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Though his leg had improved some little way overnight, Laurence was still pale and sweating even from the short walk he risked taking up the front stairs of the building. The pain was increasing sharply, dizzying, and he was forced to stop and catch his breath before he went into the small office.
‘Good Heavens; I thought you had been let go by the surgeons. Sit down, Laurence, before you fall down; take this,’ Lenton said, ignoring Barham’s scowl of impatience, and put a glass of brandy into Laurence’s hand.
‘Thank you, sir; you are not mistaken, I have been released,’ Laurence said, and only sipped once for politeness’s sake; his head was already clouded badly enough.
‘That is enough; he is not here to be coddled,’ Barham said. ‘Never in my life have I seen such outrageous behaviour, and from an officer— By God, Laurence, I have never taken pleasure in a hanging, but on this occasion, I would call it good riddance. But Lenton swears to me your beast will become unmanageable; though how we should tell the difference I can hardly say.’
Lenton’s lips tightened at this disdainful tone; Laurence could only imagine the humiliating lengths to which he had been forced in order to impress this understanding on Barham. Though Lenton was an admiral, and fresh from another great victory, even that meant very little in any larger sphere; Barham could offend him with impunity, where any admiral in the Navy would have had political influence and friends enough to require more respectful handling.
‘You are to be dismissed the service, that is beyond question,’ Barham continued. ‘But the animal must be gotten off to China, and for that, I am sorry to say, we require your cooperation. Find some way to persuade him, and we will leave the matter there; any more of this recalcitrance, and I am damned if I will not hang you after all; yes, and have the animal shot, and be damned to those Chinamen also.’
This last very nearly brought Laurence out of his chair, despite his injury; only Lenton’s hand on his shoulder, pressing down firmly, held him in place. ‘Sir, you go too far,’ Lenton said. ‘We have never shot dragons in England for anything less than man-eating, and we are not going to start now; I would have a real mutiny on my hands.’
Barham scowled, and muttered something not quite intelligible under his breath about lack of discipline; which was a fine thing coming from a man who Laurence well knew had served during the great naval mutinies of ’97, when half the fleet had risen up. ‘Well, let us hope it does not come to any such thing. There is a transport in ordinary in harbour at Spithead, the Allegiance; she can be made ready for sea in a week. How then is the animal to be gotten aboard, since he is choosing to be balky?’
Laurence could not bring himself to answer; a week was a horribly short time, and for a moment he even wildly allowed himself to consider the prospect of flight. Temeraire could easily reach the Continent from Dover, and there were places in the forests of the German states where even now feral dragons lived; though only small breeds.
‘It will require some consideration,’ Lenton said. ‘I will not scruple to say, sir, that the whole affair has been mismanaged from the beginning. The dragon has been badly stirred-up, now, and it is no joke to coax a dragon to do something he does not like to begin with.’
‘Enough excuses, Lenton; quite enough,’ Barham began, and then a tapping came on the door; they all looked in surprise as a rather pale-looking midwingman opened the door and said, ‘Sir, sir—’ only to hastily clear out of the way: the Chinese soldiers looked as though they would have trampled straight over him, clearing a path for Prince Yongxing into the room.
They were all of them so startled they forgot at first to rise, and Laurence was still struggling to get up to his feet when Yongxing had already come into the room. The attendants hurried to pull a chair – Lord Barham’s chair – over for the prince; but Yongxing waved it aside, forcing the rest of them to keep on their feet. Lenton unobtrusively put a hand under Laurence’s arm, giving him a little support, but the room still tilted and spun around him, the blaze of Yongxing’s bright-coloured robes stabbing at his eyes.
‘I see this is the way in which you show your respect for the Son of Heaven,’ Yongxing said, addressing Barham. ‘Once again you have thrown Lung Tien Xiang into battle; now you hold secret councils, and plot how you may yet keep the fruits of your thievery.’
Though Barham had been damning the Chinese five minutes before, now he went pale and stammered, ‘Sir, Your Highness, not in the least—’ but Yongxing was not slowed even a little.
‘I have gone through this covert, as you call these animal pens,’ he said. ‘It is not surprising, when one considers your barbaric methods, that Lung Tien Xiang should have formed this misguided attachment. Naturally he does not wish to be separated from the companion who is responsible for what little comfort he has been given.’ He turned to Laurence, and looked him up and down disdainfully. ‘You have taken advantage of his youth and inexperience; but this will not be tolerated. We will hear no further excuses for these delays. Once he has been restored to his home and his proper place, he will soon learn better than to value company so far beneath him.’
