Work Text:
…
January 1808
They had not gone a quarter of an hour from the Woolvey residence, taking refuge in their shabby clothes and in the full darkness into which all of central London had been plunged at nightfall, before they turned a corner and found themselves at the tail-end of a loose queue of people being herded into Grosvenor Square. French soldiers stood on either side, alternately holding muskets and oil lamps to light the way; when one turned his eye on their small party, Tharkay joined the queue, and his companions silently followed suit.
The lack of protest was not a little wonderful. Not on Laurence’s account; if he could be depended upon to sit meekly in an unguarded prison cell in the midst of a burning harbour, one could at least depend on him with equal certainty to be clandestine when required, and to exercise self-restraint; this much their little adventure in Istanbul had confirmed beyond a shadow of doubt. It was their third companion who might yet as easily give them away by accident as by design. Indeed, Woolvey’s forbearance lasted only another moment before, as soon as they were out of earshot of the soldiers behind and ahead, he burst out in a muted furious whisper, “That blackguard — by God, I can scarcely credit it —”
“Mr. Woolvey?” Laurence asked, quietly; and Woolvey thrust into his hand one of the play-bills that a thin, smudgy boy in a cap had been handing out, at the street-corner they had rounded not two minutes before. Laurence held it to the light of the next soldier’s oil lamp, so that as they shuffled forward he and Tharkay might see for themselves what they had inadvertently stumbled into.
LA
PESTE
DES DRAGONS,
MÉLODRAME
EN UNE ACTE, EN PROSE ET À GRAND SPECTACLE;
PAR R.C. GUILBERT-PIXERÉCOURT,
Représenté, pour la première fois à Londres, sur le théâtre de Grosvenor Square le 12ème janvier1808
“A performance,” Laurence said doubtfully; “at this hour? in such weather?”
“You might say rather, during an invasion, in a foreign capital?” Woolvey snapped. “Making himself quite at home, isn’t he; and so what if a few dozen British freeze to feed his pride?”
“We are not likely to freeze in such company,” Tharkay said.
“I beg your pardon, I have not the —” Woolvey began, and stopped in the street: they had just been ferried into the enormous park and greeted by a scene very likely unique in the history of Britain; he could not finish saying, if it was indeed what he had meant to say, that he had no notion what Tharkay was talking about.
A gargantuan wooden platform had been erected in the middle, and Londoners apparently found on the streets and compelled to join the queues had clustered closely around it; huddled, rather, looking fearfully over their own shoulders and half-clinging to the stage for shelter, against the dozens and dozens of dragons whose audience-space occupied the wide outer ring. This ring had been politely fenced off with rope, which could not possibly be anything but a gentle reminder to the dragons of where they ought not to step, so as not to squash anyone by mistake, and in the light of the oil lamps rearranged to best illuminate the stage, their teeth and claws glinted inescapably. “Good God,” Woolvey said, weakly, but Laurence was already saying low, in Tharkay’s ear, “We must continue; there is not a moment to lose —”
“No,” Tharkay agreed, and began gently weaving through the crowd toward Hyde Park, diagonally across the square. If Bonaparte — or, more likely, an enterprising Marshal of France — had organized a piece of theatre for the French dragons, the audience would surely be motionless once it began, with the draconic half rapt and the human half stark with fear; their best chance was now, in the murmuring, milling crowd, where a little extra movement would not draw attention. Half the French dragons were still in harness, fresh from battle, and though they were not crammed in there were quite enough of them to bring up the general temperature of the square. “Les acteurs vont-ils avoir des costumes, penses-tu?” one rumbled to his comrade, in curious tones; “ou des bijoux—?” as the three of them passed by his talons. “J’ai entendu dire que l’empereur lui-même s'est impliqué comme scénariste, et même la Reine Blanche —”
Tharkay kept moving, steadily, steadily through the crowd, occasionally murmuring some placating apology, all the while keeping one eye on the tall, multi-storied platform beneath which they would have to pass to escape, where a red canopy had been put up for a small audience of French officers; medals glinted on their breasts, and swords at their hips, visible whenever one would get up to brace his hands on the balustrade and peer down into the square. No one paid the three of them any mind, too angry at being pressed into the rôle of happy audience for Bonaparte's pleasure, and too busy darting looks at the rooftop officers; then suddenly Laurence gripped his shoulder, wordless, and Tharkay himself looked up to see Granby upon the canopied platform: pale, wretched-looking and flanked by soldiers with bayonets, but in closer reach than they could have hoped.
“Is that him?” Woolvey asked, who had also stopped, following their line of sight. “However are we to get at him?”
“We must wait until the performance is finished,” Tharkay said, “and catch them unawares on the road, if we can,” and abruptly they were out of time: a hush was descending over the plaza as a man in an officer's uniform bounded onto the stage.
“Welcome, my friends,” he said in French; he had a booming, barrel-chested voice, and with the speaking-trumpet it echoed nearly well enough for all the surrounding dragons to hear him; Tharkay looked up when a shadow flickered overhead, but it was only a Pêcheur-Couronné craning her head forward, to see out from behind the Petit Chevalier who quite blocked her line of sight. “I most heartily welcome you, whether French or English, to the first-ever theatrical performance to take place in London, for humans and dragons alike.”
