Astrid screamed. Sharpe ignored her. He pulled the musket from Bang’s unresisting hand and kicked him again, this time in the face so that the Dane flew backward to thump onto the floor. Sharpe picked him up by the lapels and dumped him in a chair. “You want to play soldiers,” he told Bang, “then learn to fight first.”
“I am doing my duty,” Bang said through gritted teeth.
“No, Aksel, you’re swilling in gin.” Sharpe took away the man’s sword and quickly searched Bang for other weapons. There were none. “Bloody hell, man, I’m not here to fight you or Denmark.”
“Then why are you here?”
“To stay,” Sharpe said.
“This is true,” Astrid said earnestly, “he will stay.” She was standing at the door where she had ordered a maid to make tea.
Bang looked from Astrid to Sharpe and then, pathetically, began to cry. “He’s rare drunk,” Sharpe said.
“He does not drink,” Astrid insisted.
“He took a bellyful tonight,” Sharpe said. “You can smell it on him. He’ll be throwing up soon.”
Sharpe half carried and half led Bang downstairs and put him to bed on a pile of empty sacks in the warehouse. Back upstairs, in the parlor, he turned Bang’s musket upside down and rapped it smartly on the floorboards. The ball and powder, after a moment’s reluctance, simply fell out. “Poor Aksel,” Astrid said, “he must have been frightened.”
“It’s hard if you’re not used to it,” Sharpe said, talking of the bombardment rather than the gin. He went to the window. The bombs were more sporadic now and he guessed the batteries were running out of ammunition. He saw a fuse streak the smoke cloud, heard the explosion and watched the flames roar hungrily. “It’ll stop soon,” he said, “and I’ll be going out.”
“You’re going out?”
Sharpe turned and smiled at her. “I’m not a deserter. I’ll write a letter to the British army and tell them they can have their commission back. Do it legal, see? But I’ve something to do first. And it’s English business, not Danish.”
“Major Lavisser?”
“If he’s dead,” Sharpe said, “then your father will be safer.”
“You’ll kill him?” Astrid seemed surprised.
“It’s my job,” Sharpe said, “for now.”
“For now?” Astrid wondered. “You mean you will stop killing soon?”
“Not much opportunity for killing here. I’ll have to find another sort of work, eh?”
But first he would find and kill Lavisser. The renegade was off duty tonight, but Sharpe doubted he was at home. He would be watching the fires and bombs, but he must eventually go back to his bed and Sharpe reckoned that was the time to find him. So Sharpe would be a housebreaker for Britain. He would wait for Lavisser in the Bredgade house, kill him when he returned and take the gold as a gift for his new life in Denmark.
The city clocks were striking midnight as he went down the stairs. He carried the two pistols and the seven-barreled gun, but he had left the rifle and cutlass upstairs. Bang was sleeping, his mouth open. Sharpe paused, wondering if the man would wake and decide to go into the city and find some soldiers who could help him arrest the Englishman who had so inconveniently returned, but he decided Bang was probably stupefied by the unfamiliar gin. He left him snoring, unlocked the front door with the key Astrid had given him, carefully locked it again, then turned north through streets smelling of battle. The bombs had ended, though the fires still blazed. He walked fast, following the directions Astrid had given him, but he still got lost in the shadowed alleys, then saw a crowd hurrying three wounded people northward and remembered she had told him that Bredgade was close to King Frederick’s Hospital. “You cannot mistake it,” she had told him. “It has a black roof and a picture of the Good Samaritan above the door.” He followed the wounded folk and saw the hospital’s black tiles shining in the flame light.
He went to the front of Lavisser’s house first. He doubted he could get in that way, and sure enough the windows were shuttered. The Danish flag celebrating Lavisser’s homecoming still hung from the lantern. He counted the houses, then doubled back into a wide alley that ran behind the rich houses. He counted again until he came to a gate that would let him into the backyard.
The big gate was locked. He glanced up and saw spikes on top of the gate and glints of light on the wall’s coping. There was glass embedded, there, but householders never did the job properly and Sharpe simply went to the house next door and found their gate unlocked. The party wall had no glass on its coping and a convenient store shed gave him access to the top of the wall. He climbed, paused and stared into Lavisser’s backyard.
It was empty. There was a stable and coach house, then a short flight of steps leading into the house, which was dark as pitch. He dropped over the wall and unbolted Lavisser’s back gate to give himself an escape route, then crouched by the stable and examined the house again. There was a dark hole under the stone steps and he suspected it led to the basement. He would start there, but first he stared up at the house again. The uppermost windows were not shuttered and three of them were cracked open, but no lights showed there except the flickering reflection of the fires on the glass. All was still and utterly quiet, yet suddenly his instincts were tight as a drum skin. There was something wrong. Three open windows? All open the same amount? And it had all been too easy so far and it was much too quiet. Those open windows. He stared up at them. They had been opened just enough to let muskets poke through. Were there men there? Or was he imagining things? Yet he sensed he was being watched. He could not explain it, but he was certain this was not nearly so easy as he had imagined.
The house no longer looked dark and vulnerable. It was a threat. One part of his mind told Sharpe he was imagining things, but he had learned to trust instinct. He was being watched, being stalked. There was one way to find out, he thought, and so he took the big gun off his shoulder, cocked it, and positioned himself so he could see only the right-hand window. If he was being watched then the man up there would be waiting for Sharpe to cross the yard, to be in the open space that would serve as a killing ground. But the man would also see death in the seven barrels of the big gun and Sharpe suddenly jerked the weapon up, aiming it at the window and he saw the spark of the flint deep in the room and then the cough of flame at the window sill and he was already rolling back into cover as a musket ball cracked against the brick just inches from his face. Two more guns fired almost immediately, venting smoke from the upper floors. A tile shattered on the stable roof, then a voice shouted and feet sounded on the stone stairs that led from the house. Sharpe leveled the pistol at the steps, fired, then saw more men spilling from the coach house. He dropped the pistol, leveled the seven-barreled gun and pulled the trigger.
The noise, in the confines of the yard, was like a cannon firing. The muzzle flames licked out six feet, filling the air with smoke that was wickedly tangled by ricocheting bullets. A man shouted in pain, but Sharpe was already at the back gate. He hauled it open, slipped into the alley and ran. Two musket balls followed him from the high windows and a few seconds later a pistol was discharged down the alley, but Sharpe was already out of sight. He ran to the front of the hospital where a crowd waited under the bas-relief of the Good Samaritan. Some of them, alarmed by the eruption of gunfire and seeing the big gun in Sharpe’s hand, shouted a question, but he dodged into another alley, ran to its end, turned and twisted down two more and then slowed to catch his breath. God damn it, but they had been ready for him. Why? Why would a man keep a close guard on his house when he was supposedly among friends?