Page 28 of Confounding Oaths
“What does this mean?” was his first, and eminently understandable, question.
With a wisdom that few besides me understood her to possess, Miss Bickle kept her personal theories on what it would mean silent.
The younger Mr. Caesar, however, did not have that luxury. “It means that she is presently beyond our reach. At least, beyond our reach by any method that I know of. But it also means that she is not dead.”
“Can you be sure of that?” asked Lady Mary, who despite several reassurances on this front had been all anxiety since that afternoon.
“Reasonably.” It was not the answer the younger Mr. Caesar wanted to give, but they had never been a family that lied to one another. “As a rule, gods kill, fairies steal.”
He was oversimplifying, but that did largely capture the essence of it.
“Our best hope, I think,” put in Miss Mitchelmore, “is to speak with the Ambassador.” For those readers who have had the ill manners to ignore my previous published work, the Ambassador to which she referred was the Ambassador from the Other Court, a mortal man in service to my master with whom she had dealt a little in the past. “He would have knowledge at least, even if he were not inclined to help us.”
Less of an oversimplification, and largely true. And there was an element of solidarity between changelings that they might have been able to play upon.
“Do we have any idea how to actually contact him?” asked the younger Mr. Caesar.
To Miss Bickle, this was a trifling concern. “Well, no, but I am sure something will come up. Trust the system, John.”
“Is there a system?” the younger Mr. Caesar asked, without a trace of uncertainty.
“Well, no, but I feel one should trust it anyway.”
For the past two hours, Lady Mary had been pretending to work at needlepoint while actually twisting a needle between her fingers and wondering why she had been confronted with a problem so wholly beyond her resources. Now she looked up at her son with an almost pleading air. “At least tell me you are no longer going to fight that pointless duel.”
“Things will go worse for us if I do not.”
“Will they?” Lady Mary seemed wholly unconvinced. “Or will it only be worse for your pride?”
Privately, Mr. Caesar was unsure. It was what he told himself, certainly. But how was he to know what he believed and what he had merely been told he should believe? A gentleman did not backdown from a challenge. A gentleman did not lie with other gentlemen. A gentleman was always courteous and well presented. A gentleman did not let his sister come to harm. He had failed in so many areas that he was not sure he could bear to fail in another. “We may need to take actions that require connections. If I am thought a coward as well as a ruffian, it will make maintaining those connections harder. I need to do this.”
The logic was sound, and although none amongst the company liked the reasoning, they accepted it readily enough. And the same logic led to the conclusion that it would be best if the younger Mr. Caesar got an early night. Or at least, he got what passed for an early night in his circumstances, which was a night of lying in bed staring at nothing, trying to keep his thoughts from running to all of the terrible things that lay either behind or before him. He found himself wishing, absurdly, that the captain was there. Which was not a wish he was accustomed to making about men he’d fucked. If anything he was more accustomed to wishing they’d leave.
So silence fell early over the household, a quiet, waiting sort of silence broken only by the scribbling of the elder Mr. Caesar’s pen nib in his study where he, like his son, tried not to dwell on the present misfortune and his role within it. And, like his son, he failed.
There were no more falling stars that night. Which suggested to me that the Lady was busy. Perhaps she had found in Miss Caesar what she had been looking for. A project she could work on. Even if I had been the sort to show concern for mortals, which I am not, I would have felt no fear for the girl. For her life at least. The Lady’s way is only to give, and to give nothing that is not asked for.
Which is, of course, its own kind of cruelty.
Mr. Caesar made his way to Hampstead Heath alone in the small hours of the morning. Well, alone save for a swallow flying overhead and observing his every action with the meticulous attention to detail of a master narrativist.
He was, he realised, somewhat taking his life in his hands not only in fighting this duel but in approaching it. The patrols had largely suppressed the threat of highwaymen but there was still the danger of more regular footpads, to say nothing of such prosaic perils as falling in a ditch, breaking one’s ankle, or staining one’s jacket. And those were only the perils that mortalsknowabout. If you had seen half the things that I have seen lurking in the shadows of even the tamest of wild places, I swear you would none of you ever leave your houses.
Still he made the walk across not-especially-rough ground in not-especially-deep darkness unscathed, and was rewarded with the gratifying sight of Captain James and the somewhat less gratifying sight of Major Bloodworth already waiting for him. The major, it seemed, had enlisted Mr. Bygrave to be his own second, probably because Lord Hale was not the kind of man who would get out of bed for a dawn rendezvous unless he stood to profit from it personally. Of course, by acquiescing to this arrangement, Mr. Bygrave was risking direct involvement in the death of the brother of a girl he was making at least some attempt to court. A fact that bespoke either an amusing obliviousness or a commendable callousness on his part. I lean towards the former.
There stood also with the company a man who Mr. Caesar belatedly realised was a military doctor, and it was his presence more than anything else that brought home to him the reality of what he proposed to do or, more to the point, to risk having done to him. The captain’s slightly too enthusiastic descriptions of thethings different kinds of blades could do to a human body crept up in him and hooked into his mind like ill-mannered spiders.
“Wear these” was Captain James’s only greeting, slapping a pair of heavy leather gauntlets against Mr. Caesar’s chest.
Mr. Caesar looked at his own gloves, which were a rather fine kidskin although he’d had the foresight not to wear his best pair. “Aren’t they a little—”
“They’re a little more likely to dull a cut, put them on.”
He obeyed. Or, not being a man who relished the thought of obedience, was persuaded to take the suggested course of action independently.
While Mr. Caesar was making this small alteration to his attire, Mr. Bygrave came scurrying over. “Major Bloodworth wishes me to say,” he began, juddering to a halt, “that you can still be reconciled if you apologise.”
“Happily,” replied Mr. Caesar. “As soon as he apologises to me.”
