Empire of Ivory Page 0,134

was not only the secret of the Corps which would have prevented him ever making her known to his mother.

Chapter 15

JANE," LAURENCE SAID, "will you marry me?"

"Why, no, dear fellow," she said, looking up in surprise from the chair where she was drawing on her boots. "It would be a puzzle to give you orders, you know, if I had vowed to obey; it could hardly be comfortable. But it is very handsome of you to have offered," she added, and standing up kissed him heartily, before she put on her coat.

A timid knock at the door prevented anything more he might have said: one of Jane's runners, come to tell her the carriage was ready at the gates of the covert, and they had perforce to go. "I will be glad when we are back in Dover; what a miserable swamp," Jane said, already blotting her forehead on her sleeve as she left the small barracks-house: the London setting added, to the attractions of stifling heat and the heavy moisture-laden air, all the city's unrivaled stench, and the mingling of barnyard scents with the acrid stink of the small covert's presently overburdened dragon-middens.

Laurence said something or other about the heat, and offered her his handkerchief mechanically. He did not know how to feel. The offer had come from some deeper impulse than conscious decision; he had not meant to speak, and certainly not yet, not in such a manner. An absurd moment to raise the question, almost as if he wished to be refused; but he was not relieved, he was by no means relieved.

"I suppose they will keep us past dinner-time," Jane said, meaning their Lordships, an opinion which seemed to Laurence rather optimistic; he thought it very likely they should be kept for days, if Bonaparte were not so obliging as to invade, with no warning. "So I must look in on Excidium before we go: he ate nothing at all, last night; nothing, and I must try and rouse him up to do better today."

"I do not need to be scolded," Excidium murmured, without opening his eyes, "I am very hungry," but he was scarcely able to rouse himself from his somnolence even to nudge briefly at her hand. Though naturally one of those earliest dosed with the supply of mushroom sent on by frigate from Capetown, he was by no means yet fully recovered from his ordeal; the disease had been well advanced in his case by the time the cure had arrived, and only in the last few weeks had it been judged safe for him to leave the uncomfortable sand-pits which had made his home for more than a year. Nevertheless he had insisted on managing the flight to London, instead of letting Temeraire carry Jane with Laurence, and was now paying for his pride with near-prostration; he had done nothing but sleep since their arrival, the afternoon before.

"Then try and take a little while I am here, for my comfort," Jane said, and stepped back to the clearing's edge to keep her best coat and trousers from being spattered by the fresh-butchered sheep carried hurriedly over by the covert herdsmen, and hacked apart directly in front of Excidium's jaws, which ground methodically away at the joints of meat as they were put in his mouth.

Laurence took the opportunity of escaping her company for a moment, and went to the neighboring clearing where Temeraire was busily engaged, despite the early hour, with his two sand-tables, upon the letter. He was working upon an account of the disease, and its treatment, which he meant to send to his mother in China, with Mr. Hammond as his proxy, against the danger that a similar outbreak might one day there occur. "You have made that Lung look more like Chi," he said severely, casting an eye over the work of his coterie of secretaries: Emily and Dyer, who had been disgruntled to learn that their promotion to the exalted rank of ensign had not relieved them of all responsibility of schoolwork, and with them Demane and Sipho, who were at least at no greater disadvantage learning Chinese script than anyone else would have been.

Laurence thought, abruptly, he might have asked her the other day, after they had disposed of the fate of the boys. They had been closeted alone together, without interruption, nearly an hour; that, at any rate, would have been a more opportune moment to speak, barring any scruple at introducing a subject