Page 44 of Confounding Oaths
Chapter Nine
The Earl of Semweir wasone of the more disgustingly wealthy gentlemen in London. Of course I say disgustingly wealthy, but that is to do the man an injustice. By the standards of his era his wealth was eminently respectable, meaning his distant ancestors had stolen it from other Englishmen long enough ago that it didn’t count, and his more recent ancestors had increased it by stealing from people who werenotEnglish, and so that didn’t count either.
Indeed his house was so respectable that it was ordinarily entirely closed to the Caesars. Lady Mary might, perhaps, have been welcome on her own account had she left the entirety of her family at home, but since she would never have wished to enter such a house in the first place, the point was moot. While Lady Mary would have scrupled at attending a ball at which neither her husband nor her children would ever have been welcome, however, her eldest daughter had the giddiness of youth, a sheltered upbringing, and fairy magic guiding her away from such considerations.
It was not the grandest house Miss Caesar had ever seen—hergrandfather’s residence, being in the countryside and thus having more land to sprawl over, was larger, as was the Duke of Annadale’s ancestral-ish residence of Leighfield—but it was by far the most splendid building she had ever been invited to within the confines of the city.
“And you are certain we shall be admitted?” she asked the Lady, her eyes wide with wonder.
“Quite certain.” The Lady gave no further explanation. She simply willed the carriage to halt, and the door to open, and disembarked. Makinganotherdetermined attempt to stop me following her by slamming the door in my face as I tried to leave. Unfortunately for her its windows were transparent and in the days before my exile I could take the form of sunlight if I wished, and so I did.
The door of the great house (Inching, it was called, though the name will largely not matter) was attended by two footmen who approached the newcomers with the initial intent of informing them that they had not been invited but who, at the sight of Miss Caesar and her escort, fell to deference, opening the doors wide and letting Miss Caesar, the Lady, and the things that posed as her servants walk past quite unimpeded.
By the year 1815 the practice of guests at a ball, or any public event, being introduced by fanfare had long since died out, but this did not stop the Lady, whose servants heralded her arrival, and that of her protégé, with the uncanny piping of their bone trumpets. I found the sound pleasant enough, but then I am accustomed to the music of the otherworlds.
For any mortal to so interrupt a dance in progress (for the Lady had come, as it would now be termed, fashionably late) would be an unforgivable social transgression. But transgression is the lifeblood of our kind and so it was quite overlooked.
What was not overlooked, however, was Miss Caesar. Like the sunlight and the starlight before it, her body of unearthly glass captured the candlelight of the ballroom and whirled it into a cavalcade of pale motes that coursed through her and wrapped around her like the finest gown ever spun by hands mortal or immortal.
You cannot know, reader, how much it pains me to admit it, but the Lady was very, very good at her job.
When the trumpeters finished trumpeting, the whole room fell into an eerie silence, broken only by the ringingtap-tap-tapof Miss Caesar’s glass feet on the ballroom floor. The Lady and I stood back and watched and she, content with her work, permitted herself to fade from view.
“You have to admit,” she said, more challengingly than I thought warranted, “she looks wonderful.”
I nodded. “For how long?”
“Long enough.”
Had I cared, and of course I did not, I would have found the answer ominous.
From the great silent crowd a young man came forwards. It was Mr. Bygrave, still in uniform—even an earl liked to have the occasional respectable soldier in his home—and looking now at Miss Caesar with a very similar rapt admiration to that with which he had once looked at her sister.
“Miss Caesar,” he said, with remarkable composure for a man beholding the Beauty Incomparable, “would you be so good as to give me this dance?”
And although she had no card to mark, Miss Caesar nodded, and gave him her hand, and the band struck up a waltz.
At the same time (well, not quite the same time, but the distance from Inching to the Folly was not so very long and Iamso very fast) that Miss Caesar’s glass slippers weretap-tap-tappingthrough the waltz at one of the ton’s more exclusive private balls, glass of a different sort was becoming important to her brother.
That glass was window glass. It was important because it had shattered. It had shattered because something had been thrown through it. The thing that had been thrown through it was the severed head of a bull.
The many and various insalubrious inhabitants of the Folly scrambled. For the civilian occupants, that meant making for the exits; for the military men (and for Sal, who was currently a lady), it meant finding cover and arming themselves.
Without a word from anybody in the regiment, Jackson skirted the edge of the room with his head down and a pistol he’d acquired from the-god-of-your-choice-knows-where drawn. With the caution conveniently shared by professional soldiers and professional criminals, he risked a glance through the least grimy corner of the unshattered window.
“Red robes,” he said, “white masks.”
“Mithraists?” asked Kumar, who had readied a musket and trained it at the door.
Jackson still had his eyes on the intruders. “The fuck should I know? Do I look like a professor of comparative religion at a celebrated university?”
“It’ll be the major,” replied the captain, with bitter confidence. “Every rich bastard in His Majesty’s army’s in at least two cults.”
… Back at Inching (I am swift, reader, so very swift), Miss Caesar danced with Mr. Bygrave, their hands joined above their heads, the music and the lights swirling inside her. …
In my fleeting absence, the door had been breached, and therobed men had come forth with fire and sabre and pistol. It had not, in the first instance, gone well for them, because while the musket was not so accurate as the rifle, the Irregulars were good shots and Kumar caught one in the chest, Callaghan got another in the shoulder, and the captain, with his pistol, took a third through the mask.
… In the ballroom all was harmony and wonder. The first waltz had ended and, sensible even now of the mores of society, Miss Caesar chose another man to dance with. Mr. Bygrave, after all, she could return to later, if he truly favoured her. …
