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
