Page 115 of Confounding Oaths
Gently, so as not to disturb his wound, Mr. Caesar leaned over and kissed the captain on the forehead, then the cheek, then the lips. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m grateful and I’m sorry and”—reaching down, he twined his fingers through the captain’s—“I can’t promise that I’ll ever see the men the way you do. I don’t think I ever could without living through what you’ve lived through. But please don’t think I took what you did lightly. What any of you did.”
I had seldom seen a man want to believe something as much as Captain James wanted to believe Mr. Caesar in that moment. And hemostlydid. “Still,” he said, “it’s over now. And I’ve known plenty of men as felt different once the gunsmoke died down and they could go back to their old lives.”
“My old life,” replied Mr. Caesar, “was flitting from salon to salon, trying to out-poison people who despised me. I have no wish to return to it.”
Captain James drew in a deep, slow breath. “You might change your mind. I’ll always be a soldier, and running from war to war orwaiting for a man to come back when he may never. That’s—well, that’s not much of anything.”
In the candlelight, Mr. Caesar reached up to brush a hand across the captain’s cheek. “This felt like something,” he said. “This feels like—”
He got no further because a commotion from downstairs woke the whole household.
Sal and Jackson, both back in uniform, stood in the Caesars’ parlour, each looking like rage in a red jacket.
“What’s all this about?” asked Captain James, the elder Mr. Caesar, and Lady Mary simultaneously.
“You havefuckedthis,” Jackson told the captain. “You haveproperfucked this.” Usually carefully mannered, his accent was slipping noticeably closer to the streets.
“Fucked what?” asked the captain. “And how?”
“Boy William didn’t make it back to the Folly,” explained Sal, the more composed of the two if only slightly.
The young Misses Caesar, still dressed for bed and so not at all in a seemly state to be seen by the soldiery, made their way into the parlour to discover what the matter was. Seized by a moment’s caprice, I took on the shape of the dog Ferdinand and nuzzled myself against Miss Caesar’s freshly human ankles.
“What’s wrong?” asked Miss Anne, wide-eyed and timorous. “Did you say something had happened to William?”
Jackson rounded on her with a menace more properly reserved for bailiffs or professional criminals. “He’s gone. What do you know?”
“Nothing.” She quailed back, trembling, and Sal placed a hand on Jackson’s arm to restrain him.
“Don’t let him worry you, miss,” Sal said as gently as he could manage. “But if you could tell us when you last saw him, it’d help.”
Having no wish to subject her daughter to any more questioning, Lady Mary cut in. “He saw us home a little after midnight,” she told the soldiers. “We asked if he wished to stay, but he said he should return to your … your inn. He said he would be missed else.”
“He was fucking right,” replied Jackson. “Did you see anything on the way back?”
“Any men in red?” added Captain James.
Lady Mary shook her head. “Nobody. Not that I saw.”
“Nor I,” added the elder Mr. Caesar. “I should not have let him go if I had thought it unsafe.”
“At least tell me,” said the captain in a voice that was practically a growl, “that he wasn’t a virgin.”
Miss Anne stiffened. “I’m not sure what that has to do with—”
“Somebody,” Captain James went on, “must have thought to take him out and make a man of him.” He glared at Sal.
“Firstly, Captain, you know as well as I do that fucking isn’t what makes a man a man. Secondly, we’d considered it, but he didn’t seem ready. And I agree with the lady, why does it matter?”
The younger Mr. Caesar moistened his lips. “It matters because if he’s a virgin, they’ll sacrifice him to Artemis.”
A pall fell over the room.
“We’re finding him,” declared the captain. “Now.”
“And how are we doing that?” asked Jackson. “That dog a tracker?” He nodded derisively in my direction.
The younger Mr. Caesar looked down at me. “Where did you get that animal exactly?”
