bombs.” He spat the last two words at Sharpe. “They wanted somewhere safe to put them, so I let them use the yard. In the morning we must pull their fuses out.”

“Why would I go to the yard?” Astrid asked. She edged past Bang, who still glared at Sharpe. Sharpe followed and, as he pushed past the recalcitrant Dane, he smelt gin on his breath. Aksel Bang drinking? It was extraordinary what a bombardment would do.

They went to the parlor where Astrid rang a bell to summon a maid and Sharpe crossed to the window and pulled aside the curtains to stare at the burning city. The cathedral’s dome reflected the flames that roared skyward from the black walls of broken houses. The sky pulsed with gun flashes, was laced by the red threads of falling fuses and crazed by the fierce trails of rockets. A church bell, incongruous among the turmoil, struck the half-hour and then Sharpe heard the musket lock click.

He turned. Bang, pale-faced, was pointing the musket at Sharpe’s breast. It was an old gun, smoothbore and inaccurate, but at three paces even a drunken Bang could not miss. “Aksel!” Astrid cried in protest.

“He is English,” Bang said, “and he should not be here. The authorities should arrest him.”

“You’re the authorities, are you, Aksel?” Sharpe asked.

“I am in the militia, yes. I am a lieutenant.” Bang, seeing that Sharpe was calm, became more confident. “You will take the two guns from your shoulder, Mister Sharpe, and give them to me.”

“You’ve been drinking, Aksel,” Sharpe said.

“I have not! I do not take strong liquor! Miss Astrid, he lies! The truth is not in him.”

“Gin’s in you,” Sharpe said. “You’re reeking of it.”

“Do not listen to him, Miss Astrid,” Bang said, then jerked the musket. “You will give me your guns, Lieutenant, then your saber.”

Sharpe grinned. “Don’t have a lot of choice, do I?” He took the seven-barreled gun from his shoulder with deliberate slowness, holding it well clear of the trigger to show he meant no mischief. The bombs echoed about the city, their explosions rattling the windows. Sharpe could smell the powder smoke, which was like the stench of rotten eggs. “Here,” he said, but instead of tossing the gun he threw it with all his force. Bang flinched and before he recovered Sharpe had taken two paces, pushed the musket barrel aside and buried his right foot in Bang’s groin.

Astrid screamed. Sharpe ignored her. He pulled the musket from Bang’s unresisting hand and kicked him again, this time in the face so that the Dane flew backward to thump onto the floor. Sharpe picked him up by the lapels and dumped him in a chair. “You want to play soldiers,” he told Bang, “then learn to fight first.”

“I am doing my duty,” Bang said through gritted teeth.

“No, Aksel, you’re swilling in gin.” Sharpe took away the man’s sword and quickly searched Bang for other weapons. There were none. “Bloody hell, man, I’m not here to fight you or Denmark.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To stay,” Sharpe said.

“This is true,” Astrid said earnestly, “he will stay.” She was standing at the door where she had ordered a maid to make tea.

Bang looked from Astrid to Sharpe and then, pathetically, began to cry. “He’s rare drunk,” Sharpe said.

“He does not drink,” Astrid insisted.

“He took a bellyful tonight,” Sharpe said. “You can smell it on him. He’ll be throwing up soon.”

Sharpe half carried and half led Bang downstairs and put him to bed on a pile of empty sacks in the warehouse. Back upstairs, in the parlor, he turned Bang’s musket upside down and rapped it smartly on the floorboards. The ball and powder, after a moment’s reluctance, simply fell out. “Poor Aksel,” Astrid said, “he must have been frightened.”

“It’s hard if you’re not used to it,” Sharpe said, talking of the bombardment rather than the gin. He went to the window. The bombs were more sporadic now and he guessed the batteries were running out of ammunition. He saw a fuse streak the smoke cloud, heard the explosion and watched the flames roar hungrily. “It’ll stop soon,” he said, “and I’ll be going out.”

