“I heard as he burned Weedon to the ground,” the young soldier with him ventured. “I heard, he set dragons on it, sent the whole place up.”
“Fucking Jacobin buggers,” the sergeant said gloomily. “Begging your pardon, sir,” he said, seeing Laurence and touching his hat.
He nodded to them, and they fell silent, taking their post. A door opened in the side of the tower, and raised voices came drifting out while it sighed gently shut again: more heated argument, strategy and sacrifice. Laurence looked, but it was not Wellesley or one of his aides; it was an old man in nightshirt and bed slippers, muttering to himself as he came into the rain. His hair was grey and thinned out, matted without a wig, and he walked with the uneasy hitch of rheumatism as he groped his way towards the chapel across the courtyard.
“Is it the vicar?” the young Marine whispered.
“At this hour?” the sergeant said, doubtfully, and they both looked at Laurence.
Laurence crossed the courtyard to go to his side: the old man did not seem steady on the wet icy stones, and he was talking to himself, a stream of low unintelligible speech, which remained incomprehensible even as Laurence came close enough to make out the words. “Horses,” the old man said, “horses and mules, and three weeks’ grain, and Copenhagen; the fleet in Copenhagen. Thirty-three pounds.”
He did not seem to notice Laurence’s approach at all; until Laurence said, “Sir, should you not go back inside?”
“I will not,” the old man said, querulous. “Is that you, Murat? Is that you?” He peered at Laurence’s face, touched his coat, and, evidently satisfied, nodded. “You are not Napoleon; you are Murat. Are you here to kill me? Give me your arm,” he said, abruptly peremptory, and, taking a grip on Laurence’s arm, leaned on him heavily. He had fixed his gaze on the chapel, and started determinedly to limp on towards it. “They all mean to kill me,” he told Laurence, confidentially. “They are in there talking of it now. My son is with them.” He sounded neither indignant nor afraid, more as though he were sharing a piece of interesting gossip.
Laurence looked back at the tower, and then at the old man again, at his profile; and recognition came. “Sire,” Laurence said, low and wretchedly, “may I not help you inside? You ought not be out in this weather.” He dragged at the ties of his own cloak, and shrugging it off managed to put it over the King’s shoulders.
“I will go to Windsor,” the King said. “Napoleon is not there. Why may I not go to Windsor?” He continued his unsteady progress towards the chapel, and Laurence had either to pace him or let him go alone. “He is in London, he is in London. He is not in Windsor. I need not go to Halifax. It would be cowardly to go. Do you want me to go to Halifax?” he demanded. “My son wants me to go. He wishes me to die on the ocean.”
“I would wish to see you safe, Sire,” Laurence said, “as I am sure would he.”
“I will not go,” the King said. “I ought not go. I will die in England.”
The door flung open again: frightened servants hurrying with cloak and umbrella to hold over him, and coax him back within; they gave Laurence no more than a glance, and he stepped back to let them work. The King’s voice rose in protest over their guiding hands, and then died away again into muttering confusion. He let himself be drawn gradually back inside.
“Poor old fellow,” the sergeant of Marines said, coming close to peer after them, for a glimpse inside the tower. “Gone out of his head, I suppose. Who was he?”
Laurence stood in the courtyard behind the closing door, rain running down his sleeves and his face like blood; stood and said aloud, “O God, I wish I had not done it.”
III
Chapter 13
TEMERAIRE PULLED CLOSE around himself, his tail coiled snugly against his body, and tried without much success to sleep; there were a great many things he did not want to think about, but so long as he continued awake, they clamored for his attention.
They had landed in Edinburgh covert only after dark, and found it wet and bleak and muddy, and the water of the pond not fit to drink: there were too many dragons buried there, too recently. So they had to take turns putting their heads below a thin run-off from the castle walls, which tasted unpleasantly green, and settle themselves uncomfortably between the two burial-mounds most widely separated. They were crowded, and there was plenty of room for one or another of them to go and sleep among the other mounds, but no-one at all proposed to go off alone; they rather huddled more closely. Laurence had left almost at once to go and speak with Wellesley, and he was gone a long time; enough that they had finished their dinner long before his return—a couple of old tough cows and three sheep, hacked up and pit-roasted with a great heap of potatoes, which Gong Su had organized the crews to procure: happily these took on some of the flavor of the meat and were not unappetizing at all, once they had cooked long enough.
“I don’t hold with this cookery much,” Maximus had said, licking his chops, having slowly and thoughtfully wrecked seventeen bushels of potatoes roasted in their skins, “but these are not half bad, if one cannot have a nice fresh cow, that is.”
Temeraire took a long time over his own meal, but at last he had stretched it as far as it could go, and Maximus was eyeing the last pile of sheep-intestines hopefully, so Temeraire had to finish it off; and then he had nothing to do but lie uncomfortably in the mud, curled up small to stay warmer, and worry about Laurence.
“Of course he ain’t happy,” Gentius said sleepily. “The country overrun by all these Frogs, who would be happy? I would not think much of his sense if he were dancing a jig.”
“But that is not the same as unhappy,” Temeraire said, “when we are going to fight to make the French leave, and will have some battles soon.”
Gentius cocked his head ruminatively. “Men like to be unhappy sometimes,” he offered. “My second captain would come sit under my wing with a book and weep over it, most evenings. I thought at first she must be wounded, but she told me not to fret at all, she liked to do it; and the next morning she would be right as rain again.” Temeraire was doubtful; he had never noticed Laurence weeping over a book, although sometimes he did not enjoy them very much.
But he did not quite like to press the conversation very far. To be perfectly honest, Temeraire was a little concerned—he was perhaps anxious—very well, he was afraid, that he might learn that Laurence was not so much upset as angry—He was afraid that Laurence was angry with him.
Temeraire had not quite understood what it would mean, for Laurence to be called a traitor. Of course, the Government meant to execute him or imprison them away from one another, but Temeraire had thought, with those two fates averted, that otherwise all would be much the same; and at first it seemed so: they flew together, and were given orders, and everything nearly like. But it was not the same at all. Of course there had been no other alternative but to take over the cure; only, Temeraire had not quite understood, before they went, that treason meant Laurence should be losing his life, and his crew, and his rank.
“At least,” he said, “at least, you are still my captain; and after all, while there are many captains who have some sort of dragon, I am the only dragon who is a commodore—” But when he had tried this argument out privately to himself, it did not sound really consoling after alclass="underline" puffing himself off, as though Laurence ought to be satisfied with Temeraire’s consequence and none of his own—insult to injury, and Laurence had lost his gold bars, too.