“I suppose they will keep us past dinner-time,” Jane said, meaning their Lordships, an opinion which seemed to Laurence rather optimistic; he thought it very likely they should be kept for days, if Bonaparte were not so obliging as to invade, with no warning. “So I must look in on Excidium before we go: he ate nothing at all, last night; nothing, and I must try and rouse him up to do better today.”

“I do not need to be scolded,” Excidium murmured, without opening his eyes, “I am very hungry,” but he was scarcely able to rouse himself from his somnolence even to nudge briefly at her hand. Though naturally one of those earliest dosed with the supply of mushroom sent on by frigate from Capetown, he was by no means yet fully recovered from his ordeal; the disease had been well advanced in his case by the time the cure had arrived, and only in the last few weeks had it been judged safe for him to leave the uncomfortable sand-pits which had made his home for more than a year. Nevertheless he had insisted on managing the flight to London, instead of letting Temeraire carry Jane with Laurence, and was now paying for his pride with near-prostration; he had done nothing but sleep since their arrival, the afternoon before.

“Then try and take a little while I am here, for my comfort,” Jane said, and stepped back to the clearing’s edge to keep her best coat and trousers from being spattered by the fresh-butchered sheep carried hurriedly over by the covert herdsmen, and hacked apart directly in front of Excidium’s jaws, which ground methodically away at the joints of meat as they were put in his mouth.

Laurence took the opportunity of escaping her company for a moment, and went to the neighboring clearing where Temeraire was busily engaged, despite the early hour, with his two sand-tables, upon the letter. He was working upon an account of the disease, and its treatment, which he meant to send to his mother in China, with Mr. Hammond as his proxy, against the danger that a similar outbreak might one day there occur. “You have made that Lung look more like Chi,” he said severely, casting an eye over the work of his coterie of secretaries: Emily and Dyer, who had been disgruntled to learn that their promotion to the exalted rank of ensign had not relieved them of all responsibility of schoolwork, and with them Demane and Sipho, who were at least at no greater disadvantage learning Chinese script than anyone else would have been.

Laurence thought, abruptly, he might have asked her the other day, after they had disposed of the fate of the boys. They had been closeted alone together, without interruption, nearly an hour; that, at any rate, would have been a more opportune moment to speak, barring any scruple at introducing a subject so intimate in the precincts of her office. Or he might have spoken yesterday night, when they had left the dragons sleeping and retired together to the barracks-house; or, better still, he ought to have waited some weeks, until the settling of this first furious bustle of activity after their arrival: hindsight serving powerfully to show him how he might better have forwarded the suit he had not wholly intended to make.

Her rejection had been too practical, too quick, to give him much encouragement to renew his addresses, under any future circumstances. In the ordinary way, he should have considered it as forming a necessary end to their relations, but the mode of her refusal made it seem mere petulance to be wounded, or to insist on some sort of moralizing line. Yet he was conscious of a lowering unhappiness; perhaps in turning Catherine’s advocate towards the state of matrimony, he had become his own, and without quite knowing had set his heart upon it, or at any rate his convictions.

Temeraire finished his present line upon the sand-table, and lifting his foreleg away to let Emily carefully exchange it with the second, caught sight of Laurence. “Are you going?” he inquired. “Will you be very late?”

“Yes,” he said, and Temeraire lowered his head and peered at him searchingly. “Never mind,” Laurence said, putting his hand on Temeraire’s muzzle. “It is nothing; I will tell you later.”

“Perhaps you had better not go,” Temeraire suggested.

“There can be no question of that,” Laurence said. “Mr. Roland, perhaps you will go and sit with Excidium this afternoon, and see if you can convince him to take a little more food, if you please.”

“Yes, sir. May I take the children?” Emily said, from the advanced age of twelve, meaning Demane and Sipho, the older of whom lifted his head indignantly at the name. “I have been teaching them how to read and write in English, in the afternoons,” she added importantly, which filled Laurence with anticipatory horror at the results of this endeavor, as Emily’s penmanship most often resembled nothing more than snarled thread.

“Very good,” he said, consigning them to their fate, “if Temeraire does not need them.”

“No; we are almost finished, and then Dyer may read to me,” Temeraire said. “Laurence, do you suppose we have enough mushroom to spare, that we may send a sample with my letter?”

“I hope so; Dorset tells me that they have managed to find a way to cultivate the thing, in some caves in Scotland, so what remains need not all be preserved against future need,” Laurence said.

The carriage was old and not very comfortable, close and hot and rattling horribly over the streets, which were in any case none to the good this close to the covert. Chenery, so ordinarily irrepressible, was sweating and silent; Harcourt very pale, although this had a more prosaic cause than anxiety, and halfway along she was obliged in a choked voice to request they stop, so she might vomit into the street.

“There, I feel better,” she said, leaning back in, and looked only a little shaky when she stepped down from the carriage and refused Laurence’s arm for the short walk through the courtyard into the offices.

“A glass of wine, perhaps, before we go in?” Laurence said to her softly, but she shook her head. “No; I will just take a touch of brandy,” she said, and moistened her lips from the flask which she carried.

They were received in the boardroom, by the new First Lord and the other commissioners: the Government had changed again in their absence, over the question of Catholic emancipation, Laurence gathered; and the Tories were in once more: Lord Mulgrave sat now at the head of the table, a little heavy by the jowls, with a serious expression and pulling a little at the end of his nose; the Tories did not think much of the Corps, under any circumstances.

But Nelson was there, also; and quite in defiance of the general atmosphere he rose as soon as they had entered, and remained standing, until in some embarrassment the other gentlemen at the table struggled to their feet; then coming forward he shook Laurence’s hand, in the handsomest manner, and asked to be presented.

“I am filled with admiration,” he declared, on being named to Catherine, and making her a noble leg, “and indeed humbled, Captain Harcourt, on having read your account; I have been accustomed,” he added, smiling, “to think a little well of myself, and to like a little praise: I will be the first to admit it! but your courage stands above any example which I can easily recollect, in a lifetime of service. Now, we are keeping you standing; and you must have something to drink.”

“Oh—no, nothing,” Catherine said, so mortally crimson her freckles stood out as pale spots. “Nothing, thank you, sir; and it was nothing, I assure you, nothing which anyone else would not have done; which my fellow-officers did not do,” she added, confusing her refusals of both refreshment and praise.

Lord Mulgrave did not look entirely satisfied to have his precedence thus usurped. A chair had of course to be offered her, and perforce them all; some shuffling ensued so they were ranged together in a close row along the farther side of the table, with the naval lords facing them along the other, but still it did not quite have the court-martial quality of standing for interrogation.