He paused in a deep doorway. If anyone pursued him they had taken the wrong turning, for no one looked in this alley. Sharpe reloaded the seven-barreled gun, doing it by touch, hardly thinking about the powder and shot, instead wondering why Lavisser would have his house manned like a fortress. To protect the gold? Yet if men stood sentry night after night they soon became bored. They dozed. They thought about women instead of watching for enemies and the men in the Bredgade house had been alert, waiting, ready. So there was something new there, something that had made Lavisser very cautious.

And there had been something else new in this strange night. Something that had seemed funny at first, but now struck Sharpe as sinister. He rammed the last bullet home, put the ramrod in its hoops and set off southward. Off to his right the fires still roared and tired men worked the feeble pumps. Brewery carts brought barrels of water from the harbor, but the pumps were hardly touching the fires, though as the church clocks struck one it began to rain and the men fighting the fires at last began to dare feel hope.

Sharpe unlocked Skovgaard’s door. He very much doubted that Skovgaard was at home, and Astrid, he hoped, was sleeping. He went to the kitchen and rooted in the dark for a lantern and a tinderbox. He found both, then carried the light to the warehouse where he discovered Aksel Bang still snoring on his makeshift bed of empty sacks. Sharpe put the lantern and the seven-barreled gun down, then lifted Bang off the sacks, shook him like a terrier killing a rat and flung him hard against a crate of cloves. Bang yelped with pain and blinked up at Sharpe.

“Where is he, Aksel?” Sharpe asked.

“I do not know what you are saying! What is happening?” Bang was still waking up.

Sharpe stepped toward him, lifted him again and slapped his lugubrious face hard. “Where is he?”

“I think you are mad!” Bang said.

“Maybe,” Sharpe said. He thrust Bang against the crate and held him with one hand while he searched the Dane’s blue uniform pockets. He found what he had dreaded in the coat’s tail pockets. Guineas. The golden cavalry of Saint George; new, shining and fresh from the Mint. Sharpe put the coins on the crate one by one while Bang just whimpered. “You bastard,” Sharpe said. “You sold him out for twenty guineas, didn’t you? Why didn’t you make it thirty pieces of silver?”

“You are mad!” Bang said and made a grab for the coins.

Sharpe hit him a stinging blow on the jaw. “Just tell me, Aksel.”

“There is nothing to tell.” A trickle of blood ran down Bang’s long chin.

“Nothing! You go to a prayer meeting with Skovgaard and come back without him? You’re drunk as a judge and you’ve got a pocketful of gold. You think I’m a fool?”

“I trade for myself,” Bang said, wiping the blood from his lips. “Mister Skovgaard approves. I sold some things.”

“What things?”

“Some coffee,” Bang declared, “coffee and jute.”

“You do take me for a bloody fool, Aksel,” Sharpe said. He drew out his pocket knife.

“I have done nothing!” Bang glared at him.

Sharpe smiled and unfolded the blade. “Coffee and jute? No, Aksel, you were selling a soul, and now you’re going to tell me all about it.”

“I have told you the truth!” Bang declared indignantly.

Sharpe pushed him against the crate, then held the blade just under Bang’s left eye. “We’ll take this one first, Aksel. Eyeballs just pop out. It’s not even very painful at first. We’ll have the left one, then the right, and after that I’ll fill the sockets with salt. You’ll be screaming then.”

“No! Please!” Bang screamed now, and feebly tried to push Sharpe away. Sharpe pressed the cold blade into the flesh and Bang squealed like a gelded pig. “No!” he wailed.

“Then tell me the truth, Aksel,” Sharpe said, pressing harder. “I’ll exchange the truth for your eyes.”

The tale was not told straight for Bang desperately wanted to justify himself. Mister Skovgaard, he said, was a traitor to Denmark. He had been supplying news to the British and were not the British the enemies of Denmark? And Ole Skovgaard was a mean, tight-fisted man. “I have worked for him two years now and he has not raised my wages once. A man must have prospects, he must have prospects.”

“Go on,” Sharpe said. He tossed the knife into the air and Bang watched it circle and glitter, then gave a start when the handle slapped back into Sharpe’s hand. “I’m listening,” Sharpe said.

“It is not right what Mister Skovgaard was doing,” Bang said. “He is a traitor to Denmark.” He gave a small whimper, not because of anything Sharpe had done, but because Astrid, in a swathing green robe, had come down to the warehouse. Bang’s scream must have woken her and she was carrying Sharpe’s rifle, half expecting a thief, but now laid the weapon down and looked inquisitively at Sharpe.

“Aksel’s telling us a story,” Sharpe said, “of how he sold your father for twenty pieces of gold.”

“No!” Bang protested.

“Don’t piss on me!” Sharpe shouted, frightening Astrid as much as Bang. “Tell the damned truth!”

The damned truth was that a man had approached Bang and persuaded him that his patriotic duty was to betray Skovgaard. “For Denmark,” Bang insisted. He claimed to have agonized over his decision, but it seems the agony was helped by a promise of gold and when Skovgaard suggested that the two of them attend a prayer meeting Bang had let his new friend know where and when the prayers would be offered. A coach had been waiting beside the church and Skovgaard had been snatched from the street in an instant.

Astrid had gone pale. She just stared at Bang, scarce crediting what she heard. Sharpe put the knife close to Bang’s eye again. “So you sold him, Aksel, then celebrated with gin?”

“They said it would make me feel better,” Bang admitted sadly. “I did not know it was gin.”

“What the hell did you think it was? The milk of human kindness?” Sharpe was tempted to thrust the knife home, but instead he stepped back. “So you’ve given Astrid’s father to Lavisser?”

“I do not know Major Lavisser,” Bang insisted, as though that made his offense less heinous.

“That’s what you did,” Sharpe said. “I was there an hour ago and the house was guarded like a newly built outpost. You gave him to the French, Aksel.”

“I gave him to Danes!”

“You gave him to the French, you bloody fool. And God knows what they’re doing to him. They pulled two teeth before.”

“They promised me they would not hurt him.”

“You pathetic bastard,” Sharpe said. He looked at Astrid. “You want me to kill him?”

She shook her head. “No, no.”

“He bloody deserves it,” Sharpe said. But instead he took Bang out to the yard where there was a brick-built stable that had a solid door with a heavy padlock. Sharpe locked Bang inside, then investigated the handcart that had been placed beside the yard gate. Eight unexploded bombs lay on the cart. They were probably safe, but in the morning he would pull out the wooden fuse plugs and pour water into the charges just to make sure. He went back to the warehouse, pocketed the guineas, and then climbed the stairs. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Astrid was shivering, though it was hardly cold. “Those men,” she said falteringly.

“The same men as before,” Sharpe said, “and they’ve got the house in Bredgade tight as a prison.”

“What are they doing to him?”

“Asking him questions,” Sharpe said. And he did not doubt that the questions would eventually be answered, which meant that those answers had to stay in Copenhagen. The list of names had to be kept from the French, but that meant getting into the house on Bredgade and Sharpe could not do that without help.

He put his hands on Astrid’s shoulders. “I’m going out again,” he told her, “but I’ll be back, I promise I’ll be back. Stay here. Can you keep the warehouse closed? And don’t let Aksel out.”