He went on in this vein a while, in good humour, while Laurence craning his own neck tried vainly to catch Granby's eye; but no-one on that balcony, Tharkay knew, could possibly have distinguished any individual faces in the morass below, even if his guards let him up to have a look. The man onstage turned slowly in a circle, addressing the whole motley, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree audience, the bronze brigadier general's insignia gleaming from his coat under the lamplight. The melodrama, he said, was to commemorate a great tragedy averted, and a reminder of the evils to which a council of oligarchs would stoop to further their own self-interest; or rather, said the man smiling, a reminder to some only, who needed it, and might have forgotten events recently overshadowed by His Majesty's capture of London. Hearing this, Laurence held the playbill up to the light of the nearest streetlamp to read afresh; his face was shadowed, and his expression could not be seen.
The brigadier general finished his speech and leapt offstage, to no human applause but a great deal of talon-clicking, which Napoleon's dragons seemed to have all adopted after Lien's example. A string ensemble had in the meantime set up on a smaller, adjacent platform, and now began to play: a violin in the lead, supported by a second violin, a cello and a contrabass, weaving together a cheerful melody better suited to pastoral farmland than to a midwinter city under occupation.
The play began with a prologue evoking the great destiny of the nation of France, only lately risen up from under the yoke of the Bourbons and reborn from the blood and bedlam of the Terror. Bonaparte would not suffer himself to be represented in theatre, but the actors who climbed up onto the stage, dressed alternately in militia uniforms and peasant clothing — likely all that was available to them on short notice — declaimed with passion of the hero who had catapulted their country into glory and prosperity, and a few characters representing infantry officers spoke of their recent string of victories in Prussia and Poland with less allusion than direct eyewitness testimony. “Mais n’oubliez pas, mon colonel,” said one, himself portraying a captain, “qu’on n’aurait jamais pu accomplir ces prodiges sans l’héroïsme de nos braves dragons et leurs équipages de l’Armée de l’Air.”
His compatriots, retreating, ceded centre stage to several actors in the light blue rig of the Armée de l’Air accompanied by their dragons: great snarling maws with glaring eyes, constructions of silk upon a bamboo frame supported by three separate people: one for the head, the body and the segmented tail each. The bulkiest of these, in the tawny yellow of a Chanson-de-Guerre, circled the perimeter of the stage once or twice, the actors within doing their utmost to coordinate a billowing, up-and-down motion mimicking flight, which manoeuvre was greeted by appreciative talon-clicking from the draconic audience.
“That’s never French stagecraft?” one nearby Londoner muttered to another, interrogatively. His companion shrugged.
“Marie,” said one captain to his dragon, laying a hand on her silken snout so the actor beneath could make it nuzzle into his palm, “je connais aujourd’hui tout le bonheur du monde; tu as protégé de tous tes forces notre patrie et notre honneur, et je suis fier de toi.”
“Et moi de toi, mon capitaine,” said the actor beneath the dragon’s head, in a falsetto muffled by the silk. “Il était très difficile; les prussiens se sont bien battu,” a generous piece of condescension, “mais nous l’avons emporté enfin, alors maintenant commence le vrai travail : la paix et la splendeur de la France.”
“What are they saying?” Woolvey hissed, having apparently reached the limit of his French — not to either them, Tharkay noted dryly, but to the stranger on his other side, who wore no hat and a labourer’s soot-stained coat: a man unlikely to know any more French than Woolvey himself did Chinese. Laurence lowered the playbill. He had realized, then, the direction in which this was to proceed. “Do oi look like a damned Frog,” the labourer said indignantly, and Woolvey made an impatient noise and fell silent again: one of the other dragon characters, a Pou-de-Ciel, had come forward to speak. One of her brethren, a courier, had gone on a brave mission into English territory only to be tragically captured. Was he eating? Had they hurt his captain? Oh, how he must be suffering! At once all her fellow dragons and their aviators assured her, with what was clearly intended to be egregious naïveté, that the English would never hurt any captured dragon or their captain, so long as they behaved; they adhered to the same code of honour as did France, and would never stoop to any war tactic so underhanded as to dishonour their own service.
Hissing, from just behind them and overhead: the dragons, too, knew the story. Several human audience members looked over their shoulders fearfully; Woolvey did not, but frowned; trying perhaps to piece it together out of context and the little French he knew, words like service and capitaine requiring no translation.
And then, a series of scenes that so closely followed the true course of events that they might well not have been doctored at all. The return of the infected courier-beast, which set the others off coughing as loudly and pitifully as possible; the first death, Marie herself, her bamboo framework laid crumpled on the edge of the stage to allow her puppeteers to vanish over one side; her captain on his knees bewailing her fate; the news that England had orchestrated everything. None of this, of course, would be news to anyone in the square, all of whom would understand the pantomime if not the dialogue; the story had been framed in British newspapers as a stroke of genius on the Admiralty’s part — a bloodless, indeed necessary, new form of warfare, which the French would wholly deserve, thwarted by one traitor in the ranks of the Aerial Corps and his recalcitrant beast. But it would be another matter entirely, Tharkay supposed, to have it all laid out for an audience of not only one’s own countrymen but one’s enemies, as proof of British perfidy. The man playing Marie’s captain wept very convincingly, with an edge of real bitterness, before throwing his arms wide and calling in a choked voice, “Voilà la justice de l’Angleterre! Voilà l’honneur des britanniques!”, which would have been intelligible to even the least linguistically gifted individual present.
