released from the schoolroom just in time for the event. Despite a better share of the virtues of birth and education than Mrs. Gerald, Miss Hershelm was stricken with so much shyness that all Laurence’s efforts could barely win a syllable from her lips; she did not raise her eyes from her plate even once.
He could not think the occasion ideal for such a child, particularly when the younger men lower down the table began to show signs of forgetting their company, and growing boisterous. Laurence saw Mrs. MacArthur glance down the table, and a quick word to her butler followed; an assemblage of cheeses and sweets came to the table accompanying the pudding, in a rather incoherent combination. Laurence rather suspected another two courses had been intended and forgone, though no-one could have complained of the menu so far: fresh-caught roughy in a sauce of lemons and oranges, with fresh peas; an exceedingly handsome crown roast of lamb ornamented with preserved cherries; new potatoes in their skins presented alongside veal chops dressed with brown butter; a whole tunny baked in salt crust, occupying half the table.
But when the pudding had been cleared, Mrs. MacArthur rose; with equal prudence, MacArthur did not let the port go round very long after dinner was cleared, and proposed their rejoining the ladies almost at once.
When they had come into the drawing rooms, several of the women had vanished, Miss Hershelm among them, Laurence was glad to see; Mrs. Gerald, on the other hand, coming up took him by the arm and declared her intention of presenting him to all the eligible young ladies of the company.
“For it is a great shame you should not be doing some girl any good,” she said, “and it is really too bad of you; I am sure you could use some good company, and you needn’t worry I will present you to anyone so poor-spirited as to mind a dragon. Miss Oakley, may I introduce to you Captain Laurence?”
Laurence managed eventually to demur, on the grounds of ineligibility and imminent departure both, and joined Hammond by the balcony, where he was speaking with another of the ladies: a Mrs. Pemberton, widowed on the very journey which had brought her to the colony, and only lately out of black gloves.
“I do not suppose we would have thought of it, save that Elizabeth—Mrs. MacArthur—is a friend of mine, from our schoolroom days,” she said, Hammond having exclaimed over her having made so long a journey. “But having made your own home in so distant a country as China, can you be so surprised that others might wish to see more of the world than encompassed by a single parish in Devonshire, and six weeks in London? I was glad of the notion when she proposed our coming and taking up a grant of land; her husband would have had work for mine. But there is nothing for a woman alone to do here.”
Except to marry again, she did not say, and her speaking look at the company—grown coarser by the moment, and more loud—made clear she did not see much to admire in the local prospects.
“You might return to England,” Hammond said.
“And go back to Devonshire, and tat lace with my mother-in-law, while her pug snores at our feet,” she said, dryly: it did not seem the sort of portrait which would appeal to a woman who had willingly followed her husband across the world to a half-established colony. “I understand you are gone away again shortly, yourselves?”
“As soon as we have our tide, and the wind is in the west,” Hammond said, poetic but quite inaccurate, as making sail with a westerly wind from her present anchorage would serve better to drive the Allegiance onto the harbor rocks than to the open ocean. “But I do hope to return to England, ma’am, someday. I do not grudge my country any service, but I am not so peripatetic as that; and surely the delights of home must call still more to a woman’s heart.”
“And you, Captain Laurence?” she asked. “Does your heart yearn for a quiet retirement at the end of your service, and a house in the country?”
There was something a little mocking in her tone. “Only if there were room enough for a dragon,” Laurence said, and excused himself to step outside and take the air: in the dark, with the lights of the house shining and the garden full of palm-trees and fruit bats obscured, he might have been at exactly that sort of manor, which he might indeed have imagined for himself, six years and a lifetime ago. He had given the future scarcely a thought since then, occupied excessively by an unexpected present; he was surprised to find he would now gladly prefer his isolate valley, with all its toil and inconveniences.
But the valley had been left behind: the cattle sold, or loaded aboard the Allegiance to feed the dragons; the pavilion roofless under the stars with its pillars sentinel over the half-grown sheaves of wheat. No caretaker could be found for so lonely a place; if ever they returned, there would be vines twining the pillars, and weeds and saplings thick in the fields they had so laboriously cleared.
If ever they returned. He turned and went back into the house.
The governor’s mansion stood opposite the promontory housing the covert, around the bay, so the aviators and the soldiers had a sobering course of night air on the way back to their quarters. Some of the younger officers found the lights of the dockside taverns along the way a stronger lure than the quiet of their barracks, however, and eeled away in twos and threes; until Laurence was very nearly walking alone but for Granby. Rankin was on ahead, with Lieutenant Blincoln and Lieutenant Drewmore, and without need for discussion Laurence and Granby slowed their steps and turned off onto a more circuitous route, to stretch out the walk.
“No-one can say it wasn’t a handsome way to see us off,” Granby said, “although MacArthur might have been less festive about it: I am sure he would have wrung my hand with just as much pleasure if I had told him I was going to the devil; not to say we aren’t.”
“I think we must have a little more faith in Mr. Hammond than that,” Laurence said.
“I’ve more in the Tswana,” Granby said. “I can’t imagine what he supposes we are going to say that will turn them up sweet, and they have some damned dangerous beasts: fire-breathers, and four heavy-weight breeds that we know of, and we know precious little. I would just as soon try farther north, and see if the colonials would hire out some of their beasts for fighting, if they have so many they are using them for freight these days.”
He spoke with a vague disgruntlement shared, Laurence knew, by every aviator who had learned that the Americans had begun to raise dragons in so much earnest that they were bidding fair to rival British numbers, with a scant fraction of the number of men looking to fly them: it was deeply dissatisfying to those who had spent their lives in service, hoping for a rare chance to one day captain their own dragon.
“But much smaller creatures,” Laurence said, “and without military training; there can be no comparison. You may be certain Napoleon will have shipped the most deadly of the Tswana, and as many of them as he could cram aboard his transports.”
“Well, I will hope the three of us may make them take enough notice to bother listening, instead of just having at us straight off,” Granby said, but pessimistically.
“I know Hammond is claiming there will be reinforcements sent to meet us from Halifax, or the Channel, but I will rely on that when they land before us yelling for cattle, and not an instant before.
“Anyway, I oughtn’t complain about the Foreign Office’s latest notion, when I am damned grateful for the consequences: it was enough to drive a fellow wild thinking of you and Temeraire thrown away in this wretched little port with that fellow Rankin yapping at your heels, and a crowd of useless layabouts besides. I don’t blame you for chucking the lot of them and going into the wilds. Whatever are they about, now?” They had come at last in sight of the covert gates, and there was a commotion up on the hillside.
They
