“Don’t be absurd, Richard,” Lavisser said with a smile. “Do you really think I meant it? Of course not. I like her far too much. Not as you do, of course, though I must say I admire your taste.” He glanced at the volley gun and saw it was still pointed away from him. “I would never have hurt her, Richard.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“No! What do you take me for, Richard?”
“A bastard,” Sharpe said, “a lying bloody bastard,” and he pulled the volley gun’s trigger. The seven bullets whipped up into the smoke and snatched the pistol out of Lavisser’s hand. They also ripped his hand and wrist into bloody shreds so that Lavisser gaped at it, then shrieked as the pain struck.
“You bastard,” Sharpe said, “you utter bloody bastard,” and he tossed the seven-barreled gun down to Clouter and drew the cutlass, which he shoved hard into Lavisser’s chest to drive him back and Lavisser snatched at his own sword hilt with his left hand, but he could not draw the weapon across his body, and Sharpe speared his chest with the cutlass point again and Lavisser staggered back a further step, then saw that the balcony ended at a doorway that had once led to the chapel’s gallery and now opened onto an inferno.
“No!” he screamed and tried to lurch forward, but Sharpe was quicker. He rammed the heavy blade at Lavisser’s chest, jarring him hard back, and Lavisser teetered on the doorway’s edge. Beneath him was the red-hot fire of burning pews and bibles. “No!”
“Go to hell,” Sharpe said and pushed again, but this time Lavisser caught hold of the cutlass blade with his good hand and clung on to the steel to keep himself from falling.
“Pull me back,” he said to Sharpe, “please. Please!”
Sharpe let go of the cutlass and Lavisser fell back into the burning chapel. He screamed as he fell, his arms outspread, then thumped into the flames.
The balcony lurched under Sharpe. He vaulted the rail and jumped down to the yard. The archway was filled with smoke and brilliant with flames, but Sharpe reckoned they could dash through safely enough. He took the seven-barreled gun from Clouter then looked at the fire that roared and boiled in the archway. “Are you feeling lucky, Clouter?”
“Luckier than that poor bastard, sir.”
“Then go!”
They ran.
The city surrendered next morning. Seven thousand bombs had fallen in the night and some of the streets blazed so fiercely that no one could get within a hundred paces. Charred pages of the university’s library had rained across a hundred square miles of Zealand, while the cathedral was a gaunt frame of scorched stone in which a heap of embers smoked like the pit. Bodies lay in neat rows in parks, squares and on the harbor quays. There were not nearly enough coffins, so folk whose homes were undamaged brought their sheets and did their best to make the dead decent. The fleet was whole, unburned and captured. No one had come to light the fuses and even if they had the ships would not have burned for Captain Chase had stripped the incendiaries away.
British soldiers fought the flames while a redcoat military band played outside the Amalienborg Palace. General Peymann listened to the unfamiliar music and tried to pay attention to the flattering remarks made by the city’s new masters, but he could not rid himself of a feeling of gross injustice. “There were women and children here,” he said again and again, but he spoke in Danish and the British officers, who dined off the palace’s finest porcelain plates, did not understand him. “We did not deserve this,” he finally protested, insisting one of his own aides offered a translation.
“Europe didn’t deserve the Emperor,” Sir David Baird retorted hotly, “but we have him. Come, sir, try the ragout of beef.”
General Cathcart, who had never wanted to bombard the city, said nothing. The smell of smoke filled the dining room, taking away his appetite, though every now and then he would glance from the windows to see the masts of the captured fleet and wonder how much of their value would be given him in prize money. More than enough to buy an estate in his native Scotland, that was for sure.
Not far away, in Bredgade, a dozen sailors had finished hauling blackened beams and scorched bricks from a gaping hole. Now they squatted in a circle and chipped away at dozens of curious black lumps that, when broken apart with a boarding axe, gleamed like a newly risen sun. Not all of the gold had melted, some of the coins were still in the charred remnants of their bags, and Captain Chase was making piles of guineas. “I’m not sure we got it all, Richard.”
“Enough,” Sharpe said.
“Oh enough, certainly enough, more than I ever dreamed!”
