“I do not understand,” Temeraire said. “Why would they not have spoken to you before, when they do have these Dutch translators?”
“Well, their shogun wouldn’t have it,” Wampanoag said. “They aren’t much for foreigners here, but I guess they have thought it over and decided, since the Chinese are throwing in with you lot, they had better start making some more friends.” He snorted and waved his tail in the air. “They aren’t wrong, either: those of us who don’t want to get dragged into this mess you lot and Napoleon are brewing up all over the place had better stick together. I’ll tell you, you ought to think better of it. Bad for business, that sort of thing.”
That was not very fair, in Temeraire’s opinion: he did not want war—he did not object to battles, of course, but war did seem a great trouble for everyone. “But we cannot very well just lie down before Napoleon: he is always provoking war, and trying to conquer his neighbors, and tell them how they are to go on; only someone very poor-spirited indeed could endure it.”
Wampanoag shook his head doubtfully. “If you say so: it takes two to make a quarrel, in my experience.” He shook out his wings. “But I cannot complain of the consequences for myself: they have given me license to buy more goods than they had meant to allow, on credit, and I suppose I will have a commission for Yankee ships to come in our own right before I go away again. I have promised them we will bring them a company of shipwrights straight from Salem, next season, if they will give us a treaty and let us trade, and I don’t doubt the President will back me if I bring him terms for that.”
“The President?” Temeraire said, and listened with mounting indignation as Wampanoag said, quite casually, “Yes: I have met him half-a-dozen times, and I am sure he will see the sense of a proper treaty with the Japanese for us. I should have rather had Hamilton in the job, of course, but there! You can’t have everything, and for all that he isn’t a Federalist, Tecumseh is a clever fellow.”
He gave a final nod of his head, and leapt aloft, leaving Temeraire to simmer. “It is a good deal too much,” he said to Maximus stormily, “that Napoleon sits in Lien’s lap, and Wampanoag is off chatting with the President, and we must yell and make a great noise in Britain only to be seen by a general now and again. I have never met a minister in my life.”
“Why would you wish to?” Maximus said, sleepily. “Berkley is always saying they are nothing but a lot of tiresome old windbags.”
“Not to mention,” Iskierka put in, as her own pontoon-raft drifted closer, “that if you hadn’t interfered, Granby should have been a king himself: then you needn’t have complained.”
? ? ?
Laurence found the dinner, which he could not escape, a peculiarly constrained affair. It was held at the estate of the Japanese governor, in his gardens very near the shore, and the whole of it passed very nearly in silence. Hammond alone had anything to say to any member of the other company, having monopolized the conversation of the governor since the moment he had come ashore, through one of the translators; with an oblivious rudeness almost painful to witness, he had taken the seat at that gentleman’s right hand, although the servants had made a very valiant effort to reserve it for Laurence himself. Laurence had then been established on the governor’s other hand, making him unwilling witness to the rest of Hammond’s performance: a mortifying experience, as all Hammond’s too-anxious entreaties and half-apologies were met alike with silence, or responses brief and noncommittal: the governor betrayed by not the flicker of an eyelid his opinions on any of Hammond’s remarks, and offered no encouragement whatsoever to his proposals for an exchange of envoys, or an opening of diplomatic communications.