“You’re going out?”

Sharpe turned and smiled at her. “I’m not a deserter. I’ll write a letter to the British army and tell them they can have their commission back. Do it legal, see? But I’ve something to do first. And it’s English business, not Danish.”

“Major Lavisser?”

“If he’s dead,” Sharpe said, “then your father will be safer.”

“You’ll kill him?” Astrid seemed surprised.

“It’s my job,” Sharpe said, “for now.”

“For now?” Astrid wondered. “You mean you will stop killing soon?”

“Not much opportunity for killing here. I’ll have to find another sort of work, eh?”

But first he would find and kill Lavisser. The renegade was off duty tonight, but Sharpe doubted he was at home. He would be watching the fires and bombs, but he must eventually go back to his bed and Sharpe reckoned that was the time to find him. So Sharpe would be a house-breaker for Britain. He would wait for Lavisser in the Bredgade house, kill him when he returned and take the gold as a gift for his new life in Denmark.

The city clocks were striking midnight as he went down the stairs. He carried the two pistols and the seven-barreled gun, but he had left the rifle and cutlass upstairs. Bang was sleeping, his mouth open. Sharpe paused, wondering if the man would wake and decide to go into the city and find some soldiers who could help him arrest the Englishman who had so inconveniently returned, but he decided Bang was probably stupefied by the unfamiliar gin. He left him snoring, unlocked the front door with the key Astrid had given him, carefully locked it again, then turned north through streets smelling of battle. The bombs had ended, though the fires still blazed. He walked fast, following the directions Astrid had given him, but he still got lost in the shadowed alleys, then saw a crowd hurrying three wounded people northward and remembered she had told him that Bredgade was close to King Frederick’s Hospital. “You cannot mistake it,” she had told him. “It has a black roof and a picture of the Good Samaritan above the door.” He followed the wounded folk and saw the hospital’s black tiles shining in the flame light.

He went to the front of Lavisser’s house first. He doubted he could get in that way, and sure enough the windows were shuttered. The Danish flag celebrating Lavisser’s homecoming still hung from the lantern. He counted the houses, then doubled back into a wide alley that ran behind the rich houses. He counted again until he came to a gate that would let him into the backyard.

The big gate was locked. He glanced up and saw spikes on top of the gate and glints of light on the wall’s coping. There was glass embedded there, but householders never did the job properly and Sharpe simply went to the house next door and found their gate unlocked. The party wall had no glass on its coping and a convenient store shed gave him access to the top of the wall. He climbed, paused and stared into Lavisser’s backyard.

It was empty. There was a stable and coach house, then a short flight of steps leading into the house, which was dark as pitch. He dropped over the wall and unbolted Lavisser’s back gate to give himself an escape route, then crouched by the stable and examined the house again. There was a dark hole under the stone steps and he suspected it led to the basement. He would start there, but first he stared up at the house again. The uppermost windows were not shuttered and three of them were cracked open, but no lights showed there except the flickering reflection of the fires on the glass. All was still and utterly quiet, yet suddenly his instincts were tight as a drum skin. There was something wrong. Three open windows? All open the same amount? And it had all been too easy so far and it was much too quiet. Those open windows. He stared up at them. They had been opened just enough to let muskets poke through. Were there men there? Or was he imagining things? Yet he sensed he was being watched. He could not explain it, but he was certain this was not nearly so easy as he had imagined.

The house no longer looked dark and vulnerable. It was a threat. One part of his mind told Sharpe he was imagining things, but he had learned to trust instinct. He was being watched, being stalked. There was one way to find out, he thought, and so he took the big gun off his shoulder, cocked it, and positioned himself so he could see only the right-hand window. If he was being watched then the man up there would be waiting for Sharpe to cross the yard, to be in the open space that would serve as a killing ground. But the man would also see death in the seven barrels of the big gun and Sharpe suddenly jerked the weapon up, aiming it at the window and he saw the spark of the flint deep in the room and then the cough of flame at the window sill and he was already rolling back into cover as a musket ball cracked against the brick just inches from his face. Two more guns fired almost immediately, venting smoke from the upper floors. A tile shattered on the stable roof, then a voice shouted and feet sounded on the stone stairs that led from the house. Sharpe leveled the pistol at the steps, fired, then saw more men spilling from the coach house. He dropped the pistol, leveled the seven-barreled gun and pulled the trigger.

