“Admiral Laurence,” Hammond said, nearly stammering, “I wonder at—have you—”

“His Majesty was gracious enough to receive me,” Laurence said, and would have excused himself, but the Emperor waved a hand.

“Perhaps you will give the Prince de Bénévent your chair, as there is none other,” Napoleon said, meaning Talleyrand, “but there can be no objection to your remaining. What is done in this room must soon be known in all Europe, and you cannot leave it with a tale of dishonor, save if I fail in my oaths to France, which I trust these gentlemen know I will never do.” He spoke with an almost jocular air, but there was steel in the grey eyes.

There was a pause, an awkward silence, as the three ministers exchanged looks. Hammond in particular plainly wished Laurence anywhere but in the room, and Metternich looked little better pleased. But Talleyrand said genially, “Surely His Majesty only speaks the truth,” and limped over to the chair; seating himself he leaned in to the Emperor and said, “Sire, I have the pleasure of delivering to you this letter, from the Empress: by the courtesy of the Tsar, I was granted the liberty of sending her a courier to inform her of your good health, and to receive this reply for you.”

“Ah!” Napoleon said, and seized the letter with real enthusiasm; he opened and read it with an intent, hungry look, nodding to himself a little. It was not long: he read it over quickly, twice, and then put it away in his breast. “I am grateful for your kindness to Her Majesty. Now, gentlemen, I beg you not to hesitate further. Speak plainly: there is nothing to be gained by delay.”

Talleyrand bowed towards him from the waist, in his chair. “Sire,” he said, “I will obey. It is the united demand of the allied forces that you must be removed from your throne as the price of peace. I regret that those who stand arrayed against France, on the cusp of invading her territory, refuse to consider any other outcome.”

Napoleon made a gesture of impatience, a quick flicking up of his hand: this was of no importance. “My enemies know my life is in their power. They may kill me or banish me, as they please, but do not let them suppose that either to preserve my life or my freedom I should ever willingly yield my throne to the Bourbons, nor sacrifice the gains which the Revolution won for the French people.”

Talleyrand remained placid in the face of this dramatic speech. “It has been agreed that Your Majesty shall abdicate in favor of your son,” he said, “with the Empress as regent.”

Napoleon paused, silenced. After a moment, he said, “What of France?”

“Upon your abdication, the enemy nations are prepared to sign an immediate armistice, recognizing her natural borders,” Talleyrand said. “So long as France yields to each of the allied nations a share of the dragon eggs presently laid in her breeding grounds.”

“Belgium?” Napoleon said quickly.

“Flanders shall be made part of the Netherlands,” Talleyrand said. “Wallonia remains to France.” There was another brief silence. “In exchange,” Talleyrand continued, when Napoleon had made no answer, “you are to surrender your throne, and retire permanently to the island of St. Helena. The British,” here he nodded to Hammond, who had a stiff, uncomfortable expression, “will undertake to guarantee your safety and comfort there, and that of your faithful dragon.”

Laurence overheard all this, standing awkwardly by the rough fireplace and staring at the dully glowing logs, conscious of both the impropriety of listening and the impossibility of doing anything else. He was determined at first not to really hear, to listen only in the base shipboard sense of some audible noise reaching his ears by the accident of enforced proximity, which was not to be understood or repeated, or treated as knowledge in any way. But he could not help it; he heard, and knew, and he was surprised—there was no other way to describe his feelings. He was very surprised.

The exile would be a remarkably harsh one. St. Helena was an isolate half-tenanted rock under the control of the East India Company, valuable only as a way station on the sea-journey to Asia. Its population had been entirely imported, more than half of them as slaves, and there was but a single town which catered only to the shipping. Its distance from any other shore would make it a secure prison even for a dragon, and even the long-range couriers came but infrequently, which would bar any regular communication. To imprison Napoleon there, divided so thoroughly from his wife and child and all the world, was undeniably a cruelty, and of a sort which he had never visited upon his own conquered enemies despite many opportunities to do so.

But in every other respect these were terms offered to end a war, not ones dictated afterwards by its victors. Laurence knew it had long been the position of the British Government that Belgium must be wholly stripped from France, to safeguard Britain from another invasion; it had long been the position of all the monarchs of Europe that the legitimate kings of France should be restored. If Napoleon had been free, with all France eager and united at his back, Laurence would have been surprised to hear him offered such terms; when he was prisoner, after a sharp defeat, they seemed absurdly generous.

He was not alone in surprise. Napoleon, too, said nothing. He sat back in his narrow, hard-backed chair, gazing at Talleyrand for a period of silence with an almost baffled expression, as though he did not know what to make of what he heard. And then abruptly his face changed. The confusion went out of it, and for one moment his hand went to his breast-pocket, where the letter from the Empress had gone. He sprang up out of his chair and walked away to the window and stood there, his back to the room; his shoulders were very straight.

Laurence stared at him, his own confusion unabated, and then looked round at Hammond. Hammond did not meet his eye, giving every appearance of finding the bare wooden floor of their chamber an object of intense interest, and Metternich also had a constrained expression, very still and controlled, with his hands clasped before him. Talleyrand only made no appearance of discomfort or consciousness; his looks remained perfectly easy and open, milky mild. He was the one to break the silence, gently prompting, “Sire, will you make an answer?”

Napoleon moved his hand slightly to his side, a gesture not of refusal; only of denial. He was silent a little longer, then he said, “You have the papers?”

Metternich produced a document from his coat; after a moment Napoleon turned from the window to take it. His face was changed wholly, gone utterly remote; he might have been cut out of stone. He read over the papers quickly, without sitting down, then put them on the table and reached for his pen and bent over and signed with a single swift flourish: Napoleon. He turning handed them back to Metternich, who received them with a bow.