But his colleague said, "Perhaps there is a middle ground."
Oswald snorted. "Between madness and sanity? Give me leave to doubt."
"How would this be?" David Hartley said. "Let the Atlantean Assembly earnestly recommend to the governing bodies of the respective states that they provide for the restitution of estates, rights, and properties belonging to those who did not take up arms against the United States of Atlantis. This would be consistent not only with justice and equity but also with the spirit of conciliation which on the return of the blessings of peace should universally prevail."
Victor Radcliff suspected hotheads in the Atlantean Assembly would damn him for a soft-hearted backslider for making an arrangement like that. He also suspected the states' governing bodies might not care to heed the Atlantean Assembly's recommendations, no matter how earnest they were. But a mild occupation of French Atlantis had gone well on the whole, where a harsh one might have sparked festering rebellion. He didn't nod with any great enthusiasm, but nod he did. "Let it be so."
"Capital!" Hartley wrote swiftly. "I believe this conveys the gist of what I said. Is it acceptable to you?"
Victor read the proposed article. He nodded again. "It is."
"By the same token, then, there should be no further confiscations-nor prosecutions, either, for that matter-because of past loyalties," Richard Oswald said. "Any such proceedings now in train should also be stopped."
"I will agree to that, provided it also applies reciprocally," Victor replied. "England should not prosecute any Atlanteans in her territory for preferring the Assembly to the king."
Oswald looked as if he'd bitten into an unripe persimmon. But David Hartley nodded judiciously. "That seems only fair," he said. With his own countryman willing to yield the point, Oswald grumbled but did not say no.
Terms for the evacuation of English troops had already been worked out between Victor and General Cornwallis. It remained but to incorporate them into the treaty. The English also undertook not to destroy any archives or records. Quite a few documents had already gone up in flames, the better to protect informers and quiet collaborators. Well, the Atlanteans had burned their share of papers, too. But enough was enough.
"One other point remains,'' Victor said. "Operations of which we here know nothing may yet continue against Avalon, New Marseille, or the smaller towns of the west coast. In case it should happen that any place belonging to Atlantis shall have been conquered by English arms before word of this treaty arrives in those parts, let it be restored without difficulty and without compensation."
The English commissioners looked at each other. They both shrugged at the same time. "Agreed," Oswald said. Again, David Hartley wrote down the clause.
After he finished, he asked, "Is your west coast as savage as the savants say?"
"It is sparsely settled, though Avalon makes a fair-sized town," Victor answered. "The truly empty region is the interior between the Green Ridge Mountains and the Hesperian Gulf. Its day will come, I doubt not, but that day is not yet here."
"Will it come in our lifetime?" Hartley asked.
"I can hope so," Victor said. "I must admit, I don't particularly expect to see it."
"Shall we proceed?" Richard Oswald said. "Does anything more need to go into this treaty?" He waited. When neither his countryman nor Victor said anything, he went on, "Then let it go into effect when it is ratified by Parliament and by the Atlantean Assembly, said ratification to take place within sue months unless some matter of surpassing exigency should intervene."
"Agreed," Victor said. He shook hands with both Englishmen.
"I shall give you a copy of the articles," David Hartley said.
"For which I thank you kindly," Victor replied. Amazing how defeat in the field inclined England toward sweet reason. He barely kept himself from clapping his hands in glee. No one now, not King George and not the Emperor of China, either, could claim the United States of Atlantis had no rightful place among the nations of the world!
Victor was lodged above a public house called the Pleasant Cod. The place had been open for business for upwards of a century; by now, very likely, every possible jest about its name had been made. That didn't keep new guests from making those same jokes over again. Only the glazed look in the taverner's eye kept Victor from exercising his wit at the Cod's expense.
He-or rather, the Atlantean Assembly-was paying for his lodging. One of the principal grievances Atlantis had against England was the uncouth English practice of quartering troops on the citizenry without so much as a by-your-leave-and without so much as a farthing's worth of payment. And if the taverner gouged him for the room… well, Atlantean paper still wasn't close to par with sterling.
Someone pounded on the door in the middle of the night, Victor needed a moment to come back to himself, then another to remember where he was and why he was there. He groped for the fine sword from the Atlantean Assembly. In these days of gunpowder, generals rarely bloodied their blades on the battlefield. But the sword would do fine for letting the air out of a robber or two.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Whoever was out in the hall really wanted to come in. People in other rooms swore at the racket. Victor had no trouble hearing every angry oath through the thin walls.
"Who's there, dammit?" he called, blade in his right hand, the latch in his left. He wasn't about to open it till he got an answer he liked.
He made the knocking stop, anyway. "Is that you, Victor?" a voice inquired. A familiar voice?
"No," he said harshly. "I am the Grand Vizier of the Shah of Persia." He would have assumed a Persian accent had he had the faintest notion of what one sounded like.
Someone else spouted gibberish in the hall. For all Victor knew, it might have been Persian. It was beyond a doubt Custis Cawthorne. Victor threw the door open. "I thought you were still in France!" he exclaimed.
"His ship put in at Pomphret Landing," Isaac Fenner said. "We've ridden together from there to Croydon to see you."
"Perhaps not quite so much of you as this," Cawthorne added. Victor looked down at himself in the dim light of the hallway lantern. All he had on were a linen undershirt and cotton drawers.
"I was asleep," he said with as much dignity as he could muster. "You might have waited till morning to come to call."
"That's right! You bloody well might have, you noisy buggers!" someone else yelled from behind a closed door.
Victor ducked back into his room. After some fumbling, he found the candle stub that had lighted his way up the stairs. He lit it again at the lantern. Then he made a gesture of invitation. "Well, my friends, as long as you are here, by all means come in."
"Yes-go in and shut up!" that unhappy man shouted.
"We should have let it wait till morning," Cawthorne said as Victor shut the door behind them.
His little bit of candle wouldn't last long. Then they could either talk in the dark or go to bed. "Why didn't you?" he asked.
"Because what we came for is too important," Isaac Fenner answered stubbornly. The dim, flickering light only made his ears seem to stick out even more than they would have anyway.
"And that is…?" Victor prompted.
"Why, to finish negotiating the treaty with the English commissioners… Confound it, what's so funny?"
"Only that I reached an accord with them this afternoon," Victor answered. "If the Atlantean Assembly should decide the said accord is not to its liking, it is welcome to change matters to make them more satisfactory. And, should it choose to do so, I shall retire once for all into private life with the greatest delight and relief imaginable."