“Trust him with my life, Richard. He’s been a Pucelle longer than I have. And Collier needs a fellow who can talk the language.”
The night fell. The clouds made it utter dark, so black that Sharpe wondered how the launch would ever find its way into the harbor mouth, but Chase reassured him. He pointed to a distant lantern that glowed a pale blue. “That’s hanging from one of the Pucelle’s yardarms and we’re going to put another lantern on the Vesuvius’s foremast, and as long as young Collier keeps the two lights in line then he’ll go straight as an arrow. The navy does try to anticipate these problems.” He paused.
“Would you very much mind, Richard, if I didn’t see you away? I’m feeling somewhat sickly. Just something I ate. I need sleep. Do you feel well?”
“Very.”
“I wish you joy, Richard,” Chase said, clapped his shoulder and walked aft.
It seemed a strangely abrupt farewell, and it did not seem right that Chase should be sleeping when the launch crew left, but Sharpe suspected Chase’s sickness was as much to do with nervousness as an upset stomach. Sharpe himself was nervous. He was about to try and pierce an enemy stronghold, and doing it in a launch that offered no hiding place if they were discovered. He watched Chase go to the after quarters, then went and waited in the Vesuvius’s well deck where the great mortars crouched and where Hopper and his men honed knives and cutlasses.
It seemed an age until Collier ordered the embarkation and then it took another long while for all the men, encumbered with their weapons and carrying bags of food and skins of water, to clamber down the bomb ship’s side into the tar-stinking launch. The men were oddly excited, almost giggly, so much so that Collier snapped at them to be quiet, then sensibly checked that none of them had loaded weapons for he feared the accidental discharge of a pistol or musket. Rain had started to fall. It was not heavy, merely an insistent drizzle that found its way down Sharpe’s upturned collar.
The launch was crowded. It usually had a crew of a dozen men, but now held fifteen. They had embarked over the side of Vesuvius that lay farthest from the city and, at Collier’s order, the men now rowed a few strokes to take them clear of the bomb ship. The great oars were silent in the tholes, though once they were a few yards from the Vesuvius Collier ordered the men to stop rowing. “The tide will take us in,” he whispered to Sharpe. There was no need to whisper for they were still more than half a mile from the shore, but already they were feeling vulnerable.
The launch drifted. Every now and then the stroke or bow side oars would pull a brief correction to keep the pale-blue lanterns in line. The blue was very pale, almost white, and Sharpe, twisting about on the rear thwart, marveled that the men could distinguish those two lamps from all the other lights in the fleet. Most of the time the crew stayed still and silent, listening for the telltale splashes and creaks that would betray the presence of a Danish guard boat. There was bound to be at least one enemy boat patroling the harbor boom to prevent just such an incursion as this one by the Pucelle’s darkened launch.
A few lights burned in the city, their reflections glimmering long and shakily on the black water. A wind gusted cold out of the east, splashing small waves against the launch. Sharpe shivered. He could smell the harbor now, its water made rank by all the sewage and rot that was penned up by the long quays. A small flame flared and died on the ramparts of the citadel and Sharpe supposed it was a sentinel lighting a pipe. He turned to see that the lanterns of the British fleet now looked very far away and were blurred by the rain, then a hiss from the launch’s bows made everyone go still. Sharpe heard a splash nearby and the groan of an oar in its rowlock. An enemy guard boat was close and Sharpe waited, scarce daring to breathe, but the next splash was fainter. He thought he saw a flash of white water from an oar, but he could not be certain. Collier and his men were bending low as if they might hide from the patroling enemy in the dark of the sea’s surface.
A reddish glow now showed above the citadel’s ramparts, cast by the lanterns in its central courtyard. The launch was drifting faster now, carried in by the fierce tide. Sharpe could not see the pier and he tried not to think of the big Danish guns in the embrasures above him. Just one barrel, loaded with canister, could turn the launch into a mess of bloodstained kindling. The first of the city clocks struck one.
Then the launch bumped into an obstacle. Sharpe gripped the gunwale, sticky with its coating of tar. His first thought was that they had drifted into the boom, or perhaps struck a rock, then he realized that the bow men were clambering out of the launch. They had reached the pier, guided unerringly by the blue leading lights. He heard thumps as the big bags of food and ammunition were heaved upward. “We’ll just leave the boat here,” Collier whispered, “let it drift.”
Sharpe groped his way forward, then scrambled awkwardly up to the wooden staging which smelt of fish. “So where now, Richard?” a low voice asked him.
Sharpe turned, astonished. “Sir?”
“Shh.” Captain Chase grinned in the dark. “Admiral Gambier thinks I’m ill, but I couldn’t possibly let these lads come without me.” His lads were all grinning. They had known the Captain was coming, which was why they had been so excited when they left the Vesuvius. “So where to, Richard?” Chase asked.
“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.