“Come; I would have you eat something,” Laurence said. “A little dinner; and then I will read to you, if you like.”

Temeraire did not find much consolation in philosophy, or even mathematics; and he picked at his food until, pricking up his ruff, he raised his head and put a protective forehand over his cow, and Volly came tumbling into the clearing, kicking up a furious hovering cloud of dust behind him.

“Temrer,” Volly said happily, and butted him in the shoulder, then immediately cast a wistful eye on the cow.

“Don’t be taken in,” James said, sliding down from his back. “Fed not a quarter-of-an-hour ago, while I was waiting for the mails in Hyde Park, and a perfectly handsome sheep, too. How are you, Laurence? Tolerably brown, I find. Here’s for you, if you please.”

Laurence gladly accepted the parcel of letters for his crew, with one on top, to his personal direction. “Mr. Ferris,” he said, handing the packet over, to be distributed. “Thank you, James; I hope we find you well?”

Volly did not look so bad as Meeks’s report might have made Laurence fear, if with a degree of rough scarring around the nostrils, and a slightly raspy voice. It did not inhibit him from rambling happily on to Temeraire, with an enumeration of the sheep and goats which he had lately eaten, and a recounting of his triumph at having sired, early in the recent disaster, an egg, himself. “Why, that is very good,” Temeraire said. “When will it hatch?”

“Novembrer,” Volly said delightedly.

“He will say so,” James said, “although the surgeons have no notion; it hasn’t hardened a tick yet, and it would be early. But the blessed creatures do seem to know, sometimes, so they are looking out a likely boy for the thing.”

They were bound for India, “Tomorrow, or the day after, maybe; if the weather keeps fair,” James said airily.

Temeraire cocked his head. “Captain James, do you suppose that you might carry a letter for me? To China,” he added.

James scratched his head to receive such a request; Temeraire was unique among British dragons, so far as Laurence knew, in writing letters; indeed, not many aviators managed the habit themselves. “I can take it to Bombay,” he said, “and I suppose some merchantman is bound to be going on; but they’ll only go to Canton.”

“I am sure if they give it to the Chinese governor there, he will see it delivered,” Temeraire said with justifiable confidence; the governor was likely to consider it an Imperial charge.

“But surely we ought not delay you, for personal correspondence,” Laurence said a little guiltily; if James did seem a little careless of his schedule.

“Oh, don’t trouble yourself,” James said. “I don’t quite like the sound of his chest yet, and the surgeons don’t, either; as their Lordships ain’t disposed to worry about it, so neither am I, about being quite on time. I’m happy enough to linger in port a few days, and let him fatten himself up and sleep a while.” He slapped Volly on his flank, and led him away to another clearing, the small Greyling following on his heels almost like an eager hound, if a hound were imagined the size of a moderate elephant.

The letter was from his mother, but it had been franked: a small but valuable sign of his father’s approval, of its having been sent, with replies to his last letter:

We are very shocked by the News you send us from Africa, which in many respects exceeds that appearing in the Papers, and pray for the Solace of those Christian souls caught in the Wrack, but we do not repudiate some Sentiment, which the Abhorrence of such dreadful Violence cannot wholly silence, that the Wages of Sin are not always held in Arrears to be paid off on the Day of Reckoning, but Malefactors by God’s Will may be held to account even in this earthly life; Lord Allendale considers it a Judgment upon the failure of the Vote. He is much satisfied by your Account, that the Tswana (if I have it correctly) might perhaps have been appeased, by the Ban; and we have hopes that this necessary Period, to that evil trade, may soon lead to a better and more humane Condition for those poor Wretches who yet suffer under the Yoke.

She concluded more unfortunately by saying,

…and I have taken the Liberty of enclosing a small Trinket, which amused me to buy, but for which I have no Use, as your Father has mentioned to me that you have taken an Interest in the Education of a Young Lady, who I hope may find it suitable.

It was a fine string of garnets, set in gold; his mother had only one granddaughter, a child of five, out of three sons and now five grandsons, and there was a wistful note to be read between the closely written lines. “That is very nice,” Temeraire said, peering over at it with an appraising and covetous eye, although it would not have gone once around one of his talons.

“Yes,” Laurence said sadly, and called Emily over to deliver the necklace to her. “My mother sends it you.”

“That is very kind of her,” Emily said, pleased, and if a little perplexed, quite happy to forgo that sentiment in favor of enjoyment of her present. She admired it, over her hands, and then thought a moment, and a little tentatively inquired, “Ought I write to her?”

“Perhaps I will just express your thanks, in my reply,” Laurence said; his mother might not dislike receiving the letter, but it would only have encouraged the misunderstanding, and his father would certainly look with disfavor on any such gesture as suggesting expectations of a formal acknowledgment, no part of his sense of the responsibilities towards an illegitimate child; and there was no easy way to explain to him the perfect lack of foundation for such a concern.

Laurence was sadly puzzled how to write, even in his own letter, to avoid adding to the confusion, as he could not in civility omit the barest facts: that he had delivered the gift, seen it received, and heard thanks; all of which alone revealed that he had seen Emily very lately and, by the speed of his reply, it would seem regularly. He wondered how he might explain the situation to Jane: he had the vague and slightly lowering thought that she would find it highly amusing, nothing to be taken seriously; that she would not at all mind being taken for—and here his pen stuttered and halted, with his thoughts, because of course, she was the mother of a child, out of wedlock; she was not a respectable woman, and it was not only the secret of the Corps which would have prevented him ever making her known to his mother.

JANE,” LAURENCE SAID, “will you marry me?”

“Why, no, dear fellow,” she said, looking up in surprise from the chair where she was drawing on her boots. “It would be a puzzle to give you orders, you know, if I had vowed to obey; it could hardly be comfortable. But it is very handsome of you to have offered,” she added, and standing up kissed him heartily, before she put on her coat.

A timid knock at the door prevented anything more he might have said: one of Jane’s runners, come to tell her the carriage was ready at the gates of the covert, and they had perforce to go. “I will be glad when we are back in Dover; what a miserable swamp,” Jane said, already blotting her forehead on her sleeve as she left the small barracks-house: the London setting added, to the attractions of stifling heat and the heavy moisture-laden air, all the city’s unrivaled stench, and the mingling of barnyard scents with the acrid stink of the small covert’s presently overburdened dragon-middens.

Laurence said something or other about the heat, and offered her his handkerchief mechanically. He did not know how to feel. The offer had come from some deeper impulse than conscious decision; he had not meant to speak, and certainly not yet, not in such a manner. An absurd moment to raise the question, almost as if he wished to be refused; but he was not relieved, he was by no means relieved.