“I am,” Laurence said, and heaved a breath. “I will see you there, I think?”

“Yes, though the Lord knows they are running out of honors to heap on my shoulders, and Wellington is in even worse case: I think they will have to make him a new order of knighthood. You are getting off lightly by comparison, with your mere baronetcy. But I have come to drop a word in your ear: I have been invited four times in letters this last month to say something about the need for a strengthened presence in Halifax. Will you go if you are ordered there?”

“No,” Laurence said. “I mean to retire, when we have returned. I have enough money to keep Temeraire, now, and enough of a countenance to ask my brother to put us up on one of the farms.”

Or they might return to Australia, or to China: Temeraire had every right to ask that of him, now that the war was won. Laurence did not mean to refuse him; he only hoped to go back to Wollaton Hall first, and find a way to carry it with him, somehow. He longed in a deep inward part for Britain, for home: to see the house standing at twilight with all the windows lit, a child’s memory of peace. He could even be grateful there for the counterfeit honors that had been heaped onto his head, if they gave his mother some peace, and if his brother need not be ashamed to give him a field for Temeraire to sleep in, for a little while.

—

“I am glad to know,” Edith said, low, when Laurence had finished. She sighed once, deeply, and looked out into the south field, where her son was now climbing all over Temeraire’s forelegs with Laurence’s three nephews. They had spent the first week of Temeraire’s residence plastered to the windows of their nursery, under the confining hand of their nurse; but a few of the village boys, less supervised, had made a game of daring one another to come and touch Temeraire’s tail, and observing them from the window had been too much for high spirits to endure. The middle boy had dared his elder, the dare had been reciprocated, and by the time Temeraire had woken, the boys had managed to scale his back and were busily defeating Napoleon in a grand aerial battle bearing a strong resemblance to the highly fictional accounts which had lately filled the newspapers.

“Well, that is not how it happened at all,” Temeraire had informed them, turning his head round, and all three children had gone very still and quiet, but the story recommended itself too highly not to overcome what, their exasperated mother lectured them that night, was a relatively slight concern for the preservation of life and limb.

Her lectures and the protests of their nurse had not had much effect. Old wooden swords had been unearthed from a chest the next day, and endless battles fought since then. Edith’s son had lasted five minutes clinging to her skirts before he had run out through the garden gates to join the irresistible game, and she had not held him back, though her hands curled in her lap as though she half-wished to restrain him.

“I am glad he should not be afraid of dragons,” she said, despite a little anxiety in her looks: the boy was her only child.

“I assure you Temeraire will have a care,” Laurence said to her. Temeraire indeed was in danger of showing too much care, as he had begun to inquire of Laurence whether the boys might not really be considered as under his protection, by virtue of their connection.

“Churki writes,” he had said a little wistfully, “that she has met Hammond’s family at last, and there are twenty-six of them, if one counts the smallest children and his cousins, which she does.” He sighed a bit enviously. “She has already set about building them a larger house,” he added, “and helped their tenants plow their fields more quickly, which she says was of the greatest assistance, because so many of the young men have been away at the war, and are not returned yet. Laurence, oughtn’t we plow this field?”

“No, it is resting this year,” Laurence had answered. “But if you are in want of occupation, I am sure my brother’s steward would be delighted to have your assistance.” He had been surprised to find a thriving clan of Yellow Reapers established just outside Nottingham, who were now a regular sight throughout the city and the surrounding countryside, most commonly carrying large loads of coal from the pits but willing to take on other work as well; they had been of use on the estate more than once, his brother had said.

Temeraire had indeed found some satisfaction, since then, in bringing in prodigious loads of timber and stone required for repairs, and offering to bring more, if they should care to repair the ruins of the abbey behind the house, which had burnt down sometime in the eleventh century. He had even offered his services to their neighbors, one of whom was Edith’s father.

Lady Galman had included Laurence in a subsequent invitation for the families to dine together, and he had with some hesitation accepted. No number of accolades would ever make him easy going into society again, but he had wished to speak with Edith. He had written long years ago, by his mother, to acquaint her with the manner of her husband’s death during the invasion of Britain, which had borne a sufficiently heroic character for him to wish her to know of it, in hopes of its relieving some of the pain of her loss. But he felt the inadequacy of such an indirect account, and the obligation to do better, if she wished to know more.

“I am glad to know,” she said now: they had spoken briefly at dinner, and she had called this morning, for a chance of more privacy. “And glad to have the power to tell my son, when he is older. I only wish…” She stopped a moment, and Laurence was not certain she meant to continue. “I only wish I might not feel Bertram had pursued a course for which no training or inclination had fitted him,” she said finally, low, “in an effort to secure my good opinion. He ought to have been certain of it.”

Laurence was silent. It had been long years since he and Edith had spoken on such terms of intimacy, but there had been long separations between them before, demanded by a naval career, and he did not pretend that he did not understand her. If Bertram Woolvey had never made himself notorious, neither had he made himself notable, before his death. He had been a gentleman, and he had offered his wife a comfortable home and a place in respectable society, when Laurence could no longer aspire to either. But a man might well have wished to figure in his wife’s eyes as something other than a safe harbor, if she had once looked for more.

“His aid was material,” he said finally: the only comfort he could give. “I do not know if we would have succeeded in freeing Iskierka, without his help, and her loss would have been disastrous.”