The noise, in the confines of the yard, was like a cannon firing. The muzzle flames licked out six feet, filling the air with smoke that was wickedly tangled by ricocheting bullets. A man shouted in pain, but Sharpe was already at the back gate. He hauled it open, slipped into the alley and ran. Two musket balls followed him from the high windows and a few seconds later a pistol was discharged down the alley, but Sharpe was already out of sight. He ran to the front of the hospital where a crowd waited under the bas-relief of the Good Samaritan. Some of them, alarmed by the eruption of gunfire and seeing the big gun in Sharpe’s hand, shouted a question, but he dodged into another alley, ran to its end, turned and twisted down two more and then slowed to catch his breath. God damn it, but they had been ready for him. Why? Why would a man keep a close guard on his house when he was supposedly among friends?

He paused in a deep doorway. If anyone pursued him they had taken the wrong turning, for no one looked in this alley. Sharpe reloaded the seven-barreled gun, doing it by touch, hardly thinking about the powder and shot, instead wondering why Lavisser would have his house manned like a fortress. To protect the gold? Yet if men stood sentry night after night they soon became bored. They dozed. They thought about women instead of watching for enemies and the men in the Bredgade house had been alert, waiting, ready. So there was something new there, something that had made Lavisser very cautious.

And there had been something else new in this strange night. Something that had seemed funny at first, but now struck Sharpe as sinister. He rammed the last bullet home, put the ramrod in its hoops and set off southward. Off to his right the fires still roared and tired men worked the feeble pumps. Brewery carts brought barrels of water from the harbor, but the pumps were hardly touching the fires, though as the church clocks struck one it began to rain and the men fighting the fires at last began to dare feel hope.

Sharpe unlocked Skovgaard’s door. He very much doubted that Skovgaard was at home, and Astrid, he hoped, was sleeping. He went to the kitchen and rooted in the dark for a lantern and a tinderbox. He found both, then carried the light to the warehouse where he discovered Aksel Bang still snoring on his makeshift bed of empty sacks. Sharpe put the lantern and the seven-barreled gun down, then lifted Bang off the sacks, shook him like a terrier killing a rat and flung him hard against a crate of cloves. Bang yelped with pain and blinked up at Sharpe.

“Where is he, Aksel?” Sharpe asked.

“I do not know what you are saying! What is happening?” Bang was still waking up.

Sharpe stepped toward him, lifted him again and slapped his lugubrious face hard. “Where is he?”

“I think you are mad!” Bang said.

“Maybe,” Sharpe said. He thrust Bang against the crate and held him with one hand while he searched the Dane’s blue uniform pockets. He found what he had dreaded in the coat’s tail pockets. Guineas. The golden cavalry of Saint George; new, shining and fresh from the Mint. Sharpe put the coins on the crate one by one while Bang just whimpered. “You bastard,” Sharpe said. “You sold him out for twenty guineas, didn’t you? Why didn’t you make it thirty pieces of silver?”

“You are mad!” Bang said and made a grab for the coins.

Sharpe hit him a stinging blow on the jaw. “Just tell me, Aksel.”

“There is nothing to tell.” A trickle of blood ran down Bang’s long chin.

“Nothing! You go to a prayer meeting with Skovgaard and come back without him? You’re drunk as a judge and you’ve got a pocketful of gold. You think I’m a fool?”

“I trade for myself,” Bang said, wiping the blood from his lips. “Mister Skovgaard approves. I sold some things.”

“What things?”