‘Your Highness, you are mistaken; we have every intention to cooperate with you,’ Lenton said bluntly, while Barham was still struggling for more polished phrases. ‘But Temeraire will not leave Laurence, and I am sure you know well that a dragon cannot be sent, but only led.’
Yongxing said icily, ‘Then plainly Captain Laurence must come also; or will you now attempt to convince us that he cannot be sent?’
They all stared, in blank confusion; Laurence hardly dared believe he understood properly, and then Barham blurted, ‘Good God, if you want Laurence, you may damn well have him, and welcome.’
The rest of the meeting passed in a haze for Laurence, the tangle of confusion and immense relief leaving him badly distracted. His head still spun, and he answered to remarks somewhat randomly until Lenton finally intervened once more, sending him up to bed. He kept himself awake only long enough to send a quick note to Temeraire by way of the maid, and fell straightaway into a thick, unrefreshing sleep.
He clawed his way out of it the next morning, having slept fourteen hours. Captain Roland was drowsing by his bedside, head tipped against the chair back, mouth open; as he stirred, she woke and rubbed her face, yawning. ‘Well, Laurence, are you awake? You have been giving us all a fright and no mistake. Emily came to me because poor Temeraire was fretting himself to pieces: whyever did you send him such a note?’
Laurence tried desperately to remember what he had written: impossible; it was wholly gone, and he could remember very little of the previous day at all, though the central, the essential point was quite fixed in his mind. ‘Roland, I have not the faintest idea what I said. Does Temeraire know that I am going with him?’
‘Well, now he does, since Lenton told me after I came looking for you, but he certainly did not find it in here,’ she said, and gave him a piece of paper.
It was in his own hand, and with his signature, but wholly unfamiliar, and nonsensical:
Temeraire—
Never fear; I am going; the Son of Heaven will not tolerate delays, and Barham gives me leave. Allegiance will carry us! Pray eat something.
—L.
Laurence stared at it in some distress, wondering how he had come to write so. ‘I do not remember a word of it; but wait, no; Allegiance is the name of the transport, and Prince Yongxing referred to the Emperor as the Son of Heaven, though why I should have repeated such a blasphemous thing I have no idea.’ He handed her the note. ‘My wits must have been wandering. Pray throw it in the fire; and go tell Temeraire that I am quite well now, and will be with him again soon. Can you ring for someone to valet me? I need to dress.’
‘You look as though you ought to stay just where you are,’ Roland said. ‘No: lie quiet a while. There is no great hurry at present, as far as I understand, and I know this fellow Barham wants to speak with you; also Lenton. I will go tell Temeraire you have not died or grown a second head, and have Emily jog back and forth between you if you have messages.’
Laurence yielded to her persuasions; indeed he did not truly feel up to rising, and if Barham wanted to speak with him again, he thought he would need to conserve what strength he had. However, in the event, he was spared: Lenton came alone instead.
‘Well, Laurence, you are in for a hellishly long trip, I am afraid, and I hope you do not have a bad time of it,’ he said, drawing up a chair. ‘My transport ran into a three-day gale going to India, back in the nineties; rain freezing as it fell, so the dragons could not fly above it for some relief. Poor Obversaria was ill the entire time. Nothing less pleasant than a sea-sick dragon, for them or you.’
Laurence had never commanded a dragon transport, but the image was a vivid one. ‘I am glad to say, sir, that Temeraire has never had the slightest difficulty, and indeed he enjoys sea-travel greatly.’
‘We will see how he likes it if you meet a hurricane,’ Lenton said, shaking his head. ‘Not that I expect either of you have any objections, under the circumstances.’
‘No, not in the least,’ Laurence said, heartfelt. He supposed it was merely a jump from frying-pan to fire, but he was grateful enough even for the slower roasting: the journey would last for many months, and there was room for hope: any number of things might happen before they reached China.
Lenton nodded. ‘Well, you are looking moderately ghastly, so let me be brief. I have managed to persuade Barham that the best thing to do is pack you off bag and baggage, in this case your crew; some of your officers would be in for a good bit of unpleasantness, otherwise, and we had best get you on your way before he thinks better of it.’
