Page 32 of Confounding Oaths
From her window seat, Miss Anne made a sound of profound grievance. “Well, isn’t that just like you.”
“Just like me?” The tone Miss Caesar had been aiming for was, I think, hurt, but in her new fairy-touched shape her every word was touched with mirth, and so it came out cutting. “Whatever do you mean?”
With the aggrieved fury of all her fourteen years, Miss Anne gave her sister a look of withering accusation. “You couldn’t let me have even one thing. You had to be the pretty one as well.”
“Not wishing to speak out of turn,” said Captain James very gently, “I don’t think that’s what we should be worrying about right now.”
“Well, of course you don’t,” replied Miss Anne. “You’re not even a proper officer. How would you understand these things?”
By the door, Nancy cleared her throat. “Saving your presence, miss, and yours, miss”—she bobbed curtseys to both of her young mistresses—“I wouldn’t know a proper officer from an improper one, but he’s right. I knew a lass made a wish once and it went bad for everybody.”
Reader, I have left the following exchange intact out of my peerless personal integrity, but I should remind you that incidents like the ones described in these pages represent an unrepresentative minorityof mortal-fairy interactions. The vast majority of them end extremely satisfactorily for both parties and with hardly anybody dead, transformed to sea-foam, or ruing their choices until death and beyond.
“What did she wish for?” asked Lady Mary, releasing her son from her embrace.
“For her brother to not die of the scarlatina.”
“And did he?” asked Mr. Caesar.
“No,” replied Nancy. And there was an ominousness to the syllable which begged for follow-up.
“Did he …” Lady Mary was trying her very best to formulate a question whose answer would not be devastating to hear. “Did he die of something else instead?”
Nancy nodded. “Shot by three Bow Street Runners.”
For a moment the detail meant nothing to anybody present. But then Miss Anne, who paid rather more attention to lurid rumours and broadside ballads than most of her family, put her hands to her mouth. “You mean he was the Red Death of Clapham?”
Mr. Caesar turned to his youngest child. “What is that, precisely?”
“He was a spirit,” Miss Anne explained, still slightly too shocked to recount the tale properly, “or a demon, or a monster of some kind. His touch spread the scarlet fever and he killed twenty men before they found him and—”
“I do not,” Miss Caesar insisted, “spread scarlet fever. I am just”—she stood for a moment looking down at herself, at the light spilling out from where her heart had been—“I’m just me.”
And that observation hushed the room. Presumably because nobody wanted to voice the doubts they were experiencing over that exact question.
Lady Mary, aware that on that matter at least her silence was speaking as loudly as any admonition, crossed the sitting room towrap her arms warmly around her daughter. But this nauseatingly affectionate action was cut off by a cry of pain, and she withdrew, blood flowing freely from lacerations on her palm.
“Mama?” Miss Caesar looked quite distraught, as might any child in such a situation.
Lady Mary, still nursing her injury, couldn’t quite look her daughter in the eye. “Don’t worry, it’s just—those leaves are very sharp.”
Cautiously, Miss Caesar raised her fingers to her hair. But glass does not cut glass and so she felt nothing. “I didn’t mean to,” she tried.
“No doubt.” The elder Mr. Caesar had yet to move, but he stood now to inspect his wife’s injury. “Nancy, this looks deep, you may need to fetch a doctor.”
Miss Caesar looked close to tears. Close to, but not actually crying, and I wondered, idly, if she still could. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m sorry.”
“You should be,” snapped Miss Anne from the window. “Look what you’ve done.”
That earned her a harsh “That’s enough, Anne” from Lady Mary, but it was too late. There is little that hardens the heart like a reprimand from a younger sibling.
Nancy returned with water, lint, and bandages, and Lady Mary sat down, a little unsteady, her husband supporting her.
“This is not Mary’s fault,” the elder Mr. Caesar told his daughter with a certainty honed over years of public speaking. “This is something that was done to her.”
It was, by all accounts, a reasonable statement, but he had reckoned without the wilfulness he and his wife had, with some consideration, instilled in all of their children.
“It was not,” insisted Miss Caesar. “This is what I wanted. What I asked for. The Lady—”
