“Yes, I sent for him,” Jane said, flatly. “And you may leave off your coughing and your insinuations: if I wanted a man between my legs so badly, there is a campful of handsome young fellows outside, and I dare say I could find one out to oblige me, without going to such trouble.”
Having momentarily appalled her audience of generals and ministers into silence, she rode on, with no more muttering to contend against, “If the French took him prisoner, they would have two Celestials; and even if the two are too close related to breed direct, they will cross-breed them—perhaps to Grand Chevaliers, if you like to imagine that—and breed the offspring back to fix the traits: in a generation they will have a breed of their own, and we nothing: we haven’t a single egg out of Temeraire yet. Put Laurence in a gaol-waggon and bring him along under guard, if you insist; but if you have any sense, you will make use of him, and the beast.”
The atmosphere in the generals’ tent was not a convivial one. All conversation circled endlessly around the central disaster of the landing, returning to it again and again, and Laurence had already gathered enough to understand: Jane had not been in command of the aerial defense, after all. Sanderson had been made Admiral at Dover, over her head.
For what reason, Laurence scarcely needed to wonder: they had never liked making her commander, but having been forced to do it by necessity, they would likely have gone on as they had begun rather than admit a mistake; if they had not wanted vengeance, if they had not thought her complicit in Laurence’s treason.
As for Sanderson, Laurence knew the man a little: he was handler to a Parnassian and commanded a large independent formation at Dover; they had served together, if not very closely. Thoroughly experienced but no brilliant officer, Laurence would have said, and Sanderson’s attention was badly divided. Though his Animosia had been dosed with the cure, several times, she still fared poorly from the aftereffects of the epidemic, and it had nearly killed him, too: he was not a year short of sixty, and had scarcely slept or eaten while his dragon ailed.
He sat now in a corner of the tent and wiped occasionally at an oozing cut over his eye with a folded bandage, saying nothing, while the generals shouted instead at Jane; he looked grey and faded under the bright bloody streak on his forehead.
“Splendid, so you would put a known traitor and his uncontrollable beast into the middle of our very lines,” one member of the Navy Board said. “You may as well rig up a telegraph and signal all our plans to Bonaparte at once.”
“Bonaparte can’t damned well have an easier time of it than he has already, unless you run up a white flag instead,” Jane snapped. “He has a hundred dragons more than he ought to, by any numbers. You gentlemen at the Admiralty swear up and down we should have heard if he’d stripped Prussia and Italy to the bone; so I suppose he is pulling them out of the trees; and as we can’t do the same, we must have every last beast we can scrounge. Six beasts too injured to fight in the next month, four of our newest ferals slunk off, and you want to let a Celestial rot; pure idiocy.”
“Why precisely are we listening to this haranguing fishwife?” someone said.
“To be precise,” Jane said, “you aren’t listening to me, and you had better start. Begging your pardon, Sanderson, you are a damned fine formation-leader; but you weren’t the man for this.”
“No, not at all, Roland,” Sanderson said, dully, and patted the cloth to his forehead again.
“We are listening to her,” another general said in back, impatient: a lean sharp-faced man with a decided aquiline nose, and the Order of the Bath, “because you could not scrape up a competent man for the job. We are not going to beat Bonaparte with yesterday’s mess.”
“Portland—” another began.
“Stop bleating the man’s name like a talisman,” the general said. “If it is not Nelson with you, it is Portland. Gibraltar is as bad as Denmark: neither of them is to be had in under a month. Until then, get out of her way.”
“General Wellesley, you cannot seriously be lending your voice to the suggestion—” another minister said, gesturing to Laurence.
“Thank you; I am capable of deciding to what I will lend my voice, without consultation,” Wellesley said. He raked Laurence up and down with a cold dismissive eye. “He’s a sentimentalist, isn’t he—surrendered himself? Damned romantic. What difference does it make? Hang him after.”
Jane took him to her tent. “No, you had better stay, Frette,” she said, speaking to her aide-de-camp, who had risen from a camp-table as she ducked inside. “I can better afford to be frank before a witness than make hay for any more rumors.”
She poured herself a glass of wine, and drank it with her back to him. Laurence could not quarrel with her decision, but he wished that they had been alone; he himself felt it impossible to speak as he wished before anyone else. Then she put down the glass and sat down behind her desk. “Tomorrow you will go by courier to Pen Y Fan,” she said, tiredly, without looking at him. “That is where they have been keeping Temeraire. Will you bring him back?”
“Yes, of course,” Laurence said.
“They very likely will hang you after, unless you manage to do something heroic,” Jane said.
“If I had wished to avoid justice, I might have stayed in France,” Laurence said. “Jane—”
“Admiral Roland, if you please,” she said, sharply. After a moment’s silence, she added, “I cannot blame you, Laurence; Christ knows it was ugly. But if I am to do any good, I cannot be fighting their damned Lordships as well as Napoleon’s dragons. Frette will take you to the officers’ tent to eat, and find you somewhere to sleep. You will go tomorrow, and when you come back you will be flying in formation, under Admiral Sanderson. That will be all.”
She gave a jerk of her head, and Frette clearing his throat held open the tent flap; Laurence could only bow, and withdraw too slowly, wishing he had not seen her drop her forehead to her clenched fist, and the grimness around her mouth.
There was a dreadful awkwardness when he came into the large mess tent in Frette’s company. He saw none of his nearest acquaintance, and was glad to postpone that evil, but several remarks were made by captains little known to him, which he had to pretend not to hear, and worse than that was the discomfort and downcast faces of those who would not snub him, but still did not choose to meet his eyes.
He had been prepared for this much; he was not as well braced to have his hand seized, and aggressively pumped, by a gentleman he had only seen perhaps twice before, across the officers’ common room at Dover. Captain Hesterfield loudly said, “May I shake your hand, sir?” too late for the request to be refused, and then nearly bodily dragged Laurence over to his table in the corner, and presented him to his companions.
There were six officers at the small and huddled table: two Prussians, one of whom, Von Pfeil, Laurence recognized from the siege of Danzig, and another who stood and shook his hand, and introduced himself as cousin to Captain Dyhern, with whom they had fought at the Battle of Jena. They were refugees from their own country, having chosen exile and service in Britain over accepting the parole which Napoleon had offered to Prussian officers.
Another stranger, Captain Prewitt, had been called to England a few months before, out of desperation: his Winchester had escaped the epidemic, as they were ordinarily assigned to Halifax covert, whence he had been stationed on a lonely circuit out in Quebec to put him out of the way of anyone hearing his radical political views, as he freely acknowledged.
“Or perhaps my poetry,” Prewitt said, laughing at himself, “but my pride can better stand condemnation of my politics than of my art, so I choose to take it so. And this is Captain Latour,” a French Royalist turned British officer. Hesterfield and the two others, Reynolds and Gounod, were political sympathizers of Prewitt’s, if a little quieter than he on the subject, and Laurence gradually realized they were not incidentally supporters of his act, but were divided from the rest of the company precisely by quarreling over it.