Page 17 of Confounding Oaths
“Have you known Mr. Bygrave long?” she followed up, noting that Mr. Bygrave and Miss Anne were already walking several paces ahead of them and engaged in an animated conversation about, as near as she could tell, nothing of consequence.
“Many years. We were at Eton together.”
Miss Caesar clasped her hands together. “Oh, how marvellous. It must be so fascinating to go to Eton, to learn all those wonderful things.”
“I daresay.”
It occurred to Miss Caesar that Mr. Saunders was not looking at her. And she wanted to believe that this could be accounted forby the beauty of the scenery, or the interesting tableau presented by all of the other persons walking the same route at the same time. But Mr. Bygrave was experiencing no such distractions. And besides, there was nothing remotely diverting about the crowd in Hyde Park on a weekday morning. The company was always the same: a pack of self-important mortals who were far too keen on being looked at to be remotely worth seeing.
Not to be defeated, and lacking my sensible disdain for everybody not myself, Miss Caesar tried a different approach. “I have lately been readingThe Wanderer.”
That at least got Mr. Saunders to turn his head towards her. “Burney?”
“You like her work.”
For the briefest of moments, Mr. Saunders’s expression settled into something other than neutrality. Although it wasn’t a something that Miss Caesar especially liked, or a something that changed my personal preferences re: minnows. “I neither like nor dislike it. Although regarding her latest I think I rather agree with Hazlitt. It focuses far too much on women’s problems.”
“You do not think women’s problems a fit subject for fiction?”
No, she definitely did not like the cast his expression was taking. It was not cruel, nor even unpleasant exactly. But it had an almost didactic quality that a deep and instinctual part of her revolted against. “In a few short weeks, Bygrave there will be sent to France where he will be fighting for his life in a war that will determine the future of Europe and thus the world.That,I think, is a fit subject for fiction.”
The polite thing to do, Miss Caesar knew, was to nod and smile and agree. To say,Yes, that’s a very good point, I hadn’t thought of it that way.But despite her sister’s insistence to the contrary, she was beginning to realise that a sweet temperament was getting hernowhere. So instead she said, “And must everything be about the fate of the world?”
“For ladies?” replied Mr. Saunders, his tone lightening in a way that Miss Caesar could not help but read as patronising. Probably because it was, in fact, patronising. “Not at all. But an educated gentleman does generally expect his reading matter to engage with issues of substance.”
Having no desire to continue that particular conversation, Miss Caesar quickened her pace to draw level with her sister and Mr. Bygrave.
“I was just saying to Mr. Saunders,” she said very loudly, and shooting an imploring look at Miss Anne, “what a fine day we are having.”
Painstakingly courteous as always, Mr. Bygrave nodded. “Oh yes, quite. Miss Anne was just sharing a remarkably similar observation.”
“Actually,” Miss Anne corrected him, “we were having a rather lovely conversation about the situation in France. A conversation that you’reinterrupting,Mary.”
Mr. Saunders, bringing up the rear, held up his hands in amea culpagesture. “Sorry, Robert, rather fumbled that one. The chit had some terribly silly opinions about literature.”
While Miss Anne was still fuming about the intrusion on her doubtlessly lovely, and not at all a cavalcade of mortal banalities, conversation about the French situation, Miss Caesar was making some swift social calculations.
“Which ball did you drop exactly?” she asked.
Standing a little way off, Nancy winced. She, too, could see exactly where this was going and also exactly who would be left picking up the pieces.
With all the elan of a midsized terrier, Mr. Bygrave did his best to smooth things over. “There were no balls. Not really. I just sortof mentioned to Saunders here that it might be nice to go for a bit of a walk and that maybe it might be nice to have some company from, you know, the gentler sex, and that—”
“And that you wanted somebody to take me, so you could have Anne?” Miss Caesar finished for him.
“When you say it like that,” Mr. Bygrave protested, “it sounds far more sinister than—”
But Miss Caesar was not listening. She had turned, tears pricking her eyes, and was making for home.
We leave the ladies now and turn to their brother. Yes, such a shift at so pivotal a juncture is a rather tawdry trick, but I am an otherworldly sprite exiled to physicality in the mortal world. Tawdriness is hardly beneath me. Besides, you must surely wish also to know what was becoming of Mr. Caesar in his (I believe here it is customary to clear one’s throat to signal euphemism)fighting lessons.
He had been collected by the captain first thing in the morning and led through London’s tangled streets to one of the city’s most notorious rookeries. It was called the Holy Land by some, a moniker I thought fit it well given how venal and blood-soaked the things you mortals callholytend to be. They had progressed through the grey dawn light (yes, reader, I have narrated these events slightly out of their chronological order, it’s another tawdry trick of the narrative) towards what a less creative wordsmith than I might call a low tavern.
Mr. Caesar was not wholly unfamiliar with the city’s underworld, since society still dictated that gentlemen who wished to liaise with other gentlemen needed to do so at a discreet distancefrom polite company. But he had never quite found himself in a trueslum,those blights on the city steeped in the kind of poverty that moralists chose to call sin.
Which was his loss because they’re tremendous fun.
As they drew closer to their apparent destination, Mr. Caesar found himself looking up at a finely painted but ill-maintained sign naming the establishment as the Lord Wriothesly’s Folly.
