BUT THEY REACHED Weymouth covert only a little short of dusk, in much perturbation of spirit, Wringe having expressed the intention, five or six times during the course of their flight, of climbing off mid-air to fly the rest of the way herself. Then she had accidentally scratched Temeraire twice, and thrown a couple of the topmen clean off his back with her uneasy shifting, their lives saved only by their carabiner-locked straps. On landing, they were both handed down bruised and ill from the knocking-about they had taken, and helped away by their fellows to be dosed liberally, with brandy, at the small barracks-house.
Wringe put up a singular fuss to having the bullets extracted, sidling away her hindquarters when Dorset approached knife in hand, insisting she was quite well, but Temeraire was sufficiently exasperated by now to have no patience with her evasions; his low rumbling growl, resonating upon the dry, hard-packed earth, made her meekly flatten to the ground and submit to being picked over with a lantern suspended overhead. "That will do," Dorset said, having pried out the third and final of the balls. "Now some fresh meat, to be sure, and a night's quiet rest. This ground is too hard," he added, with disapproval, as he climbed down from her shoulder with the three balls rattling bloodily in his little basin.
"I do not care if it is the hardest ground in Britain; only pray let me have a cow and I will sleep," Temeraire said wearily, leaning his head so 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 the hindquarters go down his throat. The farmer who had been prevailed upon to bring some of his beasts to the covert stood paralyzed in a macabre sort of fascination, his mouth gaping, and his two sons likewise with 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. In courtesy, Ferris likely felt compelled to make the invitation, if his family had 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-genteel, and Laurence knew they were inclined to think him higher than he did himself: his father kept a grand state, certainly, but Laurence had not spent three months together at home since taking to sea, without much sorrow on either side, except perhaps his mother's, and was better accustomed to a hanging berth than a manor.
Out of sympathy he would have spared Ferris, but for the likely difficulty of finding any other lodgings, and his own weary desire to be settled, even if it were only in an attic corner, with a crust of bread. The noise of the day behind them, he was finding it difficult not to yield to a certain lowness of spirit. The ferals had behaved quite as badly as expected, and he could not help but see how impossible it should be, to guard the Channel with such a company. The contrast could not have been greater, to the fine and ordered ranks of British formations, those ranks now decimated; and he felt their absence all the more keenly for it.
The word was accordingly sent, and a carriage 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-minutes' drive brought them to the outskirts of Weymouth. Ferris grew steadily more hunched as they bowled along, and so miserably white that Laurence might have thought him taken ill with the motion, if he had not seen Ferris perfectly settled through thunderstorm aloft and typhoon at sea, and not likely to be distressed by the motion of a comfortable, well-sprung chaise. The carriage turned, then, drawing into a heavily wooded lane, and Laurence realized his mistake as the forest parted, and they drew abreast the house: a vast and sprawling gothic sort of edifice, the blackened stone barely to be seen behind centuries of ivy, the windows all illuminated and throwing a beautiful golden light out 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 home more often. Does your family reside here long?"
"Oh, a dog's age," Ferris said blankly, lifting his head. "There was some Crusader or other first built the place, I think, I don't know."
Laurence hesitated and a little reluctantly offered, "My own father and I have disagreed on certain of our occasions, I am sorry to say, so I am not often at home."
"Mine is dead," Ferris said. After a moment, he seemed to realize this was a rather abrupt period to the conversation, and added with an effort, "My brother Albert is a good sort, I suppose; he has ten years on me, so we have never really got to know one another."
"Ah," Laurence said, left no more the wiser as to the cause of Ferris's dismay.
There was certainly nothing lacking in their welcome. Laurence had braced himself for neglect: perhaps they would be shown directly to their rooms, out of sight of the rest of the company; he was tired enough to even hope to be so 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 stopped Ferris's mouth.
They were shown directly to the drawing room, to find all the company assembled to meet them, not very large, but decidedly elegant: the women all in clothing of unfamiliar style, the surest mark of the height of fashion to a man who was often from society a year at a time, and several of the gentlemen bordering on outright dandyism. Laurence noted it mechanically; he was himself in trousers and Hessians, and those stained with dust; but he could not be brought to care, very much, even when he saw the other gentlemen in the greater formality of knee-breeches. There were a couple of military men among their number, a colonel of Marines whose long, seamy, sun-leathered face had a certain vague familiarity that meant they had most likely dined together on one ship or another, and a tall army captain in his red coat, lantern-jawed and blue-eyed.
"Henry, my dear!" A tall woman rose from her seat to come and greet them with both her hands outstretched: too like Ferris to mistake her, with the same high forehead and reddish-brown hair, and the same trick of holding her head very straight, which made her neck look longer. "How happy we are you have come!"
"Mother," Ferris said woodenly, and bent to kiss her presented cheek. "May I present Captain Laurence? Sir, this is Lady Catherine Seymour, my mother."
"Captain Laurence, I am overjoyed to make your acquaintance," she said, offering him her hand.
"My lady," Laurence said, giving her a formal leg. "I am very sorry to intrude upon you; I beg you will forgive our coming in all our dirt."
"Any officer of His Majesty's Aerial Corps is welcome in this house, Captain," she declared, "at any moment of day or night, I assure you, and should he come with no introduction at all still he should be welcome."
Laurence did not know what to say to this; he himself would no more have descended upon a strange house without introduction than he would have robbed it. The hour was late, but not uncivilized, and he came with her own son, so in any case these reassurances were not much to the point; he could not have supposed it otherwise, having been invited and welcomed. He settled on a vague, "Very kind."
