Page 16 of Confounding Oaths
Captain James looked around the party quizzically. “I feel like I’ve missed something.”
“Long story,” unexplained Lady Georgiana. “Perhaps we should return to sharper topics?”
The younger Mr. Caesar glared at her accusingly. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“Immeasurably.”
“So if it’s smallswords,” the captain continued, “which it might be for a dispute between gentlemen, then you’re in proper trouble.”
“Misnamed, are they?” asked Lady Mary, who had little experience of bladecraft.
The captain shook his head. “About this long”—he held his hands a little over two feet apart—“and thin as a knitting needle. One can go right through you and it’ll take you a minute to even notice.”
“That’s not sounding too awful at the moment,” Mr. Caesar hazarded, although the fact that talk of being run through constitutednot too awfulwas its own kind of awfulness. “You’ve not mentioned losing any parts of my anatomy yet.”
The captain gave him what could almost have been a teasing look. “Oh, you’ll be fine on the day. Little hole never stopped anybody. It’s the fever’s the problem. Thin, deep wound. Hard to clean. Hard to heal. You just get worse and worse and then they put you in the ground.”
Mr. Caesar was looking decidedly queasy but was, perhaps unexpectedly, feeling queasily decided. As ghastly as it was toadmit, his sister had been right. He had already brought shame on the family by starting a fight; it would only deepen that shame were he not to finish it. “That sounds flatly terrible. But even so, I think I may have to go through with it.”
Paying at least some mind to the gravity of the situation, the Misses Caesar managed to restrain themselves from applauding. If only just.
“Are you sure, John?” asked the elder Mr. Caesar. “It’s a lot of danger for no gain.”
The younger man nodded. “If I refuse, it will go poorly for all of us. I already caused a scene at a ball, I shan’t compound aggression with cowardice. That would be the worst of all possible worlds.”
“The worst of all possible worlds is one where you are dead,” observed Lady Mary. And though restraint was in her blood, she sounded almost impassioned, which she normally did only when speaking of her causes.
Having restrained their ghoulish enthusiasm for whole seconds, the Misses Caesar would be held back no longer.
“Will you need to learn to fence?” asked Miss Caesar. “I am sure we could afford an instructor if we made economies elsewhere.”
“Perhaps Mr. Bygrave could teach you,” suggested Miss Anne. “I am sure he is quite the swordsman.”
“With respect,” replied Captain James, “I know the lad. He’s not a bad sort but he’s green as a spring lawn, and though I’ve no doubt he’s taken lessons, he’ll have seen no battle.”
“Then perhaps you could teach him,” suggested Miss Mitchelmore with, I thought, a wickeder glint than I was used to seeing in her eye.
Captain James considered this for a moment. “Duelling’s agentleman’s art, and I’m no gentleman. I can’t teach you to fence.”
Everybody at the table looked, for their own reasons, disappointed. What those reasonswere,of course, varied markedly from person to person.
“But,” he continued, “I’m pretty sure I could teach you tofight.”
Chapter Four
The following morning a largefraction of the Caesar household returned to a semblance of their normal routine while Mr. Caesar diverted from it so enormously that he even found himself out of bed before ten. But the matter of Mr. Caesar’s lessons in swordplay under the tutelage of a man who, if pushed, could tear a monster’s arm off and watch it bleed to death (then have similar luck with its mother and be royally screwed over by a dragon) is one to which I will return later. There are many threads to this tale that demand my attention, and I choose for now to focus on the Misses Caesar. For they, too, were about to have an unusual day, albeit a far less unusual one than their brother.
Mr. Bygrave called, as he always did, at the fashionable hour, but this time he arrived, uncharacteristically, with a guest. The gentleman he had brought with him was roughly of an age with Mr. Bygrave, lanky and tousle-haired with a faintly bewildered expression that some might find endearing but which I personally found made me want to turn him into a minnow and throw him into a horse trough.
“I was wondering,” Mr. Bygrave explained to the household, “seeing as it is such a fine day, if you would be so good as to permit your lovely daughters”—he was looking exclusively at Miss Anne as he said this—“to come walk with us awhile?”
Lady Mary, who understood well enough how the game was played and understood, too, the delicacies of it, extended a cautious permission, assigning Nancy to play chaperone since she herself was running late for a meeting and with all the recent excitement had fallen a little behind on her correspondence. And so Mr. Bygrave introduced his friend as Mr. Saunders and, once it had been established that his family were rich enough to be trustworthy by default, the foursome set out into the late morning sunshine.
At the beginning of the walk, Miss Caesar did her best to enjoy herself. It was uncommon for gentlemen to seek her company in any matter and so she decided to seize the opportunity with both hands.
“It is a fine day,” she began. As opening gambits went it lacked originality, but what can we expect from a mortal? Especially sinceill met by moonlightwas already taken.
“Hmm?” Mr. Saunders nodded, then added a distant “Yes.”