“Mais — attendez!” said one of the aviators onstage, pointing dramatically into the sky. “Qui est-ce que c’est?”
“Nous sommes attaqués!” cried another.
“Silence!” bellowed a third, evidently portraying their commanding officer, and stepped out to meet the newcomers emerging from the other side of the stage, as if from thin air. “Que voulez-vous ici? Parlez!”
For the newcomers had emerged bearing a white flag of surrender: a man in a bottle-green aviator’s coat, accurate down to the buttons, and his companion, a black dragon with a ruff and tendrils hanging from his snout. A ripple of recognition passed through the London crowd, and Laurence stiffened as though he had had to suppress a bodily flinch.
“Nous nous rendons,” said the aviator, going down to one knee; “et nous vous avons apportés le remède.”
He was very like, to do credit to the dramatists: blonde, broad-shouldered, hair tied back into a queue. He bowed his head and stretched out a small wooden box, the sort ordinarily used for medicinal phials, holding his back as straight and proud as ever had the genuine article; and when the French commander took it from him, he let go and braced his free arm across his bended knee, as a vassal lord before his king.
Heedless of the angry mutters from the London audience, the French commander demanded to know who he was, and how his cure was to be trusted. Naught but an ordinary serving-officer, replied the aviator, his French not too egregiously accented, and I am sorry, but you have little choice: the disease progresses too quickly, and many of England’s own beasts have already sickened and died. I pray you, there is not a moment to lose.
They went on in this manner for a little while, the French commander’s righteous anger wearing down against the noble submission of the kneeling aviator, before at last the former affected confusion and asked, why? We don’t understand. You are English; you might have devastated our forces without firing a single shot. If this truly is the cure, then you have saved us all. Why would you do such a thing?
And the aviator answered, low and solemn: We are at war, sir, but there are limits to what any honest Christian can tolerate. My country may have forgotten all honour and decency, but I have not; and I will buy it back at the cost of my life, for should you not hang me yourselves, I will go back and die in the arms of England, which is all that a traitor can ask.
By now Tharkay was tolerably certain that at least one person involved in the production had met William Laurence before and scrupled to do him justice; but he did not look, though the temptation was considerable. He did not need to see Laurence’s face to know that the Devil himself could not have invented a better rack for him to lie upon, and to feel himself observed at such a moment, by one who knew him, would only add to his shame.
“And there,” announced the French commander, switching abruptly to English as the play drew to a close, “goes the last honourable man in the nation of Britain.” The man in the green coat knelt with his back to the audience. Another actor, in buckled shoes and a ludicrous wig worn by such men as populated the Admiralty board, approached him with an upraised sword as if to behead him, outdated but very illustrative; and they were swallowed up by the whole theatrical company in their uniforms and peasant getups as if to delicately shield the audience from the act of execution itself. “What it says about a nation when its most honourable man is a traitor to his country, I will allow you to decide, my friends. There will be a judgment and a reckoning for Britain, not only for the saviour of France —” gesturing to the implied site of execution; this time Laurence did flinch “— but for all the dragons of our nation, nearly put to the sword by consumption, who have risen up stronger than ever to claim what is theirs: their lives, their rights, their futures!”
The assembled dragons roared in approbation. Woolvey jumped, and he was not the only one; all around them the conscripted London audience was cowering, or shrieking, or clutching at each other. Tharkay took the compass from his pocket and directed the glass face into the light of the oil-lamp above them. Above the square, in the canopied box, Granby squinted: the light had shone directly into his eyes, and he shifted forward slightly to peer down into the darkness.
Tharkay placed a hand on Laurence’s shoulder. Laurence tensed, as though he would have liked to throw it off for being the show of pity he so dreaded; then he followed Tharkay’s gaze up to the box, and they both knew the moment Granby found them in the crowd: he looked as though he had to restrain himself from leaping over the wooden supports, three stories straight down to the cobblestones.
“Come,” Tharkay said quietly, and slipped through the crowd toward him.
February 1810
“I must offer my deepest and humblest apologies,” said de Guignes, bowing. “I am afraid it cannot be otherwise for the moment. You will see him once a day, at a distance and under guard, that you might have every assurance of his continued good health. I promise you that he will come to no harm now that all your party has given parole.”
“Iskierka has not given parole,” Temeraire pointed out, disgruntled. “Neither has Kulingile, and neither have I, for that matter; but I take your point,” he added, seeing de Guignes pinch his mouth; he would not make trouble for Laurence, “and I will not alarm the sailors. So far as Laurence stands surety for the crew, I suppose I must stand surety for the two of them, as I have seniority.”
“You do not,” Iskierka muttered sleepily. They were all being made to fly half the day to allow the French dragons their turn to rest upon the dragondeck, and as she had only just eaten, she was as subdued as one might ever expect her to be under such circumstances. This, Temeraire felt certain, could only be called a happy silver lining to their present unhappy situation. The fact that Iskierka had lost all her jewels and Granby’s fine things in the wreck of the Allegiance — well, he certainly did not intend to throw it in her face in any uncouth way, as though he was not above such nasty tactics, but it would not hurt to save the reminder for some inevitable future incident which could be defused by diminishing her ego. “You have had the same interval of disgrace in between, as Laurence had, so if you ever had any seniority it has been quite interrupted. I am senior,” and her words petered out into a kettle-whistle snore.
