Victory of Eagles (7 page)

Temeraire did not say anything; a terrible sensation was rising, climbing up his throat. He turned blindly

away to let it come, the roar bursting out like the roll of thunder overhead, silencing every word around

him, and the wall of stone cracked open before him like a pane of mirrored glass.

Page 19

Chapter 3

T
HEY PULLED THEship’s boats into Dover harbor past eleven o’clock at night, sweating underneath

their chilled, wet clothing, hands blistered on the oars; they climbed out shivering onto the docks, Captain

Puget handed up in a litter almost senseless with blood-loss, and Lieutenant Frye, nineteen, the only one

left to oversee; the rest of the senior officers were all dead. Frye looked at Laurence with great

uncertainty and glanced around. The men offered him nothing, beaten down with rowing and defeat,

silent. At last Laurence said quietly to the young man, “The port admiral,” prompting, and Frye colored

and said to a gangly young midshipman, clearing his throat, “You had better take the prisoner to the port

admiral, Mr. Meed, and let him decide what is to be done.”

With two Marines for guards, Laurence went with Meed along the dockside streets to the port admiral’s

office, where they found nearly more confusion than had been on the deck of the
Goliath
in her last

moments after the double broadside had dismasted her: smoke everywhere, fire crawling steadily down

through the ship towards the powder magazine, and cannon running wild back and forth on her decks;

here instead the hallways were thick with unchecked speculation. “Five hundred thousand men landed,”

one man said in the hallway, a ridiculous number, inflated by panic without common sense; “Already in

London,” said another, “and ten millions in shipping seized,” the very last of these the only plausible

suggestion. If Bonaparte had captured one or two of the ports on the Thames estuary, and taken the

merchantmen there, he might indeed have reached something like that number: an enormous collection of

prizes to fuel the invasion already begun, like coal heaped into a burning stove.

“I do not give a damn if you take him out and lynch him, only get him out of my sight,” the port admiral

said furiously, when Meed finally managed to work his way through the press and ask him for orders;

there was a vast roaring noise outside the windows like the wind rising in a storm, even though the night

was clear. More petitioners were shoving frantically past them, so Laurence had to catch Meed by the

arm and hold him up as they were carried away: the boy could scarcely have been fourteen and was a

little underfed.

Set adrift, Meed looked helplessly. Laurence wondered if he should have to find his own prison and

lock himself into it, but then one young lieutenant pushed through towards them, flung him a look of flat

contempt, and said, “That is the traitor, is it? This way, and you two damned dogs take a proper hold of

him, before he crawls away in this press.”

He took up an old truncheon in the hallway, left from some press-gang perhaps, and swinging it to clear

the way took them out into the street, Meed trotting gratefully after. He brought them to an old run-down

sponging house two streets away, with bars upon the windows and a mastiff tied in the barren yard,

howling unhappily to add to the clamor of the uneasy, half-rioting crowd. Beating upon the door brought

out the master of the house, who whined objections which the lieutenant overruled one after another, and

at last defeated entirely by pushing in upon him.

“There, and better than you deserve,” he said to Laurence coldly, having taken them up to the small and

squalid attic, and held open the door. He was a slight young man with a struggling moustache, and a solid

push would have served to lay him out upon the unkempt floor. Laurence looked at him a moment, and

then went inside, stooping under the lintel; the door was shut upon him. Through the wall he heard the

lieutenant ordering the two Marines to stay and stand watch, and the owner’s complaints trailing him

back down the stairs.

Page 20

It was bitterly cold. The irregular floor of warped and knotted boards felt strange under Laurence’s feet,

still expecting the listing motion of the ship. There was a handkerchief-square of a window for air and

light, which at present let in only the thick smell of smoke, and a reddish glow shining on the undersides of

the rooftops, all that he could see.

Laurence sat down on the narrow cot and looked at his hands. There would be fighting by now all along

the coast: men landed at Deal, and likely along points north, all around the mouth of the Thames. Not five

hundred thousand, nothing like, but enough, perhaps. It would not take a very large company of infantry

to establish a secure beachhead, secure enough, and then Napoleon could land men as quick as he could

get them across the Channel.

This, Laurence would have said, could be not very quickly; not in the face of the Navy. But that opinion

fell before the maneuvers he had witnessed today: pitting great numbers of light-weights, easy to feed and

quick to maneuver, against the British heavy-weights, in the face of all common wisdom; and using the

massed power of their own heavy-weights instead against the ships, the British point of strength. It bore

the same tactical stamp as the whirling attack which he had seen at the battle of Jena, spearheaded there

by Lien, and Laurence had no doubt her advice had served Napoleon in this latest adventure.

Laurence had reported on the Battle of Jena to the Admiralty; it was a bitter thought to consider that his

treason must have undermined that intelligence, and likely discredited all his reports. Jane at least, he had

thought—had hoped—would still have kept it under consideration, even if she had not forgiven; would

have understood him so far, to know that his treason had begun and ended with delivering the cure. But

in what he had seen of the battle, the British dragons had been locked in their same formations, all the

same antiquated habits of aerial war.

