“Yes, I will post them for you, but you are behaving absurdly, Laurence,” she said, collecting up the letters. “A knock on the head can be very nasty, even if you have not cracked your skull. When I had the yellow fever I did not prance about claiming I was well; I lay in bed and took my gruel and possets, and I was back on my feet quicker than any of the other fellows in the West Indies who took it.”

“Thank you, Jane,” he said, and did not argue with her; indeed he felt very ill, and he was grateful when she drew the curtains and cast the room into a comfortable dimness.

He briefly came out of sleep some hours later, hearing some commotion outside the door of his room: Roland saying, “You are damned well going to leave now, or I will kick you down the hall. What do you mean, sneaking in here to pester him the instant I have gone out?”

“But I must speak with Captain Laurence; the situation is of the most urgent—” The protesting voice was unfamiliar, and rather bewildered. “I have ridden straight from London—”

“If it is so urgent, you may go and speak to Admiral Lenton,” Roland said. “No; I do not care if you are from the Ministry; you look young enough to be one of my mids, and I do not for an instant believe you have anything to say that cannot wait until morning.”

With this she pulled the door shut behind her, and the rest of the argument was muffled; Laurence drifted again away. But the next morning there was no one to defend him, and scarcely had the maid brought in his breakfast—the threatened gruel and hot-milk posset, and quite unappetizing—than a fresh attempt at invasion was made, this time with more success.

“I beg your pardon, sir, for forcing myself upon you in this irregular fashion,” the stranger said, talking rapidly while he dragged up a chair to Laurence’s bedside, uninvited. “Pray allow me to explain; I realize the appearance is quite extraordinary—” He set down the heavy chair and sat down, or rather perched, at the very edge of the seat. “My name is Hammond, Arthur Hammond; I have been deputized by the Ministry to accompany you to the court of China.”

Hammond was a surprisingly young man, perhaps twenty years of age, with untidy dark hair and a great intensity of expression that lent his thin, sallow face an illuminated quality. He spoke at first in half-sentences, torn between the forms of apology and his plain eagerness to come to his subject. “The absence of an introduction, I beg you will forgive, we have been taken completely, completely by surprise, and Lord Barham has already committed us to the twenty-third as a sailing date. If you would prefer, we may of course press him for some extension—”

This of all things Laurence was eager to avoid, though he was indeed a little astonished by Hammond’s forwardness; hastily he said, “No, sir, I am entirely at your service; we cannot delay sailing to exchange formalities, particularly when Prince Yongxing has already been promised that date.”

“Ah! I am of a similar mind,” Hammond said, with a great deal of relief; Laurence suspected, looking at his face and measuring his years, that he had received the appointment only due to the lack of time. But Hammond quickly refuted the notion that a willingness to go to China on a moment’s notice was his only qualification. Having settled himself, he drew out a thick sheaf of papers, which had been distending the front of his coat, and began to discourse in great detail and speed upon the prospects of their mission.

Laurence was almost from the first unable to follow him. Hammond unconsciously slipped into stretches of the Chinese language from time to time, when looking down at those of his papers written in that script, and while speaking in English dwelt largely on the subject of the Macartney embassy to China, which had taken place fourteen years prior. Laurence, who had been newly made lieutenant at the time and wholly occupied with naval matters and his own career, had hardly remembered the existence of the mission at all, much less any details.

He did not immediately stop Hammond, however: there was no convenient pause in the flow of his conversation, for one, and for another there was a reassuring quality to the monologue. Hammond spoke with authority beyond his years, an obvious command of his subject, and, still more importantly, without the least hint of the incivility which Laurence had come to expect from Barham and the Ministry. Laurence was grateful enough for any prospect of an ally to willingly listen, even if all he knew of the expedition himself was that Macartney’s ship, the Lion, had been the first Western vessel to chart the Bay of Zhitao.

“Oh,” Hammond said, rather disappointed, when at last he realized how thoroughly he had mistaken his audience. “Well, I suppose it does not much signify; to put it plainly, the embassy was a dismal failure. Lord Macartney refused to perform their ritual of obeisance before the Emperor, the kowtow, and they took offense. They would not even consider granting us a permanent mission, and he ended by being escorted out of the China Sea by a dozen dragons.”

“That I do remember,” Laurence said; indeed he had a vague recollection of discussing the matter among his friends in the gunroom, with some heat at the insult to Britain’s envoy. “But surely the kowtow was quite offensive; did they not wish him to grovel on the floor?”

“We cannot be turning up our noses at foreign customs when we are coming to their country, hat in hand,” Hammond said, earnestly, leaning forward. “You can see yourself, sir, the evil consequences: I am sure that the bad blood from this incident continues to poison our present relationship.”

Laurence frowned; this argument was indeed persuasive, and made some better explanation why Yongxing had come to England so very ready to be offended. “Do you think this same quarrel their reason for having offered Bonaparte a Celestial? After so long a time?”

“I will be quite honest with you, Captain, we have not the least idea,” Hammond said. “Our only comfort, these last fourteen years—a very cornerstone of foreign policy—has been our certainty, our complete certainty, that the Chinese were no more interested in the affairs of Europe than we are in the affairs of the penguins. Now all our foundations have been shaken.”

THE ALLEGIANCE WAS a wallowing behemoth of a ship: just over four hundred feet in length and oddly narrow in proportion, except for the outsize dragondeck that flared out at the front of the ship, stretching from the foremast forward to the bow. Seen from above, she looked very strange, almost fan-shaped. But below the wide lip of the dragondeck, her hull narrowed quickly; the keel was fashioned out of steel rather than elm, and thickly covered with white paint against rust: the long white stripe running down her middle gave her an almost rakish appearance.

To give her the stability which she required to meet storms, she had a draft of more than twenty feet and was too large to come into the harbor proper, but had to be moored to enormous pillars sunk far out in the deep water, her supplies ferried to and fro by smaller vessels: a great lady surrounded by scurrying attendants. This was not the first transport which Laurence and Temeraire had traveled on, but she would be the first true oceangoing one; a poky three-dragon ship running from Gibraltar to Plymouth with barely a few planks in increased width could offer no comparison.

“It is very nice; I am more comfortable even than in my clearing.” Temeraire approved: from his place of solitary glory, he could see all the ship’s activity without being in the way, and the ship’s galley with its ovens was placed directly beneath the dragondeck, which kept the surface warm. “You are not cold at all, Laurence?” he asked, for perhaps the third time, craning his head down to peer closely at him.