Lord Pumphrey was watching over the excavation. He had appeared unexpectedly, accompanied by a dozen soldiers, and announced that he was there to look after the Treasury’s interests. “Though I shall do as Nelson did at Copenhagen,” he told Sharpe, “and turn a blind eye. I do not, after all, have a great love for the Treasury. Who does? But we must return something to them.”
“Must we?”
“I like to think they will owe me a favor, so yes. But do help yourself, Richard, while my blind eye is watching.”
Sharpe gave Pumphrey the list of names. “Lavisser’s dead, my lord.”
“You cheer me, Sharpe, you do cheer me.” Pumphrey peered at the papers. “Is that blood?”
“Yes, my lord.”
Pumphrey looked up at Sharpe, saw the anger that was still in the rifleman, so said nothing more of the blood. Nor did he ask him about the blood in his hair or the scorch marks on the green jacket. “Thank you, Sharpe. And Skovgaard?”
“Alive, sir, barely. I’m going to see him now. Last night’s bombs burned his warehouse, nothing left of it at all, but he’s got a house outside the city walls in Vester Faelled. You want to come?”
“I think I shall wait before I pay my respects,” Pumphrey said, then held out a hand to hold Sharpe back. “But tell me, will he move to Britain? He can hardly stay here.”
“He can’t?”
“My dear Sharpe, we shall stay here a month, at the most two, and then the French will be very firmly in the Danish saddle. How long do you think Mister Skovgaard will last then?”
“I think, my lord, that he would go to hell before he went to Britain,” Sharpe said, “so you’ll have to find another way to protect him. And his daughter.”
“His daughter?”
“She knows as much as he does. What will you do, my lord?”
“Sweden, perhaps?” Lord Pumphrey suggested. “I’d prefer them both to be in Britain, but I do promise you, Sharpe, I do promise you upon my honor, that the French will not trouble them.”
Sharpe looked hard at Pumphrey who almost shivered under the intensity of the gaze, but then Sharpe nodded, satisfied with the promise, and walked away. His pockets were heavy with gold. Chase and his men would become rich this day, and doubtless Lord Pumphrey would skim a share before he returned the gold to the Treasury, but Sharpe, despite the weight in his pockets, would not be rich.
Nor would he stay in Denmark. Ole Skovgaard had forbidden his daughter to marry the Englishman. Sick as Skovgaard was, he had summoned the force to utter the refusal and Astrid would not disobey him. Now, when Sharpe came to the big house in Vester Faslled, she looked close to tears. “He will not change his mind,” she said.
“I know.”
“He hates Britain now,” she said, “and he hates you, and he says you are not a Christian and I cannot... “ She shook her head, unable to go on, then frowned as Sharpe took lumps of blackened gold and handfuls of coins distorted by heat from his pockets. “You think that will change his mind?” Astrid asked. “Money will not persuade him.”
“It’s not for him. Nor for you, unless you want it,” Sharpe said as he took the last guinea and added it to the rest on the harpsichord. The house had been a billet for British officers during the bombardment and the fine wooden floor was marked with boot nails and the rugs were smeared with dried mud. “You said you wanted to rebuild the orphanage,” Sharpe said, “so now you can.”
&nb
sp; “Richard!” Astrid tried to push the gold back to him, but he would not take it.
“I don’t want it,” he said. He did want it, he wanted it badly, but he had stolen enough guineas in the last month and, besides, he wanted Astrid’s dream to come true even more than he wanted this gold. “Give it to the children,” he said, and then she just wept and he held her.
“I cannot go against my father’s wishes,” she said at last. “It would not be right.”
“No,” he said, and he did not really understand her obedience but he did understand that it was important to her. He stroked her hair. “Someone told me this was a very respectable society,” he said, “and I reckon I wouldn’t have fitted. I’m not godly enough, so maybe it’s for the best. But one day, who knows, perhaps I’ll come back?”
He walked away, going through the nearby cemetery where a great pit was being dug for the fire-shrunken dead.
That night, in Amalienborg Palace, Lord Pumphrey carefully took part of the gold and stored it in his valise. The remaining gold-he reckoned it was worth about nine thousand pounds-would be returned to the Bank of England and the Honorable John Lavisser could conveniently be blamed for all that was missing. “You could let Sharpe take it back,” he told Sir David Baird next day.
“Why Sharpe?”