“Pray do not take offence at her manners,” Temeraire said to de Guignes. “I am afraid she was hatched in the middle of a skirmish and nothing has ever gone right with her since. But if she were to try anything, I would stop her, you may rely upon that.”
“I could always sit on her,” Kulingile put in from Iskierka’s other side.
“Your assurances fill me with confidence,” said de Guignes, “and I thank you for your most gracious cooperation. If you will pardon me, I must return and see to it that your men are settling in. Pray hail Lieutenant Hébert if you require urgent assistance,” and with one final bow, he turned and disappeared down the stairs of the dragondeck.
Temeraire sighed, disconsolate. The Triomphe had saved all their hides, and he was quite aware that it was better to be a prisoner of war, however temporarily, than drowned — oh, how terrible it would have been to drown, with all his crew still aboard — but he could not like having Laurence out of sight. Ghastly things always befell him when he was out of sight. Granby said it was because Laurence was brought up in the Navy, and had the martyr’s streak, and had been radicalized by certain overseas experiences; but it was not either of their faults, Temeraire privately thought, that everybody wanted to banish them, only for having correct opinions and the most righteous principles. Laurence might be willing to trust in de Guignes’s honour, but Temeraire was not so sanguine about the rest of the transport’s crew. They were every one of them to be regarded with the utmost suspicion.
Hence his ruff immediately mantling when he heard Laurence’s title on the lips of one of the midshipmen walking just beneath the dragondeck: le capitaine anglais, hushed, and then le traitre when asked to specify, there being three English captains presently on board. “Tu l’as vu?” his companion demanded, and having received confirmation, “Eh bien? À quoi ressemble-t-il?”
“À peu près pareil que la statuette,” said the other grudgingly. “Plus vieux, mais …” A shrugging sort of pause, which seemed to Temeraire the perfect opportunity to both interrupt without being rude and catch them at whatever slander they might be cooking up. He swung his head over the side and said, “Que dites-vous au sujet de mon —” and before he could even finish speaking they had leapt quite high into the air and backed off, out of reach of his jaws, to the scattered laughter and jeering of their fellow officers across the deck.
“Mr. Hammond,” Temeraire said, once he and that gentleman had gone aloft together for one of their poorly-concealed Quechua-English lessons, from which Maila the Incan dragon drew entirely too much benefit for Temeraire’s liking, “might you not find out for me what they meant? Surely it cannot be for the good if the French are all being taught what Laurence looks like, even their Navy; do they not mean to be able to recognize him on sight as a valuable prisoner?”
“I — well — perhaps —” Hammond said, hesitating if not out of mid-flight nausea than out of a reluctance to do any such easy, helpful thing — “Temeraire, I cannot be questioning our hosts about a conversation eavesdropped upon —”
“They were being perfectly audible,” Temeraire said, “and it is not my fault if they choose to forget I can speak French —”
“— we are prisoners, and cannot afford to give offence —”
“— if we are prisoners, then it seems to me that we have little left to lose —”
“— apart from their good-will, to which we owe our very lives, yours included, Temeraire,” Hammond shouted, overriding the wind. “No; I am sorry, but I will not countenance it; I will not pry into a fellow ambassador’s affairs,” which only proved, Temeraire thought peevishly, that if one wanted anything done and done well, it ought to be done without the use of men as intermediaries, and if possible without involving men at all.
“Monsieur de Guignes, if you would kindly indulge me,” he said the following day, as casually as possible, “I am afraid I overheard one of the officers yesterday comparing Laurence to a statuette he had seen, and I am very curious as to what he was speaking of; I have never seen sculpture before, apart from the figure-head of the Allegiance.”
“Ah!” said de Guignes, looking not displeased; he had come up to exchange a few courteous words with his dragon prisoners, and to promise that Laurence would be permitted to come up and see him that evening. “I know what you speak of. The figures belong to me, as it happens, but Captain Thibaux’s officers have more than once seen them on display in the gunroom, and could tell you more about them if you wish.”
“Figures?”
“Yes, little replicas of a series His Majesty commissioned a few years ago. The last was completed last summer, I think; all life-sized and, you will be happy to know, given pride of place in his palace halls.”
Temeraire tilted his head. “That sounds very nice, I am sure, but why should I be happy to know it? Because Laurence looks like one of the figures in it?”
“Why, no,” de Guignes said. “He is one of the figures in it; and so are you, Téméraire. His Majesty wished this series to immortalize all the heroes of France, and it would scarcely have been complete otherwise.
“Poor Monsieur Canova was quite a slave to his work for a while,” he went on, pretending not to notice Temeraire sitting back on his haunches in surprise. “Sculpture can be quite physically taxing, as I understand. Before our departure from France, he graciously permitted me to purchase his early clay-fired models, which are nearly as satisfying to look upon as the final product, and which alleviate the home-sickness of a long journey.”
