Granby came into the room to join them and said, “You’re determined you won’t take ship with us?” while perching upon the end of the bed. “It won’t be an easy road. You’ll be flying cold, Laurence, I’m afraid: I dare say the Chinese would have a fit if you tried to put up a tent on Temeraire’s back. Have you got a new flying-coat, yet?”
“I have, thank you,” Laurence said. Mianning had made him free of his own purse, towards repairing his wardrobe, and Laurence had swallowed his half-remembered irritation and begged Gong Su for assistance in navigating the etiquette of commissioning a garment from one of the local tailors in such a way that would not oblige the poor tradesman to proffer the item as a gift.
The coat had been delivered with sufficient alacrity to mean that the fellow had however stayed up night and day working upon it. But Laurence was grateful for the speed, which should let him take the coat with him; and more so that the garment did not make a guy of him. The leather was a supple black and the sleeves darted cleverly at shoulder and elbow with padded dark blue silk: a little outré, perhaps, but when Laurence had discovered how the contrivance served to ease the sweep of a sword, he had no objections to make. There were a few more ornate embossed decorations than he might have liked upon the sleeves, but these were subtle and easily to be missed at a distance.
His memory had begun more steadily to come back to him—flashes of recollection and emotion, conversations and actions: still with blank spaces full of surprise between them, but he felt no longer that strange sense of division from himself. Even that, he now recognized, was not so great a distance from the state of his mind these last several years. He was divided from the man he had once been, and by a gulf he could no longer cross.
“I fear there is something of cowardice in it,” he admitted, meaning his loss of memory. “A retreat, and weak-minded at that, when I can no longer be what I was even if I wished; there is no pretense, no masquerade that could achieve it. I thought I had faced up to it; I had not thought to be so easily overcome.”
“I am of the opinion,” Tharkay said, “that you ought not assign to free will something more likely the consequence of a sharp blow to the skull.”
Granby snorted. “You are the only fellow I can think of, Laurence, whose notion of a weak-minded retreat would be to cast your own head ahoo and slog onwards confused beyond everything, and nearly kill yourself thrice over.”
He rose and gave Tharkay a bow in lieu of shaking hands: as he was short one, and Tharkay’s still in sorry condition. Together they left him to his rest, closing the courtyard door behind them as they stepped out. The dragons of the formation were engaged in postdinner ablutions—a final enjoyment of that pleasure which they would not so easily find after leaving the Imperial precincts, where enormous dragon’s-head spouts were placed at the eaves of the buildings through which torrents of pleasantly hot water might be pumped over the dragons’ backs.
“What an ungodly flood: we will be lucky if we are not all carried away,” Captain Little said, as he sprang up onto one of the stone benches to save his boots, after Nitidus had grown too enthusiastic in his pumping: a broad gushing stream developed, running down Immortalis’s back to the drain. “John, we will need Iskierka to toast their rumps before we get them back under harness, or we will all be flying wet,” he said, offering a hand to pull Granby up by his good arm; and then, after a moment’s hesitation, Laurence afterwards.
Laurence took it in an equally awkward spirit. The return of his memory had belatedly clarified all Little’s avoidance: of course Little knew, for Granby had surely told him, that Laurence had by misfortune and Iskierka’s indiscretion been brought into not only Granby’s guilty secret, but his own.
And not, as one might learn of such a thing aboard a ship—not by whispered ship’s gossip, and eavesdropping through her wooden walls, and one suspicious circumstance laid upon another like bricks to make a wall of certainty. Laurence could by that sort of testimony have denounced a score of men, in the Navy, and would nevertheless cheerfully and with a sense of perfect honesty have sworn, under oath, that he knew nothing of their predilections and personal habits, and denied any knowledge of a crime, even if Admiral D—had maintained an entire troop of particularly beautiful young men who could not reef a sail or pull upon a line, and Captain K—had so passionately greeted his first lieutenant of ten years, that man returning wounded from a boarding party, as to require all present to avert their eyes.