Temeraire did not say anything. A terrible sensation was rising, climbing up his throat. He turned away to let it come. The roar burst out like the roll of thunder overhead, silencing every word around him, and the wall of stone cracked open before him like a pane of mirrored glass.

Chapter Three

They pulled the ship's boats into Dover harbour well past eleven o'clock at night, sweating underneath their wet clothing, hands blistered on the oars. They climbed out shivering onto the docks. Captain Puget was handed up in a litter, almost senseless with blood-loss, and Lieutenant Frye, nineteen, was the only one left to oversee. The rest of the senior officers were dead. Frye looked at Laurence with great uncertainty, then glanced around. The men offered him nothing, they were beaten with rowing and defeat. At last, Laurence quietly offered, ‘The port admiral,’ prompting him. Frye coloured and said to a gangly young midshipman, clearing his throat, ‘Mr. Meed, you had better take the prisoner to the port admiral, and let him decide what is to be done.’

With two Marines for guards, Laurence followed Meed through the dockside streets to the port admiral's office where they found nearly more confusion than had been on the deck of the Goliath in her last moments. After the double broadside had un-masted her, smoke had spread everywhere, fire crawling steadily down through the ship towards the powder magazine, as cannon ran wildly back and forth on her decks.

Here the hallways were suffocating with unchecked speculation. ‘Five hundred thousand men landed,’ one man said in the hallway, a ridiculous number, inflated by panic. ‘Already in London,’ said another, ‘and two millions in shipping seized,’ the very last of these being the only plausible suggestion. If Bonaparte had captured one or two of the ports on the Thames estuary and taken the merchantmen there, he might indeed have reached something like that number. He would have seized an enormous collection of prizes to fuel the invasion, like coal heaped into a burning stove.

‘I do not give a damn if you take him out and lynch him, only get him out of my sight,’ the port admiral said furiously, when Meed finally managed to work his way through the press and ask him for orders. There was a vast roar outside the windows like the wind rising in a storm, even though the night was clear. More petitioners were shoving frantically past them. Laurence had to catch Meed by the arm and hold him up as they fought their way out. The boy could scarcely have been fourteen and was a little underfed.

Set adrift, Meed looked helpless. Laurence wondered if he would have to find his own prison, but then one young lieutenant pushed through towards them, flung him a look of flat contempt, and said, ‘That is the traitor, is it? This way. You dogs take a damned proper hold of him, before he sneaks away in this press.’