“They have loaded up those boats there with tinder,” Granby answered him, shading his eyes to peer at the shore. “They may come out and have a go at setting us afire, we think.”
“What?” Iskierka said, rearing up her head abruptly, her eyes going very wide. “What? How dare they! I will go and fire them, at once!”
“Oh, no, you shan’t,” Granby said firmly. “Not until we have seen what they mean to do; you cannot blame them for having a lookout, when a transport loaded to the brim comes creeping into their harbor.”
When Hammond had been put back aboard—he was so unhandy about coming up the side that Churki would no longer have it, pronouncing it a ludicrous and unnecessary risk, and insisted on reaching down to lift him up herself out of the launch—he did not say anything at all of Laurence, and nothing to reassure about the egg, either.
“The worst news imaginable,” he said. “I had private conversation of Mr. Doeff, who is the commissioner here, and good God! Do you know a ship called the Phaeton?”
“Lost in the Pacific, two years ago,” Captain Blaise said, automatically.
Laurence had thought well of Blaise—had called him a respectable and a sensible man, but in Temeraire’s private opinion he was only a block: not the least imagination or interest as far as Temeraire had been able to discover in nearly the full year of their acquaintance. He was not afraid of dragons, which was the best Temeraire could say of him, and indeed he made a point of taking the air upon the dragondeck every day—after making a punctilious request of the most senior aviator on deck for the liberty—as a sort of gesture to reassure the hands. But his head was full of nothing but the Naval Chronicle; he had no other conversation but the weather, and that was not very much use as he insisted on always saying the prospect was very fair, even when it was plainly coming on to a three-days’ blow.
“Pellew’s second boy had her, if I recall aright, and she was looking in at the Dutch trade last anyone heard of her,” Blaise added now. “Likely she went down in a gale—” and stopped as Hammond shook his head.
“She was sunk here,” he said, “—here, after coming in under false colors, taking hostage two of the Dutch officials who went out to greet her, and threatening to fire the shipping in the harbor if the Japanese did not supply them. Her captain must have been a lunatic,” he added bitterly.
The uproar this produced, Hammond had evidently not expected. He had meant to convey that the Japanese were not in the least pleased with the British, and that they naturally thought the Potentate had come to make a fuss over the sinking of the Phaeton. In this he had succeeded, but was dismayed to discover that Captain Blaise would have liked to confirm all the worst fears the Japanese might have entertained. When Hammond had finished, Blaise walked to and fro along the deck for an hour altogether in great fury, repeating that it was more than a dog could bear, that they should have sunk a British ship and receive no answer, even in the face of all Hammond’s increasingly anxious remonstrations.
He was only at last persuaded to go inside to write a report of it to the Admiralty; Hammond turned at once to the dragondeck, so he might corner Captain Harcourt, who was senior, and try to make repairs by urgently pressing her in turn to disavow any possibility of action.
“Hammond, I haven’t the least wish to start us another war in some hasty fashion,” she said at last, in some irritation, “but no-one can blame Blaise for being distressed, and I am so myself. It is all very well to say her captain was provoking: whose word do you have for that, but this Dutch fellow, whose trade he would have gone after?”
She walked away from his importunities, and at last Temeraire could pin Hammond down with a clawed foot laid down in his path, when he would have dashed away from the dragondeck at once again. “Oh—no, no, they do not know anything of Laurence,” Hammond said, distracted. “Pray will you move, I must go down and speak with Blaise again—”