“Oh,” Temeraire said, embarrassed; he did not know whether to be gratified, that someone had made a statue of them, or outraged that Napoleon had appropriated anything about him and Laurence in the first place, as though they had done anything for him. “Well, I suppose it is just like Napoleon, to make a pretense of humility in having other sculptures made, to put beside his own; I suppose he does not wish to make himself out to be the only hero of France, if he wishes not to appear arrogant, although everyone already knows he is.”
“I beg your pardon,” de Guignes said, “but you are mistaken: His Majesty is not himself among the figures.”
“Oh,” Temeraire repeated, deflating further. “Then who is?”
“Charlemagne,” de Guignes said succinctly. “Voltaire, Jeanne d’Arc, a handful of other historical luminaries. I am afraid they must stay belowdecks for the time being, but — if I may express a personal hope of mine — perhaps you will one day have the opportunity of seeing Monsieur Canova’s work in the royal gardens yourself; they were made large for dragon admiration, after all.”
It took Temeraire far too long after de Guignes’s departure to realize that the founding assumption of this personal hope was that they would not only be taken to France but grow atypically cooperative in the process. Such an underhanded remark could not be answered as it ought to have been, as the conversation was over, but he had flown half the day already; he was so tired that he fell asleep before he could work out exactly what sort of a response he might have given if only de Guignes had given him a moment to think of it.
But de Guignes did not approach him again for the duration of their stay aboard the Triomphe. As they were marooned soon afterward, no further opportunity to speak presented itself, and by the time they reached Cusco and were obliged to dine with the Sapa Inca and Napoleon on the same evening, Temeraire had forgotten about the sculptures entirely. At one point or another Napoleon asked permission to present gifts to the empress, and this granted, nodded across the table to de Guignes, who nodded to one of his men, who brought forth a very fine sea-chest and began removing all sorts of treasures for her inspection. Temeraire crept forward with one cautious eye on the dragons guarding the Sapa Inca, who had bristled the moment he stepped closer to the banqueting table, himself crouching low with his ruff flat to communicate a lack of aggressive intent. Jewels he saw, and fine cloth, and a few miniature paintings which de Guignes explained could be viewed as samples of what the Tuileries Palace had to offer, and then — why — a series of tiny statues!
“Oh!” he said, nosing closer to peer over Laurence’s shoulder; but they were only drab clay, not at all exciting to look at, and the details rather too small for him to comfortably appreciate. “Are those the replicas you told us of, Monsieur de Guignes? Which is Laurence?”
“Patience, patience!” de Guignes said, good-naturedly, and named each replica figure in both Quechua and French, for the benefit of the company, as they were placed one by one before the Sapa Inca. Maila and the Incan dragon on the empress’s other flank were by now glowering at him so powerfully that Temeraire thought it prudent to move no closer, though he could not resist craning his neck at least a little when de Guignes said: “— and this, Your Majesty, is Temeraire and Captain William Laurence, whom we have the honour of counting among our number today,” with a respectful nod in their direction.
Laurence, uncharacteristically, did not react to this at all. He sat so grimly silent that Temeraire turned his head back around just to make sure he was attending; and he seemed to be, as far as Temeraire could tell, only he was not looking at the statues at all, but across the table at Bonaparte, who did not return his gaze but wore a knowing and not-very-well concealed smile.
“Granby,” Temeraire said afterward, in as low a voice as he could manage, once they had retreated to their makeshift camp in the courtyard, “did you see the replica? Of myself and Laurence?”
“Oh, well,” Granby said uneasily, and looked over one shoulder to where Laurence was conferring in low voices with Hammond and Mrs. Pemberton, briefly out of earshot of this delicate question.
Temeraire persisted. “Could you not describe it to me?”
“Why, did you not see it?”
“I did, only not enough to understand what all the fuss was about.”
Granby pushed a hank of hair out of his face with his forearm. “Well, that’s only just, I suppose, as it is the two of you in the carving.” He rubbed at his temple, as though his head pained him. “Let me see … it had Laurence on bended knee, holding out a sort of barrel, which must be what you brought the cure over in.”
“It was a tub,” Temeraire said tolerantly, “but never mind that; what do I look like?”
“They gave you a good likeness,” Granby said. “I expect the sculptor saw Lien up close and modeled you after her. You’re sort of wrapped around him, crouching, so that — well, likely that the whole could have been carved from a single block, though even then it’s not to scale: you’ve been shrunk down quite a bit, and the proportions are all wrong.”
“I thought they might be,” Temeraire sighed. “We must hope that anyone looking at it will know already that I am not really that small.”
Granby did not immediately answer. Instead he looked over his shoulder, and Temeraire followed his line of sight: Napoleon had emerged from the banqueting hall and approached Laurence with almost a spring in his step, and Laurence turned toward him, and they spoke. Temeraire could not quite catch what was being said, only that Laurence’s tone of voice was the level, polite one he used whenever he wished to conceal what he felt. Napoleon clasped him once, by the shoulder, and sauntered off.
“Oh, Lord,” Granby said.
“What is it?” Temeraire asked.
“Nothing,” Granby said, “only — it’s the figure, you see. I don’t think Laurence cares for how it was done.”
“Well,” Temeraire said, “I can understand why: he is very modest, and it is abominable that Napoleon should be using what we did, for all the dragons, to glorify France.”
