of coat and neckcloth, he was more formally dressed than all of them; a couple had even taken off their shirts entirely. The furniture had been pushed pell-mell into the edges of the room, and the carpet rolled up and thrust into a corner.
‘Lieutenant John Granby, unassigned,’ the dark-haired man said. ‘Have you just arrived?’
‘Yes; Captain Will Laurence, on Temeraire,’ Laurence said, and was startled and not a little dismayed to see the smile fall off Granby’s face, the open friendliness vanishing at once.
‘The Imperial!’ The cry was almost general, and half the boys and men in the room disappeared past them, pelting towards the courtyard. Laurence, taken aback, blinked after them.
‘Don’t worry!’ The yellow-haired young man, coming up to introduce himself, answered his look of alarm. ‘We all know better than to pester a dragon; they’re only going to have a look. Though you might have some trouble with the cadets; we have a round two dozen of ’em here, and they make it their mission to plague the life out of everyone. Midwingman Ezekiah Martin, and you can forget my first name now that you have it, if you please.’
Informality was so obviously the usual mode among them that Laurence could hardly take offence, though it was not in the least what he was used to. ‘Thank you for the warning; I will see Temeraire does not let them bother him,’ he said. He was relieved to see no sign of Granby’s attitude of dislike in Martin’s greeting, and wished he might ask the friendlier of the two for guidance. However, he did not mean to disobey orders, even if given by a dragon, so he turned to Granby and said formally, ‘Celeritas tells me to ask you to show me about; will you be so good?’
‘Certainly,’ Granby said, trying for equal formality; but it sat less naturally on him, and he sounded artificial and wooden. ‘Come this way, if you please.’
Laurence was pleased when Martin fell in with them as Granby led the way upstairs; the midwingman’s light conversation, which did not falter for an instant, made the atmosphere a great deal less uncomfortable. ‘So you are the naval fellow who snatched an Imperial out of the jaws of France. Lord, it is a famous story; the Frogs must be gnashing their teeth and tearing their hair over it,’ Martin said exultantly. ‘I hear you took the egg off a hundred-gun ship; was the battle very long?’
‘I am afraid rumour has magnified my accomplishments,’ Laurence said. ‘The Amitié was not a first-rate at all, but a thirty-six, a frigate; and her men were nearly falling down for thirst. Her captain offered a very valiant defence, but it was not a very great contest; ill fortune and the weather did our work for us. I can claim only to have been lucky.’
‘Oh! Well, luck is nothing to sneeze at, either; we would not get very far if luck was against us,’ Martin said. ‘Hullo, have they put you at the corner? You will have the wind howling at all hours.’
Laurence came into the circular tower room and looked around his new accommodations with pleasure; to a man used to the confines of a ship’s cabin, it seemed spacious, and the large curved windows a great luxury. They looked out over the lake, where a thin grey drizzle had started; when he opened them a cool wet smell came blowing in, not unlike the sea, except for the lack of salt.
His bandboxes were piled a little haphazardly together beside the wardrobe; he looked inside this with some concern, but his things had been put away neatly enough. A writing desk and chair completed the furnishings, beside the plain but ample bed. ‘It seems perfectly quiet to me; I am sure it will do nicely,’ he said, unbuckling his sword and laying it upon the bed; he did not feel comfortable taking off his coat, but he could at least reduce the formality of his appearance a little by this measure.
‘Shall I show you to the feeding grounds now?’ Granby said, stiffly; it was his first contribution to the conversation since they had left the club.
‘Oh, we ought to show him the baths first, and the dining hall,’ Martin said. ‘The baths are something to see,’ he added to Laurence. ‘They were built by the Romans, you know; and they are why we are all here at all.’
‘Thank you; I would be glad to see them,’ Laurence said; although he would have been happy to let the obviously unwilling lieutenant escape, he could not say otherwise now without being rude; though Granby might be discourteous, Laurence did not intend to stoop to the same behaviour.
They passed the dining hall on the way; Martin, chattering away, told him that the captains and lieutenants dined at the smaller round table, then midwingman and ensigns at the long rectangle. ‘Thankfully, the cadets come in and eat earlier, for the rest of us would starve if we had to hear them squalling throughout our meals, and then the ground crews eat after us,’ he finished.
‘Do you never take your meals separately?’ Laurence asked; the communal dining was rather odd, for officers, and he thought wistfully that he would miss being able to invite friends to his own table; it had been one of his greatest pleasures, ever since he had won enough in prize money to afford it.
‘Of course, if someone is sick, a tray will be sent up,’ Martin said. ‘Oh, are you hungry? I suppose you had no dinner. Hi, Tolly,’ he called, and a servant crossing the room with a stack of linens turned to look at them, an eyebrow raised. ‘This is Captain Laurence; he has just flown in. Can you manage something for him, or must he wait until supper?’
‘No, thank you; I am not hungry. I was speaking only from curiosity,’ Laurence said.
‘Oh, there’s no trouble about it,’ the man Tolly said, answering directly. ‘I dare say one of the cooks can cut you a fair slice or two and dish up some potatoes; I will ask Nan. Tower room on the third floor, yes?’ He nodded and went on his way without even waiting for a reply.
‘There, Tolly will take care of you,’ Martin said, evidently without the least consciousness of any thing out of the ordinary. ‘He is one of the best fellows; Jenkins is never willing to oblige, and Marvell will get it done, but he will moan about it so that you wish you hadn’t asked.’
‘I imagine that you have difficulty finding servants who are not bothered by the dragons,’ Laurence said; he was beginning to adjust to the informality of the aviators’ address among themselves, but to find a similar degree in a servant had bemused him afresh.
‘Oh, they are all born and bred in the villages hereabouts, so they are used to it and us,’ Martin said, as they walked through the long hall. ‘I suppose Tolly has been working here since he was a squeaker; he would not bat an eye at a Regal Copper in a tantrum.’
A metal door closed off the stairway leading down to the baths; when Granby pulled it open, a gust of hot, wet air came out and steamed in the relative cold of the corridor. Laurence followed the other two down the narrow, spiralling stair; it went down for four turns and opened abruptly into a large bare room, with shelves of stone built out of the walls and faded paintings upon the walls, partly chipped away: obvious relics of Roman times. One side held heaps of folded and stacked linens, the other a few piles of discarded clothes.
‘Just leave your things on the shelves,’ Martin said. ‘The baths are in a circuit, so we come back out here again.’ He and Granby were already stripping.
‘Have we time to bathe now?’ Laurence asked, a little dubiously.
Martin paused in taking off his boots. ‘Oh, I thought we would just stroll through; no, Granby? It is not as though there is a need to rush; supper will not be for a few hours yet.’
‘Unless you have something urgent to attend to,’ Granby said to Laurence, so ungraciously
