"OWING TO THE MODE of our last communication, it is quite impossible Mr. Laurence and I should have any intercourse. - I hope I may not be thought difficult," Rankin said, his crisp and aristocratic vowels carrying quite clearly, over the deck of the Allegiance; his transport the Beatrice had already gone away again, with no more news for the colony: she had left only two months after the Allegiance herself, and the news of the rebellion had not yet reached Government. "But it is generally accepted, I believe, that the dragondeck is reserved for officers of the Corps; and if the gentleman is quartered towards the stern, I see no reason why any inconvenient scenes should arise."
"I see no reason why I shouldn't push his nose in for him," Granby said, under his breath, joining Laurence on the leeward side of the quarterdeck, where passengers were ordinarily allowed liberty. "The worst of it," he added, "is I can't see any way clear to refusing him: the orders are plain black on white, he is to be put to Wringe's egg. What a damned waste."
Laurence nodded a little; he, too, had had a letter, if not in an official capacity.... though nothing would I like better than if he should get himself sunk in the Ocean on his way to you, Jane had written.
... but his damnd Family have been squalling at their Lordships for nigh on Five Years now, and he had the infernal Bad Luck - mine, that is - of finding himself in Scotland, lately, when we were so overset: went up with one of the Ferals out of Arkady's pack, saw a little fighting, and mannaged to get himself wounded again.
So I must give him a Beast, or at least a Chance of one, and Someone must put up with him thereafter; as I am about to have twenty-six hatchlings to feed and likely enough a War in Spain, I don't scruple to say, Better You Than Me.
This last was emphatically full of capitals, and underlined.
I have made the Excuse, that this is the first Egg we have had out of the Ferals, and his having Experience of them in the field, should be an Advantage in its Training.
I was tolrably transparent, I think, but a Title does wonderful things, Laurence: I should have contrivved one much sooner if I had known its Use. Gentlemen who swore at me like fishwives sixmonth ago are become sweet as milk, all because the Regent has signed some scrap of paper for me, and nod their Heads and say Yes, Very Good, when before they would have argued to Doomsday if I should say, It is coming on to rain. Also it is a great benefit they none of them know whether to say Milady or Sir, and as soon as they have arrived at a Decision, they change it again. I only hope they may not make me a Duchess to make themselves easy by saying Your Grace; it would not suit half so well.
I am very obligd to your Mother, by the bye: she wrote, when she saw my name had come out in Debrett's - as J. Roland, very discreet - and had me to a nice, sociable little Dinner, with every Cabinet Minister she could contrive to lay hands on, I gather: all very shocked, as they had brought their Wives, but they could not say so much as Boo with Her Ladyship at the foot of the Table as if Butter would not Melt in her mouth, and the Ladies did not mind inn the Least, when they understood I was an Officer, and not some Vauxhall Comedienne. I found them sensible Creatures all of them, and I think perhaps I have got quite the wrong Notion about them, as a Class; I expect I ought to be cultivating them. I don't mind Society half so much if I may wear Trousers, and they were very kind, and left me their Cards.
We are trundling along well enough otherwise and getting back into some Order: feeding dragons on Mash and Mutton Stew is a damn'd site cheaper, Thank God, if the older ones do complain; Excidium is all Sighs and loud Reminiscences of fresh Cattle, and Temeraire's name is not much lov'd among them, for having given us the Technique.
I will say a word in your Ear for him: I am uneasy about this Business in Spain. Bonaparte ain't a Fool, and why he should wreck a dozen cities, on the southern Coast, fresh from the ruin of his Invasion, I cannot understand. Mulgrave thinks he means to take Spain and to stop us from supplying them from the Sea, but for that, he ought to be burning them in Portugal, instead.
If Temeraire should think it some Stratagem of Lien's, I would be glad to know of it, even late as the Intelligence must come: it is very strange to think, Laurence, that I cannot hope for an Answer in under ten Months and a year and a half the more likely. Now we have lost the Capetown port to those African fellows, the couriers cannot even go to India, and meet your letter halfway.
