Page 50 of Confounding Oaths
“Yes, but—”
“My dad was a soldier. My mum was a soldier’s wife. I serve with soldiers, fight with soldiers against soldiers. When I die I’ll die a soldier and I’ll rot with soldiers.”
In some ways it took Mr. Caesar longer to wrap his mind around this than it had for him to accept his sister becoming a living vitreous statue. “It can’t be that straightforward. What about other officers?”
“Fuck other officers.”
“What about everybody else?”
“My everybody else isn’t the same as your everybody else.”
Mr. Caesar looked sceptical. “Isn’t everybody’s everybody else the same as everybody else’s everybody else?” He checked himself. “Fuck, you’ve got me talking like Lizzie.”
“Your everybody else,” the captain explained, “is a bunch of rich bastards who’ve got everything and spend their whole lives scheming against each other to get more. My everybody else is regular people. And regular people have too much going on to care who you fuck or where your parents came from.”
To Mr. Caesar, especially in that moment, it sounded unimaginably pleasant. Or perhaps just unimaginable.
“I’m not saying people aren’t pricks sometimes,” the captain continued. And there was a steadiness in his voice that Mr. Caesar wanted to cling to like a drowning man might cling to a piece ofdriftwood. “But I’ve never had to split myself in two. Your lot’ll never let me in. My lot’ll never let me down. You know where you are with that.”
Mr. Caesar allowed the conversation to lull into silence. What, after all, could he say? That a world without contradictions was so alien to him that the mere description of it was humbling? Ordinarily in his assignations that kind of break in the conversation would be the cue to start fucking or leaving. Which had been—well, it had beenaway to live a life. And it was the way that unmarried men were expected to live. Albeit they were generally expected to be seeking a different flavour of conquest.
“Thank you,” Mr. Caesar said at last. “For caring. Mary isn’t at all your responsibility.”
When he wanted it to, Captain James’s smile could be all kinds of wicked. “I’ve always had a weakness for a damsel in distress.”
“I’m not sure I’d call her that.”
“Wasn’t talking about her.”
Mr. Caesar did not look affronted, but he looked close to the front. “I’m not sure I care fordamsel.I’m not that kind of Ganymede.”
“Dandy in distress then?”
This was better, but not by much. “Nor am Iin distress.”
“When we first met,” the captain reminded him, “you were getting drug up off your feet by two men who’d have thrashed you bloody without breaking a sweat.”
“That might, I confess, have constituted a modicum of distress,” conceded Mr. Caesar. “But I had your back at the hearing. And I don’t think I was entirely useless in the attack on the Folly.”
Captain James laughed. “Hold on, I’ll send a runner to Wellington, let him know we’ve another for the front. ‘Send John Caesar over right away, he’s not entirely useless.’”
“That fire could have burned out of control.”
“Or just burned out.”
Deeply conscious that he was beginning to sound petulant, but not quite able to stop himself, Mr. Caesar said: “I thought I was tolerably courageous.”
“Tolerably,” agreed Captain James. “And there’s officers who’d have done less.”
Sensing a blessed opportunity to turn the conversation to other men’s deficiencies, Mr. Caesar pounced. “Like Major Bloodworth?”
“And half the rest.”
Not quite sure if theirs was yet a placing-a-reassuring-hand relationship, Mr. Caesar kept his hands very much to himself. “It was him tonight, wasn’t it? The men in red.”
Captain James nodded. “Probably wasn’t with them, but rich fucks are up to their neck in cult bollocks. I think they learn it at them posh schools they go to.”
“Having been to a posh school”—Mr. Caesar looked uncomfortable—“there were definite whispers, but I never saw anything myself. Then again I wouldn’t have been invited. Wrong connections.” With a frustrated groan he flopped back onto the bed. “Do you think,” he asked the ceiling, “that if we sent the major a very polite letter he’d agree to stop trying to kill us until after I’ve worked out how to stop my sister being a statue?”
