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?”
“Of course not!” She laughed at the idea, and indeed the orphanage looked anything but a prison. The two-story building was painted white and built about a courtyard where flowers grew in neat beds. There was a small chapel with a pipe organ, a simple altar and a high stained-glass window that showed Christ surrounded by small, golden-haired children. “I grew up in a place like this,” Sharpe told Astrid.
“An orphanage?”
“A foundling home. Same thing. Wasn’t quite like this, though. They made us work.”
“The children work here too!” she said sternly. “The girls learn to sew and the boys must learn to be sailors, see?” She had led him back into the courtyard where she pointed to a tall flagpole that was rigged like a ship’s mast. “The boys must learn to climb it, and the girls make all those flags.”
Sharpe listened to the sound of laughter. “It wasn’t like this,” he said. A dozen children, all in gray dresses or breeches, were playing a complicated game of tag about the flagpole. Three crippled children and one idiot, a girl with her head cocked sideways who twitched and dribbled and made small mewing noises, watched from wicker chairs equipped with wheels. “They seem happy,” Sharpe said.
“That is important,” Astrid said. “A happy child is more likely to be given a home by a good family.” She led him upstairs to where the hospital occupied two large rooms and Sharpe waited on the balcony while she delivered her food and he thought of Jem Hocking and Brewhouse Lane. He remembered Hocking’s fear and smiled.
“Why are you smiling?” Astrid asked as she came back to the balcony.
“I was remembering being a child,” he lied.
“So it was happy?”
“No. They beat us too much.”
“These children are beaten,” Astrid said, “if they steal or tell lies. But it is not frequent.”
“They used to whip us,” Sharpe said, “till the blood ran.”
Astrid frowned as if she was not sure whether to believe him. “My mother always said the English were cruel.”
“World’s cruel,” Sharpe said.
“Then we must try to be kind,” Astrid said firmly.
He walked her home. Bang scowled when they came through the door and Ole Skovgaard, seeing his daughter’s happiness, gave Sharpe a suspicious look. “We must find Danes to protect us,” Skovgaard told his daughter that evening, but men were needed in the militia, and the militia was busy throwing up the new outworks in the suburbs and so, reluctantly, and mostly at his daughter’s urging, Skovgaard allowed Sharpe to stay on in Ulfedt’s Plads. On Sunday the rifleman went with the household to church where the hymns droned, the sermon was interminable and Sharpe fell asleep until Aksel Bang dug an indignant elbow in his ribs. Next morning Sharpe escorted Skovgaard to a bank and in the afternoon he accompanied Astrid back to the orphanage, and then to a sugar warehouse on Amager, the small island on which the eastern half of Copenhagen was built. They crossed a lifting bridge which spanned the narrowest part of the harbor and walked past the vast boom which protected the inner haven in which the endangered Danish fleet was stored. Sharpe counted eighteen ships of the line and as many frigates, brigs and gunboats. Two great ships were under construction in the yard, their great hulls rearing on the slipways like half-clothed skeletons of wood. These ships were Napoleon’s last hope of invading Britain, which was why the British were in Denmark and the French were poised across the Holstein frontier. Sailors were busy taking the great guns from the ships of the line and ferrying them ashore where they would be added to the artillery already on the city’s walls.
After Astrid had delivered a bill of sale to the sugar warehouse she led him to the seaward ramparts where they climbed to the firestep between two giant bastions. The wind ruffled the water and lifted the fair hair at Astrid’s neck as she gazed northward to where the masts of the British fleet looked like a thicket on the horizon. “Why are they staying to the north?”
“Takes time to land an army,” Sharpe said. “Lots of time. It’ll be a day or two before they come here.”
The dull boom of a gun sounded flat in the warm afternoon. Sharpe stared eastward and saw a smudge of gray-white smoke rise from the distant sea. The smoke drifted on the wind to reveal the low hull of a gunboat, then a second gunboat fired to make a new white cloud. The gunboats were strung across the wide channel that ran past the city and a ship had sailed into their clutches. A third gunboat fired, then a cluster of shots hammered like thunder across the sun-touched waves. Sharpe took the telescope from his pocket, extended the tubes and saw the trapped ship’s sails shudder as her captain turned into the wind. Then her flag, a British ensign, came down from the mizzen.
“What is it?” Astrid asked.
“A British merchantman,” Sharpe said. The skipper must have come from deep in the Baltic and probably had no idea that his country was at war with Denmark until the gun ships had pounced. The Danish boats, low in the water, had ceased firing as the British ship furled her sails.
He gave the telescope to Astrid who steadied it on the wall. “What happens now?” she asked.
“They bring it in. She’s a prize.”
“So we are at war?” She sounded incredulous. The British army might have landed, the city might be raising a militia and building forts, yet still war had been unimaginable to her. Not in Denmark, and certainly not against Britain.
“We’re at war,” Sharpe said.
On their way back to Ulfedt’s Plads they made a detour to see the big houses in Bredgade. It was easy enough to spot which house belonged to Lavisser’s grandfather, for a small crowd was waiting outside for a glimpse of their new hero. Women carried flowers and someone had hung a Danish flag from the lantern above the front door. Sharpe stood on the street’s far side and gazed up at the windows, but there was no sign of the renegade. Lavisser had effectively vanished, as though the night at Skovgaard’s house had never happened. Yet Lavisser and his French allies would be back, Sharpe was sure of it.
Next day the city was filled with the news that the British were at last marching south. It was that same day that Sharpe came back from the orphanage to discover Aksel Bang was now in uniform. He wore a plain blue coat with tarnished silver buttons and a single silver bar on each shoulder. “I am a lieutenant in the militia,” Bang said proudly. He carried an ancient sword with a black cloth-covered scabbard. A half-dozen men, all with muskets, lounged in the warehouse shadows. They were elderly men, the remnants of Skovgaard’s workforce, who had all joined the militia with Bang. “They are stationed here,” Bang said, “because this is now an official food store for the city. We are on guard. And now that we have muskets we can provide protection for Mister Skovgaard.”
Sharpe looked at the six men. “Properly trained, are they?”