For Consolation, if you should find yourself overcome with Passion and happen to accidentally drop Rankin down a Cliff, or by some Mischance run him through, at least I will not hear of it for as long, and anyway you are already transportd, which I must call a great Convenience for Murder. But I do not mean to Hint, although it is a great Pity to waste an Egg upon him, even one of our poor unwanted Stepchildren.
I hope Emily has not got into too many Scrapes; tho she cannot officially be your Ensign, I am sure you will oblige me by keeping her from any really reckless Behaviour, and do not let Rankin come the Scrub over her, if he have the Gall: I have seen enough to know he is just the sort of Rotter who would try off Airs of False Pity for her Sacrifice and other non Sense.
The three eggs which had been sent with them to begin the experiment were not, by the lights of Britain's breeders, any great prizes: one a dirt-common Yellow Reaper, sent over because there were seventeen such eggs in the breeding grounds waiting; the second a disappointing and extremely stunted little thing which had unaccountably been produced out of a Parnassian and a Chequered Nettle, both heavy-weights. The last and most promising of the three, large and handsomely mottled and striated, was the offspring of Arkady, the feral leader, and Wringe, the best fighter of his pack.
There was no great enthusiasm for this egg in Britain, where the breeders for the most part viewed the newly recruited ferals as demons sent to wreak havoc and destruction upon their carefully designed lines; so it had been sent away. But it had quickly become the settled thing among the aviators who had been sent along as candidates for the new hatchlings to anticipate great things of the egg. "It stands to reason," Laurence had overheard more than one officer say to another, "if that Wringe one should have got so big out in the wild, this one should do a good deal better with proper feeding, and training; and no one could complain of the ferals' fighting spirit."
Those young officers were now in something of a quandary, which Laurence was not above grimly enjoying, a little: they had been firm and united in their disdain, both for his personal treason and for what they saw as his failure to manage Temeraire properly. But now Rankin had come to supplant one of them, and claim the best egg for himself; he was their most bitter enemy, and Temeraire's recalcitrance their best hope of denying him.
"He mayn't have it at all," Temeraire had said at once, when he had been informed of the proposed arrangement, "and if he likes, he can come up here and try and take it; I should be very pleased to discuss it with him," darkly, in a way which bade fair to answer all of Jane's hopes.
"My dear," Laurence said, having lowered his letter, "I like the prospect as little as you; but if he should be denied even the chance, and return to England thwarted, we have only deferred the evil: he will certainly be put to another egg, there, where you may be certain the poor hatchling will have less opportunity to refuse. And the blame will certainly devolve upon Granby: the orders are for him, and the responsibility to carry them out."
"I am certainly not having Granby take the blame for anything," Iskierka said, raising her head, "and I do not see what the problem is, anyway; the egg will be hatched, by then, and why should it be any business of ours what it does after that? It can take him or not, as it pleases."
Iskierka herself had hatched already breathing fire, and with all the disobliging and determined character anyone could have imagined; she would certainly have had no difficulty in rejecting any unworthy candidate. Most hatchlings did not come from the shell with quite the same mettle, however, and the Aerial Corps had developed many a technique and lure to ensure the successful harnessing of the beasts. Rankin had certainly prepared himself well: he had come over from the Beatrice with not only his two chests of personal baggage, but a pile of leather harness, some chainmail netting, and a sort of heavy leather hood.
"You throw it over the hatchling's head as it comes out of the shell, if you are out of doors," Granby said, when Laurence now inquired, "and then it cannot fly away; when you take it off, the light dazzles their eyes, and then if you lay some meat in front of them, they are pretty sure to let you put the harness on, if you will only let them eat. And some fellows like it, because they say it makes them easier to handle; if you ask me," he added, bitterly, "all it makes them is shy: they are never certain of their ground, after."
"I wonder if you might be able to put me in the way of some cattle-merchant," Rankin was saying, to Riley and Lord Purbeck. "I intend to provide for the hatchling's first meal from my personal funds."
