“Yes, sir.”
Skovgaard leaned back in the chair and stared at Sharpe with an expression of distaste. His long fingers toyed with the letter opener, then he tossed it on the desk. “It is true, Lieutenant,” he said, “that I have, at times, been of assistance to Great Britain.” He waved a hand as if to suggest that assistance had been trivial, though in truth there were few men in northern Europe more valuable to London. Skovgaard was a Danish patriot, but his marriage to an Englishwoman had given him a fond attachment to a second country that was now sorely tried by the expectation of a British fleet. Skovgaard had never intended to involve himself in the murky business of espionage. At first he had merely passed on to the British embassy whatever news he gathered from the skippers of the Baltic traders who came to his warehouse, and over the years that intelligence had grown until Skovgaard was paying the golden coins of Saint George to a score of men and women in northern Europe. London valued him, but Skovgaard was no longer sure he wanted to help London now that a British fleet was fast approaching Copenhagen. “This is a time,” he said to Sharpe, “when all Danes must choose their allegiance. That is as true of me as it is of Major Lavisser, a man I am not inclined to doubt. He has risen high in your country’s service, Lieutenant. He was a Guards officer, an aide to the Duke of York and a gentleman who, in all conscience, can no longer support what your country is doing. But you? What are you, Lieutenant?”
“A soldier, sir,” Sharpe said bleakly.
“What kind?” The question was caustic. “How old are you? Thirty? And still a second lieutenant?”
“It’s where you start that counts,” Sharpe said bitterly.
“And where will you end?” Skovgaard did not wait for an answer, but instead picked up the Berlingske Tidende. “The newspaper, Lieutenant, tells us more than the mere facts of Major Lavisser’s arrival. Yesterday afternoon, at the invitation of the Crown Prince, Major Lavisser addressed the Defense Commission and I think you should hear his remarks. He warned that Britain is desperate and that she will stoop to the lowest measures to weaken Denmark’s resolve. “If it is a matter of cutting off heads then Britain can do it as well as Madame Guillotine.” Are you listening, Lieutenant? These are Major Lavisser’s words. ‘I have heard, I cannot vouch for its truth, that an army officer whose career is close to an end, a ruffian promoted from the ranks who faces ruin because of scandal at home, has been dispatched to Denmark to assassinate the Crown Prince. I cringe from believing such a thing, but would still encourage every loyal Dane to be watchful,” Skovgaard threw down the paper. “Well, Lieutenant?”
Sharpe stared at him in disbelief.
“And what are you, Lieutenant?” Skovgaard asked. “An aging lieutenant who started in the ranks, yet you wish me to believe that Britain would send such a man to treat with a prince? You?” He looked Sharpe up and down with utter disgust.
“I’ve told you the truth!” Sharpe protested angrily.
“I doubt that,” Skovgaard said, “but it is easy enough to discover. I have sent a note to Major Lavisser asking him to come here in the morning to confirm or deny your account.”
“You invited Lavisser here!” Sharpe protested. “That bastard tried to kill me!”
Skovgaard stiffened. “I deplore base language,” he said. “So, Lieutenant, are you willing to wait here and face Major Lavisser?”
“Like hell I am,” Sharpe said. He turned to fetch his pack and coat. “And damn you, Skovgaard,” he added.
The two young men blocked Sharpe from the door and Skovgaard’s voice turned him back toward the desk where the merchant now held a long-barreled pistol. “I am not willing to risk my Prince’s life, Lieutenant!” Skovgaard said. “You will either stay here of your own accord or I shall detain you until Major Lavisser can give me advice.”
Sharpe was just gauging the distance to the desk and the likelihood that the pistol would be accurate, when one of the two men drew another gun. It was a big one, the kind of pistol that a man would employ to put down a horse, and its great black muzzle was pointed at Sharpe’s head. Skovgaard said something in Danish and the other man, while his companion held the gun steady, took away Sharpe’s saber, then searched his pockets. He found the gold Sharpe had stolen on board the Cleopatra, but Skovgaard sternly ordered him to return it, then the man discovered Sharpe’s small folding knife which went into a drawer of Skovgaard’s desk. Then, with the pistols still threatening him, Sharpe was pushed into the hall. Astrid, Skovgaard’s daughter, watched in astonishment from her doorway, but said nothing.
Sharpe was thrust into a small room that opened from the hall. The door was shut and he heard a key turn in the lock and the sound reminded him that he had lost his picklock on the beach near Koge. There were no windows in the room, and thus no light, but he groped about to discover he was in a small dining room furnished with a wide table and six chairs. It was the kind of room where a small intimate dinner party could be held, warmed by a great fire that would burn in the now empty hearth. The room was now Sharpe’s prison.
He was locked in and feeling like a bloody fool. Lavisser had anticipated him, trapped him and beaten him. The guardsman was forty-three thousand guineas richer and Sharpe had failed.
CHAPTER 5
It was on the wide terrace of Kronborg Castle, at Helsingør, that the ghost of Hamlet’s father had stalked the night and now, under the quarter moon of another night’s sky, a score of big guns faced the narrow sea, their long barrels shadowed in the deep embrasures.
Beneath the terrace, in an arched crypt, two men pumped the handles of massive bellows to blast cold air into one of the fortress’s three furnaces. Other men, using long-handled cradles, tongs and pokers, rolled iron shot onto the coals which, in the fire’s deep heart, glowed white as the air hissed through the bellows’ iron nozzles. The furnace, hidden in the crypt so that its light would not glow on the fortress walls at night, was like a glimpse of hell. Red light flickered on the stone arches and glistened on the naked torsos of the men laboring about the roaring, seething incandescence.
The first six shot, each one an iron ball weighing twenty-four pounds, glowed red. “It’s hot, sir,” a sweat-soaked man shouted through the crooked passage that led from the furnace crypt.
“We’re ready!” an officer outside the crypt called up to the nearest battery.
The guns had already been charged with their bags of powder over which had been rammed thick layers of felt that had been soaked with water. The felt was there to stop the red-hot shot prematurely igniting the powder.
“Bring the shot!” a man shouted from the battery.
A dozen men manhandled the red-hot round shot onto their cradles. The cradles were like stretchers and, at their centers, were shallow iron dishes for holding the heated shot. “Quick now!” the officer said as the men hurried from the crypt and up the stone steps to the waiting guns. The round shot cooled quickly, losing their glow, but the officer knew the heat was deep in the iron’s heart and, when the great guns fired, the redness would come back. A thoroughly heated twenty-four-pound shot could cool for an hour and still retain enough fire in its belly to ignite wood. They were lethal against ships.
“Wait!” a new voice called. The commander of Kronborg Castle, a lieutenant-general who had been hastily summoned from his bed, hurried up the battery steps. He wore a tasseled nightcap and had a black woollen gown over his long nightshirt.
“The shot’s newly heated, sir,” the battery officer, a captain, pointed out respectfully as the furnacemen lowered the cradles beside the waiting barrels where the gunners had giant pincers ready to maneuver the shot into the cannons’ muzzles. The Captain wanted to ram the first six guns and hear the felt wadding hiss. He wanted to see the round shot glowing as they seared across the sea to leave six streaks of redness in the dark, but the fortress’s commander would not give the order to load. Instead the General climbed onto the lip of an embrasure and just gazed out to sea.