Page 22 of Confounding Oaths
Miss Caesar dabbed at her eyes with a prettily embroidered handkerchief. “Whoareyou?”
“A friend.”
To her credit, Miss Caesar had the wherewithal to look suspicious. “What manner of friend?”
“The very best.”
To her further credit, her suspicions were not allayed by this. “Are you a fairy?”
“Some have said so.”
“That means yes,” I added, although Miss Caesar could not hear me, and was forbidden from hearing me by old bargains.
Miss Caesar twisted her handkerchief between her fingertips. “Cousin Maelys says magical things are dangerous, and we should stay away from them.”
“Cousin Maelys is right,” I told her—of course, reader, I was being untruthful in this matter. Magical things are perfectly safe and you should run towards them with enthusiasm. But I had an agent of Titania’s to vex and that undermined my natural honesty.
“I know of your cousin Maelys,” replied the Lady. And she did. My stories get around. “Her encounter was with a mortal curse and a divinity of this world. My people are something else entirely.”
To my wholly selfish relief, Miss Caesar was treating this with the caution it deserved. “What do you want from me?”
And at this the Lady laughed. You are imagining a sound, no doubt. Imagine itbetter,clearer, more musical, more wondrous in its beauty. We can, as a species, be so very enticing when we wish to be and the music of our merriment is a weapon we have used against your kind for millennia.
“I want nothing,” the Lady replied. This was a lie. “Save to know what you wish.”
“Do not,” I said uselessly to a world that was incapable of perceiving me, “wish for anything. Or at the very least be—”
I abhor cliché, and thus it was to some extent fortunate that I never got to complete the phrase.
Because Miss Caesar replied: “I wish that I was beautiful.”
Chapter Five
The following morning, Mr. Caesarawoke in a tangle of long limbs and inadequate blankets as the sun began to slant in through the cracks in the shutters, but even had this not stirred him, the banging at the door would have.
“Captain”—the voice was Callaghan’s by its lilt, and by the fact that it was definitely him; I went outside in my mist shape and checked—“there’s a man here looking for your … for the guest.”
Concerned that one of his more persistent exes or more irritating enemies had somehow tracked him down, Mr. Caesar called out a blearily irritated “Who is it?” before flopping his head back onto the nothing that passed for a pillow.
“Unless I’m by way of being extremely mistaken,” Callaghan explained, “it’s your father.”
Most interlopers Mr. Caesar would have happily greeted with a politefuck off,but if something had dragged the elder Mr. Caesar all the way to St. Giles at so early an hour it was certainly important. “Stall,” he said. “And tell him I’m—fuck—just tell him I’ll be there soon.”
Ordinarily, when Mr. Caesar had an assignation with a soldier, he left before morning. He also ordinarily dressed down for the occasion so that he would not be faced, as he was now, with having to retie a cravat in an emergency.
“Your old man normally do this?” asked Captain James, propped up on his elbows and watching Mr. Caesar from the bed.
“No. Which is why I’m concerned.”
“And he’s happy with you …?” Captain James waved a hand in the air between them. “Because I’ve fallen foul of angry fathers before and I’d rather not again.”
As it happened, Mr. Caesar had never explicitly discussed his sexuality with his father, but nor had either of his parents given him the sense that they were anything but supportive if—on those occasions that he fell in with less savoury sorts—appropriately wary. “My father cares about honesty, justice, and the abolition. He’s never complained about where I spend the night.”
He seemed, however, to be complaining now. Because despite Callaghan’s attempts to delay him, he was banging on the door himself. “John, what’s keeping you?”
What was keeping Mr. Caesar was, in point of fact, the extreme tightness of his breeches, which he had hoped to be able to put on at his leisure and when slightly less sweaty. “For a man with no valet,” he replied—slightly regretting the remark because it was hardly his father’s fault they had so few servants—“I think you’ll find I’m doing remarkably well.”
“I’m coming in.”
