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the makeshift benches. Temeraire sniffed, and then lowered his head abruptly and said, "You are hurt; you are bleeding," with urgent anxiety.

"It is nothing to concern you; I am afraid we only had a little accident in the town," Laurence said, guiltily preferring a certain degree of deceit to the inevitable complications of Temeraire's indignation.

"So, dearest, you see it is just as well I wore my old coat," Granby said to Iskierka, in a stroke of inspiration, "as it has got dirty and torn, which you would have minded if I had on something nicer."

Iskierka was thus diverted to a contemplation of his clothing, instead of his bruises, and promptly pronounced it a natural consequence of the surroundings. "If you will go into a low, wretched place like that town, one cannot expect anything better," she said, "and I do not see why we are staying here, at all; I think we had better go straight back to England."

Chapter 2

"I AM NOT SURPRISED in the least," Bligh said later that evening, when they had left Riley's table and gone to the quarterdeck for coffee and cigars, "not in the least; you see exactly how it is now, Captain Laurence, with these whoreson dogs and Merinos."

His language was not much better than that of the aforementioned dogs, and neither could Laurence much prefer his company. He did not like to think so of the King's governor and a Navy officer, and particularly not one so much a notable seaman: his feat of navigating three thousand miles of open ocean in only a ship's launch, when left adrift by the Bounty, was still a prodigy.

Laurence had looked at least to respect, if not to like; but the Allegiance had stopped to take on water in Van Diemen's Land, and there found the governor they had confidently expected to meet in Sydney, deposed by the Rum Corps and living in a resentful exile. He had a thin, soured mouth, perhaps the consequence of his difficulties; a broad forehead exposed by his receding hair; and delicate, anxious features beneath it, which did not very well correspond with the intemperate language he was given to unleash on those not uncommon occasions when he felt himself thwarted.

He had no recourse but to harangue passing Navy officers with demands to restore him to his post, but all of those prudent gentlemen, to date, had chosen to stay well out of the affair while the news took the long sea-road back to England for an official response. This, Laurence supposed, had been neglected in the upheaval of Napoleon's invasion and its aftermath; nothing else could account for so great a delay. But no fresh orders had come, nor a replacement governor, and meanwhile in Sydney the New South Wales Corps, and those men of property who had promoted their coup, grew all the more entrenched.

The very night the Allegiance put into the harbor, Bligh had himself rowed out to consult with Captain Riley; he had very nearly asked himself to dinner, and directed the conversation with perfect disregard for Riley's privilege; though as a Navy man himself he could not be ignorant of the custom.

"A year now, and no answer," Bligh had said in a cloud of spittle and fury, waving his hand to Riley's steward to send the bottle round to him again. "A full year gone, Captain, and meanwhile in Sydney these scurrilous worms yet inculcate all the populace with licentiousness and sedition: it is nothing to them, nothing, if every child born to woman on these shores should be a bastard and a bugger and a drunken leech, so long as they do a little work upon their farms, and lie quiet under the yoke: Let the rum flow is their only maxim, the liquor their only coin and god." He did not, however, stint himself of the wine, near-vinegared though it was, nor the last dregs of Riley's port; ate well, also, as might a man living mostly on hardtack and a little occasional game.

Laurence, silent, rolling the stem of his glass between his fingers, had been unable to feel some sympathy: a little less self-restraint, and he might have railed with as much fervor against the cowardice and stupidity which had united to send Temeraire into exile. He, too, wished to be restored, if not to rank or to society at least to a place where they might be useful; and not to merely sit here on the far side of the