Yet another relief, scarcely looked-for. ‘Sir,’ Laurence said, ‘I must tell you how deeply indebted I am—’
‘No, nonsense; do not thank me.’ Lenton brushed his sparse grey hair back from his forehead, and abruptly said, ‘I am damned sorry about all this, Laurence. I would have run mad a good deal sooner, in your place; brutally done, all of it.’
Laurence hardly knew what to say; he had not expected anything like sympathy, and he did not feel he deserved it. After a moment, Lenton went on, more briskly. ‘I am sorry not to give you a longer time to recover, but then you will not have much to do aboard ship but rest. Barham has promised them the Allegiance will sail in a week’s time; though from what I gather, he will be hard put to find a captain for her by then.’
‘I thought Cartwright was to have her?’ Laurence asked, some vague memory stirring; he still read the Naval Chronicle, and followed the assignments of ships; Cartwright’s name stuck in his head: they had served together in Goliath, many years before.
‘Yes, when Allegiance was meant to go to Halifax; there is apparently some other ship being built for him there. But they cannot wait for him to finish a two years’ journey to China and back,’ Lenton said. ‘Be that as it may, someone will be found; you must be ready.’
‘You may be sure of it, sir,’ Laurence said. ‘I will be quite well again by then.’
His optimism was perhaps ill-founded; after Lenton had gone, Laurence tried to write a letter and found he could not quite manage it, his head ached too wretchedly. Fortunately, Granby came by an hour later to see him, full of excitement at the prospect of the journey, and contemptuous of the risks he had taken with his own career.
‘As though I could give a cracked egg for such a thing, when that scoundrel was trying to have you hauled away, and pointing guns at Temeraire,’ he said. ‘Pray don’t think of it, and tell me what you would like me to write.’
Laurence gave up trying to counsel him to caution; Granby’s loyalty was as obstinate as his initial dislike had been, if more gratifying. ‘Only a few lines, if you please – to Captain Thomas Riley; tell him we are bound for China in a week’s time, and if he does not mind a transport, he can likely get Allegiance, if only he goes straightaway to the Admiralty: Barham has no one for the ship; but be sure and tell him not to mention my name.’
‘Very good,’ Granby said, scratching away; he did not write a very elegant hand, the letters sprawling wastefully, but it was serviceable enough to read. ‘Do you know him well? We will have to put up with whoever they give us for a long while.’
‘Yes, very well indeed,’ Laurence said. ‘He was my third lieutenant in Belize, and my second in Reliant; he was at Temeraire’s hatching: a fine officer and seaman. We could not hope for better.’
‘I will run it down to the courier myself, and tell him to be sure it arrives,’ Granby promised. ‘What a relief it would be, not to have one of these wretched stiff-necked fellows—’ and there he stopped, embarrassed; it was not so very long ago he had counted Laurence himself a ‘stiff-necked fellow’, after all.
‘Thank you, John,’ Laurence said hastily, sparing him. ‘Although we ought not get our hopes up yet; the Ministry may prefer a more senior man in the role,’ he added, though privately he thought the chances were excellent. Barham would not have an easy time of it, finding someone willing to accept the post.
Impressive though they might be, to the landsman’s eye, a dragon transport was an awkward sort of vessel to command: often enough they sat in port endlessly, awaiting dragon passengers, while the crew dissipated itself in drinking and whoring. Or they might spend months in the middle of the ocean, trying to maintain a single position to serve as a resting point for dragons crossing long distances; like blockade-duty, only worse for lack of society. Little chance of battle or glory, less of prize-money; they were not desirable to any man who could do better.
But the Reliant, so badly dished in the gale after Trafalgar, would be in dry-dock for a long while. Riley, left on shore with no influence to help him to a new ship, virtually no seniority, would be as glad of the opportunity as Laurence would be to have him, and there was every chance Barham would seize on the first fellow who offered.
Laurence spent the next day labouring, with slightly more success, over other necessary letters. His affairs were not prepared for a long journey, much of it far past the limits of the courier circuit. Then too, over the last dreadful weeks he had entirely neglected his personal correspondence, and by now he owed several replies, particularly to his family. After the battle of Dover, his father had grown more tolerant of his new profession; although they still did not write one another directly, at least Laurence was no longer obliged to conceal his correspondence with his mother, and he had for some time now addressed his letters to her openly. His father might very well choose to suspend that privilege again, after this affair, but Laurence hoped he might not hear the particulars of it: fortunately, Barham had nothing to gain from embarrassing Lord Allendale; particularly not now when Wilberforce, their mutual political ally, meant to make another push for abolition in the next session of Parliament.
