League of Dragons (45 page)

Napoleon moved his hand slightly to his side, a gesture not of refusal; only of denial. He was silent a little longer, then he said, “You have the papers?”

Metternich produced a document from his coat; after a moment Napoleon turned from the window to take it. His face was changed wholly, gone utterly remote; he might have been cut out of stone. He read over the papers quickly, without sitting down, then put them on the table and reached for his pen and bent over and signed with a single swift flourish:
Napoleon.
He turning handed them back to Metternich, who received them with a bow.

“If I may express to Your Majesty—” Talleyrand began.

“You may not,” Napoleon said over his shoulder, cold and contemptuous; not what the work of a servant who had brought him such remarkable terms ought to have deserved. He went back to the window, his hands clasped behind his back; a dismissal without a word.

Coming out of the cottage behind the three ministers, Laurence lengthened his stride and caught Hammond by the arm. “Mr. Hammond,” he said, “I hope you will come and greet Temeraire: he will be glad to know you are well.”

“Oh,” Hammond said, stifled. He looked longingly at the sedan-chair waiting to carry him away, back to the headquarters, and then said, “Gentlemen, I hope you will excuse me,” with a bow to his counterparts.

He walked away with Laurence across the field towards Temeraire, stumbling now and then, and picking his buckled shoes up out of the churned ground. Laurence waited until they were private enough, out of earshot, and said, “I find myself in a false position, Mr. Hammond, and I would be glad of your assistance to escape it: I am sorry that all the dispatches, this morning, should have spoken in such excessive and inaccurate terms of my and Temeraire's part in the Emperor's capture yesterday.”

It was a shot at a venture, but it bore fruit: Hammond darted a look at him, hunted—enough, if Laurence had needed anything more than Napoleon's own reaction, to tell him there was something underhanded at work.

“I will certainly correct the misapprehension, as widely and as soon as I may,” he continued grimly. “If the Tswana had not disrupted his retreat, we could have done nothing, and our final capture depended entirely on the panic and flight of Napoleon's Incan escort. The dispatches have all proposed that we captured him in the face of an enormous force of dragons, making us figure in a truly heroic light, when we have only done our duty, in I hope an honorable but not an astonishing manner.”

“Admiral,” Hammond said, “I beg you not to repine upon—not to make an effort to—There are certain considerations—”

Laurence stopped and turned to face him. “And what would these considerations be, Mr. Hammond, which have induced you and the ministers of four nations to jointly publish a fabricated report of the battle?—And moreover, to have made the French an offer of terms which I should have been astonished to hear London approve under these circumstances: the Emperor our prisoner, the war certainly ended, and yet you hand the throne on to his son—”

He broke off even as Hammond raised an anxious hand to try to halt him. Too late: Laurence had understood at last. He saw before him suddenly the inexplicable flight of Napoleon's escort—the vivid colors of the Incan dragons fleeing in a pack, the handful of Grand Chevaliers and the other French dragons swept up in their midst.

“Or I should say, to his wife,” he finished, after a moment, with a sour taste of disgust in the back of his throat. “Tell me, Hammond, how long have Talleyrand and the Empress conspired with you, to deliver the Emperor into our hands?”

“Admiral—” Then Hammond flung up his hands in frustration, letting them fall limp, and said bluntly, “Laurence, what would you have had us do?”

He turned and walked away, his shoulders bowed, back to the sedan-chair. Laurence stood alone in the field, the cottage in the distance small and dark against the brilliancy of the blue summer sky, and the shadow of a man standing solitary by the window.

T
HE
E
MPRESS, STANDING AT
the head of the stairs of the palace, kept one hand lightly resting in the crook of the Tsar's elbow as though she were fatigued by the effort of maintaining her position, and required his support to welcome the guests ascending to the Tuileries. For his part, he gave that support with a regal, cool expression, and if he felt any concern regarding the slate of highly anxious Incan dragons, all ruffled up into enormous size and peering over at the proceedings from the square, he did not show it, though more than one guest threw alarmed looks in their direction. She let go his arm for a moment, however, to welcome the King of Prussia with an embrace, and beckoning to reunite him with his son, standing beside her.

“I regret that I never met his mother,” she said, “but I have tried to offer him a little of that comfort which I might wish my own son to find if he were ever a guest in your own court, and I hope he one day shall be, now that our nations stand once more as dear friends.”

