Empire of Ivory. Naomi Novik

       Chapter Three

      They reached the Weymouth covert only a little short of dusk, somewhat dispirited. Wringe had expressed her intention seven times during the course of their flight, of climbing off mid-air and flying the rest of the way herself. Then she had accidentally scratched Temeraire twice, in startlement, and had even thrown a couple of the topmen clean off his back with her uneasy shifting. Their lives were saved only by their carabiner-locked straps. On landing, they were both handed down badly bruised and ill from the knocking they had taken, and assisted by their fellows, they limped away to be dosed liberally with brandy at the small barracks-house.

      Wringe then put up a fuss upon having the bullets extracted, sidling her hindquarters away when Dorset approached, knife in hand. She insisted that she was quite well, but Temeraire was sufficiently exasperated by now to have lost patience with her evasions, and his low rumbling growl, resonating upon the hard-packed earth, made her flatten to the ground meekly and submit.

      ‘That will do,’ Dorset said, having pried out the third and final of the balls. ‘Now let’s have some fresh meat for her, just to be sure, and a night’s quiet rest. This dry ground is too hard,’ he added, with disapproval, as he climbed down from her shoulder, the three balls rattling bloodily in his little basin.

      ‘I do not care if it is the hardest ground in Britain; only let me have a cow and I will sleep,’ Temeraire said wearily, leaning his head so that Laurence could stroke his muzzle while his own shallow cuts were poulticed. He ate the cow in three tremendous tearing gulps, hooves to horns, tipping his head backwards to let the last bite of hindquarters slip down his throat. The farmer who had been prevailed upon to bring some of his beasts to the covert stood paralyzed in macabre fascination, his mouth agape, His two farm-hands stood likewise, their eyes starting from their heads. Laurence pressed a few more guineas into the man’s unresisting hand and hurried them all off; it would do Temeraire’s cause no good to have fresh and lurid tales of draconic savagery spreading.

      The ferals disposed of themselves directly around the wounded Wringe, sheltering her from any draft and pillowing themselves one upon the other as comfortably as they could manage, the smaller ones among them crawling upon Temeraire’s back directly he had fallen asleep.

      It was too cold to sleep out, and they had not brought tents with them on patrol; Laurence meant to leave the barracks, small enough in all conscience without dividing off a captain’s partition, to his men, and take himself to a hotel, if one might be had; in any case he would have been glad of a chance to send word back to Dover by the stage, that their absence would not occasion distress. He did not trust any of the ferals to go alone, yet, with their few officers so unfamiliar.

      Ferris approached as Laurence made inquiry of the few tenants of the covert. ‘Sir, if you please, my family are here in Weymouth; I am sure my mother would be very happy if you chose to stay the night,’ he said, adding, with a quick, anxious glance that belied the easy way in which he issued this invitation, ‘I should only like to send word ahead.’

      ‘That is handsome of you, Mr. Ferris; I would be grateful, if I should not be putting her out,’ Laurence said. He did not miss the anxiety. It was likely that Ferris felt compelled to make the invitation out of courtesy, and would have done so even if his family had not so much as an attic corner and a crust of bread to spare. Most of his younger gentlemen, indeed most of the Corps, were drawn from the ranks of what could only be called the shabby-gentility. He knew that they were inclined to think him higher than he himself did: his father kept a grand state, certainly, but Laurence had not spent three months together at home since taking to sea, without much sorrow inflicted on either side, except perhaps for his mother’s, and so he was better accustomed to a hanging berth than a palace.

      Even so, he would have spared Ferris out of sympathy but for the likely difficulty of finding other lodgings; and his own weary desire to be settled, even if it were indeed in an attic corner, with a crust of bread. With the noise of the day behind them, he was finding it difficult not to yield to a lowness of spirit. The ferals had behaved as badly as expected, and he could not help but think how impossible it would be to guard the Channel with such a company. The contrast to the fine and ordered ranks of British formations could not have been greater. But those ranks were now decimated, and he felt their absence keenly.

      The word was sent accordingly and a carriage was summoned. It was waiting outside the covert gates by the time they had gathered their things and walked to meet it down the long narrow path which led away from the dragon-clearings.

      A twenty minute drive brought them to the outskirts of Weymouth. Ferris grew more hunched as they bowled along, and became so miserably white that Laurence might have thought him taken ill with motion sickness if he had not known Ferris to be perfectly settled through thunderstorms aloft and typhoons at sea. He was not likely to be distressed by the motion of a comfortable, well-sprung chaise. The carriage turned, then, drawing into a heavily wooded lane. Shortly the forest parted and they drew abreast of the house: a vast and sprawling gothic edifice, its blackened stone barely visible behind centuries of ivy; the windows illuminated, threw a beautiful golden light onto a small ornamental brook which wound through the open lawn before the house.

      ‘A very fine prospect, Mr. Ferris,’ Laurence said as they rattled over the bridge. ‘You must be sorry not to be at home more often. Has your family resided here long?’

      ‘Oh, for an age,’ Ferris said, blankly, lifting his head. ‘It was built by some crusader or other, I think, I don’t much know.’

      Laurence hesitated and then a little reluctantly offered, ‘My father and I have disagreed on occasion, I am sorry to say, so I am not often at home.’

      ‘Mine is dead,’ Ferris said. After a moment, he seemed to realize that this was rather an abrupt period to the conversation, and so added with some effort, ‘My brother Albert is a good sort, I suppose, but he has ten years on me and so we have never really come to know one another.’

      ‘Ah,’ Laurence said, left no more the wiser as to the cause of his dismay.

      There was certainly nothing lacking in their welcome. Laurence had braced himself for the usual neglect. He expected to be shown directly to rooms out of sight of the rest of the company and was even tired enough now to hope to be slighted. But nothing of the sort: a dozen footmen were out with their lights lining the drive, another two waiting with the step to hand them down, and a substantial body of the staff coming outside to greet them despite the cold and what must surely have been a full house within to manage, a wholly unnecessary ostentation.

      Ferris blurted desperately, just as the horses were drawn up, ‘Sir – I hope you will not take it to heart, if my mother – She means well—’ The footmen opened the door, and discretion forced Ferris’s mouth closed.

      They were shown to the drawing-room and found company assembled to meet them: not very large, but decidedly elegant. The women wore clothing of an unfamiliar style, the surest mark of the height of fashion to a man who was often separated from society for a year at a time. Several of the gentlemen bordered on outright dandyism. Laurence noted it all mechanically; he wore trousers and Hessians himself, and those were dust-stained, but he could not