‘I do not see why,’ Lily muttered, not very quietly.

‘—but if he is to go to sea, I suppose he had better begin as he will go on; and if he should prefer the Corps someday, there will be dragons enough, so perhaps he ought to be with his father for now,’ Catherine finished, at dinner that evening. She and Berkley had come out to see him off, as of course Laurence could not come to the covert to dine while legally a prisoner. They sat together in the pavilion around a small convenient card-table, eating roast mutton and bread, and sheltered from the wind by the dragons dozing comfortably around them.

Laurence with some reluctance said, ‘Harcourt, under ordinary circumstances, I would not presume to offer advice on such a point; but you must recall she will be a prison-ship for the journey; she will be carrying prisoners.’ The ordinary transports ran twice a year; the Allegiance would go out of turn, but she was so vast that a great many convicts could be crammed into her decks.

‘I suppose they will not be allowed to wander the ship,’ she said, surprised, and he had to convey some sense of the natural order of a prison-ship: the dreadful frequency of scurvy and fever and dysentery, the misery and regular danger of rebellion.

He was sorry to find his descriptions borne out when they came to the Allegiance the next morning, at Sheerness Dockyard. It was not pleasant to see their familiar and faithful transport in such a state. Her crew was a surly crowd of pressed landsmen, some of them not far removed from the wretches who could be heard—and smelled—beneath, clanking restlessly in their restraining irons. Nearly every able seaman had been plundered away by ships with nobler duties and captains with more influence than Riley, having perhaps been tainted by too much association with Laurence. A grating was already rigged; fresh bloodstains beneath it showed that it had lately seen use. The bo'sun and his mates were shoving the men to their work.

Across the harbour, another vessel was making ready to go down the Thames on the same wind that would keep the Allegiance in port a while longer. She made a stark contrast: a sailing barge, flat-bottomed and small next to the massive dragon transport, and manned to precision by a handful of sailors all in black; even her sails were dyed black, and her sides had been freshly painted, so there was no waterline to mar her side. A great casket, black and gold-painted, was gently and respectfully being conveyed onto her, while her officers stood at attention.