“No,” Granby said, in a strange sort of voice. “No, it isn’t that. Laurence knows what Bonaparte is like; I don’t think he expected anything better. It’s only that —”
Laurence had returned to his discussion, instead of retreating to a distance that might have put Granby more at ease. “Perhaps,” Temeraire said, with an effort to hide his curiosity, “if you whispered it,” and crouched low.
Granby stepped closer, glancing again across the courtyard. “It’s only that Laurence,” he said softly, “in the figure —”
“Yes?” Temeraire said eagerly.
“He is in irons,” Granby said. “Shackled to the earth at the wrists and ankles; and the shackles are all coming loose.”
June 1813
“If I had a farthing for every time the three of us were locked into a lavish prison together, for the sake of an egg,” Granby began, dismally, and then stopped: “— well, I should have two farthings; but it is not portentous that it has happened twice. Laurence, I am loath to just sit here; we cannot just sit here. I know he has a certain regard for you, but if he chooses to look the other way — if your note doesn’t reach him in time —”
He trailed off, scrubbing one hand through his hair in mingled frustration and misery. Laurence was able to resist doing the same only because he had begun furiously pacing the suite half an hour ago, scarcely a minute after his plea had gone with one of Bonaparte’s aides to find the emperor, and not to a fireplace: so they hoped. The dull monotony of it served to temper his anxiety, a little. “No,” he said, grimly; the thought of a reckless, improvised escape had occurred to him also, and been discarded. “We are gambling on his pride and good faith, such as it may be; any outward demonstration of the reverse on our part would not better Tharkay’s circumstances.”
“Well, there ain’t a great deal that could make them worse,” Granby said. “If it is today, then —”
Again he stopped, and Laurence did not remind him of what they both already knew: that they could not afford to waste the one tenuous chance they had, of appealing the sentence. Besides which, they had no weapons, and the substantial guard upon their door certainly did. They could not make recourse to subterfuge, nor to brute force, nor to rescue by Temeraire or Iskierka, prisoners themselves in the French training grounds. They had only this: Bonaparte’s word of honour, and whatever orders he had given his men regarding Laurence, whose messages were apparently to be treated with the same haste as was given to an ordinary Marshal of France.
Ten minutes passed in an agony of waiting; twenty minutes; half an hour. Laurence found that he was mentally arguing with himself: now for escape, now for patience, as his boots wore savage grooves into the carpet. Forty minutes. Three quarters of an hour. They must rely upon Bonaparte’s word. Fifty minutes. Or rather, not his word, but whatever gratitude might have survived six years, several wars and the French Arny’s retreat from Russia. One hour. Laurence found he was grateful for the distraction; he could not, would not, think of the alternative. He had seen men shot before. He had seen spies hanged. That it should be Tharkay on the gallows — Tharkay hooded and marched to the wall —
There was a polite knock at the door. Laurence spun to face it; Granby leapt to his feet; and then guards were there, pushing Tharkay inside.
“Oh, thank Heaven,” Granby said hoarsely, starting forward, and not bothering to lower his voice or temper the feeling in it, “we thought you’d never arrive; are you all right?”
Tharkay did not answer. He had not been beaten, at least not visibly, but his countenance was rigid and his complexion almost grey; there were red marks at his temples and around his eyes that could only have been left by a blindfold. He looked at Granby, and then at Laurence, and his trembling mouth pressed into a line.
Indeed, there was little to say. Tharkay had barely raised his hand for a paltry handshake — something yet remaining of that species of black humour which he displayed, on occasion, when freely placing himself into grave peril — before Laurence had crossed the room and embraced him. After a moment Tharkay returned the gesture, though not with half the strength Laurence impulsively put into it; then they broke apart, and Laurence realized the escort had not left. The foremost guard, evidently their captain, was looking at him over Tharkay’s shoulder, and as soon as he saw he had Laurence’s attention said, “His Majesty will speak with you.”
…
“I am glad,” Bonaparte said warmly, “very glad indeed, Captain, that you sent word to me. You have granted me little enough opportunity to repay my debt to you, these last years; and ah! such a debt of gratitude has never been owed to one man by a nation, let alone by the world entire.”
Laurence had to swallow the first response that leapt to his tongue. It was useless to say, that he had not done it for France, and had returned in the fullest expectation of being hanged for it, rather than accept anything like recompense from the enemy’s hand. He had told Bonaparte as much, and upon subsequent occasions had striven to show nothing that might even with generosity be interpreted as a change of heart. Yet Bonaparte either wholeheartedly believed that any man might be worn down by flattery, given time, or he intended to put Laurence on his back foot, by recalling his own treason to him at every opportunity.
He ought to have saved his breath. “Sir, you owe me nothing,” Laurence said. “It is I who must be grateful to you, for the life of my friend.”
Bonaparte waved a hand. “Enough. You will not hear my thanks; therefore I will not hear yours. Let us call the matter settled for to-day. I trust your Mr. Tharkay will not object to his new prospects?” he added, apparently without sarcasm.
Laurence did not speak; he did not trust himself to answer civilly just at present, where Tharkay was concerned. Seeing his face, Bonaparte elaborated, smiling: “I had thought, perhaps, that you might have contrived to find a friend or two who shared your persuasions, but I suppose no spy would ever consider himself beholden to whoever catches him. Your friendship is a happy thing, Captain; under no other circumstances would we have suffered him to live.”
