Page 48 of Confounding Oaths
“What shall I do for money if I cannot find a suitable husband?” Miss Caesar continued, demonstrating a persistent failure to—if you will forgive the anachronistic phrasing—read the room.
“Scrub floors?” suggested Callaghan.
“Take in laundry?” offered the captain.
“On Saturdays,” Sal said, “there’s Jewish folk need errands run. On account of the Sabbath.”
“You’re a well-brought-up lady,” the captain tried again, “you could probably be a schoolmistress.”
“Or,” said Jackson, half-melted into the shadow of the doorway, “you could just sell your body.”
Outraged as only a young woman infused with fairy majesty canbeoutraged, Miss Caesar glowered. “I wouldnever.”
Shielded from the worst of the Lady’s magic by cynicism and disinterest, Jackson raised an eyebrow. “Really? It doesn’t sound that different from your first plan to me.”
“More risk of the clap?” Sal observed.
“Depends on the duke.”
While the Irregulars had been debating the various careers open to unwed women in the year of some people’s lord 1815, the elder Mr. Caesar had been ruminating on the situation. When he spoke at last, it was over a room that fell swiftly silent.
“Mary,” he said, “we are glad you have returned, and we want you to be happy. But this family knows as well as any that magic is treacherous. As are smiling strangers.”
Still in the shape of Ferdinand the lapdog, I gave a gentleruffof approval.
“My Lady,” he continued, addressing the individual who went only by that moniker, “I thank you for returning our daughter to ussafely. And I trust that you will continue to do so, should you procure her further …invitations.”
For a man with no especial knowledge of the Other Court, the elder Mr. Caesar had done a remarkably efficient job of crafting an insult. We hate to be thanked, at least with words, and we hate to have our future actions predicted even more. We know the power of even simple foretelling and take it seriously in a way your kind do not.
In reply, the Lady smiled her most magnanimous smile. And like all of her smiles it embodied the adjective that describes it with a completeness that mortal flesh cannot replicate. “Think nothing of it. And I assure you, sir, that your daughter will come to no harm while she is by my side.”
“Good.” Mr. Caesar nodded with a confidence that belied his circumspection. “But I ask you to go now. The hour is late, and the household has been much disrupted.”
Disrupting households is, in point of fact, one of the twelve most beloved pastimes of my species. But while Ipersonallyfind delayed gratification to be the wholly inferior variety, the Lady was made of different stuff, and played longer games.
So she swept a perfect curtsey, assured Miss Caesar that she would return, and vanished into the night.
When she was gone the soldiers stood down, and the whole company breathed a collective sigh of relief.
“Mary,” Lady Mary told her daughter, “it might be best if you went to your room.”
So she went. And I, like a good little dog, followed her.
The dog disguise would, I was sure, eventually grow tiresome. But puppies were stolen or ran away all the time, and while her naming me would have given Miss Caesar the power to call meback, I took comfort in the fact that she was unlikely to know the proper forms.
Upstairs, she stood in the centre of her bedchamber and looked down at me.
“Oh, Ferdy,” she said, addressing herself as much as me. Not using the full name was a good sign. Nobody has ever saidnicknameshave power. “Why won’t they just let me be happy?”
“Rruff?”
“Perhaps,” she replied. What she thought I’d said I have no idea; maybe she was simply playing along. “But it seems so unfair. Mama and Papa are so overprotective.”
“Rruff.”
“That’s as may be, but I am not responsible for their uncertainties.”
A vanity sat in one corner of the lady’s room, a mirror above it, and she crossed over to it now and looked at herself, much as she had on the night the Lady first visited her. I remained at floor height, not wishing to accidentally reveal my true reflection.
