Page 64 of League of Dragons (Temeraire)
The celebration was very little to Laurence’s taste. He had not yet learned to reconcile himself to the betrayal of which he had been made an instrument, and he had no pleasure in being presented to the Empress and being obliged to receive her hand. He said as little as possible, but he suspected his looks spoke for him, and said more than they should; the Empress looked at him with a certain thoughtfulness when he straightened.
He knew it for certain, later that evening, when little Winters came tapping on his door all yawns and a rumpled nightshirt, roused from her bed to find Laurence: an escort of French Guardsmen had come to take him to the Empress. His former gaoler Aurigny was at their head, bowing, and Laurence did not feel he could refuse the summons, as little as he wished to speak with Anahuarque again.
Laurence silently followed his escort through the hallways to the Empress’s sitting room, a small snug chamber with a balcony overlooking the garden where Maila Yupanqui slept with a slitted eye trained upon her lit window. Music still drifted over the trees from the distant ballroom, but the Empress had taken off her elaborate gown, and sat now in a brightly woven dress in the Incan style, loose and comfortable, which nearly disguised her growing belly. “Come and sit with me, Admiral,” she said, and nodded a dismissal to the guards, who glanced to one another in some concern for a moment before they reluctantly withdrew.
“I hope Your Majesty is well,” Laurence said, remote, and only bowed rather than taking the seat she had offered him; he preferred to preserve all the distance which the intimacy she offered would have closed, and he was resolved to behave only with formal courtesy.
But she said, “I am as well as can be hoped,” as though lamenting the loss of the husband she had so neatly disposed of, and Laurence could not suppress a tightening of his jaw. She smiled a little, as though she had seen what she expected. “But I think few of the Emperor’s friends regret him as much as do you, his enemy.”
In the face of this provocation, Laurence could not restrain himself. “Thatsome,on whose love he ought to have been able to depend, do not regret him, is certain.”
“And you think me among that number,” she said bluntly. “You are wrong.” She paused a moment, regarding him with her steady, dark eyes. “I would like you to understand me, Admiral; I should be sorry that you thought such evil of me.”
And would be sorrier, Laurence thought, if he spread a story that did her so little credit. Few others had the power to do so, and he the only one who did not have good cause to conceal it. “Your Majesty scarcely owes me any explanations, nor can I invite your confidence.”
“I do not seek your silence, beyond what your judgment should consider best,” she said. “It grieves me that you should imagine me happy in the present circumstances. If I could have my husband here at my side, triumphant, once more the conqueror of Europe, only then could I call myself a happy woman.”
“You might have had him here as the Emperor of France,” Laurence said. “Would that not have been enough?”
“But I could not,” she said. “Youknow that I could not. You know my husband, Admiral.”
This silenced him. Anahuarque added, after a pause, “You may more justly say, I should have been content to go into exile along with him; to take him away to Pusantinsuyo. But it was my husband’s duty to hazard everything for victory—mine, to rescue our empire from defeat.”
Unwillingly, Laurence did begin to understand her a little more, and that peculiar retreat of her dragons in the final instants: she had offered only to let Napoleon fall into their hands, if he had already been defeated in battle—and thus to end a war swiftly that had almost certainly been lost, but which his gifts and determination could have long prolonged.
“Tell me, if the choice had been put to him, do you think he would have preferred to flee with me to my country, or to keep his son upon the throne he won?” Anahuarque asked, watching his face. “Do you still accuse me of disloyalty?”
There was much to be admired, in the strategic sense, in a plan which had permitted the Empress to enjoy the chance of complete victory, while hazarding very few of the risks of defeat. Laurence could only despise it a little less, for being a more limited conspiracy. But he remembered too clearly the father running through flames at Fontainebleau to save his son, heedless of his own risk; the swiftness with which Napoleon had signed the documents to accept his own exile, in exchange for handing on his throne.
“You have chosen, Your Majesty, as he would have chosen,” Laurence said briefly. That, he could not deny.