Laurence dashed off another dozen hasty notes, in a hand not very much like his usual, to other correspondents; most of them were naval men, who would well understand the exigencies of a hasty departure. Despite much abbreviation, the effort took its toll, and by the time Jane Roland came to see him once again, he had nearly prostrated himself once more, and was lying back against the pillows with eyes shut.
‘Yes, I will post them for you, but you are behaving absurdly, Laurence,’ she said, collecting up the letters. ‘A knock on the head can be very nasty, even if you have not cracked your skull. When I had the yellow fever I did not prance about claiming I was well; I lay in bed and took my gruel and possets, and I was back on my feet quicker than any of the other fellows in the West Indies who took it.’
‘Thank you, Jane,’ he said, and did not argue with her; indeed he felt very ill, and he was grateful when she drew the curtains and cast the room into a comfortable dimness.
He briefly came out of sleep some hours later, hearing some commotion outside the door of his room: Roland saying, ‘You are damned well going to leave now, or I will kick you down the hall. What do you mean, sneaking in here to pester him the instant I have gone out?’
‘But I must speak with Captain Laurence; the situation is of the most urgent—’ the protesting voice was unfamiliar, and rather bewildered. ‘I have ridden straight from London—’
‘If it is so urgent, you may go speak to Admiral Lenton,’ Roland said. ‘No; I do not care if you are from the Ministry; you look young enough to be one of my mids, and I do not for an instant believe you have anything to say that cannot wait until morning.’
With this she pulled the door shut behind her, and the rest of the argument was muffled; Laurence drifted again away. But the next morning there was no one to defend him, and scarcely had the maid brought in his breakfast – the threatened gruel and hot-milk posset, and quite unappetizing – than a fresh attempt at invasion was made, this time with more success.
‘I beg your pardon, sir, for forcing myself upon you in this irregular fashion,’ the stranger said, talking rapidly while he dragged up a chair to Laurence’s bedside, uninvited. ‘Pray allow me to explain; I realize the appearance is quite extraordinary—’ He set down the heavy chair and sat down, or rather perched, at the very edge of the seat. ‘My name is Hammond, Arthur Hammond; I have been deputized by the Ministry to accompany you to the court of China.’
Hammond was a surprisingly young man, perhaps twenty years of age, with untidy dark hair and a great intensity of expression that lent his thin, sallow face an illuminated quality. He spoke at first in half-sentences, torn between the forms of apology and his plain eagerness to come to his subject. ‘The absence of an introduction, I beg you will forgive, we have been taken completely, completely by surprise, and Lord Barham has already committed us to the twenty-third as a sailing date. If you would prefer, we may of course press him for some extension—’
This of all things Laurence was eager to avoid, though he was indeed a little astonished by Hammond’s forwardness; hastily he said, ‘No, sir, I am entirely at your service; we cannot delay sailing to exchange formalities, particularly when Prince Yongxing has already been promised that date.’
‘Ah! I am of a similar mind,’ Hammond said, with a great deal of relief; Laurence suspected, looking at his face and measuring his years, that he had only received the appointment due to the lack of time. But Hammond quickly refuted the notion that a willingness to go to China on a moment’s notice was his only qualification. Having settled himself, he drew out a thick sheaf of papers, which had been distending the front of his coat, and began to discourse in great detail and speed upon the prospects of their mission.
Laurence was almost from the first unable to follow him. Hammond unconsciously slipped into stretches of the Chinese language from time to time, when looking down at those of his papers written in that script, and while speaking in English dwelt largely on the subject of the Macartney embassy to China, which had taken place fourteen years prior. Laurence, who had been newly made lieutenant at the time and wholly occupied with naval matters and his own career, had hardly remembered the existence of the mission at all, much less any details.
He did not immediately stop Hammond, however: there was no convenient pause in the flow of his conversation, for one, and for another there was a reassuring quality to the monologue. Hammond spoke with authority beyond his years, an obvious command of his subject, and, still more importantly, without the least hint of the incivility which Laurence had come to expect from Barham and the Ministry. Laurence was grateful enough for any prospect of an ally to willingly listen, even if all he knew of the expedition himself was that Macartney’s ship, the Lion, had been the first Western vessel to chart the Bay of Zhitao.
