What threat they faced was not any longer the subject of disagreement; scouts and word along the road had brought enough plain intelligence for that. The Fleur-de-Nuits would come, two formations’ worth of them, likely near the middle of the night, and would bombard them steadily until morning, when the massed French lines would fall upon them and try to drive them from their position.
This position was indeed an enviable one: the generals had retreated from the coast very particularly to reserve for themselves the luxury of choosing the next battlefield. That Napoleon would seek to occupy London, had never been in doubt. He had occupied Vienna, though that city lacked strategic value, and marched through Berlin, only for the moral value of these victories, the personal and not the military satisfaction of standing in his enemies’ palaces and feeling them his own.—And London had a great many banks. Gold and silver to fuel his invasion, and the chance to split the country south from north, with the Thames as a useful vein bringing him lifeblood from the coast.
So the British army had arranged itself on the southern bank between Woolwich and Oxleas Wood, overlooking the Great Dover Road to London, barricades having been established across what alternate roads might have served the French. If these impediments were not as advanced as one would have liked, Napoleon having moved too quickly, still they would have markedly delayed the progress of any great mass of men, and given the British time to fall upon them from behind, and they were well-placed if Napoleon tried to come at the city down the river. But Napoleon did not mean to scorn the gauntlet which had been thrown down: he was coming to them, along the main road.
In the present encampment, the British had the advantage of higher ground, with several stout farmhouses and a few old stone walls and fences, for barricades and fortifications, which should make them all the harder to dislodge. “We will hold here,” Sir Hew Dalrymple said: he had the command, an older officer with a stout neck and fair hair creeping back from his temples. “It would be folly to yield so advantageous a position—”
“And if we are forced to yield it?” Wellesley said, dryly; there was marshy ground on their western flank, sodden with snow; but no-one would discuss this difficulty.
“He has moved quicker than we had expected, but we must not let this throw us into disarray,” General Dalrymple continued. “That is how the Prussians ran into trouble—letting him cast them into confusion, changing their minds and their ground ten times a day.”
“Sir, I beg your pardon,” Laurence said, unable to restrain himself. “That a lack of decision plagued the Prussian army, I cannot deny; but they were outfought, sir, on open ground—”
“With this trick of horse-blinders you have gone on about, in your report,” Dalrymple said. “You may set your mind at ease,” he added, in ironic tones, which said without a word how little he trusted Laurence’s anxiety, “we have not discounted what of your intelligence could be confirmed; our horses have their own damned hoods now, and if Bonaparte thinks he will stampede us with a few dragon-charges, he will soon learn otherwise.”
“And this time, Bonaparte has let his thirst for speed outpace his sense,” another general said. “All the scouts agree, even the beasts,” he added coldly in Jane’s direction, before she had said a word, “that he has not brought up all his army yet. He has some thirty thousand men, not fifty; we are not far short of him even without our levies and reinforcements.”
“You will be a damn sight shorter by morning,” she answered, “if you mean to lie here and be bombarded. And my scouts have made thirty thousand, but that does not mean there are not more to come.”
“You have caterwauled without a stop how we must have these sixty more dragons,” another officer, a colonel, said belligerently, “and swallow treason and unhandled beasts to have them, and now you talk as though we have nothing to do but sit and bear it while the French drop round-shot on our heads. If they are of no use here, they are of no use at all.”
“We have seen a great many of the French along our way from Wales,” Temeraire said, putting in his own oar, “and of course we can stop the Fleur-de-Nuits, if we can only see them, but at night that is difficult.”
“Difficult? So is winning battles difficult,” General Dalrymple said, scowling, and not looking up. He beckoned to his aide and thrust out a map to Laurence. “You will take the beasts here, a mile out past camp,” he said, “and hold the Fleur-de-Nuits there, until morning—”
“That is very silly; the Fleur-de-Nuits will go right around us if we are a mile out,” Temeraire said.
“A couple of rounds against Lefèbvre’s rear-guard, and now you try to tell us our business,” Dalrymple said to Laurence. “By God, I have half-a-mind to—you will obey orders, damn you; you will do as you are told and be grateful for the chance—”
“If I had done as I was told,” Temeraire said, “you should have sixty less dragons, and Lefèbvre would have a good deal more food, and tomorrow Napoleon would likely beat all of you for good. So that is a very stupid thing to say. Whyever ought I do as I am told?”
“If you do not, we will hang—” the belligerent officer began, and Jane said, “Maclaine!” too late, and Temeraire growled, deep in his throat, and lowered his head with his ruff up sharp.
Briefly, he had perhaps become to them only another voice in their deliberations, if a queer, more resonant one, speaking from aloft. But what contempt the little familiarity had produced, vanished in the face of that growl, the great glossy lowered head with the eyes half-a-foot across and glittering yellow-slitted like lamps, over a jawful of serrated teeth with the smallest the size of a man’s hand. It was too palpable a reminder that they were in the presence of a creature who could have, with a stroke, killed them all, and with very little effort to himself. To Laurence, Temeraire could never seem viscerally a threat; but he had handled the dragon from hatchling to maturity, and remembered him a creature scarcely larger than a dog.
“Laurence has oaths and duty to you, and he would let you hang him, although I do not understand why,” Temeraire said after a moment, low and angrily. “And I cannot make him come away with me, against his will, because that would also be wrong. But I will not let him be parted from me again, and if you do hang him, then I will take my friends and go; but not back to China. I will go to Napoleon, and I will tell him he may have my territory, if only he destroys you all, and I will give him any help he wants of me to do it. Now threaten me again, if you like.”
Laurence stood wretchedly, helplessly. He ought to have expected it. Lien had done as much, for the death of her companion, Prince Yongxing; had gone and put herself freely into Bonaparte’s hands, with nothing at the time but contempt for him and all the West, and even though a Napoleon the master of Europe might turn his eyes against her own nation, someday. And what sense of loyalty Temeraire might have begun to acquire to Britain, whatever Laurence might have been able to instill in him, had been undone thoroughly first by the Admiralty’s plan, to infect and kill all the dragons of the West, reserving the cure for British use; and by their later imprisonment and the death-sentence on Laurence which had been used as a bludgeon against him: and now used once too often.
To think his execution would leave Temeraire not free to make his own way back to China, but a devoted enemy of Britain, was a fresh agony; Laurence had no doubt that such a threat would only make the generals despise him and the dragon all the more, and see in it his own scheme for preserving his neck by blackmail. They might choose not to provoke Temeraire again, while Napoleon had men on British soil, but that, he hoped profoundly, was only a temporary state, and then—