The noise outside the window rose and fell like the sea; somewhere nearby glass was breaking. A

woman shrieked. The glow increased. He lay down and tried to sleep a little; his rest was broken by

ragged eruptions of noise, already falling back into the general din by the time he jarred awake, panting

and sore, from fragmentary images of the burning ship, which in his dreams became black and glossy

beneath the flames, scales curling and crisping at the edges. He rose once; there was a small dirty pitcher

of water to which he was not yet thirsty enough to resort for drinking, and he splashed his face a little

with a cupped handful. His fingers came away streaked black with soot and grime. He lay down again;

there was more screaming outside, and a stronger smell of smoke.

It did not grow light so much as less dark; there was a thick sooty pall over the city, and his throat ached

sharply. No one came with food; there was not a word from his guards. Laurence paced his cell: four

long strides across, three lengthwise from the bed, but he used smaller steps and made it seven, restless;

his arms clasped behind his back, feeling as though they were weighted down with round-shot, dragging;

he had rowed for five hours without a pause.

That at least had been something to do: something besides this useless fretting away to no purpose. The

city burned, and all he could do here was burn with it; or moulder to be taken a prisoner by the French,

with Napoleon’s army scarcely ten miles distant. And even if he died, Temeraire might never

know—might keep himself a prisoner long after any cause had gone, and stay to be taken by the French.

Laurence could not trust Napoleon for Temeraire’s safety: not while Lien was his ally. Her voice, and the

self-interest which would see him master of the only Celestial outside China’s borders, would be louder

in Napoleon’s ear than any prompting of generosity.

The guards might be persuaded to let him out by their own desire to be gone, if nothing else; if only

Laurence could persuade himself he had any right to go. But he had been court-martialed and convicted,

and justly so, with all due process of law, though he would gladly have forgone it all. The endless

Page 21

dragging out of evidence, though he had been condemned already by his own voice; the panel of officers

listening, faces blank if not tight with disgust. Navy officers all of them; not an aviator had been allowed to

serve. Too many of them had been one after another dragged into the vile business, implicated and

smeared any way they could be—Ferris, because Laurence must have confided in his first

lieutenant—“And it must present a curious appearance to the court,” the prosecutor had said, sneering,

while Ferris sat drawn and pale and wretched and did not look at Laurence, “that he did not raise the

alarm for an hour after the accused and his beast were known to be missing, and did not at once open

the letter which was left behind—”

Chenery, too, had been named, only because he had also been in London covert at the time, and

Berkley and Little and Sutton all brought in to give evidence; and if Harcourt and Jane had not been

mentioned, Laurence was sure it was only because the Admiralty did not know how to do it, without

embarrassing themselves more than their targets. “I did not know a damned thing about the business, and

I am sure neither did anyone else; anyone who knows Laurence will tell you he would not have breathed

a word of it to anyone,” Chenery had said defiantly, “but I do say sending over the sick beast was a

blackguardly thing for the Admiralty to have done, and if you like to hang me for saying so, you are

welcome.”

They had not hanged Chenery, thank God, for lack of evidence and for need of his dragon; but Ferris, a

lieutenant with no such protection, had been broken out of the service: every effort Laurence had made

to insist that the guilt was his alone had been ignored. A fine officer lost to the service, his career and his

life spoilt—Laurence had met his mother, his brothers; they were an old family and a proud, and Ferris

had been away from home from the age of seven: they did not have that intimate, personal knowledge

which should make them confident of his innocence, and give him the affectionate support now denied

him from his fellow-officers. To witness his misery and know himself culpable hurt Laurence worse than

his own conviction had done.

That had never been in any doubt. There had been no defense to make, and no comfort but the arid

certainty that he had done as he ought; that he could have done nothing else. That was no comfort at all,

but that it saved him from the pain of regret: he could not regret what he had done. He could not have let

ten thousand dragons, most of them wholly uninvolved in the war, be murdered for his nation’s

advantage. When he had said as much, and freely confessed that he had disobeyed his orders, assaulted

a Marine, stolen the cure, and given aid and comfort to the enemy, there was nothing else to say; the only

charge which he had contested, was that he had stolen Temeraire, too. “He is neither the King’s

possession nor a dumb beast, and his choice was his own and freely made,” Laurence had said, but he

had been ignored, of course; and he had scarcely been taken from the room before he was brought back

in again to hear his sentence of death pronounced.

And then at once quietly postponed: he had been hurried from the chamber under guard, and into a

stifling, black-draped carriage. A long blind rattling journey ending at Sheerness, where he had been put

aboard the
Lucinda
and then transferred to
Goliath,
and put into the brig: an oubliette meant only to

keep him breathing, and little else. A living death, worse than the hanging he was promised in future, and

if he stayed, and was not taken by the French, they would only put him back into an upright coffin.

Laurence knew it well.

But that was not his choice to make; he had made one choice, and sacrificed all the others. His life was

no longer his own, even if the court chose to leave it to him a little while longer, and to flee now would be

no better than to have fled to China, or to have accepted Napoleon’s offers and solicitations to stay. He

could not go. He had no other way of knowing himself not a traitor, no other reparation he could make.