She sat on a bench facing the sea. “You look so like Nils,” she said.

“That must be hard.”

She nodded. “He was lost at sea. We don’t know how. He was a captain, you see? He called his ship the Astrid and he was carrying sugar from the West Indies. When he didn’t come home I thought perhaps his ship was being mended, but it wasn’t so. We heard he had sailed and then there was a big storm just a few days after. We waited, but he never came. But I used to see him every day. I would see a stranger in the street and think, that is Nils! He has come back, then the stranger would turn and it would not be Nils.” She was not looking at Sharpe as she spoke, but staring out to sea, and Sharpe wondered if she had come here in her early widowhood to look for her husband. “Then I saw yoU in the house”—she turned her big eyes on Sharpe—”and I knew it was Nils. For a moment I was so happy.”

“I’m sorry,” Sharpe said awkwardly. He knew how she felt, forever since Grace’s death he would see a dark-haired woman in the street and think it was Grace. He felt the same leap of the heart and knew the same dull ache that followed the disappointment.

Gulls cried above the harbor channel. “Do you think we’re really in danger?” Astrid asked.

“You know what your father does?”

She nodded. “I’ve helped him in the last few years. Since Mother died. He corresponds, Lieutenant, that is all. He corresponds.”

“With folk in Europe and in Britain.”

“Yes.” She stared at the British fleet. “He does business all over the Baltic and all through the north German states, so he has scores of men who write to him. If a French column of artillery passes through Magdeburg then he will know within a week.”

“And he tells the British?”

“Yes.”

“Dangerous work,” Sharpe said.

“Not really. His correspondents know how to write safely. That’s why I help my father, because his eyes are not so good as they were. Some of the best ones send him newspapers. The French do not mind newspapers going to Denmark, especially if they are from Paris and full of praise for the Emperor, but if you open the paper and hold it against the window you can see that someone had pushed a pin hundreds of times through the pages. Each pinprick is under a letter and I just read the letters off in order and that is the message.” She shrugged. “It is not so dangerous.”

“But the French know who he is now,” Sharpe said. “They want to know who writes to him, who sticks those pins in the newspapers. They want to stop the messages and your father can give them the names. So it is dangerous.”

Astrid said nothing for a while. She gazed at a gunboat that was being rowed out of the harbor. There was a heavy boom made from chained logs protecting the entrance, but it had been hauled aside to let the gunboat pass. The ship had a tall mast on which a sail was furled, but the small wind was against the ungainly craft and so a score of oarsmen were pulling on long sweeps to crawl out of the channel. The boat had an ugly bill of a bow on which two heavy and very long-barreled cannons were mounted. Twenty-four-pounders, Sharpe guessed. Guns that could fire a long way and hit hard, and there were a score of other gunboats tethered against the far quay where powder and shot were being unloaded from carts. Other boats were bringing food into the city. “I hoped the danger was past,” Astrid said after a long while, “now that the French are gone. But at least it stops life being dull.”

“Is life dull?” Sharpe asked.

She smiled. “I go to church, I do the accounts and I look after Father.” She shrugged. “It must sound very dull to you.”

“My life’s become dull,” Sharpe said, thinking of his job as a quartermaster.

“You!” She was teasing him, her eyes bright. “You are a soldier! You climb chimneys and kill people!” She gave a shudder. “Your life is much too exciting.”

Sharpe stared at the gunboat. The rowers, stripped to the waist, were hauling hard, but the boat was making little progress. He could see the tide rippling against the piers of the jetty and the gunboat was fighting the flood, but the oarsmen pulled on as though every burning muscle would help turn back the British. “I’m thirty years old,” he said, “and I’ve been a soldier for fourteen years. Before that I was a child. I was nothing.”

“No one is nothing,” Astrid protested.

“I was nothing!” Sharpe sounded angry. “I was born into nothing, raised into nothing, expected to do nothing. But I had a talent. I can kill.”

“That is not good.”

“So I became a soldier and I learned when to kill and when not to kill. I became something, an officer, but now they don’t want me. I’m not a gentleman, see? I’m not like Lavisser. He’s a gentleman.” He knew he had sounded jealous and angry and was embarrassed. He had forgotten, too, the reason for being with Astrid and he guiltily turned and looked at the folk taking the summer air on the fort’s esplanade, but no one appeared to be taking any undue notice of the two of them. No Frenchmen were lurking and there was no sign of Barker or Lavisser. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said.

“Sorry, why?”

“Tide has turned,” Sharpe said, changing the subject and nodding at the gunboat. “Those lads are making some progress now.”

“We must make some progress too,” Astrid said, standing. Then she laughed. “You make me feel very rich.”

“Rich? Why?”

“To have a manservant carrying the basket! Only the folk living on Amaliegade and Bredgade can afford such luxuries.” They walked westward, skirting the moat of the vast citadel until they came to a poorer quarter of the city, though even here the houses were neat and clean. The single-story homes had been built to a pattern, were brightly painted and in good repair. “This is the sailors’ quarter,” Astrid told Sharpe. “Nyboder, it is called. They all have ovens! One oven for every two houses. It is nice, I think.”

“Very nice.”

“My father was a sailor’s son. He grew up in that street, Svanegaden. He was very poor, you see?” She looked at him with big eyes, evidently trying to reassure him that she was no better born than himself. But Svanegaden, Sharpe thought, was a paradise compared to Wapping.

“You reckon this is a poor area?” Sharpe asked.

“Oh yes,” Astrid said seriously, “and I know about these things. Father is one of the Commissioners of the Poor and I help with the correspondence.”

The orphanage was on the edge of Nyboder, close to the sailors’ cemetery where Astrid’s son was buried. Astrid tidied the little grave, then bowed her head and Sharpe wanted to embrace her when he saw the tears on her cheeks. Instead he stepped back, giving her privacy, and watched the gulls wheeling over the citadel’s ramparts. He thought of Grace and wondered what birds flew above her grave. She had been buried in a Lincolnshire church among her dead husband’s family and under a memorial tablet recording Lord William Male’s virtues. Sharpe imagined her spirit hovering over him. Would she approve that he was so drawn to Astrid? He turned and looked at the widow stooping over the tiny grave and knew he was falling in love. It was as though green shoots were coming from the hatred and fury that had obsessed him since Grace had died.

Astrid stood and smiled at him. “Come,” she said, “you must meet the children.” She led him to the hospital where her son had died and Sharpe could hardly believe it was also an orphanage. It was nothing like Brewhouse Lane. There was no high wall or spiked gate, though the upper windows were all equipped with iron bars. “That is to stop the boys being daredevils,” Astrid explained. “Sometimes the older boys want to climb on the roof.”

“So it’s not a prison?”

“Of course not!” She laughed at the idea, and indeed the orphanage looked anything but a prison. The two-story building was painted white and built about a courtyard where flowers grew in neat beds. There was a small chapel with a pipe organ, a simple altar and a high stained-glass window that showed Christ surrounded by small, golden-haired children. “I grew up in a place like this,” Sharpe told Astrid.