"Surely he can be restrained in some way," Laurence said, low. He was not yet beyond the heat of righteous anger kindled all those years before, when they had been unwilling witness to the cruelty of Rankin's treatment of his first dragon. Rankin was the sort of aviator beloved of the Navy Board: in his estimation as in theirs, dragons were merely a resource and a dangerous one, to be managed and restrained and used to their limits; it was the same philosophy which had rendered it not only tolerable but desirable to contemplate destroying ten thousand of the French beasts through the underhanded sneaking method of infection.
Where Rankin might have been kind to Levitas, he had been indifferent; where indifferent, deliberately cruel, all in the name of keeping his poor beast so downtrodden as to have no spirit to object to any demands made upon him. When Levitas had with desperate courage brought them back the warning of Napoleon's first attempt to cross the Channel, in the year 'five, and been mortally wounded in that effort, Rankin had left his dragon alone and slowly dying in a small and miserable clearing, while he sought comfort for his own lesser injuries.
It was a mode of service which had gone thoroughly out of fashion in the last century among most aviators, who increasingly preferred to better preserve the spirit of their partners; the Government did not always agree, however, and Rankin was of an ancient dragon-keeping family, who had preserved their own habits and methods and passed these along to the scions sent into the Corps, at an age sufficiently delayed for these to be impressed upon them firmly, along with a conviction of their own superiority to the general run of aviators.
"He cannot be permitted to ruin the creature," Laurence said. "We might at least bar him from use of the hood - "
"Interfere with a hatching?" Granby cried, looking at Laurence sidelong and dismayed. "No: he has a right to make the best go of it he can, however he likes. Though if he can't manage it in fifteen minutes, someone else can have a try," he added, an attempt at consolation, "and you may be sure fifteen minutes is all the time he will have; that is all I can do."
"That is not all that I can do," Temeraire said, mantling, "and I am not going to sit about letting him throw nets and chains and hoods on the hatchling: I do not care if it is not in the shell anymore. In my opinion, it is still quite near being an egg."
He realized this was an irregular way of looking at the matter, but after all, if the hatchling had not yet eaten anything, and if perhaps a bit of egg were still stuck to its hide, one could not be sure that it was ready to manage on its own, and so it was still one's responsibility. "Anyway," he added, "I do not like him at all, and I don't see that he has any right to be a captain again; just let him try and come here, and I will knock him down for it."
"You are not doing anything which Granby would not like!" Iskierka said, jetting out a bit of steam.
"As though you had anything to say to it," Temeraire said, coolly. "Anyway, you do things which Granby does not like every day."
"Only," Iskierka said, "when it is particularly important," a monstrous lie, "and anyway, that is quite different. You might think of Granby, since you are always on about how I do not take proper care of him: I am not having him made not a captain, like you have done with Laurence, only because you are being absurd again and worrying about hatched dragons," she added, which thrust hit home quite successfully; Temeraire flinched involuntarily, and put back his ruff.
"Why," Iskierka continued, "I have seen this Rankin person: he is smaller than a pony, even. I could have burnt him up to a cinder as soon as I cracked the shell."
"If he wanted you," Temeraire said, "he might have you, and welcome," but this was only a feeble bit of quarreling, and not really a just argument; he put his head down and stared at the eggs unhappily.
"And," he said to Laurence, a little later, "if the egg does not take him, I suppose he will want to try the second, and then the third; I am sure he will not just go, when he has come all this way where no-one wants him, only to be difficult."
"Only to have another dragon; but so far as that goes, I am afraid you may be right," Laurence said, low. "But there is not much we can do about it, my dear, if we do not care to put Granby in a very awkward position; and make our own the worse. The eggs are not formally in our care at all, but his."
"But Arkady charged me with his," Temeraire said, "and I gave my word; surely that makes me interested."
Laurence paused and agreed somberly, "That does put another complexion on the matter," but it did not offer any other solution, except squashing Rankin, which would have been quite unfair, as a matter of relative size, and which Laurence insisted was not to be contemplated, despite Admiral Roland's letter.
