Empire of Ivory

Chapter 3

BUT THEY REACHED Weymouth covert only a little short of dusk, in much perturbation of spirit, Wringe having expressed the intention, five or six times during the course of their flight, of climbing off mid-air to fly the rest of the way herself. Then she had accidentally scratched Temeraire twice, and thrown a couple of the topmen clean off his back with her uneasy shifting, their lives saved only by their carabiner-locked straps. On landing, they were both handed down bruised and ill from the knocking-about they had taken, and helped away by their fellows to be dosed liberally, with brandy, at the small barracks-house.
Wringe put up a singular fuss to having the bullets extracted, sidling away her hindquarters when Dorset approached knife in hand, insisting she was quite well, but Temeraire was sufficiently exasperated by now to have no patience with her evasions; his low rumbling growl, resonating upon the dry, hard-packed earth, made her meekly flatten to the ground and submit to being picked over with a lantern suspended overhead. "That will do," Dorset said, having pried out the third and final of the balls. "Now some fresh meat, to be sure, and a night's quiet rest. This ground is too hard," he added, with disapproval, as he climbed down from her shoulder with the three balls rattling bloodily in his little basin.
"I do not care if it is the hardest ground in Britain; only pray let me have a cow and I will sleep," Temeraire said wearily, leaning his head so Laurence could stroke his muzzle while his own shallow cuts were poulticed. He ate the cow in three tremendous tearing gulps, hooves-to-horns, tipping his head backwards to let the last bite of the hindquarters go down his throat. The farmer who had been prevailed upon to bring some of his beasts to the covert stood paralyzed in a macabre sort of fascination, his mouth gaping, and his two sons likewise with their eyes starting from their heads. Laurence pressed a few more guineas into the man's unresisting hand and hurried them all off; it would do Temeraire's cause no good to have fresh and lurid tales of draconic savagery spreading.
The ferals disposed of themselves directly around the wounded Wringe, sheltering her from any draft and pillowing themselves one upon the other as comfortably as they could manage, the smaller ones among them crawling upon Temeraire's back directly he had fallen asleep.
It was too cold to sleep out, and they had not brought tents with them on patrol; Laurence meant to leave the barracks, small enough in all conscience without dividing off a captain's partition, to his men, and take himself to a hotel, if one might be had; in any case he would have been glad of a chance to send word back to Dover by the stage, that their absence would not occasion distress. He did not trust any of the ferals to go alone yet, with their few officers so unfamiliar.
Ferris approached as Laurence made inquiry of the few tenants of the covert. "Sir, if you please, my family are here in Weymouth; I am sure my mother would be very happy if you chose to stay the night," he said, adding, with a quick, anxious glance that belied the easy way in which he issued this invitation, "I should only like to send word ahead."
"That is handsome of you, Mr. Ferris; I would be grateful, if I should not be putting her out," Laurence said. He did not miss the anxiety. In courtesy, Ferris likely felt compelled to make the invitation, if his family had so much as an attic corner and a crust of bread to spare. Most of his younger gentlemen, indeed most of the Corps, were drawn from the ranks of what could only be called the shabby-genteel, and Laurence knew they were inclined to think him higher than he did himself: his father kept a grand state, certainly, but Laurence had not spent three months together at home since taking to sea, without much sorrow on either side, except perhaps his mother's, and was better accustomed to a hanging berth than a manor.
Out of sympathy he would have spared Ferris, but for the likely difficulty of finding any other lodgings, and his own weary desire to be settled, even if it were only in an attic corner, with a crust of bread. The noise of the day behind them, he was finding it difficult not to yield to a certain lowness of spirit. The ferals had behaved quite as badly as expected, and he could not help but see how impossible it should be, to guard the Channel with such a company. The contrast could not have been greater, to the fine and ordered ranks of British formations, those ranks now decimated; and he felt their absence all the more keenly for it.
The word was accordingly sent, and a carriage summoned; it was waiting outside the covert gates by the time they had gathered their things, and walked to meet it down the long narrow path which led away from the dragon-clearings.
