Page 63 of League of Dragons (Temeraire)
Napoleon made a gesture of impatience, a quick flicking up of his hand: this was of no importance. “My enemies know my life is in their power. They may kill me or banish me, as they please, but do not let them suppose that either to preserve my life or my freedom I should ever willingly yield my throne to the Bourbons, nor sacrifice the gains which the Revolution won for the French people.”
Talleyrand remained placid in the face of this dramatic speech. “It has been agreed that Your Majesty shall abdicate in favor of your son,” he said, “with the Empress as regent.”
Napoleon paused, silenced. After a moment, he said, “What of France?”
“Upon your abdication, the enemy nations are prepared to sign an immediate armistice, recognizing her natural borders,” Talleyrand said. “So long as France yields to each of the allied nations a share of the dragon eggs presently laid in her breeding grounds.”
“Belgium?” Napoleon said quickly.
“Flanders shall be made part of the Netherlands,” Talleyrand said. “Wallonia remains to France.” There was another brief silence. “In exchange,” Talleyrand continued, when Napoleon had made no answer, “you are to surrender your throne, and retire permanently to the island of St. Helena. The British,” here he nodded to Hammond, who had a stiff, uncomfortable expression, “will undertake to guarantee your safety and comfort there, and that of your faithful dragon.”
Laurence overheard all this, standing awkwardly by the rough fireplace and staring at the dully glowing logs, conscious of both the impropriety of listening and the impossibility of doing anything else. He was determined at first not to really hear, to listen only in the base shipboard sense of some audible noise reaching his ears by the accident of enforced proximity, which was not to be understood or repeated, or treated as knowledge in any way. But he could not help it; he heard, and knew, and he was surprised—there was no other way to describe his feelings. He was very surprised.
The exile would be a remarkably harsh one. St. Helena was an isolate half-tenanted rock under the control of the East India Company, valuable only as a way station on the sea-journey to Asia. Its population had been entirely imported, more than half of them as slaves, and there was but a single town which catered only to the shipping. Its distance from any other shore would make it a secure prison even for a dragon, and even the long-range couriers came but infrequently, which would bar any regular communication. To imprison Napoleon there, divided so thoroughly from his wife and child and all the world, was undeniably a cruelty, and of a sort which he had never visited upon his own conquered enemies despite many opportunities to do so.
But in every other respect these were terms offered to end a war, not ones dictated afterwards by its victors. Laurence knew it had long been the position of the British Government that Belgium must be wholly stripped from France, to safeguard Britain from another invasion; it had long been the position of all the monarchs of Europe that the legitimate kings of France should be restored. If Napoleon had been free, with all France eager and united at his back, Laurence would have been surprised to hear him offered such terms; when he was prisoner, after a sharp defeat, they seemed absurdly generous.
He was not alone in surprise. Napoleon, too, said nothing. He sat back in his narrow, hard-backed chair, gazing at Talleyrand for a period of silence with an almost baffled expression, as though he did not know what to make of what he heard. And then abruptly his face changed. The confusion went out of it, and for one moment his hand went to his breast-pocket, where the letter from the Empress had gone. He sprang up out of his chair and walked away to the window and stood there, his back to the room; his shoulders were very straight.
Laurence stared at him, his own confusion unabated, and then looked round at Hammond. Hammond did not meet his eye, giving every appearance of finding the bare wooden floor of their chamber an object of intense interest, and Metternich also had a constrained expression, very still and controlled, with his hands clasped before him. Talleyrand only made no appearance of discomfort or consciousness; his looks remained perfectly easy and open, milky mild. He was the one to break the silence, gently prompting, “Sire, will you make an answer?”
Napoleon moved his hand slightly to his side, a gesture not of refusal; only of denial. He was silent a little longer, then he said, “You have the papers?”
Metternich produced a document from his coat; after a moment Napoleon turned from the window to take it. His face was changed wholly, gone utterly remote; he might have been cut out of stone. He read over the papers quickly, without sitting down, then put them on the table and reached for his pen and bent over and signed with a single swift flourish:Napoleon.He turning handed them back to Metternich, who received them with a bow.
