Page 29 of Confounding Oaths
Mr. Bygrave looked uncertain. “What would he need to apologise to you for?”
It was not entirely unreasonable that the lad didn’t know. Mr. Caesar had deliberately kept the details from both of his sisters. Not that it had helped Mary, in retrospect. “For having his men accost me?” Mr. Caesar suggested. “But more pertinently for what he said about my sister.”
“What did he say about your sister?” asked Mr. Bygrave.
“He … implied that she was ill-favoured.”
Mr. Bygrave adopted a look of shock that Miss Bickle would have been proud of. “Surely not, Anne is one of the—”
“Not Anne. Mary.”
The look of shock vanished. “Oh, well—I mean, look, military men can be indelicate and well …”
“Well?” asked Captain James, his voice soft and level.
“Well, I’d never say as much aloud, but not every girl can be a beauty.”
It was, I feel, testimony to the general evenness of Mr. Caesar’s temperament that he felt no desire to strike the gentleman. “He insulted her by specific reference to her … heritage.”
Sometimes, you can see a gentleman walking towards a cliff edge from so far away you have time to fetch your trombone and start playing an appropriately farcical tune. This, with Mr. Bygrave, was one such time. “I suppose,” he began. It was not an auspicious beginning. “That is … from the major’s perspective you have to concede that African ladies do, on average, look—”
“Choose your next words well,” warned Captain James. “And when you do, remember two things.”
“What things?” asked Mr. Bygrave obligingly.
“Number one. That what you say next isn’t just about Mary, it’s about my mother. And her mother. And her mother’s mother. Number two, that one day in the very near future I might be in a position where I must decide whether or not it’s worth saving your life.”
Mr. Bygrave blinked, unused to such frank discussion of death from the officer class but cowed as much by Captain James’s heroic reputation as anything else. “Of course,” he said, “I’m sorry. And I meant no offence.”
“See how easy that was?” replied the captain. “Now, why don’t you run off and see if the major’ll do the same.”
Mr. Bygrave dashed back to speak with the major but, as he did, I lost interest, because I saw a single star streak across the heavens, and heard a music like glass chimes in a gentle breeze, and felt the breath of the Lady on my neck.
“I am working,” I told her.
“So you continue to tell yourself.”
In my peripheral vision I watched Mr. Caesar walk over to the major and say … something. It was hard for me to make out while so distracted. “I have events to observe.”
“Don’t you just. I wonder if you realise how interesting those events are about to become.”
I did not wonder. I was beginning to know for certain. The Lady had chosen to interject herself into my story and there was nothing I could do about it without sending the narrative careening off onto paths I could not predict.
“It’s an officer’s weapon”—the major was saying—“which you’d know if you’d ever fought for your country. Go on then, you upjumped vagabond, take one.”
“The big reveal,” the Lady told me, “is coming in three.”
Mr. Caesar’s fingers closed on a narrow-bladed cut-and-thrust sword …
“Two.”
… and he retreated, uncertain, to a mark that Captain James was holding for him. …
“One.”
… “En garde,sir,” the major began with a sneer. …
“And here we go.”
