Page 51 of Confounding Oaths
Captain James looked down at him and, apparently less concerned about propriety or the thorny question of what kind of relationship the two of them actually had, brushed his fingertips lightly over Mr. Caesar’s arm in a way that wasn’t quite friendly but wasn’t quite sexual. “Shouldn’t think so. He’s not a very polite man.”
Though the sun was well risen, Mr. Caesar shut his eyes and pretended it wasn’t. “I think,” he said aloud, “that I am going to ignore all of this until the morning.”
“It is morning,” Captain James reminded him.
“Proper morning. Proper morning involves bacon.”
Laughed out for the night, the captain just exhaled amusedly. “Where I’m from, proper morning is a thousand Frenchmen coming over the hill with drums and muskets.”
Mr. Caesar rolled over. “Where I’m from, I suspect we get a lot more sleep.”
When Captain James rose to leave, Mr. Caesar felt rather than saw the motion. “You could stay,” he suggested to the empty air.
“What about propriety?”
“I meant more … for company. Besides, Nancy will thank me for keeping your boots off the upholstery.”
The captain sat back down. “You don’t pay that girl enough.”
“How do you know what we pay her?”
“I don’t, but I know it’s not enough. Balls to all hours, fairies, soldiers. She’s had a right time of it.”
Sleepily, Mr. Caesar murmured something about looking into it and, reasoning that little more would be achieved that evening, I let them be. The Caesars were, after all, not the only family I was observing at that time.
But those are different tales, for different occasions.
Chapter Eleven
By now, reader, you shouldknow that little delights me more than chaos. And so I found the scene that unfolded in the Caesar household the following morning very delightful indeed. Poor Nancy—I say poor Nancy, but she is not the focus of this story and you should, therefore, discount her needs and feelings entirely; discounting the needs and feelings of others is a vital life skill and you should practice it early and often. Nancy, the inconsequential maid-of-all-work, had been required, on two hours’ sleep, to rise, assist her various mistresses in dressing (the vitrification of Miss Caesar was a blessing in this regard since her clothes appeared now to be part of her person), and then start work on the breakfast.
She was, in this, either assisted or hindered, depending on how you might consider it, by the enthusiastic support of the captain’s enlisted men.
“I do know,” Callaghan was insisting to her, “how to boil an egg.”
Nancy looked at him suspiciously. “Not men’s work, sir. Nor guests’.”
Sal, whose current presentation rendered one of those objections invalid if not the other, pried a pan of water from Nancy’s stubbornly resisting fingers. “We’re not guests. We’re a pack of armed bastards burst into your house unannounced because one of us is fucking your master.”
At that, Nancy coloured deeply. “Mistress Sally!”
“Just Sal. And I’m nobody’s mistress.”
Lurking in one corner and pointedly not offering to help anybody with anything, Jackson choked out a half laugh. “Sal, my dear, you’reeverybody’smistress.”
“You’ll not deter us, miss,” Callaghan continued, ignoring the badinage that crossed the room. “We’ve been trained not to be deterred, you see. Leave the eggs to me and Sal, you just work on the bread, and Jackson over there will start seeing to the coffee.”
From the look on his face, Jackson had no intention of seeing to the coffee. But from the look on Callaghan’s face the coffee would be seen to whether Jackson willed it or no.
Leaving the downstairs to its downstairs business, I made my way up through the breakfast parlour, where Miss Anne was still remonstrating with her mother about the current state of the household.
“I thought youlikedsoldiers,” Lady Mary pointed out with only the faintest of smirks.
“Officers,” Miss Anne replied. “Gentlemen. Notinfantrymen.I am sure they will have no conversation. And one of them is clearly Irish.”
Her father looked up from his letters. “And what is wrong with the Irish?”
For the briefest of moments, Miss Anne adopted the perplexedexpression of one asked to justify an unexamined assumption. “Well,” she tried, “they just cause so many problems.”