A twenty-minutes' drive brought them to the outskirts of Weymouth. Ferris grew steadily more hunched as they bowled along, and so miserably white that Laurence might have thought him taken ill with the motion, if he had not seen Ferris perfectly settled through thunderstorm aloft and typhoon at sea, and not likely to be distressed by the motion of a comfortable, well-sprung chaise. The carriage turned, then, drawing into a heavily wooded lane, and Laurence realized his mistake as the forest parted, and they drew abreast the house: a vast and sprawling gothic sort of edifice, the blackened stone barely to be seen behind centuries of ivy, the windows all illuminated and throwing a beautiful golden light out onto a small ornamental brook which wound through the open lawn before the house.
"A very fine prospect, Mr. Ferris," Laurence said as they rattled over the bridge. "You must be sorry not to be home more often. Does your family reside here long?"
"Oh, a dog's age," Ferris said blankly, lifting his head. "There was some Crusader or other first built the place, I think, I don't know."
Laurence hesitated and a little reluctantly offered, "My own father and I have disagreed on certain of our occasions, I am sorry to say, so I am not often at home."
"Mine is dead," Ferris said. After a moment, he seemed to realize this was a rather abrupt period to the conversation, and added with an effort, "My brother Albert is a good sort, I suppose; he has ten years on me, so we have never really got to know one another."
"Ah," Laurence said, left no more the wiser as to the cause of Ferris's dismay.
There was certainly nothing lacking in their welcome. Laurence had braced himself for neglect: perhaps they would be shown directly to their rooms, out of sight of the rest of the company; he was tired enough to even hope to be so slighted. But nothing of the sort: a dozen footmen were out with their lights lining the drive, another two waiting with the step to hand them down, and a substantial body of the staff coming outside to greet them despite the cold and what must surely have been a full house within to manage, a wholly unnecessary ostentation.
Ferris blurted desperately, just as the horses were drawn up, "Sir - I hope you will not take it to heart, if my mother - she means well - " The footmen opened the door, and discretion stopped Ferris's mouth.
They were shown directly to the drawing room, to find all the company assembled to meet them, not very large, but decidedly elegant: the women all in clothing of unfamiliar style, the surest mark of the height of fashion to a man who was often from society a year at a time, and several of the gentlemen bordering on outright dandyism. Laurence noted it mechanically; he was himself in trousers and Hessians, and those stained with dust; but he could not be brought to care, very much, even when he saw the other gentlemen in the greater formality of knee-breeches. There were a couple of military men among their number, a colonel of Marines whose long, seamy, sun-leathered face had a certain vague familiarity that meant they had most likely dined together on one ship or another, and a tall army captain in his red coat, lantern-jawed and blue-eyed.
"Henry, my dear!" A tall woman rose from her seat to come and greet them with both her hands outstretched: too like Ferris to mistake her, with the same high forehead and reddish-brown hair, and the same trick of holding her head very straight, which made her neck look longer. "How happy we are you have come!"
"Mother," Ferris said woodenly, and bent to kiss her presented cheek. "May I present Captain Laurence? Sir, this is Lady Catherine Seymour, my mother."
"Captain Laurence, I am overjoyed to make your acquaintance," she said, offering him her hand.
"My lady," Laurence said, giving her a formal leg. "I am very sorry to intrude upon you; I beg you will forgive our coming in all our dirt."
"Any officer of His Majesty's Aerial Corps is welcome in this house, Captain," she declared, "at any moment of day or night, I assure you, and should he come with no introduction at all still he should be welcome."
Laurence did not know what to say to this; he himself would no more have descended upon a strange house without introduction than he would have robbed it. The hour was late, but not uncivilized, and he came with her own son, so in any case these reassurances were not much to the point; he could not have supposed it otherwise, having been invited and welcomed. He settled on a vague, "Very kind."
The company was not similarly effusive. Ferris's eldest brother Albert, the present Lord Seymour, was a little high in the instep, and made a point early on, when Laurence had made a compliment to his house, of conveying the intelligence that the house was Heytham Abbey, in the possession of the family since the reign of Charles II; the head of the family had risen from knight to baronet to baron in steady climb, and there remained.
"I congratulate you," Laurence said, and did not take the opening to puff off his own consequence; he was an aviator, and well knew that one evil outweighed any other considerations in the eyes of the world. He could not help but wonder that they should have sent a son to the Corps; there was no sign of the pressure of an encumbered estate, which might have made one reason: while appearances might be kept up on credit, so extravagant a number of servants could not have been managed.