“If I may express to Your Majesty—” Talleyrand began.
“You may not,” Napoleon said over his shoulder, cold and contemptuous; not what the work of a servant who had brought him such remarkable terms ought to have deserved. He went back to the window, his hands clasped behind his back; a dismissal without a word.
—
Coming out of the cottage behind the three ministers, Laurence lengthened his stride and caught Hammond by the arm. “Mr. Hammond,” he said, “I hope you will come and greet Temeraire: he will be glad to know you are well.”
“Oh,” Hammond said, stifled. He looked longingly at the sedan-chair waiting to carry him away, back to the headquarters, and then said, “Gentlemen, I hope you will excuse me,” with a bow to his counterparts.
He walked away with Laurence across the field towards Temeraire, stumbling now and then, and picking his buckled shoes up out of the churned ground. Laurence waited until they were private enough, out of earshot, and said, “I find myself in a false position, Mr. Hammond, and I would be glad of your assistance to escape it: I am sorry that all the dispatches, this morning, should have spoken in such excessive and inaccurate terms of my and Temeraire’s part in the Emperor’s capture yesterday.”
It was a shot at a venture, but it bore fruit: Hammond darted a look at him, hunted—enough, if Laurence had needed anything more than Napoleon’s own reaction, to tell him there was something underhanded at work.
“I will certainly correct the misapprehension, as widely and as soon as I may,” he continued grimly. “If the Tswana had not disrupted his retreat, we could have done nothing, and our final capture depended entirely on the panic and flight of Napoleon’s Incan escort. The dispatches have all proposed that we captured him in the face of an enormous force of dragons, making us figure in a truly heroic light, when we have only done our duty, in I hope an honorable but not an astonishing manner.”
“Admiral,” Hammond said, “I beg you not to repine upon—not to make an effort to—There are certain considerations—”
Laurence stopped and turned to face him. “And what would these considerations be, Mr. Hammond, which have induced you and the ministers of four nations to jointly publish a fabricated report of the battle?—And moreover, to have made the French an offer of terms which I should have been astonished to hear London approve under these circumstances: the Emperor our prisoner, the war certainly ended, and yet you hand the throne on to his son—”
He broke off even as Hammond raised an anxious hand to try to halt him. Too late: Laurence had understood at last. He saw before him suddenly the inexplicable flight of Napoleon’s escort—the vivid colors of the Incan dragons fleeing in a pack, the handful of Grand Chevaliers and the other French dragons swept up in their midst.
“Or I should say, to his wife,” he finished, after a moment, with a sour taste of disgust in the back of his throat. “Tell me, Hammond, how long have Talleyrand and the Empress conspired with you, to deliver the Emperor into our hands?”
“Admiral—” Then Hammond flung up his hands in frustration, letting them fall limp, and said bluntly, “Laurence, what would you have had us do?”
He turned and walked away, his shoulders bowed, back to the sedan-chair. Laurence stood alone in the field, the cottage in the distance small and dark against the brilliancy of the blue summer sky, and the shadow of a man standing solitary by the window.
THEEMPRESS, STANDING ATthe head of the stairs of the palace, kept one hand lightly resting in the crook of the Tsar’s elbow as though she were fatigued by the effort of maintaining her position, and required his support to welcome the guests ascending to the Tuileries. For his part, he gave that support with a regal, cool expression, and if he felt any concern regarding the slate of highly anxious Incan dragons, all ruffled up into enormous size and peering over at the proceedings from the square, he did not show it, though more than one guest threw alarmed looks in their direction. She let go his arm for a moment, however, to welcome the King of Prussia with an embrace, and beckoning to reunite him with his son, standing beside her.
“I regret that I never met his mother,” she said, “but I have tried to offer him a little of that comfort which I might wish my own son to find if he were ever a guest in your own court, and I hope he one day shall be, now that our nations stand once more as dear friends.”
Her voice was clear, and projected well; Laurence overheard it where he stood waiting his own turn on the stairs, and the low approving murmurs which followed. “They say she protected the prince, even after we came into the war,” he overheard one Prussian officer saying to another. “Who knows what would have become of him, otherwise, in Napoleon’s power!”
