Page 42 of Confounding Oaths
“Anne.” Lady Mary glared at her daughter. “While I am also not … overjoyed that John has chosen to absent himself at such a difficult moment, you should not speak of your brother that way.”
Standing in the centre of the room in a flawless attitude of otherworldly grace, Miss Caesar turned as slowly and inexorably as public opinion. “The difficult moment has passed, Mama. And besides, Anne is just being shrewish because she’s upset that Mr. Bygrave hasn’t called.”
“I am not being shrewish,” Miss Anne protested. “I say it suits him because it does. John has behaved very ill of late.”
Mr. Caesar, who knew more of his son’s recent activities than either of his daughters, was not quite willing to let that stand. “He has made difficult choices,” he said, “and while they are not the choices I would have made they are still his to make.”
The lesson that the lives and decisions of others are complex and best left unjudged unless one is very certain of one’s awareness and standing settled onto Miss Anne like snow and then, like snow, melted away. Whereupon it was replaced by a wholly different thought. So she sighed only a little theatrically and segued into a matter closer to her heart. “I do think this absence very unkind of Mr. Bygrave. I had grown used to his visits.”
“Perhaps somebody else has caught his fancy,” suggested Miss Caesar, a spiral of light dancing delightedly inside her.
Miss Anne’s lips trembled and a single tear glistened artfully in the corner of her eye. “Mama, make Mary stop being beastly. She has already driven John away and—”
But it was not Lady Mary who intervened. “That is enough,” said Mr. Caesar with finality. “You are sisters. You will behave like it.”
“She may not even be my sister anymore,” replied Anne. “She may be something else entirely.”
Lady Mary glared at her daughter. “Your father said that was enough. If the next words out of your mouth aren’t all rainbows and butterflies then you will not attend another ball or speak with another gentleman until you are thirty.”
The injustice of this clearly burned Miss Anne like wet fire, but she did at least keep her silence.
“I am still me,” said Miss Caesar, a little plaintively. And were I the sentimental sort I might have wondered who she was trying to convince.
“I am sure of it,” her father said. And it didn’t sound like he was trying to reassure her so much as that he was stating an immutable truth of the cosmos. “Who you are is the one thing that can never be taken away. And had you not come back to us, we would have found you. Something is trying to separate this family, and I will not permit it.”
Sunlight glittered off the glass roses in Miss Caesar’s hair. “The Lady is not trying to hurt us, Papa, she is trying to help me.”
Mr. Caesar’s face was stone. “She came in the night. And she took you. That is not the action of somebody who wishes you well. It is the action of somebody who wishes to use you.”
“She seems to have done very finely for it,” said Miss Anne, immediately following up with: “Which is a pleasant thing to say. I was paying her a compliment.”
Miss Caesar bobbed an eerily fluid curtsey. “Thank you, Anne.”
“Perhaps I should find a way to be carried off by fairies too,” Miss Anne mused. “It seems—”
“Anne.” The tone of warning in Lady Mary’s voice would have registered with even the most obtuse of debutantes, but still morenotable was the fact that her husband very quietly turned and left the room.
Miss Anne’s gaze followed her father as he left. “Is Papa very upset, do you think? I meant only—”
“Whatever you meant,” said Lady Mary, “your father does not like talk of his children … disappearing.”
For a moment a look of contrition flickered across Miss Anne’s face. “I suppose,” she tried, “it is not so very bad if Mr. Bygrave doesn’t visit so often. I am still young, after all.”
“You should not expect him today at any rate,” pointed out Lady Mary. “He will be at the Earl of Semweir’s ball tonight. He’s of good family; it should be more than enough to secure him an invitation.”
“Whereas we,” Miss Anne ask-stated, “are not of good family?”
The Caesars had tried, as best they could, to shelter their children, especially Miss Anne, from the worst realities of the world they lived in (those realities they knew of, at least; if they understood what horrors lurked beneath the soap bubble of material reality they would have had quite a different order of problem). And Lady Mary took some small comfort in the fact that if their youngest daughter had grown up naïve and a little selfish then that was, at least, a task in which they had succeeded. “Not,” she said at last, “in many people’s eyes.”
The light inside Miss Caesar’s body faded a moment and she asked: “Why did you marry Papa?”
And for an equal moment, Lady Mary was silent. It was not a topic of which she spoke often, at least not to her children “Because I was in love with him,” she began. And then she hesitated again because love was not considered a very sensible basis for marriage, and while her daughters doubtless wanted the fairy tale (I heartilyapprove of this usage, by the way; fairy tales are indeed a fine thing and always to be relied upon) for themselves, they would very much have preferred their mother marry money. “And because I knew that if he could live the kind of life that he had lived and still be the kind of man he is, then I would have nothing to fear so long as I was beside him.”
In spite of her instinctive desire to scorn everything that originated with her parents, Miss Anne pressed her hands to her bosom. “Oh, Mama, how romantic. It could almost be the subject of a novel.”
“Not,” Lady Mary replied, more sorrowfully than she had intended, “one that would be well received amongst the monied classes.” To think, reader. How terrible it must have been to live in a world where writers of fiction have to contend with such considerations.
“Because you married beneath yourself?” asked Miss Caesar. Her tone would once have been icy, but since her transformation every inflection of her voice was accentuated and it cut like, well, like glass. “That is”—she retracted hastily—“I don’t mean … Uncle Richard would say you—”
