Temeraire with an effort restrained himself from mantling. “I am quite sure,” he said, repressively. “And I intend to remain so until I am offered proof otherwise.”
Wampanoag had a trick of tilting his head a little to one side, as though he were looking you over from another angle to see if you seemed different, which Temeraire now found had the effect of making him feel under a too-sharp observation. But Wampanoag only said, “So you are only lingering to find him, this fellow you lost?”
“Yes,” Temeraire said, eagerly. “And we should be very glad of any assistance in recovering him.”
“But I beg your pardon,” Wampanoag said, “aren’t you here over the Phaeton?”
“No, for we hadn’t any notion what had happened to her,” Temeraire said. “We were only on our way to China: we have been invited to the court, you see.”
Wampanoag was quite gratifyingly surprised to hear of their destination; he expressed himself very prettily on the matter indeed, calling it a remarkable honor. “And I will not scruple to say, that puts a very different shade on things here, it seems to me,” he added, “if you are not here to quarrel.”
“We are not, in the least,” Temeraire said, although a stab of guilt, when he thought of what Laurence should say when he heard of the Phaeton, forced him to add, “although I do say we think it very hard that the Phaeton should have been sunk, so far from home with all her hands, and all because, we suppose, of some misunderstanding.”
“Let us certainly call it that, for the moment,” Wampanoag said. “That is a very good name for it, I must say.”
He declared himself delighted to be of service in any way he could, promised to speak with the chief of the Dutch, a gentleman called Doeff, to forward the search, and even with the Japanese directly. “I have a bit of Dutch myself, you know,” he said, “from the shell: my tribe adopted a good many of them back during the quarreling over New Amsterdam that was. So I can have a jaw with their translators, myself: that is why I hired us on here.”
He was so ready to be obliging that Temeraire could not even be too angry with him for adding, “but pray do understand that it is more than I undertake, to return you your sailor. I don’t mean to distress you, but my firm have lost a few ships entire ourselves, all hands, too. It is a dreadful sad wrench, I can tell you, to hear that a neat clipper with her hold packed full and three dozen men aboard has gone to the bottom of the ocean, to be gnawed by serpents, and a clear loss of twenty thousand pounds sterling.”
Temeraire shuddered in real horror, his ruff flattening involuntarily down against his neck, and Churki exclaimed in passionate dismay; but Wampanoag made a prosaic flip of his wing in the air. “I don’t complain: it is a hard business,” he said, “and a necessary risk to run, if you mean to make your fortune at it. But what I mean to say is, not a scrap of sail or bit of timber do we have to show for any ship we have lost: we only know they are lost because they left the one port and never came in at any other, and after we had sat hoping after them a couple of years it was time to leave off saying, ‘She will come in tomorrow.’ So I cannot promise you we will find a trace to say, one way or another, what has happened to your sailor. But whatever I can do, I will, sure enough.”
“I cannot hope for more than that,” Temeraire said as politely as he could manage, rather wishing that Wampanoag would leave now before sharing any other ghoulish stories, and seeing before him a long empty stretch of days, waiting and waiting, while Laurence did not come.
The party about to ford the river was evidently the train of a lord on his way home from the capital, amongst them several armed retainers wearing two swords and more serviceable armor as well. Laurence kept his head bent down and rowed industriously but not, he hoped, too fast; Junichiro was silent in the boat’s belly. Laurence thought for a moment they would manage it. The ferrymen and the porters lost interest when they saw that Laurence showed no intention to compete with their business, of which in any case there bade fair to be as much as they could manage with the sheer size of the lord’s retinue, and the confusion and noise of the welcoming inns might have overwhelmed any interest in Laurence and Junichiro’s quiet passage.