He did not think she would ask him to say more, and indeed she nodded his dismissal, satisfied. He left angry, because she was right to be satisfied; she had indeed silenced him as thoroughly as she might have wished. He would have liked to spread the infamy of the conspiracy widely, and to heave away the credit he had not earned; he would have liked to expose her and those who had abetted the betrayal of which he had been made an instrument. But he could not, without serving a worse blow to the man who had been their victim. That she would keep Napoleon’s son upon his throne, Laurence could not doubt, nor that Napoleon would have preferred that outcome to any other form of defeat.
—
“But Laurence, surely we have been trying to see Napoleon defeated, all these years,” Temeraire said, a little perplexed. “Do you mean that you are sorry, now, that he has lost?”
“No,” Laurence said. “No, I would not see him restored if it were in my power, only—” He halted and shook his head, as though he could not put his feelings easily into words.
“Well, Napoleon has never seemed to me such a very bad fellow, but I am not in the least sorry thatLienhas lost,” Temeraire said. “And this exile is by no means less than she deserves after the very underhanded way in which she behaved about the egg. I only wish they planned to put more guns on the shore, at that island, and they ought to station four heavy-weight dragons there at least. I do not think they properly respect what she is capable of doing.” He sighed a little.
Laurence shook his head in silence. He had given his opinions briefly, and advised how best to safeguard against Lien’s sinking the ships, but he thought she could not be held captive long by guns or guards, however numerous. A single accomplice ship equipped with pontoons, somewhere off the shore, would make escape possible. Napoleon’s true gaoler would be his own son. The ministers had bribed him so, to keep to his island, and so long as they left the boy on the throne, Napoleon would keep the bargain.
—
“I should like to express my gratitude,” Temeraire said a little uncertainly: he had come to the clearing where the Tswana dragons had made their camp with only the best intentions, and they had received him, but none of them had returned his introductions, and theywouldall stare so unblinkingly, as though they expected him to do something alarming; it gave him the uneasy feeling they might be right. “—mine, and of course Admiral Laurence’s as well; and I dare say everybody else is grateful also, even if they have not shown it as they ought, yet. But I believe Mr. Hammond means to speak to your prince, when the opportunity arises, and discuss perhaps reopening some of your ports, at the Cape or—”
“He may save the trouble,” one of the Tswana dragons, a large fellow in orange and green, interrupted rudely. “You do not suppose we are ever going to let any of you slavers back in our territory?”
“Oh!” Temeraire said, a little indignantly;hewas not a slaver. “I am sure I have no idea why you wanted to be helpful, then, if you choose to lump us all together.”
Another dragon snorted. “Why should we havehelpedany of you? We didn’t want this Napoleon running things, and he would have, with a few thousand dragons under his hand. Now the rest of you can squabble it out among yourselves, and leave us alone.”
“And I had meant to be so gracious,” Temeraire said to Lily afterwards, when he had flown back to their own covert: which was not at all like a British covert, but a handsome ring of pavilions, each large enough to comfortably house a dozen heavy-weights, or more if they did not mind leaving a tail or a leg poking outside, and piling in. They were situated atop a high hill overlooking Rochefort harbor, presently a very picturesque scene with three dragon transports and a second-rate in harbor, and a flotilla of frigates and ships’ boats scattered around them. In addition, the pavilion floors were raised from the ground with room to put coals beneath, in the best design; the weather was not so unpleasant that they were needed today, but thought had been given to the matter. It was rather an unhappy reminder of the conditions which did not await them in Britain, when at last they boarded those waiting transports and sailed back up the coast. “I had even meant to make them a present.”
“What sort of present?” Lily asked interestedly. She and all the old formation had been gratifyingly pleased for his good fortune, and had come from the Peninsula with their own to report: King Joseph had attempted to flee Spain with tremendous heaps of treasure, and they had captured a caravan with no less than six wagons of silver plate, the prize-money for which had made them all respectably rich, even divided up.
“A golden chain,” Temeraire said, “with some very handsome emeralds: that Incan dragon gave it to me, when she so wanted to keep Challoner.” He sighed a little; but as the Copacati had professed herself perfectly willing to go into the Aerial Corps, it meant Challoner should make captain straightaway, and Laurence had persuaded Temeraire that they could not stand in her way. Temeraire could not really like it, but the necklace had been a handsome consolation. “I am sure it could not fail to please, but of course I am not going to give it to them now, when they have been so churlish.”
