a note to discuss it privately with Laurence, later; which recalled him to Laurence's absence, and thence to the advancing hour. "Roland," he called, with a little anxiety - of course Laurence did not need nurse-maiding, but he had promised to return before the supper hour, and read a little more of the novel which he had acquired in town the day before - "Roland, is it not past five?"
"Lord, yes, it must be almost six," Emily Roland answered, putting down her sword; she and Demane were fencing a little, in the yard. She patted her face down with a tugged-free tail of her shirt, and ran to the promontory edge to call down to the sailors below, and came back to say, "No, I am wrong: it is a quarter past seven: how strange the day is so long, when it is almost Christmas!"
"It is not strange at all," Demane said. "It is only strange that you keep insisting it must be winter here only because it is in England."
"But where is Granby, if it is so late?" Iskierka said, prickling up at once, overhearing. "He did not mean to go anywhere particularly nice, he assured me, or I should never have let him go looking so shabby."
Temeraire flared his ruff a little, taking this to heart; he felt it keenly that Laurence should go about in nothing but a plain gentleman's coat, without even a little bit of braid or golden buttons. He would gladly have improved Laurence's appearance if he had any chance of doing so; but Laurence still had refused to sell Temeraire's talon-sheaths for him, and even if he had, Temeraire had not yet seen anything in this part of the world which would have suited him as appropriate.
"Perhaps I had better go and look for Laurence," Temeraire said. "I am sure he cannot have meant to stay away so long."
"I am going to go and look for Granby, too," Iskierka announced.
"Well, we cannot both go," Temeraire said irritably. "Someone must stay with the eggs." He cast a quick, judgmental eye over the three eggs in their protective nests of swaddling blankets, and the small canopy set over them, made of sailcloth. He was a little dissatisfied by their situation: a nice coal brazier, he thought, would not have gone amiss even in this warm weather, and perhaps some softer cloth to go directly against the shell; and it did not suit him that the canopy was so low he could not put his head underneath it, to sniff at the eggs and see how hard their shells had become.
There had been a little difficulty over them, after disembarking: some of the officers of the Corps who had been sent along had tried to object to Temeraire's keeping the eggs by him, as though they would be better able to protect them, which was stuff; and they had made some sort of noise about Laurence trying to kidnap the eggs, which Temeraire had snorted off.
"Laurence does not want any other dragon, as he has me," Temeraire had said, "and as for kidnapping, I would like to know whose notion it was to take the eggs halfway across the world on the ocean, with storms and sea-serpents everywhere, and to this odd place that is not even a proper country, with no dragons; it was certainly not mine."
"Mr. Laurence is going directly to hard labor, like all the rest of the prisoners," Lieutenant Forthing had said, quite stupidly, as though Temeraire were allowing any such thing to happen.
"That is quite enough, Mr. Forthing," Granby had said, overhearing, and coming upon them. "I wonder that you would make any such ill-advised remark; I pray you take no notice of it at all, Temeraire, none at all."
"Oh! I do not in the least," Temeraire answered, "or any of these other complaints; it is all nonsense, when what you mean is," he added to Forthing and his associates, "you would like to keep the eggs by you, so that they should not know any better when they hatch, but think they must go at once into harness, and that they must take whichever of you wins them by chance: I heard you talk of drawing lots last night in the gunroom, so you needn't try and deny it. I will certainly have none of it, and I expect neither will the eggs, of any of you."
He had of course carried his point, and the eggs, away to their present