Willoughby nodded. “Well, it is a shame,” he said, “but at least we cannot be too worried about her, new-hatched and untrained. I suppose they will strike their colors at once when we have made clear the situation, in any case.”
“And what is that situation?” Laurence said, a little sharply, and Willoughby looked at him with disfavor.
“I do not much care for your presence at this conference in any case, Mr. Laurence,” he said, “and I will thank you to keep silent. I do not propose to answer to the inquisition of a convicted traitor.”
“Captain Willoughby,” Laurence said, too impatient to tolerate this, “I must beg you to imagine my own interest in either your feelings or your opinion of myself, when I have allowed no similar consideration for those who had greater claims by far to alter my course; and if you dislike my company, you may be shot of it all the sooner if you will not stand upon some notion of preserving ceremony, in circumstances so wholly irregular and unexpected: unless you imagine that a twenty-ton Celestial will have any more patience for it than do I.”
Rankin looked away, as though to express silently his mortification at Laurence’s crudeness; Captain Tomkinson of the Otter covered his mouth and issued a cough, soft and uncomfortable. Granby only did not see anything awkward in the speech, and added, “And speaking of whom, if you do mean to make some noise, you oughtn’t be glad to have found us; Temeraire won’t in the least sit still for your having at these fellows, and I don’t suppose any of the other beasts would care to disoblige him. I don’t know what Captain Rankin may have said about seniority, which is a right-enough mess between us presently, but he knows very well that it don’t make a lick of difference to them. What are your orders?”
Willoughby frowned: he was a narrow-faced man, whose hair had already crept back along the curve of his skull, and he was not particularly well-dressed: his clothes were those of a man who had been at sea for eight months, and lodging in irregular shelters. But Granby had given him an excuse, and it was to Granby he answered: “Our orders,” with emphasis, “are to take the port. And if it will not be surrendered, gentlemen, I will take it; I will take it if I have to shell it to the very earth.”
Willoughby’s authority was quite real: the orders, which he allowed Granby to read, were from Commodore Rowley and indeed specific: the port, if it existed, could not be tolerated, and must be taken before it were fortified; the grounds for doing so a mere bagatelle of a technicality: the Regent had ordered the remainder of the continent claimed on the basis of Fleming’s circumnavigation, which might as easily have given France a claim by the journeys of La Pérouse.
“There’s no sense arguing it with him, anyway,” Granby said, when they had flown back to shore. “He has the bit in his teeth, and the orders are clear enough, to be just.”
“If we must choose between starting a war with China now,” Willoughby had said, “and starting it a year from now, when they have cannon here and are letting the French romp merrily through our trade, we will start it now. And I say it has been too long in coming, myself, when they have been giving Bonaparte one plum of a dragon after another. One despot likes another, I suppose.”
This was a wholesale misunderstanding of the original intention of the Chinese in sending Temeraire’s egg to Napoleon, which had been done for purely interior purposes and merely to avert a question of succession; and even more so Lien’s presence amongst the French: she had fled the country an exile, suspected in treachery against the crown prince, and had gone to Napoleon seeking only revenge.
But this was not Willoughby’s deepest objection; he had added, more vehemently, “And when I think of the way they snatched our East Indiamen, and all of us forced to be meek as milk to them after, I avow it must make any man worthy of the name want to put his hands to his gun. It is time and more we blacked their eye for them.”
Laurence remembered well his own feelings on learning that the Chinese had confiscated four British ships: confiscated them, and forced the sailors to sail their envoy to England, with neither cargo nor payment and only peremptory demands. It had been a gross violation of sovereignty, and he had felt, with every other sailor who had heard it, the most violent fury, not lessened in the least by the cringing behavior of Government—more anxious then to prevent the entry of China into the war, or at least more sanguine that it was to be prevented.
Jia Zhen might of course have felt a similar sense of outrage when Rankin presented to him the demands for surrender, through Temeraire’s dubious translation, to which Temeraire added as commentary, “I do not see how this is reasonable: after all, it is stuff for the Regent to say we have claimed the country, when the Larrakia are right here and have been for ages and ages. Why, what if I were to land in London and say, Very well, because I am the first Chinese dragon to land in London, now I will claim it for the Emperor—that has as much sense as this does.”
Rankin snapped, “That is enough: these are our orders. You may question them if you must in private, not in front of the agent of a foreign nation.”
“That is a very handsome way to talk,” Temeraire said scathingly, “after you have been sleeping in his house, and came to his dinner; it all seems to me like the sort of thing that Requiescat would do, when he was behaving like a scrub. And anyway,” he added, “if Jia Zhen could understand whatever I was saying in English, I would not have to translate, so I do not see why I ought to be any quieter about it in front of him.”
Whitehall claimed a violation of the treaty of Peking, the agreement negotiated by Hammond, wherein China had granted to Britain an equal access to any of her opened ports under the same terms as any other Western nation. Jia Zhen with great courtesy pointed out that this agreement said nothing whatsoever about China’s granting her own merchants other and more favorable terms for export, as should be natural to any nation, and further that the port was not after all a Chinese port, but the possession of the Larrakia, if they had been so kind as to grant the Chinese the use of much of the land.
“And certainly British merchants must always be welcome, in any case. The Pomfrey, I believe,” he said, “was here in the spring: her captain a pleasure to deal with, and most reasonable. I hope that Captain Willoughby will reconsider his position. Any disagreement or quarrel between our nations must be a most painful circumstance, and I fear could scarcely help but grieve the Emperor.”
Laurence ignored Rankin’s black looks to say, “Mr. Jia, I hope that you might agree that the terms of the treaty are somewhat unclear, and the possession of this port itself open to dispute: certainly left to their own devices, the Larrakia had not opened such a trade. Perhaps if the trade were suspended for a time, while our respective governments should discuss such amendments to the treaty as would satisfy them both—”
But Jia Zhen was not to be persuaded, not without reason; he did not refuse outright, but spoke in a calm and roundabout fashion of the difficulty of managing the sea-serpents, the impossibility of interrupting their peregrinations without causing their training to founder, and the expense of providing their food, which must be supported by the trade; he also, to Laurence’s dismay, spoke of the warehouses which were to be constructed, and added, “By the order of the Emperor, several craftsmen have already been commanded to prepare themselves and their families to make the journey: Lung Shen Li will bring them hence on her next journey.” This of course was very like throwing tinder onto a fire, and likely only to stir further enthusiasm on Willoughby’s part for immediate action.