“And may I say, Admiral, that it is a great pleasure to speak with a man of so much sense and understanding in these matters,” the worst of these villains had said to him earnestly, shaking his hand, when they had tacitly agreed that the cattle meant for them would be sold in port, instead, and the funds made over to Laurence personally in gold. Certainly a handsome quantity of the sums would end in the pockets of his suppliers; just as certainly, they assumed an equal quantity would end in his own, while he fed his dragons on rotten meat, or off the farms of starving peasants.

Laurence had forced himself to care only that this arrangement would permit him to replace much of the exported cattle with local grain, and feed three times the number of dragons, more healthfully, at half the cost. He knew very well what Whitehall would have said, if he had proposed the substitution to them directly. Jane was feeding her dragons in Spain on corn and horsemeat, but officially the Commissariat was shipping her five hundred barrels of salt pork per day, not a quarter of which reached her. But the rules of supply were a wheel that did not easily move from the deep-worn rut in which they traveled. The thieves in Dover might take half the money they could get for the meat, and still leave Laurence with more than enough for their needs.

Only after the battle, when Wittgenstein had sent him the vast quantity of bales of captured charqui—“I understand you have a use for this peculiar stuff, Admiral,” the accompanying supply-officer had said doubtfully, delivering him wagons loaded with enough of the dried and salted meat to feed two hundred dragons for a month—had it occurred to Laurence that he might instead use those funds to furnish prize-money, and thereby both persuade the dragons to eat the charqui, and make them more enthusiastic for their duty.

The entire business left an evil taste in his mouth, the sense of having pushed his hands deep into rotting effluvia. But Wittgenstein was only looking thoughtful, saying, “Admiral, I believe it can be arranged.”

—

“You shall have whatever supply I can scrape together, if it will serve you for prizes,” Blücher promised him, without hesitation. The old Prussian was loyal to a fault, when his loyalty was given, and he had before now decided for Laurence on the strength of Dyhern’s testimonials, and the rescue of the Prussian beasts. “I cannot promise the quantity will be great.”

The rewards were indeed not large, but it did not seem to matter to the dragons whether their share was worth four pounds, or one shilling threepence as was more commonly the case; nor was this due to any misunderstanding or mathematical confusion on their part. Every British dragon seemed able to maintain a full and perfect accounting, down to pence, of their funds. Even when there had been a further four allocations, after small seizures of individual wagons taken in skirmishing, there was still not a beast among them who could not stand before all the separate scrolls—Temeraire now kept these posted up outside his own clearing, under guard—and in an instant calculate the exact value of the shares of any dragon on the list, and compare this against their own.

This facility in no way diminished their desire of having the numbers written out for them, however, much to the dismay of their captains. “I had no idea of Iskierka’s being so handy at sums,” Granby muttered, as she announced with great satisfaction, “I believe I have one hundred twenty-four pounds sixteen shillings threepence, and Requiescat has one hundred twenty-one pounds eleven shillings tuppence; now pray check it for me, Granby, and show me all your work,” which entailed a quarter of an hour’s hard-fought calculations for him, with one mistake along the way, which Iskierka pointed out severely before he had quite finished writing it down.

Aviators did not get a great deal in the way of formal schooling. Mrs. Pemberton finally took pity upon the officers and offered her services to make individual copies of the lists, and as her head for mathematics was good enough to satisfy them, the dragons were eager to accept the substitute, although after a week she was obliged to begin charging them a shilling apiece for the copies, or she would have been applied to for a fresh set by every beast, every day.

One difficulty briefly reared its head: Windle, plainly resentful of the mechanism which had made his dragon an earnest advocate of pleasing Laurence’s judgment, loudly said, “It is nonsense, Obituria. Where do you suppose this money is, really? It is jots on paper, not cash in hand, and so it will remain. And meanwhile you are eating this smoky charqui stuff instead of good fresh beef; you have dropped two stone of flesh, I dare say, in this last week.”

Obituria had, and looked far the better for it; Laurence knew what General Chu would have said of the regular diet of British dragons. But she looked uncertain, and Ricarlee, never backwards in suspicion, presented himself that same afternoon demanding his funds in some less ephemeral form.

“Very good,” Laurence said however, having prepared himself for this eventuality, and presented Ricarlee with a neatly bound sheaf of paper money, and a scattering of shilling coins and pence, which the dragon could not have held conveniently in any manner. “Perhaps you would prefer me to deposit it with your bank?” When Ricarlee professed himself innocent of any accounts, Laurence added, “Temeraire banks with Rothschild, and has had no cause for complaint, I believe.”

He was glad, now, to have been forced to grapple with the difficulty of managing Temeraire’s funds. Drummonds’ and Hoare’s had balked entirely; they refused to do anything but put the money into an account in his own name. Tharkay had come to his rescue: Avram Maden had a considerable acquaintance among the notable Jewish families of Europe, and the Rothschild bank in London had as a favor to him offered Laurence an appointment.

The young man he had first spoken to, in their offices, had been polite but skeptical; their business was ordinarily more in the line of coin-dealing, Laurence vaguely understood. But unexpectedly the head of the bank had come into the room: Mr. Nathan Rothschild, who had been distantly acquainted with his father through Mr. Wilberforce. The gentleman had paid Laurence his condolences, listened to the difficulty before him, asked briefly about the rate of pay dragons were entitled from the Admiralty and the length of their life spans; shortly thereafter Temeraire had become the proud possessor of an account, and if the bank-book were inconveniently small for his talons, at least he showed no signs of needing to consult it.

“Well, if Temeraire banks with them, I suppose I will allow them to hold my money, too,” Ricarlee said loftily, willing to be satisfied by whatever Temeraire possessed.