Laurence had rather more sympathy for Riley’s plight; he was a little shocked by Catherine’s refusal to marry rather than burn, when the plain choice was put before her, and he was forcibly reminded to regret Reverend Erasmus, for the lack of what he was sure would have been that gentleman’s warm and forceful counsel in favor of the marriage. Mr. Britten, Riley’s official chaplain, assigned by the Admiralty, could not have brought a moral argument to bear on anyone, even if he were made sober long enough to do so.

“But at least he is ordained,” Riley said, “so there would be no difficulty about the thing whatsoever; everything would be quite legal. But she will not hear of it. And she cannot say, in fairness,” he added half-defiantly, “that it is because I am some sort of scoundrel, because I did not try to speak before; it was not as though—I was not the one who—” then cutting himself off hastily, instead ended more plaintively by saying, “and, I did not know how to begin. Laurence, has she no family, who might prevail on her?”

“No; quite alone in the world,” Laurence said. “And, Tom, you must know that she cannot leave the service: Lily cannot be spared.”

“Well,” Riley said reluctantly, “if no one else can be found to take the beast on,” a notion of which Laurence did not bother to try and disabuse him, “but it does not matter: I am not such an outrageous scrub as to abandon her. And the governor was kind enough to tell me that Mrs. Grey is perfectly willing to receive her: generous beyond what anyone might expect, and it would surely make everything easy for her in England; they have a large acquaintance, in the best circles; but of course not until we are married, and she will not listen to reason.”

“Perhaps she fears the disapproval of your family,” Laurence said, more from a motive of consolation than conviction; he was sure Catherine had not given a thought to the feelings of Riley’s family, nor would have, if she had determined on the marriage.

“I have already promised her that they would do all that is proper, and so they would,” Riley said. “I do not mean to say it is the sort of match they would have looked out for me; but I have my capital, and can marry to please myself without any accusation of imprudence, at least. I dare say that my father at least will not care two pins, if only it is a boy; my brother’s wife has not managed anything but girls, the last four years ago, and everything entailed,” he finished, very nearly flinging up his hands.

“But it is all nonsense, Laurence,” Catherine said, equally exasperated, when he approached her. “He expects me to resign the service.”

“I believe,” Laurence said, “that I have conveyed to him the impossibility of such a thing, and he is reconciled to the necessity, if not pleased by it; and you must see,” he added, “the very material importance of the circumstance of the entailment.”

“I do not see, at all,” she said. “It is something to do with his father’s estate? What has it to do with me, or the child? He has an older brother, has he not, with children?”

Laurence, who had not so much been instructed in the legal structures of inheritance and entailment as absorbed them through the skin, stared; and then he hastily made her understand that the estate would descend in the male line, and her child, if a boy, stood to inherit after his uncle. “If you refuse, you deny him his patrimony,” Laurence said, “which I believe likely to be substantial, and entailed in default on a distant relation who would care nothing for the interest of Riley’s nieces.”

“It is a stupid way of going on,” she said, “but I do see; and I suppose it would be hard luck on the poor creature, if he grew up knowing what might have been. But all I am hoping for is not a boy at all, but a girl; and then what use is she to him, or I?” She sighed, and rubbed the back of her hand across her brow, and finally said, “Oh, bother; I suppose he can always divorce me. Very well: but if it is a girl, she will be a Harcourt,” she added with decision.

The marriage was briefly postponed for want of anything suitable to make a wedding-feast, until they had managed some resupply. Already extremity had driven them to shore on several occasions: there was no safe harbor on their charts, along the southern coastline, where the Allegiance might have safely put in; so instead the empty water-casks were roped together and draped upon the dragons, who daily flew in the twenty miles of open water which Riley’s caution left between them and the coast, and tried to find some nameless river emptying into the sea.

Drawing near Benguela, they passed a pair of tattered ships on the fifteenth of June, with blackened sides and makeshift slovenly sails a pirate would have been ashamed to rig, which they took for fellow refugees from the Cape, choosing to make east for St. Helena. The Allegiance did not offer to heave-to; they had no water or food to spare of their own, and in any case the smaller ships ran away from them, likely fearing to be pressed either for supplies or men, not without cause. “I would give a good deal for ten able seamen,” Riley said soberly, watching them go hull-up over the horizon; he did not speak of what he would give for a proper dole of clean water. The dragons were already licking the sails in the morning, for the dew, all the company having been put on half-rations.

They saw the smoke first, still rising, from a long way off: a steady ongoing smoulder of damp wood piled into massive bonfires, which as they drew nearer the harbor resolved themselves into the overturned hulks of ships, which had been dragged from the ocean onto the beach. Little more than the stout keels and futtocks remained, like the rib cages of beached leviathans who had flung themselves onto the sands to die. The fortifications of the Dutch factory had been reduced to rubble.

There was no sign of life. With all the gunports open, and the dragons roused and alive to the least warning of danger, the ship’s boats went to the shore full of empty water-casks. They came back again, pulling more quickly despite their heavier load; in Riley’s cabin, Lieutenant Wells reported uneasily. “More than a week, sir, I should say,” he said. “There was food rotting, in some of the houses, and all that is left of the fort is perfectly cold. We found a large grave dug in the field behind the port; there must have been at least a hundred dead.”

“It cannot have been the same band who came on us in Capetown,” Riley said, when he had done. “It cannot; could dragons have flown here, so quickly?”

“Fourteen hundred miles, in less than a week’s time? Not if they meant to fight at the end of it, and very likely not at all,” Catherine said, measuring upon the map with her fingers; she had the chair, as Riley had managed to carry the point of giving her the large stern-cabin for the journey home. “They needn’t have, at any rate; there were dragons enough at the falls to make another raiding party of the same size, or another ten, for that matter.”

“Well, and I am sorry to sound like a damned ill-wishing crow,” Chenery said, “but I don’t see a blessed reason why they shouldn’t have gone for Louanda, while they were at it.”

Another day’s sailing brought them in range of the second port; Dulcia and Nitidus set off, beating urgently before the wind, and some eight hours later returned again, finding the Allegiance in the dark by the beacons lit in the tops.

“Burnt to the ground, the whole place,” Chenery said, tipping back the cup of grog which had been given him, thirstily. “Not a soul to be seen, and all the wells full of dragonshit; beg your pardon.”

The magnitude of the disaster began gradually to dawn upon them all: not only Capetown lost, but two of the largest ports in Africa besides. If the enemy’s purpose had been to seize control of the ports, all the intervening territory must have first been conquered; but if simple destruction were all their desire, no such long, drawn-out labor was required. Without aerial forces to oppose them, the dragons could overfly with ease any defenses or mustered force, and go directly to their target, carrying their light infantry with them; and then expend all their energy upon the hapless town which had incurred their wrath.