Victory of Eagles (48 page)

do not like,” he said, “and I do not care what Wellesley thinks, or Wellington, even if he is a duke now.”

Laurence put a hand on Temeraire’s foreleg and looked out over the valley; it was a view improved over

the last summer, with the verdant growth coming up over the undulating hills of the barrow-mounds, and

the sheep and cattle Lloyd had gathered dotting the green hills as they browsed. It was all England and

home laid out before him, creeping out from under the shadow; and now he must leave it, forever, for a

distant, dry country. “We must go,” he said.

“I AM SENDINGa few eggs on your transport,” Jane said. “They need some beasts in New South

Wales, to forward the settlement.” She sat down upon the edge of a boulder; they had walked a little

way from the pavilion, to have some privacy, and up a hillside where they might have a view all the way

to the sea: grey mist hanging over the water, and at its edges a little glitter of sunlight, a few white sails.

“Can they be spared?” Laurence asked.

“More easily than they can be kept,” Jane said. “Before you brought us your cure, we thought we should

have to replace the entire population of the Isles; now there are more eggs keeping warm than we will be

able to feed in a year, after all this plundering and bad management. As for our friend across the way,”

she added, tossing a pebble over the side of the cliff, vaguely in the direction of France, “Bonaparte lost

forty beasts in his adventures here. He will not come over again shortly, and we will be ready for him if he

does.”

He nodded and sat down beside her. Jane absently rubbed her hands together and blew upon them:

there was still a chill in the air. Below, Excidium was inspecting the foundations with interest, Perscitia

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cajoling him to spray a channel for her in some of the stones, with his acid, so it should allow water to run

off more easily.

“I am afraid, Laurence, you will officially be a prisoner; it is understood you shan’t be put in irons, or

anything which should distress Temeraire, but so far as formality—”

“I could expect nothing else.”

She sighed. “At any rate, I have had some work to persuade their Lordships to do anything but the

ungracious, but there will be crews for the new hatchlings going along, of course; so I have managed that

you will have your handful also, among them.”

“You will not send Emily, surely,” Laurence said.

“I would not send anyone else, if I was not ready to send her,” Jane said. “No; she is a sturdy creature,

and any road I would rather risk her health than her spirit. She will do better to be as far away from my

station as she can. I suppose you have not heard yet, they have named me Admiral of the Air,” and she

laughed. “Wellesley—Wellington, I must say now—is a damned hard-headed bastard, but do you know,

he insisted on it; and that they create me a peer or some such nonsense, only they are still arguing over

how to manage it, without they let me sit in the Lords.”

“I congratulate you most heartily,” Laurence said, and shook her hand. “But Jane, we will be halfway

across the world—I do not even know what we will do, there—”

“They will find out some work for you, I have no doubt,” Jane said. “They mean to find a way into the

interior; dragons will make easy work of that, and if nothing else, you may help them clear land. It is a

waste, of course,” she added, “and I hope we do not have cause to regret it, but I will tell you honestly,

Laurence, I am glad you will go. I have not liked to think what should happen if you did not.”

“I would not raise civil war,” he said.

“You would not; I am not so sanguine about him,” Jane said, looking down at Temeraire, presently

settling some sort of squabble arisen between Cantarella and Perscitia; of course half the Yellow Reapers

had dived into the quarrel on Cantarella’s side at once. “But as for Emily: I do not mean to give anyone

opportunity to whisper of special treatment, or try to work on me through her, either for good or ill. With

three or four beasts established, there will be enough scope for her to advance a while, and ships come

and go often enough. I am only worried for Catherine.”

Riley and the
Allegiance
would be their transport, as so often before; and Catherine of course could not

be spared even if she had wished to go. “Only I do not know whatever to do about the boy,” Catherine

said. “I do not quite like to let him go—”

“I do not see why,” Lily muttered, not very quietly.

“—but if he is to go to sea, I suppose he had better begin as he will go on; and if he should prefer the

Corps someday, there will be dragons enough, and perhaps he ought to be with his father,” Catherine

finished, at dinner that evening; she and Berkley had come out to see him off, as of course Laurence

could not come to the covert to dine while legally a prisoner. They sat together in the pavilion around a

small convenient card-table, eating roast mutton and bread, sheltered from the wind by the dragons

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dozing comfortably around them.

Laurence with some reluctance said, “Harcourt, under ordinary circumstances, I would not presume to

offer advice on such a point; but you must recall, she will be a prison-ship for the journey; she will be

carrying prisoners.” The ordinary transports ran twice a year; the
Allegiance
would go out of turn, but

she was so vast that a great many convicts could be crammed into her between decks.

“I suppose they will not be let to wander the ship,” she said, surprised, and he had to convey some

sense of the natural order of a prison-ship: the dreadful frequency of scurvy and fever and dysentery, the

misery and regular danger of rebellion.

He was sorry to find his descriptions borne out when they came to the
Allegiance
the next morning, at

Sheerness Dockyard: it was not pleasant to see their familiar and faithful transport all at loose ends, her

crew a sad and surly crowd of pressed landsmen, some of them not far removed from the poor wretches

who could be heard—and smelled—down beneath, clanking restlessly in the irons which must restrain

them, so close to shore. Nearly every able seaman had been plundered away by ships with nobler duties

and captains with more influence than Riley, having perhaps been tainted by too much association with

Laurence, could muster to keep them for such a mission. A grating was already rigged, and fresh

bloodstains beneath showed it had lately seen use; the bo’sun and his mates were bodily shoving the men

to their work.

