“You can explain that, Sir David?” Jackson asked.
“They’ll have stuffed the ships with incendiaries,” Baird said. “Canvas bales filled with saltpeter, mealed powder, sulphur, resin and oil”—Baird listed the ingredients with an indecent relish—”and once the fuses are lit those boats will be pure flames in three minutes. Pure flames!” He smiled, then used a candle to light a dark cigar.
“Dear God,” Jackson murmured.
“It probably isn’t sufficient then,” Lord Pumphrey spoke very judiciously, “to remove Captain Lavisser from the city?”
“Remove him?” Cathcart asked, startled.
Lord Pumphrey, so small and frail, drew a finger across his throat, then shrugged. “The message suggests that our renegade is the officer charged with delivering the order to burn the fleet, but alas, if he is absent then someone else will surely give the order.”
Everyone stared at the diminutive Pumphrey. Baird, approving the idea of killing Lavisser, smiled, but most of the other officers looked shocked. Jackson just shook his head sadly. “One devoutly wishes that such a simple solution would obviate our problem, but, alas, the Danes will have other men ready to start a conflagration.” He sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “It will be a terrible defeat,” he mused, “if we were to come this far and lose the prize.”
“But, damn it, the Frogs won’t get the ships!” Cathcart protested. “That’s the point, ain’t it?”
“A most craven defeat,” Jackson said, ignoring the General’s words, “for all the King’s horses and all the King’s men to have come this far merely to provoke a bonfire. We shall be the laughingstock of Europe.” He made the last observation to Cathcart with the obvious insinuation that his lordship would be the butt of the joke.
General Baird signaled a waiter to bring the decanter of port. “Will the ships be fully manned?” he demanded.
No one answered, but most looked to Chase for an answer. The naval Captain shrugged as if to suggest he did not know. Sharpe hesitated, then spoke up. “The sailors have been added to the garrison, sir.”
“So how many men are left aboard?” Baird demanded.
“Two or three,” Chase opined. “The ships aren’t in danger where they are, so why have crews aboard? Besides, I’m sure they’re en flûte.”
“They’re what?” Baird asked.
“En flûte, Sir David. Their guns will have been taken ashore to add to the garrison’s ordnance, so their gunports are empty like a flute’s finger-holes.”
“Why didn’t you damn well say so?”
“And ships en flûte,” Chase went on, “won’t need crews, or nothing more than a couple of fellows to keep an eye on the mooring lines, pump out the bilges and be ready to light the fuses.”
“A couple of fellows, eh?” Baird asked. “Then the question is, I suppose, how do we get a few of our fellows into the inner harbor?” Cathcart just stared at him wide-eyed. Jackson sipped port. “Well?” Baird inquired belligerently.
“I was there last week,” Sharpe said. “Walked in. No guards.”
“You can’t send men into the city! They won’t last an hour!” Cathcart protested.
“Sharpe did,” Lord Pumphrey said in his delicately high voice. He was staring at the chandelier, apparently fascinated by a lengthening strand of wax that threatened to drip into the dessert bowl. “You lasted a good few days, didn’t you, Sharpe?”
“You did?” Cathcart stared at Sharpe.
“I pretended to be an American, sir.”
“What did you do?” Cathcart asked. “Spit tobacco juice everywhere?” He had made his name in the war of American independence and reckoned himself an expert on the erstwhile colonies.
“But even if our fellows can survive in the city,” Captain Chase said, “how do we get them inside?”
Francis Jackson, elegant in a black suit and white silk shirt, snipped the end from a cigar. “How do the Danes infiltrate their messengers into the city?”
“Small boats, close inshore, dark nights,” Chase said shortly.
“There’s a small jetty,” Sharpe said diffidently, “a small wooden pier by the citadel where people go to fish. It’s very close to the fort. Too close, maybe.”
“And right under the guns of the Sixtus Battery,” one of Cathcart’s aides observed.
“But a dark night?” Chase was suddenly enthusiastic. “Muffled oars. Blackened boat. Yes, why not? But why land at the pier? Why not row all the way in?”
“There’s a boom across the outer harbor,” Sharpe said, “and across the inner, but the pier’s outside the boom.”
“Ah. The pier it is, then.” Chase smiled, then looked down the table at Cathcart. “But we’d need the Admiral’s permission to send a launch, my lord, and might I suggest, with all the humility at my command, that this is a service best done by sailors? Unless, of course, you have soldiers who can find their way around a darkened ship at night?”
“Cite a verse from the Bible,” Lord Pumphrey observed quietly, “that justifies such an expedition and I am sure Lord Gambier will grant permission.”
One or two men smiled, the others wondered whether the prickly Admiral really would authorize such a gamble. “He’ll give permission when he knows his prize money depends on it,” Baird growled.
There was an embarrassed silence. Prize money, though much appreciated, was rarely acknowledged openly. Every senior officer, army and navy, stood to make a small fortune if the Danes refused to surrender, for then the ships would be prizes of war and worth real money.
“I suspect Lieutenant Sharpe should go with your sailors,” Lord Pumphrey suggested. “He has a certain knowledge of the city.”
“I’m sure we’d welcome him,” Chase said, then looked at his friend. “Would you come?”
Sharpe thought of Astrid. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“But if it were done,” Lord Pumphrey said, “then ‘twere well it were done quickly. Your fellows will be ready to open the bombardment in a day or two, will they not?”
“If we bombard,” Cathcart growled.
“We must,” Jackson insisted.
The argument returned to its old course, whether or not to bomb the city. Sharpe sipped port, listened to Copenhagen’s bells ring the hour, and thought of Astrid.
The devil lurched up the slope and stuck at the top. “For God’s sake push, you heathen bastards!” A sergeant, muddied to his waist, snarled at a dozen men. “Push!” The devil’s eight horses were whipped, the men heaved at the wheels and the devil threatened to slide down the heap of clay. “Put your bloody backs into it!” the Sergeant bellowed. “Push!”
“Much too painful to watch,” Lord Pumphrey said and turned his back. It was the morning after Cathcart’s dinner and his lordship was feeling distinctly fragile. He and Sharpe were on a dune not far from where the devil was stuck and his lordship had an easel on which a very small piece of paper was pinned. He also had a box of watercolor paints, a tumbler of water and a set of brushes with which he was making a picture of Copenhagen’s skyline. “I do thank the Lord I was never intended for the army,” his lordship went on, touching a brush to the paper. “So very noisy.”
The devil inched over the heap of clay and trundled down to the battery. It was a grotesquely heavy cart made for transporting mortars. The mortar carriage rode on the cart while the barrel was slung beneath the rear axle. The battery already possessed six long-barreled twenty-four-pounder guns that had been fetched ashore from a ship of the line; now it was being equipped with as many mortars.
They were evil looking weapons. Just metal pots, really, squat and fat and short. The carriage was a chunk of wood in which the pot was set so it was pointing high into the air with a wedge at its front to change the elevation, though most gunners preferred to adjust their weapon’s range by varying the amount of powder in the charge. Sharpe, watching the men maneuver the devil beneath the three-legged gin that would lift the heavy barrel off the ground and onto the carriage, tried to imagine the gun being fired. There would be no recoil, for the carriage had no wheels or trails and the gun was not being fired horizontally, so instead of leaping back the squat mass of wood and iron would simply try and bury itself in the earth. The mortars being assembled in this battery were all ten-inch weapons, not the biggest, but he imagined the smoking balls arcing high into the clouding sky and thumping down inside Copenhagen.