Shortly dinner was announced, to Laurence's surprise; he had hoped for nothing more than a little cold supper, and thought them arrived late for even this much. "Oh, think nothing of it, we are grown modern, and often keep town hours even when we are in the country," Lady Catherine cried. "We have so much company from London that it would be tiresome for them to be always shifting their dinner-hour early, and sending away dishes half-eaten, to be wished-for later. Now, we will certainly not stand on formality; I must have Henry beside me, for I long to hear all you have been doing, my dear, and Captain Laurence, you shall take in Lady Seymour, of course."
Laurence could only bow politely and offer his arm, although Lord Seymour certainly ought to have preceded him, even if Lady Catherine chose to make a natural exception for her son. Her daughter-in-law looked for a moment as if she liked to balk, Laurence thought, but then she laid her hand on his arm without any further hesitation, and he chose not to notice.
"Henry is my youngest, you know," Lady Catherine said to Laurence over the second course; he was on her right. "Second sons in this house have always gone to the drum, and the third to the Corps, and I hope that may never change." This, Laurence thought, might have been subtly directed at his dinner companion, by the direction of her eyes; but Lady Seymour gave no sign she had heard; she was correctly speaking with the gentleman on her right, the army captain, who was Ferris's brother Richard. "I am very glad, Captain, to meet a gentleman whose family feels as I do on the matter."
Laurence, who had only narrowly escaped being thrown from the house by his irate father on his shift in profession, could not in honesty accept this compliment, and with some awkwardness said, "Ma'am, I beg your pardon, I must confess you do us credit we have not earned: younger sons in my family go to the Church, but I was mad for the sea, and would have no other profession." He had then to explain his wholly accidental acquisition of Temeraire and subsequent transfer to the Aerial Corps.
"I will not withdraw my remarks; it is even more to their credit that you were given good principles enough to do your duty, when it was presented to you," Lady Catherine said firmly. "It is shameful, the disdain that so many of our finest families will profess for the Corps, and I certainly will never hold with it in the least."
The dishes were being changed again as she made this ringing and over-loud speech, and Laurence noticed that they were going back nearly untouched after all. The food had been excellent, and he could only conceive, after a moment, that all Lady Catherine's protestations were a humbug: they had already dined earlier. He watched covertly as the next course was dished out, and indeed the ladies in particular picked unenthusiastically at their food, scarcely making pretense of conveying a single morsel to their mouths; of the gentlemen only Colonel Prayle was making any serious inroads. He caught Laurence looking and gave him just the slightest bit of a wink, then went on eating with the steady trencherman rhythm of a professional soldier used to take his food when it was before him.
If they had been a large party, coming late to an empty house, Laurence might have conceived of a gracious host holding back dinner for their convenience, or serving a second meal to the newcomers, but not under such pretense, as though they should have been offended with a simple supper, served to them privately, the rest of the company having dined. He was obliged to sit through several more removes, conscious they were a pleasure to no one else of the company; Ferris himself ate with his head down, and only lightly, though in the ordinary course of events he was as rapacious as any nineteen-year-old boy unpredictably fed of late. When the ladies departed to the drawing room, Lord Seymour began to offer port and cigars, with a determined if false note of heartiness, but Laurence refused all but the smallest glass he could take for politeness' sake, and no one objected to rejoining the ladies quickly, they most of them already beginning to droop by the fire even though not half-an-hour had elapsed.
No-one proposed cards or music; the conversation was low and leaden. "How dull you all are to-night!" Lady Catherine rallied them, with a nervous energy. "You will give Captain Laurence quite a disgust of our society. You cannot often have been in Dorsetshire, Captain, I suppose."
"I have not had that pleasure, ma'am," Laurence said. "My uncle lives near Wimbourne, but I have not visited him in many years."
"Oh! Perhaps you are acquainted with Mrs. Brantham's family."
That lady, who had been nodding off, roused enough to say with sleepy tactlessness, "I am sure not."
"It is not very likely, ma'am; my uncle moves very little outside his political circles," Laurence said, after a pause. "In any event, my service has kept me from the enjoyment of much wider society, particularly these last years."
"But what compensations you must have had!" Lady Catherine said. "I am sure it must be glorious to travel by dragon, without any worry that you shall be sunk in a gale, and so much more quickly."
