Empire of Ivory

The word was accordingly sent, and a carriage summoned; it was waiting outside the covert gates by the time they had gathered their things, and walked to meet it down the long narrow path which led away from the dragon-clearings.

A twenty-minutes’ drive brought them to the outskirts of Weymouth. Ferris grew steadily more hunched as they bowled along, and so miserably white that Laurence might have thought him taken ill with the motion, if he had not seen Ferris perfectly settled through thunderstorm aloft and typhoon at sea, and not likely to be distressed by the motion of a comfortable, well-sprung chaise. The carriage turned, then, drawing into a heavily wooded lane, and Laurence realized his mistake as the forest parted, and they drew abreast the house: a vast and sprawling gothic sort of edifice, the blackened stone barely to be seen behind centuries of ivy, the windows all illuminated and throwing a beautiful golden light out onto a small ornamental brook which wound through the open lawn before the house.

“A very fine prospect, Mr. Ferris,” Laurence said as they rattled over the bridge. “You must be sorry not to be home more often. Does your family reside here long?”

“Oh, a dog’s age,” Ferris said blankly, lifting his head. “There was some Crusader or other first built the place, I think, I don’t know.”

Laurence hesitated and a little reluctantly offered, “My own father and I have disagreed on certain of our occasions, I am sorry to say, so I am not often at home.”

“Mine is dead,” Ferris said. After a moment, he seemed to realize this was a rather abrupt period to the conversation, and added with an effort, “My brother Albert is a good sort, I suppose; he has ten years on me, so we have never really got to know one another.”

“Ah,” Laurence said, left no more the wiser as to the cause of Ferris’s dismay.

There was certainly nothing lacking in their welcome. Laurence had braced himself for neglect: perhaps they would be shown directly to their rooms, out of sight of the rest of the company; he was tired enough to even hope to be so slighted. But nothing of the sort: a dozen footmen were out with their lights lining the drive, another two waiting with the step to hand them down, and a substantial body of the staff coming outside to greet them despite the cold and what must surely have been a full house within to manage, a wholly u

Ferris blurted desperately, just as the horses were drawn up, “Sir—I hope you will not take it to heart, if my mother—she means well—” The footmen opened the door, and discretion stopped Ferris’s mouth.

They were shown directly to the drawing room, to find all the company assembled to meet them, not very large, but decidedly elegant: the women all in clothing of unfamiliar style, the surest mark of the height of fashion to a man who was often from society a year at a time, and several of the gentlemen bordering on outright dandyism. Laurence noted it mechanically; he was himself in trousers and Hessians, and those stained with dust; but he could not be brought to care, very much, even when he saw the other gentlemen in the greater formality of knee-breeches. There were a couple of military men among their number, a colonel of Marines whose long, seamy, sun-leathered face had a certain vague familiarity that meant they had most likely dined together on one ship or another, and a tall army captain in his red coat, lantern-jawed and blue-eyed.

“Henry, my dear!” A tall woman rose from her seat to come and greet them with both her hands outstretched: too like Ferris to mistake her, with the same high forehead and reddish-brown hair, and the same trick of holding her head very straight, which made her neck look longer. “How happy we are you have come!”

“Mother,” Ferris said woodenly, and bent to kiss her presented cheek. “May I present Captain Laurence? Sir, this is Lady Catherine Seymour, my mother.”

“Captain Laurence, I am overjoyed to make your acquaintance,” she said, offering him her hand.

“My lady,” Laurence said, giving her a formal leg. “I am very sorry to intrude upon you; I beg you will forgive our coming in all our dirt.”

“Any officer of His Majesty’s Aerial Corps is welcome in this house, Captain,” she declared, “at any moment of day or night, I assure you, and should he come with no introduction at all still he should be welcome.”

Laurence did not know what to say to this; he himself would no more have descended upon a strange house without introduction than he would have robbed it. The hour was late, but not uncivilized, and he came with her own son, so in any case these reassurances were not much to the point; he could not have supposed it otherwise, having been invited and welcomed. He settled on a vague, “Very kind.”

The company was not similarly effusive. Ferris’s eldest brother Albert, the present Lord Seymour, was a little high in the instep, and made a point early on, when Laurence had made a compliment to his house, of conveying the intelligence that the house was Heytham Abbey, in the possession of the family since the reign of Charles II; the head of the family had risen from knight to baronet to baron in steady climb, and there remained.

“I congratulate you,” Laurence said, and did not take the opening to puff off his own consequence; he was an aviator, and well knew that one evil outweighed any other considerations in the eyes of the world. He could not help but wonder that they should have sent a son to the Corps; there was no sign of the pressure of an encumbered estate, which might have made one reason: while appearances might be kept up on credit, so extravagant a number of servants could not have been managed.

Shortly di

Laurence could only bow politely and offer his arm, although Lord Seymour certainly ought to have preceded him, even if Lady Catherine chose to make a natural exception for her son. Her daughter-in-law looked for a moment as if she liked to balk, Laurence thought, but then she laid her hand on his arm without any further hesitation, and he chose not to notice.

“Henry is my youngest, you know,” Lady Catherine said to Laurence over the second course; he was on her right. “Second sons in this house have always gone to the drum, and the third to the Corps, and I hope that may never change.” This, Laurence thought, might have been subtly directed at his di

Laurence, who had only narrowly escaped being thrown from the house by his irate father on his shift in profession, could not in honesty accept this compliment, and with some awkwardness said, “Ma’am, I beg your pardon, I must confess you do us credit we have not earned: younger sons in my family go to the Church, but I was mad for the sea, and would have no other profession.” He had then to explain his wholly accidental acquisition of Temeraire and subsequent transfer to the Aerial Corps.

“I will not withdraw my remarks; it is even more to their credit that you were given good principles enough to do your duty, when it was presented to you,” Lady Catherine said firmly. “It is shameful, the disdain that so many of our finest families will profess for the Corps, and I certainly will never hold with it in the least.”