Page 47 of Confounding Oaths
“He is a good man,” Miss Caesar replied almost reflexively. “And from a good family.”
“And your sister likes him.” The reply was calculated. Not cruel exactly; cruelty has a different connotation for my people than for yours.
Certainly it was calculated well enough that it silenced Miss Caesar a moment. And made her denial sound weak when she made it.
“Come, come.” The Lady patted Miss Caesar on the knee, and I took the chance to snap at her fingers. “It is no crime to desire what others have.”
Hard as she was for me to read now, I could sense through her hands how dearly the girl wanted to believe that. Which meant she probably would, eventually. “Not a crime. But envy is a sin.”
“According to one faith. There are many.”
The mortals of England were strange about religion. They knew, of course, that the gods of the ancients were real, physical beings while having no such reassurance about the one their Church claimed to speak for, yet they persisted in believing in him anyway. So it was in this spirit of human perversity that Miss Caesar took the talk of polytheism rather more to heart than the act of turning her into a statue of living glass.
“I shall not have you lead me astray,” she protested.
“Really?” The Lady adopted a tone that I knew well, having so often used it myself. “Butastrayis where all of thebestthings are.”
And though I am loath to admit it, she was right in this also.
“I like Mr. Bygrave on his own account,” Miss Caesar replied. And in the moment at least I believed that she believed it.
The Lady, for her part, patted Miss Caesar’s hand in an almost motherly fashion. “As you say, child,” she replied. “As you say.”
They returned to the Caesar house to find it not in uproar precisely, but in a level of disharmony uncommon in the era. The night-long absence of Miss Caesar had been trying enough, but it had been punctuated around midnight by the arrival of her brother, Captain James, and a limited subsection of the Irregulars, bearing news of the robed men and the attack on the Folly. Should you be concerned for the remaining soldiers, dear reader, rest assured that they were making their own arrangements back in St. Giles. Or perhaps they had gone to stay on a nice farm in the country.
There had followed a short debriefing in which both parties had apprised one another on the flavour of fuckedness that haddescended upon them, and they had then, mutually, attempted to game through the ways in which those fuckednesses intersected and exacerbated one another.
This exercise had lasted until three, at which point the younger Mr. Caesar had retired—not, in this instance, with Captain James; there were some things one did not do in the house of one’s father—leaving his parents to wait up anxiously while various soldiers littered the drawing room like toys discarded by a gigantic schoolchild.
When Nancy, who was not technically expected to go to bed before the household and thus getting rather the worst end of this deal, showed the returning Miss Caesar through to where her parents were waiting, the young lady reacted to the scene before her with less surprise than one might expect for a girl of her age and experience. Then again, she had just been transported to a ball by a fairy, so her tolerance for the unusual was likely heightened.
The arrival of Miss Caesar and the Lady provoked a flurry of motion amongst those still awake. Lady Mary (my apologies, reader, there happen to be a number of ladies present) rushed forward, moved to embrace her daughter, remembered what happened last time, and caught her by the hands instead. The elder Mr. Caesar rose more cautiously, with his eyes firmly on the more supernatural of the pair, and Captain James let his hand drift slowly to his sword.
“I am safe, Mama,” Miss Caesar said, finding that it is hard to sound reassuring when your voice is a song from the cold side of eternity. “I danced and was—they saw me.”
Although he had maintained his calm throughout the arrival and had shown admirable willingness to overlook the bit with the needle and the direct threat on his life, this last observation provedtoo much for the elder Mr. Caesar. “They did not see you, Mary. They saw glass.”
“Glass,” the Lady replied—not, it seemed, trusting her protégé to think or act for herself—“is beauty.”
With the occasionally prim defiance that gave her such a Quakerish reputation, Lady Mary folded her arms. “Beauty is character.”
The Lady curled her lips into a smile of exquisite cruelty. “That is a lie we tell ugly people to comfort them. Your daughter made a bargain, it will be kept. To her benefit.”
Crouching behind the divan with a pistol ready, Callaghan mustered his strength of will and disagreed. “That’s what King George said to me and the lads, we’ve very few of us felt he held up his end of the deal.”
“She says I might marry a duke,” Miss Caesar protested.
“I would sooner you married a tanner and were happy,” replied her mother, “than a prince and were not.”
A creature of her society to the core, Miss Caesar saw no sense in the assertion. “I do not know what happiness there can be in poverty.”
“To be fair to the girl,” observed Sal, who uniquely amongst the soldiers had not taken cover; she was resting in the window seat with a shiv concealed in her skirts, “she has a point. Poverty is fucking terrible.”
Captain James glanced at her for a half a heartbeat before turning his attention back to the Lady. “It is, but she’s not talking about proper poverty. She’s talking about only having one servant.”
This, Miss Caesar would not abide. “If I cannot marry, I may be able to affordnoservants.”
Sal barked an unimpressed laugh. “Imagine.”
