Throne of Jade. Naomi Novik

nothing of his loss. By any measure, there was something ridiculous in his being so adrift: he had become an aviator quite unwillingly, only from the strongest sense of duty, and less than a year had passed since his change in station; yet already he could hardly consider the possibility. Only another aviator, perhaps indeed only another captain, would truly be able to understand his sentiments, and with Temeraire gone, he would be as severed from their company as aviators themselves were from the rest of the world.

      The front room at the Crown and Anchor was not quiet, though it was still early for dinner by town standards. The place was not a fashionable establishment, nor even genteel, its custom mostly consisting of country-men used to a more reasonable hour for their food and drink. It was not the sort of place a respectable woman would have come, nor indeed the kind of place Laurence himself would have ever voluntarily frequented in earlier days. Roland drew some insolent stares, others only curious, but no one attempted any greater liberty: Laurence made an imposing figure beside her with his broad shoulders and his dress sword slung at his hip.

      Roland led Laurence up to her rooms, sat him in an ugly armchair and gave him a glass of wine. He drank deeply, hiding behind the bowl of the glass from her sympathetic look: he was afraid he might easily be unmanned. ‘You must be faint with hunger, Laurence,’ she said. ‘That is half the trouble.’ She rang for the maid; shortly a couple of manservants climbed up with a very good sort of plain single-course dinner: a roasted fowl, with greens and beef gravy sauce; some small cheese-cakes made with jam, calf’s feet pie, a dish of red cabbage stewed, and a small biscuit pudding for relish. She had them place all the food on the table at once, rather than going through removes, and sent them away.

      Laurence did not think he would eat, but once the food was before him he found he was hungry after all. He had been eating very indifferently, thanks to irregular hours and the low table of his cheap boarding-house, chosen for its proximity to the covert where Temeraire was kept; now he ate steadily, Roland carrying the conversation nearly alone and distracting him with service gossip and trivialities.

      ‘I was sorry to lose Lloyd, of course – they mean to put him to the Anglewing egg that is hardening at Kinloch Laggan,’ she said, speaking of her first lieutenant.

      ‘I think I saw it there,’ Laurence said, rousing a little and lifting his head from his plate. ‘Obversaria’s egg?’

      ‘Yes, and we have great hopes of the issue,’ she said. ‘Lloyd was over the moon, of course, and I am very happy for him; still, it is no easy thing to break in a new premier after five years, with all the crew and Excidium himself murmuring about how Lloyd used to do things. But Sanders is a good-hearted, dependable fellow; they sent him up from Gibraltar, after Granby refused the post.’

      ‘What? Refused it?’ Laurence cried, in great dismay: Granby was his own first lieutenant. ‘Not for my sake, I hope.’

      ‘Oh Lord, you did not know?’ Roland said, in equal dismay. ‘Granby spoke to me very pretty; said he was obliged, but he did not choose to shift his position. I was quite sure he had consulted you about the matter; I thought perhaps you had been given some reason to hope.’

      ‘No,’ Laurence said, very low. ‘He is more likely to end up with no position at all; I am very sorry to hear he should have passed up so good a place.’ The refusal could have done Granby no good with the Corps; a man who had turned down one offer could not soon expect another, and Laurence would shortly have no power at all to help him along.

      ‘Well, I am damned sorry to have given you any more cause for concern,’ Roland said, after a moment. ‘Admiral Lenton has not broken up your crew, you know, for the most part: only gave a few fellows to Berkley out of desperation, he being so short-handed now. We were all so sure that Maximus had reached his final growth; shortly after you were called here, he began to prove us wrong, and so far he has put on fifteen feet in length.’ She added this last in an attempt to recover the lighter tone of the conversation, but it was impossible: Laurence found that his stomach had closed, and he set down his knife and fork with the plate still half-full.

      Roland drew the curtains; it was already growing dark outside. ‘Do you care for a concert?’

      ‘I am happy to accompany you,’ he said, mechanically, and she shook her head.

      ‘No, never mind; I see it will not do. Come to bed then, my dear fellow; there is no sense in sitting about and moping.’

      They put out the candles and lay down together. ‘I have not the least notion what to do,’ he said quietly: the cover of dark made the confession a little easier. ‘I called Barham a villain, and I cannot forgive him asking me to lie; very ungentlemanlike. But he is not a scrub; he would not be at such shifts if he had any other choice.’

      ‘It makes me quite ill to hear about him bowing and scraping to this foreign prince.’ Roland propped herself upon her elbow on the pillows. ‘I was in Canton harbour once, as a mid, on a transport coming back the long way from India; those junks of theirs do not look like they could stand a mild shower, much less a gale. They cannot fly their dragons across the ocean without a pause, even if they cared to go to war with us.’

      ‘I thought as much myself, when I first heard,’ Laurence said. ‘But they do not need to fly across the ocean to end the China trade, and wreck our shipping to India also, if they liked; besides they share a border with Russia. It would mean the end of the coalition against Bonaparte, if the Tsar were attacked on his eastern borders.’

      ‘I do not see the Russians have done us very much good so far, in the war, and money is a low pitiful excuse for behaving like a bounder, in a man or a nation,’ Roland said. ‘The State has been short of funds before, and somehow we have scraped by and still blacked Bonaparte’s eye for him. In any case, I cannot forgive them for keeping you from Temeraire. Barham still has not let you see him at all, I suppose?’

      ‘No, not for two weeks now. There is a decent fellow at the covert who has taken him messages for me, and lets me know that he is eating, but I cannot ask him to let me in: it would be a court-martial for us both. Though for my own part, I hardly know if I would let it stop me now.’

      He could scarcely have imagined even saying such a thing, a year ago; he did not like to think it now, but honesty put the words into his mouth. Roland did not cry out against it, but then she was an aviator herself. She reached out to stroke his cheek, and drew him down to such comfort as might be found in her arms.

      Laurence started up in the dark room, sleep broken: Roland was already out of bed. A yawning housemaid was standing in the doorway, holding up a candle, the yellow light spilling into the room. She handed Roland a sealed dispatch and stayed there, staring with open prurient interest at Laurence; he felt a guilty flush rise in his cheeks, and glanced down to be sure he was quite covered beneath the bedclothes.

      Roland had already cracked the seal; now she reached out and took the candlestick straight out of the girl’s hand. ‘There’s for you; go along now,’ she said, giving the maid a shilling; she shut the door in the girl’s face without further ceremony. ‘Laurence, I must go at once,’ she said, coming to the bed to light the other candles, speaking very low. ‘This is word from Dover: a French convoy is making a run for Le Havre under dragon guard. The Channel fleet is going after them, but there is a Flamme-de-Gloire present, and the fleet cannot engage without aerial support.’

      ‘How many ships in the French convoy, does it say?’ He was already out of the bed and pulling on his breeches: a fire-breather was nearly the worst danger a ship could face, desperately risky even with a good deal of support from the air.

      ‘Thirty or more, packed no doubt to the gills with war materiel,’ she said, whipping her hair into a tight braid. ‘Do you see my coat over there?’

      Outside the window, the sky was thinning to a paler blue; soon the candles would be unnecessary. Laurence found the coat and helped her into it; some part of his thoughts already occupied in calculating the likely strength of the merchant ships, what proportion of the fleet would be detached to go after them, how many might yet slip through to safe harbour: the guns at Le Havre were nasty. If the wind had not shifted since yesterday, they had favourable