“Because I want him out of Copenhagen,” Pumphrey said.
“What’s he done now?”
“What he has done,” Pumphrey said in his precise voice, “is exactly what I asked him to do, and he has done it exceedingly well. I commend him to you, Sir David. But among the things I asked him to do was to keep two people alive, which he did, only it is no longer in His Majesty’s interest that they should live.” Pumphrey smiled and drew a delicate finger across his throat.
Baird raised a cautionary hand. “Tell me no more, Pumphrey. I don’t want to be privy to your dirty world.”
“How very wise you are, Sir David. But remove Sharpe quickly, if you would be so kind. He has an inconveniently gallant soul and I don’t want to make an enemy of him. He could be useful to me again.”
The city still spewed smoke when Sharpe left. Autumn was in the air, brought by a cold wind from Sweden, but the sky was clear, spoiled only by the great feathered smear of smoke that drifted across Zealand. The smoke stayed in Sharpe’s sight even when the city vanished beneath the Pucelle’s horizon. Astrid, he thought, Astrid, and at least he no longer thought only of Grace, and he was still confused, except he did now know what he was doing. He was going back to the barracks, back to his quartermaster’s duties, but at least with the promise that he would not be left behind when the regiment next sailed to war. And there would be war. France was beneath that smoke-filled horizon and she was the mistress of all Europe now, and until France was beaten there would be no peace. It was a soldier’s world now, and he was a soldier.
Chase joined him at the stern rail. “You’ve got some leave coming, haven’t you?”
“A month, sir. I’m not due at Shorncliffe till October.”
“Then you’ll come to Devon with me. It’s time you met Florence, a dear soul! We can go shooting, perhaps? I won’t take a refusal, Richard.”
“Then I won’t offer you one, sir.”
“There, look! Kronborg Castle.” Chase pointed at the green copper roofs that shone in the sunset. “Know what happened there, Richard?”
“Hamlet.”
“My God, you’re right.” Chase tried to hide his surprise. “I asked young Collier when we were coming the other way and he didn’t have the first idea!”
“Did he die?”
“Who? Collier? Of course not, he’s right as rain.”
“Hamlet, sir.”
“Of course he died. Don’t you know the play? Maybe you don’t,” Chase added in a hurry. “Not everyone does.”
“What’s it about?”
“A fellow who can’t make up his mind, Sharpe, and dies of indecision. A lesson to us all.”
Sharpe smiled. He was remembering Lavisser’s fulsome friendliness when they had sailed past Kronborg, and how Lavisser had quoted some words from the play, and how Sharpe had liked the guardsman then. And he remembered how tempted he had been on the burning balcony. Part of him had wanted to take Lavisser’s friendship, to take the gold and the opportunity and the adventure, but in the end he had pulled the trigger because he had to live with himself. Though God alone knew where that would take him.
Night fell. The smoke of a broken city vanished in the dark.
And Sharpe sailed home, a soldier.
Historical Note
The British attack on Copenhagen in April 1801 is remembered (by the British), while the far more devastating attack of September 1807 is largely forgotten. Perhaps the former is distinguished by the presence of Nelson, for it was during the Battle of Copenhagen that he famously placed a telescope to his blind eye and declared he could not see the signal to discontinue the action.
The battle of April 1801 was between a British fleet and the Danish fleet which was reinforced by floating batteries and the formidable seaward defenses of the city. Some 790 Danish sailors and soldiers were killed and another 900 wounded, but all those men, like the 950 British casualties, were troops. In 1807 the British killed 1,600 Danish civilians inside Copenhagen (British losses in the whole campaign amounted to 259 men) and the Danish defeat was far more comprehensive, yet the campaign has been largely forgotten in Britain.
The cause of it was the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit between France and Russia which agreed, among many other things, that the French could take the Danish fleet. The Russians had no right to grant such a thing, nor the French to take it, but Denmark was a small country (though not so small as she is today; in 1807 she still possessed Holstein, now in northern Germany, and all of Norway). She did, however, possess the second largest merchant fleet in the world and, to protect it, a very large navy, with powerful ships which the French wanted to replace those they had lost at Trafalgar in 1805. The British, whose intelligence service was remarkably efficient, heard about the secret clause in the treaty and, to prevent its implementation, demanded that the Danes send their fleet into protective custody in Britain. The Danes, quite properly, refused, and so the 1807 expedition was launched to force their hand. When the Danes still rejected the British demands the gunners opened fire and bombarded Copenhagen until the city, unwilling to take more casualties, surrendered. The Danish fleet, instead of being taken into protective custody, was simply captured.