‘Oh,’ Hammond said, rather disappointed, when at last he realized how thoroughly he had mistaken his audience. ‘Well, I suppose it does not much signify; to put it plainly, the embassy was a dismal failure. Lord Macartney refused to perform their ritual of obeisance before the Emperor, the kowtow, and they took offence. They would not even consider granting us a permanent mission, and he ended by being escorted out of the China Sea by a dozen dragons.’
‘That I do remember,’ Laurence said; indeed he had a vague recollection of discussing the matter among his friends in the gunroom, with some heat at the insult to Britain’s envoy. ‘But surely the kowtow was quite offensive; did they not wish him to grovel on the floor?’
‘We cannot be turning up our noses at foreign customs when we are coming to their country, hat in hand,’ Hammond said, earnestly, leaning forward. ‘You can see yourself, sir, the evil consequences: I am sure that the bad blood from this incident continues to poison our present relationship.’
Laurence frowned; this argument was indeed persuasive, and made some better explanation why Yongxing had come to England so very ready to be offended. ‘Do you think this same quarrel their reason for having offered Bonaparte a Celestial? After so long a time?’
‘I will be quite honest with you, Captain, we have not the least idea,’ Hammond said. ‘Our only comfort, these last fourteen years – a very cornerstone of foreign policy – has been our certainty, our complete certainty, that the Chinese were no more interested in the affairs of Europe than we are in the affairs of the penguins. Now all our foundations have been shaken.’
Chapter Three (#ulink_281716ec-0554-5ea5-9a00-ca28185d0d67)
The Allegiance was a wallowing behemoth of a ship: just over four hundred feet in length and oddly narrow in proportion, except for the outsize dragondeck that flared out at the front of the ship, stretching from the foremast forward to the bow. Seen from above, she looked very strange, almost fan-shaped. But below the wide lip of the dragondeck, her hull narrowed quickly; the keel was fashioned out of steel rather than elm, and thickly covered with white paint against rust: the long white stripe running down her middle gave her an almost rakish appearance.
To give her the stability which she required to meet storms, she had a draught of more than twenty feet and was too large to come into the harbour proper, but had to be moored to enormous pillars sunk far out in the deep water and her supplies ferried to and fro by smaller vessels: a great lady surrounded by scurrying attendants. This was not the first transport which Laurence and Temeraire had travelled on, but she would be the first true ocean-going one; a poky three-dragon ship running from Gibraltar to Plymouth with barely a few planks in increased width could offer no comparison.
‘It is very nice; I am more comfortable even than in my clearing.’ Temeraire approved: from his place of solitary glory, he could see all the ship’s activity without being in the way, and the ship’s galley with its ovens was placed directly beneath the dragondeck, which kept the surface warm. ‘You are not cold at all, Laurence?’ he asked, for perhaps the third time, craning his head down to peer closely at him.
‘No, not in the least,’ Laurence said shortly; he was a little annoyed by the continuing oversolicitude. Though the dizziness and headache had subsided together with the lump upon his head, his bruised leg remained stubborn, prone to giving out at odd moments and throbbing with an almost constant ache. He had been hoisted aboard in a bo’sun’s chair, very offensive to his sense of his own capabilities, then put directly into an elbow-chair and carried up to the dragondeck, swathed in blankets like an invalid, and now had Temeraire very carefully coiling himself about to serve as a windbreak.
There were two sets of stairs rising to the dragondeck, one on either side of the foremast, and the area of the forecastle stretching from the foot of these and halfway to the mainmast was by custom allocated to the aviators, while the foremast jacks ruled the remainder of the space up to the mainmast. Already Temeraire’s crew had taken possession of their rightful domain, pointedly pushing several piles of coiled cables across the invisible dividing line; bundles of leather harness and baskets full of rings and buckles had been laid down in their place, all to put the Navy men on notice that the aviators were not to be taken advantage of. Those men not occupied in putting away their gear were ranged along the line in various attitudes of relaxation and affected labour; Roland and the other two cadet runners, Morgan and Dyer, had been set to playing there by the ensigns, who had conveyed their duty to defend the rights of the Corps. Being so small they could walk the ship’s rail with ease and were dashing back and forth with a fine show of recklessness.
