Page 56 of Confounding Oaths
That this discussion was going better than Mr. Caesar had expected was a damning indictment of his expectations. “I refuse to believe,” he said, “that a wish-granting spirit of otherworldly beauty and inhuman wit will be lured from her places of safety bymilk.”
Miss Bickle blinked. “Milk is good for you. And we have some very fine milk in Cornwall.”
“What if we kept the milk for a backup?” suggested Captain James, leaning back in his chair and stretching like the world’s least domesticated cat. “And thought more about giving her something she can sink her teeth into.”
Lady Mary raised an interposing hand. “I concur with my husband. We cannot stoop to deliberately imperilling children.”
“Never been in a textile mill, my lady?” asked Callaghan.
If he’d expected to shock his hostess, or to catch her out, he was bitterly disappointed. “I have, in fact. Many millworkers are friends of the abolition and I hope that the abolition is a friend to the millworker. I may not walk the streets naked in protest, but I am fully sensible of where my clothing comes from.”
Easily distracted as ever, Miss Bickle stared intensely at something nobody else could see in a corner of the room. “I declare,” she declared, “it sometimes feels as if there is truly no morally sound way of purchasing goods or services under our present social and economic system, and I rather feel there should be an efficient way to express that idea.”
Sal smiled at her in a way that I might have been inclined to call flirtatious. “No ethical consumerism under colonialism?”
“Please don’t encourage her,” warned Mr. Caesar, “half her speech consists of made-up words already.”
“Those aren’t made-up words,” Miss Bickle insisted, “they’re perfectly well-formed words whose meaning is plain.”
The elder Mr. Caesar leaned forwards. “The impossibility of perfection in an imperfect world aside, can we all agree that it would be wrong to sacrifice one child to save another?”
There was a chorus of agreement from everybody except Jackson.
“I mean, you saywrong,” he opined. “Comes out a wash from where I see it.”
“Where you see it from,” replied Captain James, “is a very dark place.”
“Safest place to be.”
Her head resting against her lover’s body, Miss Mitchelmorecraned her neck upwards to look at her. “Good Lord, Georgiana, somebody’s said something cynical and you haven’t eventriedto outdo them. It’s almost like you’ve grown as a person.”
“I know, I’m disgusted with myself.”
As the ranking officer, albeit ranking officer in charge of less than half the company, Captain James did his best to wrangle the discussion back in the direction of a plan. “Children are out,” he agreed. “But we might need somebody who looks like a victim. Somebody who seems innocent, trusting, and like they’d jump at the chance to be snatched away by some shit from another world.”
Miss Bickle’s eyes grew wide as she stared at her companions. “But where would we find such a person?”
And the rest of the party stared back.
Satisfied that the team who were planning to go toe-to-toe with a mysterious being of unknown and subtle power had the beginnings of a plan, albeit one that stood a better-than-average chance of getting them killed, I lost interest and went to check on Miss Caesar.
She was still walking with Mr. Bygrave—something that would have been quite unforgivable had she been at all in a position to care for the opinions of the ton—and I recognised in him that enraptured look that mortals got when confronted with the Beauty Incomparable.
The sun was setting over Kensington Gardens, but its last rays danced inside Miss Caesar and spilled out of her as she walked, like the opposite of shadows.
“It’s dark,” Mr. Bygrave observed as if in a daze.
“Yes.”
“We must have lost track of time.”
“Yes.”
Their voices echoed, as if from far away. An effect attributable entirely to the romantic atmosphere and not at all to the intervention of any—
“Going rather well, isn’t it?” asked the Lady, freshly arrived from a place at ninety degrees to the mortal world.
“My compliments.”
