But Catherine had not thought at all of providing herself with a dress, and Riley had not thought at all that she would not have done so, with the result that she had to be married in her trousers and coat; giving the ceremony a very strange appearance, and putting poor Mrs. Grey to the blush, and several other of the respectable Capetown matrons who had attended. Britten himself looked very confused, without the comforting haze of liquor, and stuttered rather more than less over his phrases. To crown the event, when he invited onlookers to express any objections, Lily, despite Harcourt’s many reassuring conversations on the subject, put her head over the lip of the dragondeck to the alarm of the assembled guests and said, “Mayn’t I?”

“No, you may not!” Catherine said, and Lily heaved a disgruntled sigh, and turning her lurid orange eye on Riley said, “Very well, then; but if you are unpleasant to Catherine, I will throw you in the ocean.”

It was perhaps not a very propitious entry to the state of matrimony, but the elephant meat was indeed delicious.

The lookout saw the light off Lizard Point the tenth of August as they came at last into the Channel, the dark mass of England off their port bow, and he caught sight also of a few lights running past them to the east: not ships of the blockade. Riley ordered their own lights doused, and put her on a south-east heading, with careful attention to his maps, and when morning came, they had the mingled pain and pleasure of bringing up directly behind a convoy of some eight ships bound unmistakably for Le Havre: six merchantmen, and a couple of frigates escorting them, all lawful prizes, any of which would certainly have struck at once if only they had been in range. But they were a good sixty miles away, and catching sight of the Allegiance they hurriedly pressed on more sail and immediately began to run clear away.

Laurence leaned on the rail beside Riley watching them go, wistfully. The Allegiance had not been scraped properly clean since leaving England, and her bottom was unspeakably foul; in any event, at her best point of sailing she did not make eight knots, and even the frigate at the rear of the convoy was certainly running at eleven. Temeraire’s ruff was quivering as he sat up to watch them. “I am sure we could catch them,” he said. “We could certainly catch them; at least by afternoon.”

“There are her studdingsails,” Riley said, watching through the glass. The sluggish frigate leapt forward, evidently having only waited until her charges had pulled ahead.

“Not with this wind,” Laurence said. “Or you might; but not the others, and we have no armor. In any case, we could not take them: the Allegiance would be quite out of sight until after dark, and without prize-crews they would all run away from us in the night.”

Temeraire sighed and put his head down again on his forelegs. Riley shut up his glass. “Mr. Wells, let us have a heading north-northeast, if you please.”

“Yes, sir,” Wells said sadly, and turned to make the arrangements; but abruptly, the frigate in the lead checked her way, and bent her course sharply southward, with much frantic activity in the rigging visible through the glass. The convoy all were turning, as if they meant to make now for Granville, past the Jersey Islands; rather a poorer risk, and Laurence could not imagine what they meant by it, unless perhaps they had caught sight of some ship of the blockade. Indeed, Laurence wondered that they should not have seen any such ship before now, unless all the blockade had lately been driven up the Channel by a gale.

The Allegiance had now the advantage of sailing to head them off, rather than directly in their train. Riley said, “We may as well keep on them a little while longer,” with studied calm, and put the ship after them, much to the unspoken but evident satisfaction of the crew: if only the other ship, which as yet they could not see, were fast enough! Even a single frigate might do, imbued by the near and awful presence of the Allegiance with greater force, and so long as the Allegiance was on the horizon at the climax of the chase, she should have a share in any prize taken.

They searched the ocean anxiously, sweeping with their glasses, without success; until Nitidus, who had been jumping aloft at intervals, landed and said breathlessly, “It is not a ship; it is dragons.”

They strained to see, but the oncoming specks were lost among the clouds, nearly all the time. But they were certainly coming fast, and before the hour had closed, the convoy had altered their course yet again: they were now trying only to get under cover of some French gun emplacement along the coast, risking the danger of running for a lee-shore with the wind behind them. The Allegiance had closed the distance to some thirty miles.

“Now may we go?” Temeraire said, looking around; all the dragons were thoroughly roused, and though crouched to keep from checking the ship’s way, they had their heads craned up on their necks, fixed intently upon the chase.

Laurence closed up his glass and turning said, “Mr. Ferris, the fighting crew to go aboard, if you please.” Emily held out her hand for the glass, to carry it away; Laurence looked down at her and said, “When you are finished, Roland, I hope you and Dyer may be of use to Lieutenant Ferris, on the lookouts.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, in almost a breathless squeak, and dashed to stow the glass; Calloway gave her and Dyer each a pistol, and Fellowes their harnesses a tug, before the two of them scrambled aboard.

“I do not see why I must go last,” Maximus said petulantly, while Temeraire and Lily’s crews scrambled aboard; Dulcia and Nitidus already aloft, Messoria and Immortalis to make ready next.

“Because you are a great mumping lummox and there is no damned room to rig you out until the deck is cleared away,” Berkley said. “Sit quiet and they will be off all the sooner.”

“Pray do not finish all the fighting until I am there,” Maximus called after them, his deep bellow receding and growing faint with the thunder of their passage; Temeraire was stretching himself, outdistancing the others, and for once Laurence did not mean to check him. With support so near at hand, there was every reason to take advantage of his speed; they needed only to harry and delay the convoy a little while in order to bring up all the pursuit, which should certainly make the enemy shipping strike.

But Temeraire had only just reached the convoy when the clouds above the leading frigate went abruptly boiling away in a sudden blazing eruption like cannon-fire, and through the unearthly ochre glow, Iskierka came diving down, her spikes dragging ragged shreds of mist and smoke along behind her, and shot a flamboyant billowing arc of flame directly across the ship’s bows. Arkady and the ferals came pouring after her, yowling fit for a nuisance of cats, and went streaking up and down the length of the convoy, hooting and shrilling, quite in range of the ships’ guns; but what looked like recklessness was not so, for they were going by so swiftly that only the very merest chance could have allowed a hit, and the force of their wings set all the sails to shivering.

“Oh,” Temeraire said doubtfully, as they went dashing crazily past him, and paused to hover. Iskierka meanwhile was flying in coiled circles over the frigate, yelling down at them to strike, to strike, or she would burn them all up to a tinder, only see if she would not; and she jetted off another burst of flame for emphasis, directly into the water, which set up a monstrous hissing pillar of steam.

The colors came promptly down, and meekly the rest of the convoy followed suit. Where Laurence would have expected the lack of prize-crews to pose many difficulties, there were none: the ferals at once busily and in a practiced manner set about herding the prizes as skillfully as sheepdogs tending their flock, snapping at the wheelmen, and nudging them by the bows to encourage them to turn their heads for England. The littlest of the ferals, like Gherni and Lester, landed on the ships directly, terrifying the poor sailors almost mortally.