Laurence watched them, broodingly; he was still uneasy about bringing Roland. ‘Why would you leave her? Has she been misbehaving?’ was all Jane had asked, when he had consulted her on the matter; impossibly awkward to try and explain his concerns, facing her. And of course, there was some sense in taking the girl along, young as she was: she would have to face every demand made of a male officer, when she came to be Excidium’s captain on her mother’s retirement; it would be no kindness to leave her unprepared by being too soft on her now.
Even so, now that he was aboard he was sorry. This was not a covert, and he had already seen that as with any naval crew there were some ugly, some very ugly fellows among the lot: drunkards, brawlers, gaol-birds. He felt too heavily the responsibility of watching over a young girl among such men; not to mention that he would be best pleased if the secret that women served in the Corps did not come out here and make a noise.
He did not mean to instruct Roland to lie, by no means, and of course he could not give her different duties than otherwise; but he privately and intensely hoped the truth might remain concealed. Roland was only eleven, and no cursory glance would take her for a girl in her trousers and short jacket; he had once mistaken her for a boy himself. But he also desired to see the aviators and the sailors friendly, or at least not hostile, and a close acquaintance could hardly fail to notice Roland’s real gender for long.
At present his hopes looked more likely to be answered in her case than the general. The foremast hands, engaged in the business of loading the ship, were talking none too quietly about fellows who had nothing better to do but sit about and be passengers; a couple of men made loud comments about how the shifted cables had been cast all ahoo, and set to recoiling them, unnecessarily. Laurence shook his head and kept his silence; his own men had been within their rights, and he could not reprove Riley’s men, nor would it do any good.
However, Temeraire had noticed also; he snorted, his ruff coming up a little. ‘That cable looks perfectly well to me,’ he said. ‘My crew were very careful moving it.’
‘It is all right, my dear; can never hurt to recoil a cable,’ Laurence said hurriedly. It was not very surprising that Temeraire had begun to extend his protective and possessive instincts over the crew as well; they had been with him now for several months. But the timing was wretchedly inconvenient: the sailors would likely be nervous to begin with at the presence of a dragon, and if Temeraire involved himself in any dispute, taking the part of his crew, that could only increase the tensions on board.
‘Pray take no offence,’ Laurence added, stroking Temeraire’s flank to draw his attention. ‘The beginning of a journey is so very important; we wish to be good shipmates, and not encourage any sort of rivalry among the men.’
‘Hm, I suppose,’ Temeraire said, subsiding. ‘But we have done nothing wrong; it is disagreeable of them to complain so.’
‘We will be underway soon,’ Laurence said, by way of distraction. ‘The tide has turned, and I think that is the last of the embassy’s luggage coming aboard now.’
Allegiance could carry as many as ten mid-weight dragons, in a pinch; Temeraire alone scarcely weighed her down, and there was a truly astonishing amount of storage space aboard. Yet the sheer quantity of the baggage the embassy carried began to look as though it would strain even her great capacity: shocking to Laurence, used to travelling with little more than a single sea-chest, and seeming quite out of proportion to the size of the entourage, which was itself enormous.
There were some fifteen soldiers, and no less than three physicians: one for the prince himself, one for the other two envoys, and one for the remainder of the embassy, each with assistants. After these and the translator, there were besides a pair of cooks with assistants, perhaps a dozen body servants, and an equal number of other men who seemed to have no clear function at all, including one gentleman who had been introduced as a poet, although Laurence could not believe this had been an accurate translation: more likely the man was a clerk of some sort.
The prince’s wardrobe alone required some twenty chests, each one elaborately carved and with golden locks and hinges: the bo’sun’s whip flew loud and cracking more than once, as the more enterprising sailors tried to pry them off. The innumerable bags of food had also to be slung aboard, and having already come once from China, they were beginning to show wear. One enormous eighty-pound sack of rice split wide open as it was handed across the deck, to the universal joy and delectation of the hovering seagulls, and afterwards the sailors were forced to wave the frenzied clouds of birds away every few minutes as they tried to keep on with their work.
There had already been a great fuss about boarding, earlier. Yongxing’s attendants had demanded, at first, a walkway leading down to the ship – wholly impossible, even if the Allegiance could have been brought close enough to the dock to make a walkway of any sort practical, because of the height of her decks. Poor Hammond had spent the better part of an hour trying to persuade them that there was no dishonour or danger either in being lifted up to the deck, and pointing at frustrated intervals at the ship herself, a mute argument.
