Outside the last of the tents had gone up, and the night had gone quiet: the quiet of a prison camp. The ground crewmen and the junior officers were sitting wearily at their fires, supping on the remnants of the provided food. Several knots of officers stood looking across the boundary line at the rest of the camp and the twelve red dragons drowsing along it: not with more caution than was deserved.
Granby ducked out of the tent and joined him, watching them. “Laurence, I don’t mean to tell you not to be angry: this is a rotten hole for us to have been put into, all because some fellows in Guangzhou want to line their pockets,” he said, after a moment. “But there’s a stink to this all around. Fela hasn’t told all the truth, either.”
Laurence looked at him. Granby said, “Where is this British dragon supposed to have come from, that he says was lugging these chests? It’s the sort of thing he might imagine: I dare say all their merchants ship goods dragon-back, here. We don’t; we haven’t any merchant dragons. Even our courier-beasts don’t come to China: we can scarcely get one to India four times a year.”
“And yet those chests are from Guangzhou, and from a British ship,” Laurence said slowly. “They were conveyed here somehow.”
“I suppose so,” Granby said, “but they weren’t brought by a British dragon, and if Fela says they were, he’s a bare-faced liar.”
“I beg your pardon; I am distracted,” Laurence said, to Mrs. Pemberton: she had spoken to him, and he had not attended, for the lingering turmoil in his mind. “Thank you, tea would be most welcome.”
He had not slept easily or well. The ruined village lingered in his mind, in his dreams; he saw again and again the cracked stone houses, the mill fallen silent, the walls blackened with smoke and the claw-marks standing pale against them. Again and again he had walked through the street, hearing somewhere distantly the roar of dragons, with a strange and dreadful sense of familiarity: perhaps because it might almost have been an English village, a village of Nottinghamshire on his own father’s estates, pillaged so and broken. He had woken unsettled, cloudy.
The day stood before him without direction. He had still the charge, in theory, of finding this rebellion and putting it down, but it was hard to imagine how he ought to carry that out. His command had never been more than a nominal fiction, and if Chu’s sympathies had not been with Lord Bayan and the conservative faction from the beginning, they were surely fixed in that direction now.
He had contemplated crossing the camp to Chu’s pavilion and speaking with him. “I hope you will pardon me, Captain,” Hammond had said, cool and formal with him after the previous day’s reproof, “but I must urge against it. Let us not forget the attempts upon your life. In the present—difficulties—your death would surely be the cap to the efforts to sever relations between our nations. I must ask you to remain within the camp.”
Hammond had spent the rest of the morning in Temeraire’s pavilion, drafting the letter to the Emperor, with Mei offering him advice on the choice of argument and phrase. Mei had regarded the chests of opium with a stony expression as they were brought out of the ruined village, and afterwards had curled herself to sleep without any word to Temeraire, or any of them; but at least she had remained in his pavilion. She had met Hammond’s request for assistance that morning without pleasure, but with a nod of her head.
She had as little choice as he did, Laurence supposed: the conservative faction would surely try to use this to topple the crown prince, if they could, and certainly to undermine his plans for modernization. But to her, the British could be now nothing more than a gang of ruffians, smuggling poison into her nation and conniving at treason; she could scarcely have liked any better than Laurence did, to attempt to defend their acts.
But Hammond had written the letter; she had helped him; Laurence had signed his name to it, and one of the Jade Dragons had borne it away. Then they had all three of them retired, separately: Hammond, with a short bow, to his tent; Mei curled into a corner of the pavilion in pointed silence. Laurence had gone to see Mrs. Pemberton settled: he had ordered that her tent be pitched as near Temeraire’s pavilion and his own as possible, and had begged the most reliable men from the other captains’ crews to stand guard.
She gave him a cup of tea: to his surprise, with milk. “There are some sheep down there below,” she said, with a ghost of a smile, “and Emily has made several acquaintances amongst the young women. They were kind enough to find us a milch one and liberate her. The ewe is picketed down that crevasse, over there, so she needn’t be troubled by seeing the dragons, poor creature. The flavor is not quite right, but at least it is something.”