Neither could Laurence ask outright where they were going. Upon arrival, Bonaparte had greeted him effusively, kissed both his cheeks and then, followed by Imperial Guardsmen, led him into an unfamiliar, lavish wing of the palace, deserted: one of his aides had been ordered to clear the way. Whatever he wished to say, he had not yet said it; whatever he wished to do, he had not yet begun. He set the pace at a complacent stroll that nearly tempted Laurence into increasing his own speed, as a hint; but, conscious of his manners and of Tharkay’s life, he made himself wait for the Emperor of France to come to his point.
“He will be most comfortable here,” Bonaparte continued. “As will Téméraire and — Iskierka, was it? Most charming name. Russian?”
“Polish.”
“Ah, yes. I have heard of her displeasure at being separated from their egg; she has been threatening,” Bonaparte said, clearly amused, “to set the entire covert alight, should her guards fail to bring it before her. Téméraire has thus far restrained her. He is on the mend,” he went on, tactfully not looking at Laurence. “His wings will take time to repair, but already he is coughing less, and filling out after what I understand was a most arduous journey.”
It might have been tempting, at this juncture in the principally one-sided conversation, to ask for more: permission to see for himself how Temeraire was faring. But to cross that boundary twice would give Bonaparte just the opening he so clearly wished for, and nothing good could come of exposing himself, Granby, Tharkay, and the two dragons in such a way. “I am glad to hear it,” Laurence said tersely.
“You yourself have had an arduous journey,” Bonaparte said, “if my intelligence is not mistaken.”
“Your Majesty?”
“Sent to New South Wales, then to Brazil, then to China and Russia, all in the span of a few short years. Britain has made use of you, even as she does not recognize you for what you are.”
“It was a difficult journey,” Laurence conceded. “But Temeraire and I are both hale and whole, which is more than can be said for scores of men who accompanied us. We have been fortunate.”
“Even so,” said Bonaparte, turning a corner: just ahead, on their right, was a doorway with a plaque tacked into the wallpaper above it. “You must wish to go home.”
It was spoken lightly, almost questioningly, as though he wanted to be as kind as possible about it. “We are prisoners,” Laurence said shortly. “We could not return even if we were ordered to.”
“Ah! So orders have their limits,” Bonaparte said, shaking his head; “but forgive me, Captain; I ought not tease you. You must know, of course, that had you not fallen into our hands, your native country would not have had you back for all the shipping in Canton harbour; not for the use of a Celestial dragon and all the attendant political advantages — not for anything.
“I have heard something of the terms your Téméraire secured for himself and the dragons of Britain, the last time I found myself on British soil,” he continued, where Laurence might have opened his mouth to interject, “and you will know better than I the very different consequences they will have for you and your country. The damage is done, if it can be called that. Britain will fumble along improving the lot of her citizens, as she ought to have done years ago, and perhaps even thrive in so doing. And your admirals will sit by their fireplaces and soothe their own injured feelings by denying you your dues, for they are every last one of them afraid of you.
“But France does not fear you,” he said, in sudden vehemence turning to face Laurence in that empty hallway. “I do not fear you. I must leave you shortly, for there are a great many things to be done, but first you must see yourself as you are — as I see you. I insist upon it.”
They had come to the doorway: a portrait gallery, full of gilded frames lit by the afternoon sunlight streaming in through the west-facing windows. Bonaparte with a sweep of the arm motioned for him to go in first, and Laurence stepped inside, more baffled than irritated at the last remark.
The oils on the wall to his left were all of saints, and martyrs; straight across were kings and generals in archaic armour, even a portrait of Joan of Arc with her banner and sword. On the rightmost wall were modern figures whom Laurence recognized as those Napoleon had publicly lauded as living heroes of the nation. “These are … very skillfully rendered,” he offered.
“No, Captain,” Bonaparte said gently, and taking him by the shoulders turned him around to face the fourth wall, upon which hung a landscape in dark greys and greens and pale whites.
The composition was a familiar one, to a third son who was supposed to have gone into the Church: Tobias in the robes of the Old Testament, tenderly administering the fish-gall into his father’s blind eyes, with the archangel Raphael hovering over them both protectively. Or at least, it ought to have been familiar, if it weren’t so completely, so blasphemously altered: where the fish carcass ordinarily lay on a white cloth upon a table, it had been replaced with an enormous bulging fungus; Tobit was not a bearded old man, but a young lady in a war-helm, her head tipped back in a feverish ecstasy of suffering, her spear falling slack in one hand and the other only just gripping onto a shield emblazoned with the Union Jack. Behind her was a swirling, forbidding sky, full of the silhouettes of dragons flying.
And Tobias was not a dark-haired youth at all, but a bronzed and weather-beaten man well over forty, his green aviator’s coat flung open by the storm winds tossing back fair hair: loose, not tied, in the Biblical style; and he was Laurence — they had given him Laurence’s face. Only Raphael remained unaltered.
Laurence’s lips parted, uselessly. Napoleon came to stand beside him in contemplation of the canvas.
“Britannia guérie par son fils fidèle,” he read off the title plaque; then, smiling, added softly to himself: “— My own little joke.”
“Good God,” Laurence said, involuntarily, in English.
“I was tempted, you know — my second choice was Britannia et la Vertu; but painters are all traditionalists at heart, and Monsieur David would have it that Virtue can be none but a maiden. I told him that if only he had met you, he would be of a very different mind, but I do not think he believed me.”