Her voice was clear, and projected well; Laurence overheard it where he stood waiting his own turn on the stairs, and the low approving murmurs which followed. “They say she protected the prince, even after we came into the war,” he overheard one Prussian officer saying to another. “Who knows what would have become of him, otherwise, in Napoleon's power!”

The celebration was very little to Laurence's taste. He had not yet learned to reconcile himself to the betrayal of which he had been made an instrument, and he had no pleasure in being presented to the Empress and being obliged to receive her hand. He said as little as possible, but he suspected his looks spoke for him, and said more than they should; the Empress looked at him with a certain thoughtfulness when he straightened.

He knew it for certain, later that evening, when little Winters came tapping on his door all yawns and a rumpled nightshirt, roused from her bed to find Laurence: an escort of French Guardsmen had come to take him to the Empress. His former gaoler Aurigny was at their head, bowing, and Laurence did not feel he could refuse the summons, as little as he wished to speak with Anahuarque again.

Laurence silently followed his escort through the hallways to the Empress's sitting room, a small snug chamber with a balcony overlooking the garden where Maila Yupanqui slept with a slitted eye trained upon her lit window. Music still drifted over the trees from the distant ballroom, but the Empress had taken off her elaborate gown, and sat now in a brightly woven dress in the Incan style, loose and comfortable, which nearly disguised her growing belly. “Come and sit with me, Admiral,” she said, and nodded a dismissal to the guards, who glanced to one another in some concern for a moment before they reluctantly withdrew.

“I hope Your Majesty is well,” Laurence said, remote, and only bowed rather than taking the seat she had offered him; he preferred to preserve all the distance which the intimacy she offered would have closed, and he was resolved to behave only with formal courtesy.

But she said, “I am as well as can be hoped,” as though lamenting the loss of the husband she had so neatly disposed of, and Laurence could not suppress a tightening of his jaw. She smiled a little, as though she had seen what she expected. “But I think few of the Emperor's friends regret him as much as do you, his enemy.”

In the face of this provocation, Laurence could not restrain himself. “That
some,
on whose love he ought to have been able to depend, do not regret him, is certain.”

“And you think me among that number,” she said bluntly. “You are wrong.” She paused a moment, regarding him with her steady, dark eyes. “I would like you to understand me, Admiral; I should be sorry that you thought such evil of me.”

And would be sorrier, Laurence thought, if he spread a story that did her so little credit. Few others had the power to do so, and he the only one who did not have good cause to conceal it. “Your Majesty scarcely owes me any explanations, nor can I invite your confidence.”

“I do not seek your silence, beyond what your judgment should consider best,” she said. “It grieves me that you should imagine me happy in the present circumstances. If I could have my husband here at my side, triumphant, once more the conqueror of Europe, only then could I call myself a happy woman.”

“You might have had him here as the Emperor of France,” Laurence said. “Would that not have been enough?”

“But I could not,” she said. “
You
know that I could not. You know my husband, Admiral.”

This silenced him. Anahuarque added, after a pause, “You may more justly say, I should have been content to go into exile along with him; to take him away to Pusantinsuyo. But it was my husband's duty to hazard everything for victory—mine, to rescue our empire from defeat.”

Unwillingly, Laurence did begin to understand her a little more, and that peculiar retreat of her dragons in the final instants: she had offered only to let Napoleon fall into their hands, if he had already been defeated in battle—and thus to end a war swiftly that had almost certainly been lost, but which his gifts and determination could have long prolonged.

“Tell me, if the choice had been put to him, do you think he would have preferred to flee with me to my country, or to keep his son upon the throne he won?” Anahuarque asked, watching his face. “Do you still accuse me of disloyalty?”

There was much to be admired, in the strategic sense, in a plan which had permitted the Empress to enjoy the chance of complete victory, while hazarding very few of the risks of defeat. Laurence could only despise it a little less, for being a more limited conspiracy. But he remembered too clearly the father running through flames at Fontainebleau to save his son, heedless of his own risk; the swiftness with which Napoleon had signed the documents to accept his own exile, in exchange for handing on his throne.

“You have chosen, Your Majesty, as he would have chosen,” Laurence said briefly. That, he could not deny.

He did not think she would ask him to say more, and indeed she nodded his dismissal, satisfied. He left angry, because she was right to be satisfied; she had indeed silenced him as thoroughly as she might have wished. He would have liked to spread the infamy of the conspiracy widely, and to heave away the credit he had not earned; he would have liked to expose her and those who had abetted the betrayal of which he had been made an instrument. But he could not, without serving a worse blow to the man who had been their victim. That she would keep Napoleon's son upon his throne, Laurence could not doubt, nor that Napoleon would have preferred that outcome to any other form of defeat.

