“It was a bad dream, Lieutenant,” Pumphrey said, then he and Gordon went back to Baird.
“Seen him off?” Baird asked Gordon.
“I sent him back to his regiment, sir, and you’re going to sign a letter of recommendation that I shall forward to his Colonel.”
Baird frowned. “I am? Why?”
“Because no one will then associate you with a man who has turned out to be the Duke of York’s aide and a French spy.”
“Bloody hellfire,” Baird said.
“Precisely,” Lord Pumphrey said.
Sharpe walked north and Jens went east, but the young shipwright did not take Sharpe’s advice. He should have kept walking toward the city as Sharpe had advised him, but he could not resist going north through the trees to discover the source of some sporadic musketry. Some skirmishers of the King’s German Legion saw him. They were Jager, hunters, equipped with rifles, and they saw the pistol in Jens’s hand and put three bullets in his chest.
Nothing was working well. But Copenhagen was surrounded, the Danish fleet was trapped and Sharpe had survived.
General Castenschiold had been ordered to harry the southern flank of the British forces blockading Copenhagen and he was not a man to ignore such orders. He dreamed of glory and dreaded defeat and his moods swung between optimism and a deep gloom.
The core of his force was a handful of regular soldiers, but most of his fourteen thousand men were from the militia. A few of those were well trained and decently armed, but far more were new recruits, some still wearing their wooden clogs and most carrying weapons that belonged in farmyards rather than on battlefields. They were country boys, or else from the small Danish towns of southern Zealand.
“They are enthusiastic,” an aide told the General.
That only made Castenschiold even more worried. Enthusiastic men would rush into battle with no knowledge of its realities, yet duty and patriotism demanded that he take his inadequate force north to attack the British troops encircling the capital and he tried to persuade himself that there was a real chance of surprise. Perhaps he could drive so deep into the British-held ground that he could reach the siege works about Copenhagen before the redcoats knew of his presence, and in his secret and slightly guilty dreams he imagined his men slaughtering the hapless enemy and throwing down their newly dug batteries, but in his heart he knew the outcome would not be so happy. But it had to be tried and he dared not allow his pessimism to show. “Are there any enemy south of Roskilde?” he asked an aide.
“A few,” was the airy answer.
“How many? Where?” Castenschiold demanded savagely and waited while the aide sifted through the dozens of messages sent by loyal people. Those reports said that enemy troops had appeared in Koge, but not many. “What is not many?” Castenschiold inquired.
“Fewer than five thousand, sir. The schoolmaster in Ejby says six thousand, but I’m sure he exaggerates.”
“Schoolmasters can usually count reliably,” Castenschiold said sourly. “And who leads these troops?”
“A man called”—the aide paused as he sought the right piece of paper—”Sir Arthur Wellesley.”
“Whoever he is,” Castenschiold said.
“He fought in India, sir,” the aide said, “at least the schoolmaster says he did. It seems some officers were billeted at the school, sir, and they said Sir Arthur gained a certain reputation in India.” The aide tossed down the schoolmaster’s carefully written letter. “I’m sure it isn’t hard to beat Indians, sir.”
“You are?” Castenschiold asked sarcastically. “Let us hope this Sir Arthur underestimates us as you underestimate him.” Castenschiold’s dream of piercing the British lines about Copenhagen was dying fast, for even a handful of British troops would be sufficient to detect his approach and warn their comrades. And if the five or six thousand men were under the command of an experienced general then Castenschiold doubted he would even get past them. But it had to be tried, the Crown Prince had ordered it, and so Castenschiold gave the order to move north.
It was a glorious late-summer day. Castenschiold’s army marched on three roads, filling the warm air with dust. They had a handful of field guns, though all were very old and the Captain who commanded the battery was not at all sure their barrels would endure too much firing. “They’ve been used for ceremonial purposes, sir,” he told the General. “For salutes on the King’s birthday. Haven’t had an actual ball up their gullets in fifteen years.”
“But they should fire well enough?” Castenschiold asked.
“They should, sir,” the Captain said, though his voice was dubious.
“Then make sure they do,” the General snapped. The presence of the guns gave his men confidence, though they did little for Castenschiold himself. He would rather have had a battery of new artillery, but all the new field guns were in Holstein, waiting for a French invasion that now seemed unlikely to happen. Why should the French invade Denmark when the British were forcing the Danes to become France’s ally? Which meant the best troops and guns of the Danish army were all stranded in Holstein and the British navy was blocking them from the island of Zealand, and General Castenschiold was realistic enough to know that the best Danish generals were also in Holstein, which meant that the hopes of Denmark were pinned on one middle-aged and punctilious general who had a single ancient battery of unreliable artillery and fourteen thousand inadequately trained troops. Yet still he dared dream of glory.
A squadron of cavalry trotted through the fields of stubble. They looked fine and the sound of their laughter was reassuring. Ahead, up on the northern horizon, there was the smallest gray cloud. Castenschiold fancied that was the smoke from the big guns at Copenhagen, though he could not be sure.
Castenschiold’s hopes rose in the afternoon when his cavalry patrols reported that the British troops under Sir Arthur Wellesley had withdrawn from Koge. No one knew why. They had come, stayed for a night and marched away again and the road to Copenhagen was evidently open. Castenschiold’s dream of slicing into the soft belly of the British troops was still alive, and it grew even stronger when his small army reached Koge that evening and discovered the cavalry’s reports were true. The British were gone and the road was indeed open. The commander of the local militia, an energetic chandler, had spent the time since the British departure digging entrenchments all about the small town. “If they come back, sir, we’ll pepper them, pepper them proper!”
“You have evidence that they’ll come back?” Castenschiold inquired, wondering why else the chandler had dug such impressive trenches.
“I hope they come back! We’ll pepper them!” The chandler said he had only seen three British regiments, two in red coats and one in green. “Hardly more than two thousand men, I should think.”
“Cannon?”
“They had some, but so do we now.” The chandler beamed at the Danish guns trundling into the town.
Castenschiold’s men bivouacked that night at Koge. There were reports of horsemen in the fields to the west, but by the time the General reached the place where the strange riders had been seen, they were gone. “Were they in uniform?” he asked, but no one was sure. Perhaps they had been local men? Castenschiold feared it was an enemy patrol, but the pickets saw no more such horsemen. Most of the army camped in the fields where a small stream twisted between woods and fields of stubble or turnips, while the luckier troops found shelter in the town and the General himself was billeted in the pastor’s house behind Saint Nicholas’s church where he tried to reassure his host that all would be well. “God will not desert us,” Castenschiold claimed, and his pious optimism seemed justified when, at midnight, he was woken by a returning cavalry patrol who had succeeded in riding as far as Roskilde where they had discovered that town’s garrison to be intact. The General decided he would send a message to Roskilde in the morning, demanding that its defenders march east toward Copenhagen. That might divert the British while he lunged up the open coast road. He forgot the vague reports of unidentified horsemen in the previous dusk because the dream was again taking shape.