Skovgaard frowned. “Lieutenant… “

“I know, you hate base language and after what you did to me I don’t give a bugger. But I hoped this one was alive. He could have told us who was with Lavisser. But the bastard’s dead.”

“I know who they were,” Skovgaard said bitterly, then his daughter came into the room and screamed when she saw her father. She ran to him and he clasped her to his bloodied nightgown and patted her back. “It’s all right, dearest.” Skovgaard spoke in English, then he saw the sooty marks on the big rug. His eyes widened and he stared, first at the black footprints, then at Sharpe. “Is that how you escaped?”

“Yes.”

“Good God,” Skovgaard said faintly. A maid had brought water and towels and Skovgaard sat at the desk and rinsed his mouth out. “I only had six teeth left,” he said, “and now there are just four.” Two bloody teeth lay on the desk next to his ivory false teeth and the broken lenses of his reading spectacles.

“You should have listened to me when I first came here,” Sharpe growled.

“Mister Sharpe!” Astrid chided him.

“It’s true,” her father said.

Astrid turned a troubled gaze on Sharpe. “The man in there”—she gestured toward the parlor—“He’s still sleeping.”

“Three dead?” Skovgaard sounded incredulous.

“I wish it had been five.” Sharpe put the two good pistols on the desk. “Your guns,” he said. “I was going to steal them. Why didn’t you keep a pair in your bedroom?”

“I did,” Skovgaard said, “only they took Astrid first. They said they’d hurt her if I didn’t come out.”

“So who were they?” Sharpe asked. “I know one is your patriotic Lavisser. But the others?”

Skovgaard looked weary. He spat a mix of blood and spittle into a bowl, then smiled wanly when a maid brought him a robe that he wrapped about the bloody nightshirt. “The woman,” he said, “is called Madame Visser. She is at the French embassy. Ostensibly she is merely the wife of the ambassador’s secretary, but in truth she seeks information. She collates messages from throughout the Baltic.” He hesitated. “She does for the French, Lieutenant, what I do, what I did, for the British.”

“A woman does that?” Sharpe could not hide his surprise, earning a reproachful look from Astrid.

“She is very clever,” Skovgaard said, “and without mercy.”

“And what did she want?”

Skovgaard rinsed his mouth out again, then patted his lips with a towel. He tried to put in his false teeth, but his raw gums were too painful and made him wince. “They wanted names from me,” he said, “the names of my correspondents.”

Sharpe paced the room. He felt frustrated. He had killed three men and wounded a fourth if the blood on the small rug by the shutters was any indication, but it had all happened too quickly and his anger was still high, still unslaked. So Lavisser was in French pay? And Lavisser had almost given Britain’s Baltic spymaster to the enemy, except that a rifleman had been waiting. “So what now?” Sharpe asked Skovgaard.

The Dane shrugged.

“You tell the authorities about this?” Sharpe nodded toward the dead men behind Skovgaard’s desk.

“I doubt anyone would believe us,” Skovgaard said. “Major Lavisser is a hero. I am a merchant and you are what? An Englishman. And my erstwhile affection for Britain is well known in Denmark. If you were the authorities, who would you believe?”

“So you’ll just wait for them to try again?” Sharpe asked.

Skovgaard glanced at his daughter. “We shall move back to our house in the city. It will be safer there, I think. The neighbors are closer and it is next to the warehouse so I don’t have to travel. Much safer, I think.”

“Just stay here,” Sharpe suggested.

Skovgaard sighed. “You forget, Lieutenant, that your army is coming. They will lay siege to Copenhagen and this house lies outside the walls. Within a week, I suspect, there will be British officers quartered here.”

“So you’ll be safe.”

“If Copenhagen is to suffer,” Skovgaard said with a trace of his old asperity, “then I will share it. How can I look my workmen in the face if I leave them to endure a siege alone? And you, Lieutenant, what will you do?”

“I’ll stay with you, sir,” Sharpe said grimly. “I was sent to protect someone from the French, and it’s you now. And Lavisser’s still living. So I’ve work to do. And to start I need a spade.”

“A spade?”

“You’ve got three dead bodies in the house. Where I come from we bury them.”

“But… “ Astrid began to protest, but her voice trailed away.

“That’s right, miss,” Sharpe said, “if you can’t explain them, hide them.”

It took him most of what remained of the night, but he dug a shallow trench in the soft soil by the back wall of the garden and laid the three Frenchmen inside. He patted the earth down and covered it with some bricks he found beside the carriage house.

And then, in a gray and weary dawn, he slept.

Eleven miles north of Ole Skovgaard’s house was the insignificant village of Vedbæk. It lay on the sea, halfway between Copenhagen and the fortress at Helsingør. The village held a handful of houses, a church, two farms and a small fleet of fishing boats. Tarred sheds lined the beach where nets hung to dry on tall poles and the burning charcoal of the herring smokers shimmered the air above the sand.

Work started early in Vedbæk. There were cows to be miled and fishing boats to be hauled down to the sea, yet this morning, at dawn, no one worked. The herring fires were dying and the people of the village were ignoring their duties and standing instead on the low grassy ridge that backed the beach. They said little, but just stared seaward.

Where a fleet had appeared in the night. Closest to the beach were gun brigs and bomb ships that had moored so their great cannons and mortars could threaten any Danish troops who might appear on the shore. Beyond those small ships were frigates and, farther out still, the great ships of the line, all of them with their gunports open. There was no enemy threatening the fleet, but the guns were ready.

Between the ships of the line and the frigates was moored a host of transport ships around each of which was a smaller fleet of tenders, launches and longboats that nuzzled the bigger hulls like so many suckling pigs. Horses were being slung out of holds and lowered into the boats. No one in Vedbæk had ever seen so many ships, not at one time. At least a dozen of the village men had been sailors, yet even they had not seen such a fleet, not in Copenhagen, London, Hamburg or in any other great port.

Someone began ringing the church bell as an alarm, but the pastor hurried back into the village to silence it. “We have already sent a messenger,” he told the enthusiastic bell-ringer. “Sven has ridden to Horsholm.” There was a police barracks in Horsholm, though what use the police would be the pastor did not know. They could hardly arrest a whole army, though doubtless they would send a warning to Copenhagen.

Folk from Horsholm and from the lesser villages nearby were already coming to Vedbask to see the ships. The pastor worried that the spectators might resemble an army and he did his best to disperse them. “Jarl! Your cows are lowing. They must be milked.”

“I have girls to do that.”

“Then find them. There is work to do.”

But no one moved. Instead they watched as the first small boats headed for the shore. “Will they kill us?” a woman asked.

“Only the ugly ones,” someone answered and there was nervous laughter. The man who had made the bad joke had been a sailor and he had a great telescope that he had propped on his wife’s shoulder. He could see a field gun being lifted out of a ship’s belly and slung on a whip into one of the bigger launches. “Now they’re sending a cannon to shoot Ingrid,” he announced. Ingrid was his mother-in-law and as big as a Holstein cow.