‘No, but as you were bent on that in any case, it would have meant a good deal less pain,’ Jane said, and then she rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead. ‘No, never mind. I do not mean it. I do not suppose there was any decent way to go about it: all decency was already gone. But damn you anyway, Laurence.’

He felt the justice of her rebuke, and bowed his head over his hands. After a moment she added, ‘And to crown the whole, you come back and try to make a martyr of yourself, so that anyone who cares a farthing for your life must watch you hanged. That is, if they do not decide to make a spectacle of it and draw and quarter you in the fine old style. I suppose you would go to it like Harrison, as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. Well, I should not be damned cheerful, and neither should anyone else who loved you, and some of them can knock down half of London Town if they should choose.’

‘I should certainly choose,’ Temeraire said, and thought that he would make a point of speaking again to the Ministry gentleman, or perhaps to one of those generals, to make it perfectly plain. ‘Pray do not worry, Laurence,’ he added, ‘I am sure they will not be so foolish.’

‘Men can be very foolish indeed,’ Laurence said. ‘But I must, I do, beg you not to enter into a resolution, which should prevent my being able to face death with equanimity. You should make me a coward, if I must fear that my death should turn you against my country.’

‘But I do not at all want you to face death with equanimity,’ Temeraire said, ‘if by that you mean letting them hang you, instead of making a fuss. If that causes you unhappiness, well, I should be unhappy if you were killed. It was dreadful, so dreadful, when I thought that you were gone. I did not feel as though I knew myself anymore. I even wanted to kill poor Lloyd, for no reason at all, and I do not ever wish to feel so again.’

Laurence said, ‘Temeraire, you must know that you shall, inevitably; I have two score years or three perhaps at most, and you ten, to look forward to.’

Temeraire flattened his ruff, unhappily, not wishing even to speak of the matter. ‘But that at least, will not be anyone's fault; no one will have taken you.’ The distinction was very plain in his mind. Anyway, he did not mean to think about something so far away. He might perhaps think of some way to prevent it, by then; if dragons lived for two hundred years, he did not see why people might not, also.