The company was not similarly effusive. Ferris's eldest brother Albert, the present Lord Seymour, was a little high in the instep, and made a point early on, when Laurence had made a compliment to his house, of conveying the intelligence that the house was Heytham Abbey, in the possession of the family since the reign of Charles II; the head of the family had risen from knight to baronet to baron in steady climb, and there remained.
"I congratulate you," Laurence said, and did not take the opening to puff off his own consequence; he was an aviator, and well knew that one evil outweighed any other considerations in the eyes of the world. He could not help but wonder that they should have sent a son to the Corps; there was no sign of the pressure of an encumbered estate, which might have made one reason: while appearances might be kept up on credit, so extravagant a number of servants could not have been managed.
Shortly dinner was announced, to Laurence's surprise; he had hoped for nothing more than a little cold supper, and thought them arrived late for even this much. "Oh, think nothing of it, we are grown modern, and often keep town hours even when we are in the country," Lady Catherine cried. "We have so much company from London that it would be tiresome for them to be always shifting their dinner-hour early, and sending away dishes half-eaten, to be wished-for later. Now, we will certainly not stand on formality; I must have Henry beside me, for I long to hear all you have been doing, my dear, and Captain Laurence, you shall take in Lady Seymour, of course."
Laurence could only bow politely and offer his arm, although Lord Seymour certainly ought to have preceded him, even if Lady Catherine chose to make a natural exception for her son. Her daughter-in-law looked for a moment as if she liked to balk, Laurence thought, but then she laid her hand on his arm without any further hesitation, and he chose not to notice.
"Henry is my youngest, you know," Lady Catherine said to Laurence over the second course; he was on her right. "Second sons in this house have always gone to the drum, and the third to the Corps, and I hope that may never change." This, Laurence thought, might have been subtly directed at his dinner companion, by the direction of her eyes; but Lady Seymour gave no sign she had heard; she was correctly speaking with the gentleman on her right, the army captain, who was Ferris's brother Richard. "I am very glad, Captain, to meet a gentleman whose family feels as I do on the matter."
Laurence, who had only narrowly escaped being thrown from the house by his irate father on his shift in profession, could not in honesty accept this compliment, and with some awkwardness said, "Ma'am, I beg your pardon, I must confess you do us credit we have not earned: younger sons in my family go to the Church, but I was mad for the sea, and would have no other profession." He had then to explain his wholly accidental acquisition of Temeraire and subsequent transfer to the Aerial Corps.
"I will not withdraw my remarks; it is even more to their credit that you were given good principles enough to do your duty, when it was presented to you," Lady Catherine said firmly. "It is shameful, the disdain that so many of our finest families will profess for the Corps, and I certainly will never hold with it in the least."
The dishes were being changed again as she made this ringing and over-loud speech, and Laurence noticed that they were going back nearly untouched after all. The food had been excellent, and he could only conceive, after a moment, that all Lady Catherine's protestations were a humbug: they had already dined earlier. He watched covertly as the next course was dished out, and indeed the ladies in particular picked unenthusiastically at their food, scarcely making pretense of conveying a single morsel to their mouths; of the gentlemen only Colonel Prayle was making any serious inroads. He caught Laurence looking and gave him just the slightest bit of a wink, then went on eating with the steady trencherman rhythm of a professional soldier used to take his food when it was before him.
If they had been a large party, coming late to an empty house, Laurence might have conceived of a gracious host holding back dinner for their convenience, or serving a second meal to the newcomers, but not under such pretense, as though they should have been offended with a simple supper, served to them privately, the rest of the company having dined. He was obliged to sit through several more removes, conscious they were a pleasure to no one else of the company; Ferris himself ate with his head down, and only lightly, though in the ordinary course of events he was as rapacious as any nineteen-year-old boy unpredictably fed of late. When the ladies departed to the drawing room, Lord Seymour began to offer port and cigars, with a determined if false note of heartiness, but Laurence refused all but the smallest glass he could take for politeness' sake, and no one objected to rejoining the ladies quickly, they most of them already beginning to droop by the fire even though not half-an-hour had elapsed.
No-one proposed cards or music; the conversation was low and leaden. "How dull you all are to-night!" Lady Catherine rallied them, with a nervous energy. "You will give Captain Laurence quite a disgust of our society. You cannot often have been in Dorsetshire, Captain, I suppose."
"I have not had that pleasure, ma'am," Laurence said. "My uncle lives near Wimbourne, but I have not visited him in many years."
"Oh! Perhaps you are acquainted with Mrs. Brantham's family."
That lady, who had been nodding off, roused enough to say with sleepy tactlessness, "I am sure not."
"It is not very likely, ma'am; my uncle moves very little outside his political circles," Laurence said, after a pause. "In any event, my service has kept me from the enjoyment of much wider society, particularly these last years."
"But what compensations you must have had!" Lady Catherine said. "I am sure it must be glorious to travel by dragon, without any worry that you shall be sunk in a gale, and so much more quickly."
"Ha ha, unless your ship grows tired of the journey and eats you," Captain Ferris said, nudging his younger brother with an elbow.
"Richard, what nonsense, as if there were any danger of such a thing! I must insist on your withdrawing the remark," Lady Catherine said. "You will offend our guest."
"Not at all, ma'am," Laurence said, discomfited; the vigor of her objection gave an undeserved weight to the joke, which in any case he could more easily have borne than her compliments; he could not help but feel them excessive and insincere.
"You are kind to be so tolerant," she said. "Of course, Richard was only joking, but you would be quite appalled how many people in society will say such things and believe them. I am sure it is very poor-spirited to be afraid of dragons."
"I am afraid it is only the natural consequence," Laurence said, "of the unfortunate situation prevailing in our country, which keeps dragons so isolated in their distant coverts as to make them a point of horror."