"Ha ha, unless your ship grows tired of the journey and eats you," Captain Ferris said, nudging his younger brother with an elbow.
"Richard, what nonsense, as if there were any danger of such a thing! I must insist on your withdrawing the remark," Lady Catherine said. "You will offend our guest."
"Not at all, ma'am," Laurence said, discomfited; the vigor of her objection gave an undeserved weight to the joke, which in any case he could more easily have borne than her compliments; he could not help but feel them excessive and insincere.
"You are kind to be so tolerant," she said. "Of course, Richard was only joking, but you would be quite appalled how many people in society will say such things and believe them. I am sure it is very poor-spirited to be afraid of dragons."
"I am afraid it is only the natural consequence," Laurence said, "of the unfortunate situation prevailing in our country, which keeps dragons so isolated in their distant coverts as to make them a point of horror."
"Why, what else is to be done with them?" Lord Seymour said. "Put them in the village square?" He amused himself greatly with this suggestion; he was uncomfortably florid in the face, having performed heroically his host's duties at the second dinner. He even now was doing justice to another glass of port, over which he coughed his laugh.
"In China, they may be seen in the streets of every town and city," Laurence said. "They sleep in pavilions no more separated from residences than one town-house from another, in London."
"Heavens; I should not sleep a wink," Mrs. Brantham said, with a shudder. "How dreadful these foreign customs."
"It seems to me a most peculiar arrangement," Seymour said, his brows drawing together. "Look here, how do the horses stand it? My driver in town must go a mile out of his way when the wind is in the wrong quarter and blowing over the covert, because the beasts get skittish."
Laurence was in honesty forced to admit they did not; horses were not often to be seen in the Chinese cities, except for the trained cavalry beasts. "But I assure you the lack is not felt; aside from mule-carts, they have also dragons employed as a sort of living stagecoach, and citizens of higher estate are conveyed by courier, at what you can imagine must be a much higher rate of speed. Indeed, Bonaparte has already adopted the system, at least within his encampments."
"Oh, Bonaparte," Seymour said. "No; thank goodness we organize things more sensibly here. I have been meaning to congratulate you, rather: ordinarily not a month goes by when my tenants are not complaining of the patrols, going overhead and frightening their cattle to pieces; leaving their - " he waved his hand expressively in concession to the ladies " - everywhere, but this sixmonth not a peep. I suppose you have put in new routes, and none too soon. I had nearly made up my mind to speak on the matter in Parliament."
This remark, thoroughly aware as he was of the circumstances which had reduced the frequency of the patrols, Laurence could not make himself answer civilly; so he did not answer at all, and instead went to fill his glass again.
He took it away and went to stand by the window farthest from the fire, to keep himself refreshed by the cool draught which came in. Lady Seymour had taken a seat beside it, for the same reason; she had put aside her wineglass and was fanning herself. When he had stood there a moment she made a visible effort and engaged him. "So you had to shift from the Navy to the Aerial Corps - It must have been very hard. I suppose you went to sea when you were older?"
"At the age of twelve, ma'am," Laurence said.
"Oh! - but then you came home again, from time to time, surely? And twelve is not seven; no one can say there is no difference. I am sure your mother must never have thought of sending you from home at such an age."
Laurence hesitated, conscious that Lady Catherine and indeed most of the other company, which had not already dozed off, were now listening to their conversation. "I was fortunate to secure a berth more often than not, so I was not much at home myself," he said, as neutrally as he could. "I am sure it must be hard, for a mother, in either case."
"Hard! of course it is hard," Lady Catherine said, interjecting here. "What of it? We ought to have the courage to send our sons, if we expect them to have the courage to go, and not this sort of half-hearted grudging sacrifice, to send them so late they are too old to properly take to the life."
"I suppose," Lady Seymour said, with an angry smile, "that we might also starve our children, to accustom them to privation, and send them to sleep in a pigsty, so they might learn to endure filth and cold - if we cared very little for them."
What little other conversation had gone forward, now was extinguished quite; spots of color stood high in Lady Catherine's cheeks, and Lord Seymour was snoring prudently by the fire, his eyes shut; poor Lieutenant Ferris had retreated into the opposite corner of the room and was staring fixedly out the window into the pitch-dark grounds, where nothing was to be seen.