“But Laurence, surely we have been trying to see Napoleon defeated, all these years,” Temeraire said, a little perplexed. “Do you mean that you are sorry, now, that he has lost?”

“No,” Laurence said. “No, I would not see him restored if it were in my power, only—” He halted and shook his head, as though he could not put his feelings easily into words.

“Well, Napoleon has never seemed to me such a very bad fellow, but I am not in the least sorry that
Lien
has lost,” Temeraire said. “And this exile is by no means less than she deserves after the very underhanded way in which she behaved about the egg. I only wish they planned to put more guns on the shore, at that island, and they ought to station four heavy-weight dragons there at least. I do not think they properly respect what she is capable of doing.” He sighed a little.

Laurence shook his head in silence. He had given his opinions briefly, and advised how best to safeguard against Lien's sinking the ships, but he thought she could not be held captive long by guns or guards, however numerous. A single accomplice ship equipped with pontoons, somewhere off the shore, would make escape possible. Napoleon's true gaoler would be his own son. The ministers had bribed him so, to keep to his island, and so long as they left the boy on the throne, Napoleon would keep the bargain.

“I should like to express my gratitude,” Temeraire said a little uncertainly: he had come to the clearing where the Tswana dragons had made their camp with only the best intentions, and they had received him, but none of them had returned his introductions, and they
would
all stare so unblinkingly, as though they expected him to do something alarming; it gave him the uneasy feeling they might be right. “—mine, and of course Admiral Laurence's as well; and I dare say everybody else is grateful also, even if they have not shown it as they ought, yet. But I believe Mr. Hammond means to speak to your prince, when the opportunity arises, and discuss perhaps reopening some of your ports, at the Cape or—”

“He may save the trouble,” one of the Tswana dragons, a large fellow in orange and green, interrupted rudely. “You do not suppose we are ever going to let any of you slavers back in our territory?”

“Oh!” Temeraire said, a little indignantly;
he
was not a slaver. “I am sure I have no idea why you wanted to be helpful, then, if you choose to lump us all together.”

Another dragon snorted. “Why should we have
helped
any of you? We didn't want this Napoleon running things, and he would have, with a few thousand dragons under his hand. Now the rest of you can squabble it out among yourselves, and leave us alone.”

“And I had meant to be so gracious,” Temeraire said to Lily afterwards, when he had flown back to their own covert: which was not at all like a British covert, but a handsome ring of pavilions, each large enough to comfortably house a dozen heavy-weights, or more if they did not mind leaving a tail or a leg poking outside, and piling in. They were situated atop a high hill overlooking Rochefort harbor, presently a very picturesque scene with three dragon transports and a second-rate in harbor, and a flotilla of frigates and ships' boats scattered around them. In addition, the pavilion floors were raised from the ground with room to put coals beneath, in the best design; the weather was not so unpleasant that they were needed today, but thought had been given to the matter. It was rather an unhappy reminder of the conditions which did not await them in Britain, when at last they boarded those waiting transports and sailed back up the coast. “I had even meant to make them a present.”

“What sort of present?” Lily asked interestedly. She and all the old formation had been gratifyingly pleased for his good fortune, and had come from the Peninsula with their own to report: King Joseph had attempted to flee Spain with tremendous heaps of treasure, and they had captured a caravan with no less than six wagons of silver plate, the prize-money for which had made them all respectably rich, even divided up.

“A golden chain,” Temeraire said, “with some very handsome emeralds: that Incan dragon gave it to me, when she so wanted to keep Challoner.” He sighed a little; but as the Copacati had professed herself perfectly willing to go into the Aerial Corps, it meant Challoner should make captain straightaway, and Laurence had persuaded Temeraire that they could not stand in her way. Temeraire could not really like it, but the necklace had been a handsome consolation. “I am sure it could not fail to please, but of course I am not going to give it to them now, when they have been so churlish.”

“You might give it to me instead,” Ning said; she had been apparently sleeping in a comfortable curled place upon the stones in the sun, but she lifted her head as though she had been listening, all the time.

“Whyever would I?” Temeraire said warily.

“As a gift for the Emperor,” Ning said, “a gesture of respect and gratitude, and of congratulations on his ascension. I would be delighted to present it to him on behalf of yourself and Admiral Laurence.”

Temeraire flattened his ruff. “So you are going to China, after all, and want to make a handsome appearance when you get there;
I
see.”