Page 127 of Confounding Oaths
It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say yes. But it was also the easiest thing in the world to sayI wish,so Miss Caesar had learned to be wary of easy things. “I have had many unusual experiences lately,” she explained. “And I am not sure I am quite ready to begin looking for a gentleman. Not quite yet.”
Mr. Bygrave nodded, sharp and resigned. “I understand.”
“But”—Miss Caesar bit her lip—“there can be little danger, I think, inonedance.”
The music struck up and Miss Caesar let Mr. Bygrave lead her onto the dance floor.
“I believe,” Miss Caesar told him, “it is expected that we should converse.”
Mr. Bygrave flushed a little, not quite certain what to converse about. “Have you …” he tried, “have you read any good books lately?”
“Yes,” replied Miss Caesar. “Shall I tell you about them?”
“Well, isn’t that sweet,” said a voice at Mr. Caesar’s ear.
Wrapped up in observing his sister as he had been, Mr. Caesar jumped half out of his skin as he turned to see a smiling woman whose gown, if he looked closely, didn’t look entirely made-to-measure. “Sal?”
“Captain thought it was best if a couple of us went in quiet. Reyne’s mob are still out there and they’ve still got guns.”
Now he was looking still closer, he noticed that Sal’s makeup was a little heavier than it once had been, and that it seemed to be covering a fresh scar on her right cheek. “Are you well?” he asked.
“Well enough. Always did my best to take the fuckers with me. And this’ll fade.” She touched her face, a little self-consciously. “But it’s not me you want to ask about really, is it?”
“How are … all of you?” Mr. Caesar asked.
“Alive.”
“Good.” A prickling sensation began to gather on Mr. Caesar’s spine. Perhaps it was just the thought of the Iphigenians, still active, still sharpening their knives. “And is Orestes …”
With surprising polish, Sal pointed with her eyes towards the entrance to the ballroom, and Mr. Caesar turned just in time to see Captain James arrive.
He looked much as he had ever done, much as Mr. Caesar suspected he would ever do. There is a kind of immortality that comes with confidence, and a kind of timelessness. He still belonged more to the battlefield than to the ballroom, but he brought his world with him.
While Mr. Caesar’s brain was debating with itself over whether he should approach the captain or let the captain approach him, his feet were making the decision on its behalf. He crossed the floor with an almost unseemly directness until he found himself face-to-face with Captain James.
“Thought I’d find you here,” the captain said.
“I should have …” Mr. Caesar cast his eyes down. “I knew when the regiments were returning, but I didn’t know if you’d … if you’d want me to.”
“As a rule,” replied Captain James, looking playfully aggrieved, “a man comes back from war, he wants you to.”
“Sorry.”
The captain patted Mr. Caesar on the back in a way that could easily be mistaken, by a casual observer, for companionable. Thenhe left his hand in place in a way that certainly could not. “Do better next time.”
Mr. Caesar’s mouth was going a little dry, which was only about the third on the list of things making him feel foolish. “There’ll be a next time?”
“And a time after that. I’m still a soldier, John. Going away is part of the life. That okay with you?”
It wasn’t a question that he’d ever imagined having to answer, but Mr. Caesar found it easier than he might have imagined. “As long as you come back.”
There was little that could pass between them at a public ball, the laws and the state of society being what it was, but Captain James’s fingertips shifted just slightly along Mr. Caesar’s shoulder blade. “Always.”
And that, reader, is where we shall leave them. Surrounded by the wealthy and oblivious, frozen like butterflies in glass in a moment where we may pretend, in the face of all conceivable evidence to the contrary, that all is right with the world.
It is also where I shall leave you.
We have walked together awhile now, and I do not do this for fun but because I am stuck in your reality and driven to it by penury. Besides, I can give you no assurances about the future of our heroes. After all, the captain is a military man, and military men have such eventful lives so who, truly, can say what the future (theirfuture, I should say—and your past, and my eternal present) may hold. Perhaps he and Mr. Caesar found themselves travelling the globe and witnessing wonder after wonder, Mr. Caesar learningeventually to cherish the rough sleeping and hard living that comes with being a soldier’s lover.
