‘Sir,’ Laurence said, ‘we have been ordered to cover your retreat,’ and handed Wellesley Admiral Roland's note: a brief scrawl in her bad handwriting, which Temeraire could not quite read from overhead.

Wellesley scowled through the explanation, and then he crumpled the note and pitched it away; one of his aides hastily retrieved it out of the mud behind his back, to be sure it did not lie about to be picked up. ‘That woman is to be relied upon more than half the general staff; it is a damned embarrassment. So this Chinese beast is managing Bonaparte's dragons for him? How did he get the creature to obey him in the first place? He was not there for her hatching.’

‘She is snobbish, so I suppose she liked that he is an emperor,’ Temeraire said, ‘and that he should make it easy for her to be nasty to me: she is a very unpleasant sort of dragon.’

‘I think perhaps you dislike her too greatly to be just, Temeraire,’ Laurence said, and to Wellesley, ‘Sir, she had lately lost her companion before coming to France, and being bereft was perhaps more vulnerable to a kindness which ordinarily pride would have armoured her against. But Bonaparte has not won her by any trick, only a high degree of real affection, and certainly all the outward shows of respect; and he has materially altered the conditions for dragons under his rule, for the better.’

‘So anyone can manage a dragon, then, if you bribe the creature properly, and cosset it like a woman,’ Wellesley said.

Temeraire laid back his ruff. He did not think he had been unjust to Lien; but he did see that Laurence's explanation was the more important one, for their case; and Lien was not helping Napoleon just because he had given her a few presents. Not that Temeraire would have said no to a diamond as handsome as the one she had been wearing at the battle of Jena; but that was after she had decided to help. ‘It is not bribery or cosseting, if you pay someone what they deserve, and if they do not like to help you otherwise.’

‘It is a good four hundred pounds to feed a beast your size for a year,’ Wellesley said. ‘Do you expect more?’

‘Then give me the four hundred pounds,’ Temeraire said, ‘and I will undertake to feed myself, and put aside the rest, as I like.’

‘Hah,’ Wellesley said, ‘and when you gamble it away, and are starving, and you steal a cow to eat, then what is to be done with you?’

‘Of course I would not gamble with treasure,’ Temeraire said repressively. ‘If I wanted to take someone else's treasure, I would fight them; and if I did not want to fight them, then I would not want to take it with a game anyway, because if I did win, then of course they would want to fight to get it back afterwards.’