Laurence did not dissuade Temeraire with much enthusiasm; he would not have greatly minded Rankin's being squashed under other circumstances, and the present situation would have rendered the event not only painless but highly desirable. His sentiments in the matter were only the more exacerbated the following morning, when Riley called upon them: Laurence had preferred to pass another irregular night up on the promontory in his small tent, still more comfortable a berth than remaining aboard ship, when he now must be careful only to visit the quarterdeck, and not go forward.
For Rankin was of course perfectly correct in the point of etiquette, and they were both barred from the field of honor, which was the only other suitable redress Rankin could have demanded for Laurence's actions in their last meeting. Laurence could not be sorry in the least for having handled Rankin so violently, but neither could he force himself into Rankin's presence, nor pursue the quarrel to which Rankin could not make answer, and retain any pretensions to the character of a gentleman.
"And I cannot blame you for it, either," Riley said, "but it left me in an awkward position. I had to have him to dinner, and Bligh, too, or look rather shabby; and I am wretchedly sorry, Laurence: is this egg likely to be something out of the common way? Because what must the cawker do ten minutes after we are at table but declare Bligh has been monstrous used by a pack of mutinous dogs, and it ought not be borne."
"Oh, damn him," Laurence said, unguarded in savage exasperation. "No, Tom, so far as the egg goes; not if you mean of an order to pick a quarrel with Temeraire; but that has nothing to do with the case. We cannot set upon a British dragon, if it is as small as a Winchester. Are we to have a pitched battle in the harbor? I cannot conceive what he is thinking."
"Oh, I will tell you that," Riley said. "He is thinking he means to have the beast, will-you, nill-you. I beg you to imagine how our passenger took it: Bligh at once informed me he considers it my duty to ensure the Admiralty's orders as regards the egg are carried out; and that he will be sure to write their Lordships to express his opinion, and convey that he has made me so aware."
And the very last thing desirable to Riley at the present date was any suggestion of disobedience or recalcitrance, and all the more so if there were any sign it should be provoked by Laurence or even amenable to him. Their connection had already injured Riley's credit with their Lordships to a severe extent, and he served now, as did all Laurence's former associates, under a veil of suspicion. Bligh might not carry his point so far as his re-establishment in the colony, and his ill-management might invite the scorn rather than the sympathy of the Admiralty; that did not mean the Navy Board would not accept with the other hand any charges Bligh laid at Riley's door.
All the more so, Laurence knew, that they had been given fresh cause to regard Temeraire, and any personage even remotely associated with him, with suspicion: Temeraire had received a letter also, in the post carried by the Beatrice; from Perscitia, who had evidently somehow acquired a scribe.
We have finished the Pavilion already -
"Oh!" Temeraire said sadly, "and I am not there to see it."
- and begun on a second; we were puzzled where we should get the funds, as it is amazing how quickly Money goes. The Government tried to persuade us all to go back to the Breeding Grounds and leave off building: when we were almost quite finished, if you can imagine it. So the promised Supply has been very late and slow, and when they do send us any Cattle they are thin and not tasty, so we have had to buy Food of our own, and it is very dear at present; also Requiescat will eat like A Glutton, of course.
But we contrived: Majestatis suggested we should send Lloyd to Dover, to inquire after carting work, and we have worked out that men will pay a great deal just for us to carry things to London, and other Towns, as we can do it much more quickly than Horses; and I have worked out a very nice Method by which one can calculate the most efficient Way to go among all of them, taking on some goods and leaving off others; only it grows quite tiresome to calculate if one wishes to go to more than five or six Places.
There was a little noise about our coming and going - nobody much minded when it was just the Winchesters, or even the Reapers; but of course, Requiescat can carry so very much more - even if he is too lazy to go further than Dover to London and back - and Ballista and Majestatis and the other Heavy-weights, and after all, it is not as though we do not fit into the Coverts, so we really saw no reason they should not go, too. But then Government grew upset - when they might have given us proper Food, to begin with, and we should never have needed to trouble ourselves! - and they tried to make a Quarrel, and set some harnessed dragons in the Covert and told them to keep us out of it.