It was not a campaign in which the British can take particular pride. The Danish army was mostly in Holstein so the only action of any note was the one described in the novel, the Battle of Koge, between Sir Arthur Wellesley’s forces and the scratch army assembled by General Castenschiold. The Danes call it “the battle of the wooden shoes” because so many of their militiamen were wearing farm clogs. It seems rather tough luck on the Danes that at a time when the British army had many mediocre generals they should have run up against the future Duke of Wellington, not to mention the 95th Rifles. Companies from the regiment had served in a couple of actions before, but Koge was the first time that the whole 1st Battalion fought together. There was no attempt to bribe the Danish Crown Prince, though the “golden cavalry of Saint George” was one of Britain’s most potent weapons in the long wars against France and was used to subvert, bribe and persuade countless rulers. Between 1793 and 1815 the British Treasury spent no less than œ52,000,000 on such “subsidies.”
It is a mystery why the Danes did not burn their fleet. The Crown Prince certainly sent orders that it should be done, for one of his messages was captured by the British. Copies probably reached the city, but the ships were not fired. There were no British seamen smuggled into the city to prevent such a fire; it simply seems that in the chaos of the bombardment the orders were overlooked, or else Peymann thought that the British would exact a terrible price if he so thwarted them. So the fleet was waiting, and the British, who occupied the city for a further six weeks
, took home eighteen ships of the line, four frigates and sixteen other ships as well as twenty-five gunboats. They also stripped the dockyard of stores and destroyed the half-built ships on the slipways. One of the ships of the line was lost on the voyage home, but the rest were all deemed to be prizes, thus making the senior officers of the expedition indecently rich (Admiral Gambier and General Cathcart alone divided about œ300,000 between them, a fortune). The British did leave behind a small and rather beautiful frigate, really little more than a pleasure craft, which had been a gift from King George III to his nephew, the Danish Crown Prince. The Danes, with a macabre sense of humor, sent this ship to England later in the year, together with a handful of British prisoners and a message saying that the frigate appeared to have been inadvertently forgotten. One of the minor trophies of the expedition was the capture from the Danes of the island of Heligoland in the North Sea which stayed under British rule until 1890 when it was amicably handed over to Germany.
The 1807 campaign was a disaster for Denmark. It forced her into a French alliance and ruined her financially. She lost Norway (to Sweden) and those parts of Copenhagen that had been burned by the British were not rebuilt for a generation. Over three hundred houses were destroyed, a thousand more seriously damaged, the cathedral was burned as were a dozen other churches and the university. The small tale of the artist extinguishing a mortar shell with the contents of his chamber pot is true; his name was Eckersburg and he left some harrowing pictures of the city under fire. Today there is little sign that the destruction ever took place, though a few of the rebuilt houses have British round shot mortared into their facades. The city’s great fortifications were demolished in 1867, though the citadel (now the Kastellet) remains. There was a small wooden fishing pier close to the citadel, not far from where the Little Mermaid now sits. Many of the street names have changed, thus Ulfedt’s Plads (which was burned out) is now Graabodretorv.
The campaign does have one curious footnote. One of the British generals on the expedition was Thomas Grosvenor who took with him a mare, Lady Catherine. While in Denmark, he discovered Lady Catherine was pregnant, so he sent her home where she gave birth to a foal, a stallion, that was later sold to Sir Charles Stewart who became Adjutant-General in the Peninsular War. Stewart, in turn, sold the stallion to Sir Arthur Wellesley and it became his favorite horse. Indeed, when he was Duke of Wellington, he rode the horse throughout the Battle of Waterloo and afterward retired it to his estate at Stratfield Saye. The horse died in 1836 and was buried in the grounds of Startfield Saye where it’s gravestone can still be seen. The name of the horse was, of course, Copenhagen. “There may have been many faster horses,” the Duke said of Copenhagen, “and no doubt many handsomer, but for bottom and endurance I never saw his fellow.”