‘If they mean to stay, they'll stay,’ Jane said. ‘You won't make 'em less eager by letting Bonaparte beat you beforehand. Scotland is the first damned sense anyone has made. We needed these sixty beasts, Maclaine, but you cannot throw sixty dragons like roundshot and hope they land somewhere useful. In a week I will have worked out a way to use them, and by Christmas I will know how to do it properly. Tomorrow we can do no more than cut them loose on his flank and let them do as they like.’

‘But that sounds perfectly agreeable to me,’ Temeraire interrupted. ‘I do not see at all why we ought not beat Napoleon tomorrow, even if he outnumbers us; it seems quite cowardly to run away from him.’

Laurence heard this speech, which he was sure could have no salutary effect, with a sinking sensation. If he did not much like the idea of retreat, he had yet to hear a plan of battle, which offered him any reason to be confident that the British were prepared to meet Bonaparte; and he was not heartened, to see that those officers advocating battle the loudest were, by and large, those in finer clothes, and fatter than field rations could keep a man.

‘O, you wretched bloodthirsty creature,’ Jane said, ‘as if it were not bad enough dealing with all the thrusting chests already, now you must do it too; we need more sense, not less.’

‘I am not thrusting out my chest at all,’ Temeraire protested, pulling himself rather concave instead, ‘and I am being very sensible, because if you did run away, it would not do any good, at least not if you go by foot as you have been. He will just go after you. He can catch you up in a trice: they go fifty miles in a day.’

‘Nonsense,’ someone said.

‘It is not nonsense,’ Temeraire said. ‘Yesterday we saw Lefèbvre's company, eight thousand men, near Swindon, and then we flew over them at Borden on our way here this morning; so he can do it.’

There was a moment of perfect silence, on all sides: it was one thing to argue over retreat, but another entirely to hear that the enemy could not be escaped. After a moment, Jane said, ‘Well, he can beat us by numbers, but we have a round two dozen heavyweights now, and he hasn't more than ten, aside from his Fleurs. I will take it upon myself to beat his speed, if you will only let me—’

‘—put redcoats on dragons, yes, yes, as you keep saying,’ she was interrupted, by another colonel. ‘I should like to see it.’