Laurence, sorry to have so blundered into an existing quarrel, by way of making peace said, "I hope you will permit me to say, I find the Corps as an occupation has been given a character which it does not deserve, being no more dangerous or distasteful, in daily use, than any other branch; I can at least say from my own experience that our sailors face as much hard duty, and I am sure Captain Ferris and Colonel Prayle will attest to the privations of their own respective services." He raised his glass to those gentlemen.
"Hear, hear," Prayle said, coming to his aid, jovially, "it is not aviators only who have all the hard luck, but we fellows, too, who deserve our fair share of your sympathy; and at least you may be sure they have all the latest news at any moment: you must know better than any of us, Captain Laurence, what is going forward on the Continent now; is Bonaparte setting up for invasion again, now he has packed the Russians off home?"
"Oh, pray do not speak of that monster," Mrs. Brantham spoke up. "I am sure I have never heard anything half so dreadful as what he has done to the poor Queen of Prussia: taken both her sons away to Paris!"
At this, Lady Seymour, still high-colored, burst out, "I am sure she must be in agony. What mother's heart could bear it! Mine would break to pieces, I know."
"I am sorry to hear it," Laurence said, to Mrs. Brantham, into the awkward silence. "They were very brave children."
"Henry tells me you have had the honor to meet them, Captain Laurence, and the Queen, during your service," Lady Catherine said. "I am sure you must agree, that however much her heart should break, she would never ask her sons to be cowards, and hide behind her skirts."
He could say nothing, but only gave her a bow; Lady Seymour was looking out the window and fanning herself with short jerking strokes. The conversation limped on a very little longer, until he felt he could in politeness excuse himself, on the grounds of the necessity of an early departure.
He was shown to a handsome room, with signs of having been hastily rearranged, and someone's comb left by the washbasin suggested it had been otherwise occupied until perhaps that evening. Laurence shook his head at this fresh sign of over-solicitousness, and was sorry any of the guests should have been shifted on his account.
Lieutenant Ferris knocked timidly on his door, before a quarter-of-an-hour had passed, and when admitted tried to express his regrets without precisely apologizing, as he could scarcely do. "I only wish she would not feel it so. I did not like to go, at the time, I suppose, and she cannot forget that I wept," he said, fidgeting the curtain uneasily; he was looking out the window to avoid meeting Laurence's eyes. "But that was only being afraid at leaving home, as any child would be; I am not sorry for it now, at all, and I would not give up the Corps for anything."
He soon made his good-nights and escaped again, leaving Laurence to the rueful consideration that the cold and open hostility of his father might yet be preferable to a welcome so anxious and smothering.
One of the footmen tapped at the door to valet Laurence, directly Ferris had gone: but he had nothing to do; Laurence had grown so used to doing for himself, that his coat was already off, and his boots in the corner, although he was glad enough to send those for blacking.
He had been abed scarcely a quarter-of-an-hour before he was roused again, by a great clamor of barking from the kennels and the horses shrilling madly. He went to the window: lights were coming on in the distant stables, and he heard a thin faint whistling somewhere aloft, carrying clear from a distance. "Bring my boots at once, if you please; and tell the household to remain within doors," Laurence told the footman, who came hurrying at his ring.
He went down in some disarray, still tying his neckcloth, the flare in his hand. "Clear away, there," he called strongly, some number of the servants gathered in the open court before the house. "Clear away: the dragons will need room to land."
This intelligence left the courtyard empty. Ferris was already hurrying out, with his own signal-flare and a candle; he knelt down to set off the blue light, which went hissing up into the air and burst high. The night was clear, and the moon only a thin slice; almost at once the whistling came again, louder: Gherni's high ringing voice, and she came down to them in a rustle of wings.
"Henry, is that your dragon? Where do you all sit?" said Captain Ferris, coming down the stairs cautiously. Gherni, whose head did not come up to the second-story windows, indeed would have been hard-pressed to carry more than four or five men. While no dragon could precisely be called charming, her blue-and-white china complexion was elegant, and the dark softened the edges of her claws and teeth into a less threatening shape. Laurence was heartened that some other few of the party, still dressed more or less, had gathered on the stoop to see her.
She cocked her head at the question and said something inquiringly in the dragon-tongue, quite incomprehensible to them all, then sat up on her hind legs to call out a piercing answer to some cry which only she had heard.