Hammond had eventually said to him, quite desperately, ‘Captain, is this a dangerously high sea?’ An absurd question, with a swell less than five feet, though in the brisk wind the waiting barge had occasionally bucked against the ropes holding her to the dock, but even Laurence’s surprised negative had not satisfied the attendants. It had seemed they might never get aboard, but at last Yongxing himself had grown tired of waiting and ended the argument by emerging from his heavily-draped sedan chair, and climbing down into the boat, ignoring both the flurry of his anxious attendants and the hastily offered hands of the barge’s crew.
The Chinese passengers who had waited for the second barge were still coming aboard now, on the starboard side, to the stiff and polished welcome of a dozen Marines and the most respectable-looking of the sailors, interleaved in a row along the inner edge of the gangway, decorative in their bright red coats and the white trousers and short blue jackets of the sailors.
Sun Kai, the younger envoy, leapt easily down from the bo’sun’s chair and stood a moment looking around the busy deck thoughtfully. Laurence wondered if perhaps he did not approve the clamour and disarray of the deck, but no, it seemed he was only trying to get his feet underneath him: he took a few tentative steps back and forth, then stretched his sea-legs a little further and walked the length of the gangway and back more surely, with his hands clasped behind his back, and gazed with frowning concentration up at the rigging, trying evidently to trace the maze of ropes from their source to their conclusion.
This was much to the satisfaction of the men on display, who could at last stare their own fill in return. Prince Yongxing had disappointed them all by vanishing almost at once to the private quarters which had been arranged for him at the stern; Sun Kai, tall and properly impassive with his long black queue and shaved forehead, in splendid blue robes picked out with red and orange embroidery, was very nearly as good, and he showed no inclination to seek out his own quarters.
A moment later they had a still better piece of entertainment; shouts and cries rose from below, and Sun Kai sprang to the side to look over. Laurence sat up, and saw Hammond running to the edge, pale with horror: there had been a noisy splashing. But a few moments later, the older envoy finally appeared over the side, dripping water from the sodden lower half of his robes. Despite his misadventure, the grey-bearded man climbed down with a roar of good-humoured laughter at his own expense, waving off what looked like Hammond’s urgent apologies; he slapped his ample belly with a rueful expression, and then went away in company with Sun Kai.
‘He had a narrow escape,’ Laurence observed, sinking back into his chair. ‘Those robes would have dragged him down in a moment, if he had properly fallen in.’
‘I am sorry they did not all fall in,’ Temeraire muttered, quietly for a twenty-ton dragon; which was to say, not very. There were sniggers on the deck, and Hammond glanced over at them anxiously.
The rest of the retinue were gotten aboard without further incident, and stowed away almost as quickly as their baggage. Hammond looked much relieved when the operation was at last completed, blotting his sweating forehead on the back of his hand, though the wind was knife-cold and bitter, and sat down quite limply on a locker along the gangway, much to the annoyance of the crew. They could not get the barge back aboard with him in the way, and yet he was a passenger and an envoy himself, too important to be bluntly told to move.
Taking pity on them all, Laurence looked for his runners: Roland, Morgan, and Dyer had been told to stay quiet on the dragondeck and out of the way, and so were sitting in a row at the very edge, dangling their heels into space. ‘Morgan,’ Laurence said, and the dark-haired boy scrambled up and towards him, ‘go and invite Mr. Hammond to come and sit with me, if he would like.’
Hammond brightened at the invitation and came up to the dragondeck at once; he did not even notice as behind him the men immediately began rigging the tackles to hoist aboard the barge. ‘Thank you, sir, thank you, it is very good of you,’ he said, taking a seat on a locker which Morgan and Roland together pushed over for him, and accepting with still more gratitude the offer of a glass of brandy. ‘How I should have managed, if Liu Bao had drowned, I have not the least notion.’
‘Is that the gentleman’s name?’ Laurence said; all he remembered of the older envoy from the Admiralty meeting was his rather whistling snore. ‘It would have been an inauspicious start to the journey, but Yongxing could scarcely have blamed you for his taking a misstep.’
‘No, there you are quite wrong,’ Hammond said. ‘He is a prince; he can blame anyone he likes.’
Laurence was disposed to take this as a joke, but Hammond seemed rather glumly serious about it; and after drinking the best part of his glass of brandy in what already seemed to Laurence, despite their brief acquaintance, an uncharacteristic silence, Hammond added abruptly, ‘And pray forgive me – I must mention, how very prejudicial such remarks may be – the consequences of a moment’s thoughtless offence—’
