‘When they have built a cannon which chooses to turn, now and again, and fire into our faces instead, and then finds means to persuade all their other cannon to do the same, I will gladly concede,’ Wellington said. ‘No, Laurence, you have convinced me entirely that the beasts are sapient, but I will be damned if I will let you make them political. We can defend against one solitary beast, but not your Whiggish rabblerousing among ten thousand of them.’

‘But if you agree we are intelligent, not that it is not perfectly obvious, then you cannot deny we have every right to be political,’ Temeraire said.

‘I can and will deny any man, or beast, the right to tear apart the foundations of our state,’ Wellington said. ‘Rights be damned; we will never hear the end of it.’

When he had gone, Temeraire looked sidelong at Laurence. ‘I am sure no one can make us go, if we do not like to,’ he said, ‘and I do not care what Wellesley thinks, or Wellington, even if he is a duke now.’

Laurence put a hand on Temeraire's foreleg and looked out over the valley. It was a view much improved over the last summer, with the verdant growth over the undulating barrow-mounds, and the sheep and cattle Lloyd had gathered dotting the green hills as they browsed. It was all England and home laid out before him, creeping out from under the shadow; and now he must leave it, forever, for a distant, dry country. ‘We must go,’ he said.

‘I am sending a few eggs on your transport,’ Jane said. ‘They need some beasts in New South Wales, to forward the settlement.’ She sat down upon the edge of a boulder; they had walked a little way from the pavilion, to have some privacy, and now stood on a hillside where they had a view all the way to the sea: grey mist hanging over the water, and at its edges a little glitter of sunlight and a few white sails.

‘Can they be spared?’ Laurence asked.

‘More easily than they can be kept,’ Jane said. ‘Before you brought us your cure, we thought we might have to replace the entire population of the Isles. Now there are more eggs than we will be able to feed in a year, after all this plundering and bad management. As for our friend across the way,’ she added, tossing a pebble over the side of the cliff, vaguely in the direction of France, ‘Bonaparte lost forty beasts in his adventures here. He will not come over again shortly, and we will be ready for him if he does.’