Temeraire's more resonant voice became audible to them all, answering, and he came down into the wide lawn behind her: the lamps gleaming on his obsidian-glossy scales in their thousands, and his shivering wings kicking up a spray of dust and small pebbles, which rattled against the walls like small-shot. He curved down his head from its great serpentine height, well clear of the roof of the house. "Hurry, Laurence, pray," he said. "A courier came and dropped a message to tell us there is a Fleur-de-Nuit bothering the ships off Boulogne. I have sent Arkady and the others to chase him away, but I do not trust them to mind without me there."
"No indeed," Laurence said, and turned only to shake Captain Ferris's hand; but there was no sign of him, or of any living soul but Ferris and Gherni: the doors had been shut up tight, and the windows all were close-shuttered before they lifted away.
"Well, we are in for it, make no mistake," Jane said, having taken his report in Temeraire's clearing: the first skirmish off Weymouth and the nuisance of chasing away the Fleur-de-Nuit, and besides those another alarm which had roused them, after a few more hours of snatched sleep; and quite unnecessarily, for they arrived only in time, at the edge of dawn, to catch sight of a single French courier vanishing off over the horizon, chased by the orange gouts of cannon-fire from the fearsome shore battery which had lately been established at Plymouth.
"These were none of them real attacks," Laurence said. "Even that skirmish, though they provoked it. If they had worsted us, they could not have stayed to take any advantage of it, not such small dragons; not if they wished to get themselves home again before they were forced to collapse on shore."
He had given his men leave to snatch some sleep on the way back, and his own eyes had closed once or twice during the flight, but that was nothing to seeing Temeraire almost grey with fatigue, his wings tucked limply against his back.
"No; they are probing our defenses, and more aggressively than I had looked for," Jane said. "I am afraid they have grown suspicious. They chased you into Scotland without hide nor wing of another dragon to be seen: the French are not fools to overlook something like that, however badly it ended for them. If any one of those beasts gets into the countryside and flies over the quarantine-coverts, the game will be up: they will know they have free rein."
"How have you kept them from growing suspicious before?" Laurence said. "Surely they must have noted the absence of our patrols."
"We have managed to disguise the situation, so far, by sending out the sick for short patrols, on clear days when they can be seen for a good distance," Jane said. "A good many of them can still fly, and even fight for a while, although none of them can stand up to a long journey: they tire too easily, and they feel the cold more than they should; they complain of their bones aching, and the winter has only made matters worse."
"Oh! If they are laying upon the ground, I am not surprised they do not feel well," Temeraire said, rousing, and lifting up his head. "Of course they feel the cold; I feel it myself, when the ground is so hard and frozen, and I am not sick at all."
"Dear fellow," Jane said, "I would make it summer again if I could; but there is nowhere else for them to sleep."
"They must have pavilions," Temeraire said.
"Pavilions?" Jane said, and Laurence went into his small sea-chest and brought out to her the thick packet which had come with them all the way from China, wrapped many times over with oilcloth and twine, the outer layers stained nearly black, the inner still pale, until he came to the thin fine rice paper inside, with the plans for the dragon pavilion laid out upon them.
"Just see if the Admiralty will pay for such a thing," Jane said dryly, but she looked the designs over with a thoughtful more than a critical eye. "It is a clever arrangement, and I dare say it would make them a damned sight more comfortable than lying on damp ground; I do hear the ones at Loch Laggan do better, where they have the heat from the baths underground, and the Longwings who are quartered in the sand-pits have held up better, though they do not like it in the least."
"I am sure that if only they had the pavilions, and some more appetizing food to eat, they would soon get better; I did not like to eat at all, when I had my cold, until the Chinese cooked for me," Temeraire said.
"I will second that," Laurence said. "He scarcely ate at all before; Keynes was of the opinion the strength of spices compensated, to some part, for the inability to smell or taste."
"Well, for that, any rate, I can squeeze out a few guineas here and there and manage a trial; we have certainly not been spending half of what we ordinarily would in powder," Jane said. "It will not do for very long, not if we are to feed two hundred dragons spiced meals, and where I am to get cooks to manage it I have no idea, but if we see some improvement, we may have some better luck in persuading their Lordships to carry the project forward."