Laurence nodded gravely. “Temeraire is a great deal younger. Perhaps he will equal Excidium some day, when he has more experience.”
“Yes, just so,” she said, very relieved, and he concealed his smile. Five minutes later she was asleep; he laid her on the bed and went to sleep with Temeraire.
“Laurence, Laurence.” He stirred and blinked upwards; Temeraire was nudging him awake urgently, though the sky was still dark. Laurence was dimly aware of a low roaring noise, a crowd of voices, and then the crack of gunfire. He started up at once: none of his crew were in the clearing, nor his officers. “What is it?” Temeraire asked, rising to his feet and unfurling his wings as Laurence climbed down. “Are we being attacked? I do not see any dragons aloft.”
“Sir, sir!” Morgan came running into the clearing, nearly falling over himself in his haste and eagerness. “Volly is here, sir, and there has been a great battle, and Napoleon is killed!”
“Oh, does that mean the war is over already?” Temeraire asked, disappointed. “I have not even been in any real battles yet.”
“Perhaps the news may have grown in the telling; I should be surprised to learn that Bonaparte is truly dead,” Laurence said, but he had identified the noise as cheering, and certainly some good news had arrived, if not of quite such an absurd caliber. “Morgan, go and rouse Mr. Hollin and the ground crew with my apologies for the hour, and ask them to bring Temeraire his breakfast. My dear,” he said, turning to Temeraire, “I will go and learn what I can, and return with the news soonest.”
“Yes, please, and do hurry,” Temeraire said urgently, rearing up on his back legs to see above the trees what might be in progress.
The headquarters was blazing with light; Volly was sitting on the parade grounds before the building tearing ravenously into a sheep, a couple of groundsmen with the dispatch service keeping off the growing crowd of men streaming from the barracks. Several of the young Army and militia officers were firing off their guns in their excitement, and Laurence was forced to nearly push his way through to reach the doors.
The doors to Lenton’s office were closed, but Captain James was sitting in the officers’ club, eating with scarcely less ferocity than his dragon, and already all the other captains were with him, having the news.
“Nelson told me to wait; said they’d come out of port before I had time to make another circuit,” James was saying, out of the corner of his mouth and somewhat muffled by toast, while Sutton attempted to sketch the scene on a piece of paper. “I hardly believed him, but sure enough, by Sunday morning out they came, and we met them off Cape Trafalgar early on Monday.”
He swallowed down a cup of coffee, all the company waiting impatiently for him to finish, and pushed his plate aside for a moment to take the paper from Sutton. “Here, let me,” he said, drawing little circles to mark the positions of the ships. “Twenty-seven and twelve dragons of ours, against thirty-three and ten.”
“Two columns, breaking their line twice?” Laurence asked, studying the diagram with satisfaction: just the sort of strategy to throw the French into disarray, from which their ill-trained crews could hardly have recovered.
“What? Oh, the ships, yes, with Excidium and Laetificat over the weather column, Mortiferus over the lee,” James said. “It was hot work at the head of the divisions, I can tell you; I couldn’t see so much as a spar from above for the clouds of smoke. At one time I thought for sure Victory had blown up; the Spanish had one of those blasted little Flecha-del-Fuegos over there, dashing about quicker than our guns could answer. He had all her sails on fire before Laetificat sent him running with his tail between his legs.”
“What were our losses?” Warren asked, his quiet voice cutting through the high spirits of their excitement.
James shook his head. “It was a proper bloodbath and no mistake,” he said somberly. “I suppose we have near a thousand men killed; and poor Nelson himself came in a hairsbreadth of it: the fire-breather set alight one of Victory’s sails, and it came down upon him where he stood on the quarterdeck. A couple of quick-thinking fellows doused him with the scuttlebutt, but they say his medals were melted to his skin, and he will wear them all the time, now.”
“A thousand men; God rest their souls,” Warren said; conversation ceased, and when finally resumed it was at first subdued.
But excitement, joy gradually overcame what perhaps were the more proper sentiments of the moment. “I hope you will excuse me, gentlemen,” Laurence said, nearly shouting as the noise climbed to a fresh pitch; it precluded any chance of acquiring further intelligence for the moment. “I promised Temeraire to return at once. James, I suppose that the report of Bonaparte’s demise is a false one?”
“Yes, more’s the pity: unless he falls down in an apoplexy over the news,” James called back, which roused a general shout of laughter that continued by natural progression into a round of “Hearts of Oak,” and the singing followed Laurence out the door and even through the covert, as the song was taken up by the men outside.
By the time the sun rose, the covert was half empty. Scarcely a man had slept; the prevailing mood could not help but be joyful almost to the point of hysteria, as nerves which had been drawn to their limits abruptly relaxed. Lenton did not even attempt to call the men to order and looked the other way as they poured out of the covert into the city, to carry the news to those who had not yet heard and mingle their voices into the general rejoicing.
“Whatever scheme of invasion Bonaparte has been working towards, this must surely have put paid to it,” Chenery said exultantly, later that evening, as they stood together on the balcony and watched the returning crowd still milling more slowly about in the parade grounds below, all the men thoroughly drunk but too happy for quarreling, snatches of song bursting out occasionally to float up towards them. “How I should like to see his face.”
“I think we have been giving him too much credit,” Lenton said; his cheeks were red with port and satisfaction, as well they might be: his judgment to send Excidium had proven sound and contributed materially to the victory. “I think it clear he does not understand the navy so well as the army and the aerial corps. An uninformed man might well imagine that thirty-three ships-of-the-line had no excuse to lose so thoroughly to twenty-seven.”
“But how can it have taken his aerial divisions so long to reach them?” Harcourt said. “Only ten dragons, and from what James said, more than half of those Spanish—that is not a tenth of the strength he had in Austria. Perhaps he has not moved them from the Rhine after all?”
“I have heard the passes over the Pyrenees are damned difficult, though I have never tried them myself,” Chenery said. “But I dare say he never sent them, thinking Villeneuve had what forces he needed, and they have all been lolling about in covert and getting fat. No doubt he has been thinking all this time that Villeneuve would sail straight through Nelson, perhaps losing one or two ships in the process: expecting them daily, and wondering where they were, and we here biting our nails meanwhile for no good reason.”
“And now his army cannot come across,” Harcourt said.
“Quoth Lord St. Vincent, ‘I don’t say they cannot come, but they cannot come by sea,’ ” Chenery said, grinning. “And if Bonaparte thinks to take Britain with forty dragons and their crews, he is very welcome to try, and we can give him a taste of those guns the militia fellows have been so busily digging-in. It would be a pity to waste all their hard work.”
“I confess I would not mind a chance to give that rascal yet another dose of medicine,” Lenton said. “But he will not be so foolish; we must be content with having done our duty, and let the Austrians have the glory of polishing him off. His hope of invasion is done.” He swallowed the rest of his port and said abruptly, “There is no more putting it off, though, I am afraid; we cannot need anything more from Choiseul now.”