Page 43 of Confounding Oaths
Perhaps because her daughter was now literally made of a brittle substance, Lady Mary replied with care. Or as much care as she could while indulging her distaste for compromise. “Your father is not beneath anybody. But yes, Uncle Richard would disagree, as do most of his friends, and most of polite society. The Vicomte de Loux they will accept, but things are different in France. Besides, there are other rules for men, and in his case it was his mother who came from … less acceptable stock.”
Miss Anne looked down at her hands. She had long, slim fingers that she was now twining nervously. Her hands, like the rest of her, were much admired in the ton but as she progressed throughher fourteenth year she was beginning to notice how often words likeexoticmade their way onto her admirers’ lips. “Still,” she said aloud, “it is hard for us sometimes. And when one’s future may be limited by a thing over which one has no control.”
“I know,” replied Lady Mary. And she did indeed know. She would indeed have given much to stop knowing, just for a day or two. “But I cannot regret my choices. Nor that I had you, or John. And besides”—she forced herself to be cheerful—“there will be other balls.”
Right on cue—a cue I had been expecting for some while thanks to my marvellous sensitivity to the ephemeral but had concealed from you, dear reader, for dramatic purpose—the street outside clattered with hoofbeats and rang with the sound of harness bells.
Without being asked, for she was in many ways a well-trained girl, Nancy went to the door to see what the matter might be and, a few minutes later, returned with a puzzled expression.
“There’s a carriage,” she said. “With footmen. Strange footmen. And a lady in a blue gown.”
The light within Miss Caesar kindled once more. “She’s here?”
The same wordsshe’s herewere echoed by Miss Anne and Lady Mary with very different inflections.
“She is,” said a voice from the hallway. It was by far the pleasantest voice any of the mortals there present had ever heard, being sunlight and hope spun into sounds. Though they heard the Lady, they did not at first see her, since she was preceded by her footmen, the ones that Nancy had denounced as “strange.”
Whether they were strange or not depended, of course, on your perspective. I have seen plenty of white-eyed servants with digitigrade legs and an extra joint in each finger. But then I go to a far better type of party than the average human. Their livery, likemost of their mistress’s belongings, was the palest of blues and they announced her arrival with slender trumpets made from a type of bone that, for the sake of my audience’s sensibilities, I shall not identify.
The commotion was enough to stir the elder Mr. Caesar once more from his study, and so he was treated to the full splendour of the Lady’s entrance. She shimmered into the room like a fallen star, which, in many ways, she was.
“What are you doing in my house?” demanded the elder Mr. Caesar with a commendable fortitude for a mortal confronted with one of Titania’s more insidious servants.
“My duty,” the Lady replied. “I have a bargain with your daughter, and I would see my side of it upheld.”
Miss Caesar was already gliding towards the Lady while Miss Anne watched her with profound jealousy and Lady Mary watched her with profound horror.
“Leave her be,” Mr. Caesar demanded. Which was useless. We are not amenable todemands.
The Lady blithely ignored him, as she was ignoring me. I was, I will freely admit, very tempted to attempt to distract her purely for my own amusement, but I was concerned that if her composure broke she would address me, and that would compromise my mission. She extended a hand, smiled beatifically at Miss Caesar, and said—because, dear reader, some incantations are mandatory, “My dear, youshallgo to the ball.”
“Mary”—Lady Mary called after her daughter—“please, don’t go with this … creature.”
Realising that the Lady was not going to listen to reason (and why should she when so little in this cosmos is even remotely rational?), Mr. Caesar decided, with some reluctance, to resort to physical intervention. He did not get very far. Although the Lady madeno word nor gesture that was perceptible to mortal kind, she bid two nearby chairs to assist her, and assist her they did, skittering across the floor to intercede themselves between her and her would-be inconveniencer. When he vaulted, with a frankly unexpected agility, over them she resorted to more drastic measures. A sewing-basket slid from beneath a settee and a single long needle aimed itself directly at Mr. Caesar’s throat.
“I do not wish to be uncouth,” she said, “but where I come from a deal is a deal.”
Miss Caesar looked from the Lady to her father and back to the Lady, and for a moment even I did not know which she would choose.
“It’s all right, Papa,” she said carefully. “I—this is what I want. There’s no need to …”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but went with the fairy. I fell into step beside her and left with them.
“I shan’t be any trouble,” I promised mostly to remind the Lady that I could if I pleased. “But you surely appreciate thatthisbranch of the story is likely to be far more interesting than the one happening back at the house.”
She did not reply, of course. But she cast me an evil look out the corner of her eye and made a valiant if doomed effort to shut the carriage door before I could slip through it.
The carriage itself was a wondrous thing, at least by mortal standards (the steeds and chariots of my master are, of course, more wondrous still, but I am adjusting my assessments to the limited experience of my audience). It was silver spun from moonlight, drawn by four white horses whose eyes burned with a pale fire and whose harnesses were strung with bells that were each a star.
Miss Caesar settled down on a seat upholstered in pale blue silkand watched as her parents’ house receded into the distance. Her expression was harder to read now that her face was made of glass, and her heart harder to read now that it had been replaced with a ball of borrowed light, but I sensed ambivalence from her.
“Papa will—you would not have hurt him?” she asked.
“Of course not,” said the Lady. Though she said it only once. “But he was trying to keep you from your destiny. And destiny, child, is not a thing with which one toys.”
I knew, as I am sure the Lady did, that it was a specious argument at best. A vapid appeal to large-sounding ideas in order to cover up an unpleasant truth.
But the lure of a life of beauty was tempting, especially to a young woman in a world where beauty was the only currency a lady really had of her own. And so Miss Caesar permitted herself to be convinced. And to be carried through the streets of London to the fashionable residence of the Earl of Semweir.
