“You shouldn’t be here, sir,” Sharpe said fiercely.
“Not you too, for God’s sake. Besides, a little late to tell me, don’t you think?” Chase was wearing his uniform, but now draped a boat cloak over his shoulders. “Lead on, Richard, lead on.”
Sharpe took them along the pier, always aware of the huge guns not a hundred paces away, then left down the path where he had walked with Astrid. Their boots seemed loud. Then, not twenty paces from the pier, a voice challenged from the garden where a battery of field guns had been placed behind fascines.
Chase’s Danish seaman answered. There was a brief laugh from the darkness, then another rattle of words. The other seamen had stopped, hands on weapons, but the tone of the exchange was reassuring and Chase led them on. “What did you tell him?” the Captain asked when they were clear of the battery.
“The truth,” the man said. “I told him we were British sailors come to capture the fleet.”
“You did?” Chase sounded alarmed.
“My mother said I’d go to hell if I lied, sir. Then I told him our boat had sprung a leak and we were walking back. He thinks we’re the guard-boat crew.”
Chase chuckled. There was just enough light seeping from lamps in the city to cast a damp shine on the road beside the harbor quay, which was heaped with barrels of food stockpiled for a siege. “Does this strike you as damned odd, Richard?” Chase asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“My God, we’re in an enemy fortress!” Chase peered down alleys, plainly disappointed that there was so little to see. The city seemed asleep, not just the civilians, but the garrison too. There was an innocence here, Sharpe thought. Copenhagen might be under siege, yet still the city wanted to carry on with its ordinary life. No one wanted war and Sharpe sensed that the folk perversely believed it would go away if they ignored it. All that Denmark asked was to be left in peace while Europe went mad, but the Danes had ships and so they must have war whether they liked it or not.
They passed the Amalienborg Palace. There must have been sentriesthere, but none challenged the group of men whose footsteps echoed from the palace walls. A cat squealed somewhere and rats skittered in the dark. The quay, which had been almost empty on the day the Crown Prince had left for Holstein, was now crowded with moored craft, most of them merchantmen that had taken refuge from the British fleet. The wind slanted the persistent rain through their high rigging. “I keep thinking I shall wake up and discover this is a dream,” Chase said.
“We’re not at the inner harbor yet,” Sharpe warned. Surely the Danes would guard their fleet? Yet the bridge had no sentries. The masts and rigging of the warships tangled the dark, dimly lit by a brazier that glowed outside a guardhouse that stood close to the two half-built ships on the slipways. Sharpe assumed it was a guardhouse, for there was a small covered booth for a sentry, but the booth was empty.
Chase led them down the stone quay that separated the inner and outer harbors. It was suddenly all ridiculously easy. The Danes had packed their fleet into the basin, gunwale to gunwale, and the bows of the warships touched the quay so that their bowsprits soared above the stones. Chase gestured at the very first ship and his men, with a practiced ease, scrambled into the netting rigged under the beakhead. Then, one by one, they vanished inside the bows. Sharpe waited till the last bundle had been passed up, then followed more clumsily.
The ship was dark as a tomb. No one challenged them. They groped down companionways until they had reached the empty lower deck. And there, come like thieves in the night, they waited.
General Peymann peered at the letter which had been brought to the city by two British officers under a flag of truce. The officers were waiting outside one of the gates for his answer.
The letter was in English and the General’s command of that language was not sufficient to understand the elaborate courtesies demanded by diplomacy so he gave the paper to Lavisser. “Perhaps you’d translate, Major?”
Lavisser read his translation aloud. He hurried through the flowery demand for the city’s surrender. “‘We, the undersigned, at this moment, when our troops are before your gates, and our batteries ready to open, do renew to you the offer of the same advantageous and conciliatory terms which were proposed through His Majesty’s ministers to your court.” Nothing new there, sir,” Lavisser commented. “’If you will consent to deliver up the Danish fleet, and to our carrying it away, it shall be held in deposit for His Danish Majesty, and shall be restored, with all its equipments, in as good a state as it is received, as soon as the provisions of the general peace shall remove the necessity which has occasioned this demand.’ It’s signed by both Admiral Gambier and General Cathcart, sir,” Lavisser said, tossing the letter down.
Peymann sat at the table and gazed gloomily at the letter. “They don’t say anything about bombarding the city?”
“Not in so many words, sir.”
“But will they?” Peymann demanded.
“They daren’t,” another aide answered. “They will earn the scorn of all Europe.”
“But if they do,” a third aide put in, “we shall have to endure. The fire brigades are ready.”
“What fire brigades?” Lavisser asked sarcastically. “There are just seven pumping engines in the whole city.”
“Seven? Only seven?” Peymann was alarmed.
“Two are being repaired, sir.”
“Seven isn’t enough!”
“Burn the fleet,” Lavisser suggested. “When they see the prize is gone, sir, they’ll go away.”
“We are here to protect the fleet,” Peymann said. “We will burn it if we must, but only at the very last moment.” He sighed, then gestured for a clerk to write a reply to the British demand. “My Lords,” he dictated, then thought for a moment. “We remain convinced that our fleet, our very own indisputable property, is as safe in His Danish Majesty’s hands as ever it can be in those of the King of England.” That, he thought, was very felicitous. Should he mention the possibility of a bombardment? He decided, on balance, that he should try to jog the British conscience. “Our master never intended any hostilities against yours,” he went on, “and if you are cruel enough to endeavor to destroy a city that has not given you the least cause for such treatment, then it must submit to its fate.” He watched the clerk write. “They won’t bombard,” he said, almost to himself. “They won’t.”
“They cannot,” an aide agreed.
“It would be barbarous,” another said.
“It will be a siege, I’m sure,” Peymann said, hoping he was right.
That would be the last thing that Chase and his men would want, for they must hide until the city surrendered and even the ever optimistic Chase did not believe their luck could hold through the weeks or months of a prolonged siege. Chase had only dared come into the city because he believed that the Danish surrender would come swiftly once the mortars began their work. “Mind you,” he told Sharpe in the morning, “we could probably live here for months. The bottom’s full of salt pork. There’s even some water barrels. A bit rank, but nothing worse than we usually drink.” Dawn had revealed that they were on board the largest ship in the Danish fleet, the 96-gun Christian VII. “She’s almost new,” Chase told Sharpe, “and beautifully built. Beautiful!” The ship had been emptied of her crew, guns and ammunition, though great canvas bundles of incendiaries had been placed throughout her decks with fuses leading up to the forecastle. There were no Danes aboard, though in the afternoon, when most of Chase’s bored men were sleeping, there was the thump of footsteps. The men, concealed in the forward magazine, took hold of their weapons while an alarmed Chase put a finger to his lips.
The footsteps came down to the deck immediately above them. There seemed to be two people, perhaps come to check the fuses or maybe to sound the ship’s well, but then one of the intruding couple laughed and sang a snatch of song. It was a woman’s voice and a moment later new sounds betrayed why the couple had come aboard. “If they fight as hard as they—” Collier whispered, but Chase silenced the Midshipman.