Across the harbor, another vessel was making ready to go down the Thames, on the same wind which

would keep the
Allegiance
in port a while longer. She made a stark contrast: a sailing barge,

flat-bottomed and small next to the behemoth of the dragon transport, and manned to precision by a tiny

handful of sailors all in black; even her sails were dyed black, and her sides had been freshly painted, so

there was no waterline to mar her side. A great casket, black-and-gold-painted, was gently and

respectfully being conveyed onto her, while her officers stood at attention.

“That is Nelson’s coffin,” Laurence said, when Temeraire quietly inquired; a hush had fallen over all the

ship, and even the most bitter of the impressed landsmen had been silenced, by the fists of their fellows if

not by a sense of decorum, while the casket was in view. Tears showed on hardened faces, and

Laurence could hear one man sobbing like a child, somewhere up in the rigging. A confused prickling of

tears stood in his own eyes.

Nelson had given Britain mastery of the sea at Trafalgar; from Copenhagen he had brought back

eighteen prizes and secured the passages of the Baltic Sea. All the month before the battle at

Shoe-buryness had been joined, he had with his fleet swept the Channel clean of French shipping and

beaten away at the regular French flights, so Napoleon should have no reinforcements. The ships had

concealed their flags and painted over their names, so no-one should realize he had returned, and for love

of him not a man out of five thousand sailors and more had deserted, even while the ships hid in home

ports.

His personal sins might have been excused, though Nelson had selfishly exposed his wife to the misery of

his flagrant unfaithfulness, and his friend Lord Hamilton to the astonished censure of the world. If Lady

Hamilton had rescued her reputation, by her heroic spy-work in the occupation, it did not redeem

Nelson’s choice; but if, for so much victory and sacrifice, all these venial matters should have been

passed over, there were worse evils to Nelson’s account. He had defended slavery, and without a qualm

advocated the hideous murder of those thousands of dragons, allies and neutrals as well as their enemies,

by the spreading of the plague: evils Laurence could never forgive, and whose consequence he would

personally bear the rest of his life.

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Yet for a moment, Laurence could feel nothing but the deepest wrenching misery, watching the barge

heave off the dock and those black sails filling; a grief unburdened by judgment; a grief he might have felt

wholeheartedly, in another life. Guns were firing as the barge passed away down the river: an impromptu

thunder of salutes. A hurried struggle went forward on the deck behind them, and the
Allegiance
’s

ragged crew managed by simple weight of her massive thirty-twos to contribute a meaningful roar or two

to the procession, though they could not yet fire a broadside in unison.

The barge vanished swiftly over the horizon, carried inland by wind and tide. Distantly the salutes went

on, like a receding storm, and at last faded entirely. The
Allegiance
groaned softly at her anchors, and

the unhappy life of the ship resumed behind him. Laurence breathed again. He had not wept, in the end.

Temeraire had watched the procession with interest; now he stretched his wings—cautiously, to keep

them in line with the wind and not abreast of it—and asked, “Will we leave soon?”

“When the captain and the passengers are come aboard,” Laurence said. “In a few days, perhaps, if the

wind turns fair.”

They, of course, had been required aboard earlier, as they were not passengers but prisoners; and if

Laurence were disposed to forget their official status, the first lieutenant, Lord Purbeck, was not. A

guard—a wholly useless guard, two Marines armed with muskets, whom Temeraire might accidentally

have knocked over without noticing—had been placed on the steps to the dragondeck, and when

Laurence looked for his things, they had been stowed in a small, dark cabin beside the stern ladderway,

two decks down: as near to the gaol-deck as practical, without being right in it, and full of the stench. To

this he was followed by the guard, and they looked as though they would have liked to keep him in it;

until he said, “You may go up, then, and explain to Temeraire I am not allowed to come to him.”

The aviators began to come aboard irregularly: they were not an assembled crew, of course, with their

own dragon, but rather were drifting over from Dover covert, by twos and threes, including two of the

captains Jane had sent: both of them older men lately dropped to earth by the death of their former

dragons, in the dreadful epidemic, long before anyone had looked for such an event; experienced men,

who might have looked for long careers ahead of them. Another man they would take aboard in

Gibraltar; three eggs were to be sent with them.

These were delivered, with great care and attention, by a party of three dragons. The eggs, swaddled in

cotton wadding and lowered down into a nest built for them over the galley, were not what anyone would

call a real prize: one Yellow Reaper, and one unfortunate cross between a Chequered Nettle and a

Parnassian, who had somehow produced a shockingly small egg that looked more likely to produce a

Winchester than a heavy-weight. The third, delivered by Arkady himself, was his own: or so he smugly

informed them, and had been lately produced by Wringe. He was not at all sorry to see the egg go,

convinced it was an especial honor to have it sent to a wide-open and unclaimed territory; although he

stayed a long time lecturing Temeraire sternly on his duty of oversight and care, and extracting promises

Temeraire should be sure the egg was not touched by anyone at all, and that only someone very rich

should be permitted to become the captain.

“I am glad to see you again, before we go,” Laurence said, to Tharkay, awkwardly; they had not

spoken, since that day in the camp, when Tharkay had so easily and so wrenchingly cut him to the bone;

Laurence scarcely knew whether to apologize or to express gratitude.

“You need not bid me farewell, just yet; I am coming,” Tharkay said. “Captain Riley has been good

enough to invite me as his guest.”

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“I did not know you knew him,” Laurence said, as near as he could come to questioning.

“I did not,” Tharkay said, “but Captain Harcourt was good enough to introduce me. I am tolerably well

in pocket, at present, thanks to your admiral’s generosity,” he added, seeing that Laurence was

surprised, “and I have never been to Terra Australis; the journey tempts me.”

Wanderlust might drive a man across the ocean or to the farther side of the world; it would not drive him