Page 11 of Confounding Oaths
Lady Mary and the elder Mr. Caesar exchanged quiet looks. Neither they nor their son had explained in front of the girlsexactlywhat service Captain James had performed for the family, but it should not ideally have been necessary.
“Brawling or not,” said Lady Mary, “the captain came to John’said when aid was required. It would be extremely unworthy of us to abandon him.”
“It would be unworthy of us,” her husband added, “to abandon anybody in need.”
Miss Anne looked chastened and, with the mental flexibility of the very young, turned her position 180 degrees without missing a beat. “At the very least, I may vouch that the man was not drunk. I spoke with him and he appeared quite sober.”
“I shall send word to Papa at once,” said Lady Mary, “and to my sister. Though I fear time may be against us.”
Mr. Caesar tried not to overly interrogate his feelings. That his parents had rallied more decisively in defence of his debt than he had was, if he wanted to be cruel to himself, both typical of them and typical of him. “I believe Maelys and Georgiana are in town also,” he tried. “I shall see what they can manage.”
“The hearing,” Callaghan added, “is rather by way of being this afternoon, so while that all sounds wonderful we’d be exceedingly grateful if you could get a scoot on.”
The logistics proved a little fiddly, with Lady Mary and her husband electing to take an emergency run to visit the earl in the hope that they could solicit his assistance personally while Nancy was dispatched with notes for the other members of the family.
As they variously departed I—being incapable, despite my preternatural swiftness, of being in two places at once—was forced to decide who to follow. And for the moment at least I chose none of them, but elected instead to remain at the family home. They had, after all, opted to leave their young daughters unattended, and I held out some hope that one or other of them would involve herself in some kind of mischief before the day was out.
They did not, while I watched. Miss Caesar divided her time between playing on the pianoforte, which she did rather pleasingly,and reading on the settee. Miss Anne took a novel and sat in a window seat, although the book seemed primarily decorative, since she mostly left it open on her knee and bombarded her sister with questions about society matters that Miss Caesar found by turns enthralling and vexatious, depending on their subject matter.
I, meanwhile, roamed the house, looking for things to steal or to break and growing increasingly uneasy.
You may already know—especially if you have ever seen a certain play that a certain mortal flagrantly stole from me some four centuries ago—that my master and his, shall we say, counterpart are locked in an aeons-ancient game of intrigue, recrimination, and rivalry. I should add, of course, that while the origins of this enmity are lost to the mists of time (or our closest analogue for it), my master is absolutely in the right and wholly justified in all of his actions.
Perhaps, then, it was merely paranoia that made me sense the hand of Titania in the way that the shadows shifted in the house, or the patterns that formed in the sunlight through the windows. Or perhaps it wasn’t.
And really, would I be mentioning it if it didn’t leadsomewhere?
Once I had convinced myself that my master’s hated rival posed no immediate threat to my own plans for the Caesars (such as they were: I should stress that I am purely a passive observer and would never, ever, under any circumstances interfere with the unfolding of events for my own benefit), I flew in the shape of a swallow across London. I had been relatively confident in my own ability to track Mr. Caesar even if he did not go to the place I expected, butmy hunter’s skills did not, in the end, need to be tested. The hearing was taking place, as military matters often did, at the Mithraeum in Walbrook.
This ancient complex had been founded nearly two millennia earlier by a cult within the then Roman army and had expanded down the centuries as generations of legionaries, mercenaries, knights, dragoons, and infantrymen had added to it little shrines and icons devoted to whichever deity they most favoured or wished to propitiate. So it contained now busts of Minerva, statues of Bacchus, rune stones to Odin, and even a small alcove dedicated to Christian saints, although ancient pacts prevented those entities from intervening in the world as directly as the old gods could.
In recent years, as the British army had grown more structured and more organised, the Mithraeum had become a somewhat more formalised space, its corridors painted bright white and portraits of kings and generals hung in any space that wasn’t already being used for the veneration of less worldly idols. Some of the less popular deities had—to their largely impotent chagrin—found their temples and offering-spaces relocated to make room for offices and antechambers.
It was in one such room that Captain James now waited, and had been waiting for some hours, impatiently aware that his future depended on decisions made by men who thought nothing of him. And it was into this room that Mr. Caesar appeared, hurried and flustered.
There was, even he could not quite keep himself from admitting, a certain pleasure to seeing the captain again. Although in ideal circumstances their reunion would have involved rather more swashbuckling romance and rather less bureaucracy. Still, even an ill-advised night with the execrable Mr. Ellersley hadn’t quite beenenough to shake the memory of their first meeting from his mind and so it was with a certain timidity that Mr. Caesar approached the captain and nodded a greeting.
“Wasn’t sure you’d come,” said the captain, without rising.
“I said I would assist you if you needed me,” Mr. Caesar replied, a little stiffly.
“Didn’t mean you’d do it.”
Mr. Caesar looked almost offended. “Sir, whatever else I may be, I am a gentleman.”
“I know,” replied the captain. “That’s why I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
That was, in Mr. Caesar’s experience, a fair assessment. He’d known far too many gentlemen who weren’t, so he understood why a man might hold the term to little account. For his own part, he had always taken pride in being a better gentleman than better gentlemen were. This, in his estimation and my own, was an extraordinarily low bar but still one Mr. Caesar failed to clear with alarming regularity.
Since the army moved on its own time, the two men had ample opportunity to become reacquainted while whoever was in charge of proceedings did whatever they needed to do on the other side of the door. They sat side by side on a low green bench that seemed to have been designed explicitly for discomfort. A portrait of George II and a statue of Mars loomed over them from opposite sides of the room, but neither made for a light conversational companion.
“Thank you,” Mr. Caesar offered. “Again. You didn’t have to look out for me.”
Captain James shrugged with one shoulder. “Yeah, I did. That’s what you do. Man needs a beating, you beat him. Man doesn’t need a beating, you stop him being beaten.”
By the standards Mr. Caesar was accustomed to, it was an almost naïve principle to live by. In his own world, if a man needed a beating, you quietly put it about that he needed a beating, and if he didn’t you put it about slightly more loudly, because you suspected he was saying the same about you. “Still, you put yourself in danger for me.”
Despite the real peril hanging over him, Captain James laughed. “That wasn’t danger, that was two servants not being paid near enough to fight a man who knows how.”