What had at first sight seemed a dark hill, behind which the three figures were taking shelter from the oncoming storm, resolved itself into a smooth scaled hide, with Temeraire’s long graceful neck doubling back on itself and his head resting at Laurence’s feet, almost completely hidden behind the table with the white cloth. Some portion of Laurence’s mind saw this; appreciated, distantly, that they had not cut Temeraire from an act owed largely to his own independent agency; and resumed trying to decide how in God’s name he was supposed answer this.
In London, he had felt only intense horror and self-repugnance, at seeing his own desolation warped on that stage; in Cusco, he had been suspicious and angry, at seeing his image and Temeraire’s so used. To add insult to falsehood, the sculptor had chiseled a prisoner’s manacles at his wrists, breaking as if by the inexorable force of his stretching forward the cure — Bonaparte’s notion, no doubt. Laurence had beheld himself, in that small clay figure, without recognition. There was no protest he could make. Neither figure nor play had been intended for his eyes; both had been for the benefit of French dragons, to teach them to loathe their enemy. But who would ever see this painting, apart from Napoleon himself and the military elite in orbit around him? What purpose could it serve but for the Emperor to congratulate himself on obtaining so great a benefit from the highest calibre of traitor imaginable?
“You are struck silent, I see,” Bonaparte observed, a little dryly. “Come, you must have something to say.”
Laurence would have liked to suggest throwing it on the hearth where it belonged, if a large enough hearth might contrive to be found. “I cannot presume to comment, Your Majesty. I am no artist.”
“But you have eyes, Captain. You are sensible to beauty. Does it not stir your heart within your breast? Look at the vigorous brushwork in the field grasses: does it not put the very wind in your hair? When Monsieur David first revealed it to me, I put my hand to my hat thinking it would blow away.”
“It is most prodigious.”
“But not to your taste?”
“No,” Laurence said, unable to check the censure in his voice; he could far more easily swallow a stranger’s uninformed and unsolicited opinion on the subject of his treason, than attempts to so blatantly manipulate him with the same. “— irreverence is not to my taste. Nor is false glory and conceit, whether a man seeks them out of his own volition, or accepts them when offered.”
“Irreverence?” Bonaparte repeated thoughtfully. “Perhaps. I will accept the charge. Tobias is apocryphal, but the comparison is not inapt, if you will pardon my saying so. Conceit also I will allow, only because you have not enough of your own. But false glory — no. I am sorry, Captain, but in this matter I am afraid I may call myself tolerably experienced. And I cannot agree with you.”
“We may have a different understanding of the term, Your Majesty.”
“Without a doubt.” The Emperor was looking at Laurence very intently, as if he suspected Laurence of hiding something and wanted to catch him at it. “Without a doubt. I do not propose to change your mind for you. Even if I wished to,” glancing at the doorway, where one of his stone-faced Imperial Guardsmen now stood, appeared as if from thin air, “I would not have half the time I needed. But I will have you know this, Captain: we do not choose our own glories.” He stepped closer and clasped Laurence by the shoulder, forcefully, as though to impress his own words upon him; and for an instant looked very like the lean, hawk-eyed man Laurence had seen on the hilltop in Jena, flushed from the wind and the anticipation of battle, intent on conquest. “You shall not be forgotten by history, whether you desire it or no. A hundred years from now, they will say: this Englishman, he knew what was right, and he acted not in accordance with the judgment of men but in accordance with the judgment of God. Britain has no notion of what she has lost, in you.”
“And Temeraire,” Laurence corrected him quietly.
“Yes,” Bonaparte said, after a pause. “And Téméraire.” But the reminder had done its work: he leaned back and let go.
“I understand perfectly well,” Laurence said, low. “You mean to inspire in me some poor resentment, or bitterness, because I cannot hope for honour or reward from my country. But such an argument will not hold with me, sir, nor with any man who loves his king. If fealty were to depend upon personal convenience, it would not deserve the name.”
“And what of fealty that depends upon blindness?” Bonaparte asked, tilting his head toward the painting.
“You may be better placed than I to answer that, sir.”
Bonaparte smiled. “Yes. That is the beauty of breaking with tradition: no-one can walk blindly into that, nor in ignorance follow a man who does so himself. You know this; I know this; so does the highest revolutionary and the lowliest mutineer. It is the greatest pity imaginable that your Admiralty looked at you and Téméraire and did not know the difference.”
He left Laurence in the portrait gallery with only a single Imperial Guardsman waiting by the door. Laurence, having no desire to spend any more time than necessary with his own deeply aggrandized mirror image, stepped closer to inspect the plaque, which credited the whole to a Mr. Jacques-Louis David; and leaning closer to make the letters out, saw a secondary inscription below the first, in English.
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
“Monsieur,” said the guard, prompting.
“J’arrive,” Laurence replied absently, with a final glance up at the painting. A hundred years from now. If the Prussians threw their lot in with Britain and the Continental Alliance, Paris would be theirs in less than two; and on that day, if there was no pillaging, if no rightfully outraged British soldier took it upon himself to put this travesty to the torch, Laurence would at the first opportunity march into the palace and request the privilege for himself. He turned and let himself be escorted from the gallery.
…