Page 6 of Confounding Oaths
“You all right?” asked Captain James.
Mr. Caesar looked up at the man he didn’t quite want to call his saviour although he had, strictly speaking, saved him. In any light, and from any angle, he cut a remarkable figure, the clean military lines of his infantryman’s jacket at odds with a slightly unshaven jaw and eyes that said he’d seen mirth and sorrow in equal measure. Realising that he was taking far too long to answer a simple question, Mr. Caesar stumbled into a “Sorry, what, yes.”
“And your sister?”
The part of Mr. Caesar that expected everything to be a slight or a feint wanted to reply with something sharp. Ahas had her fill of soldiers, I suspector similar. But it was late, and now the shock of the fight was wearing off he was realising how tired he was. So he tried honesty. “I don’t know. I’d have checked on her but Alexandre—the vicomte—wanted me out and it would have been gauche to refuse him.”
“I could go back if you like, do it for you?”
Fond as he was of military men, Mr. Caesar was beginning to grow suspicious. “You seem very keen to help me.”
That earned a smile. And Captain James’s smile was wide, sincere, and knowing. “There’s not a lad in the regiment wouldn’t lamp Bloodworth one if he thought he could get away with it. That’s worth a couple of good turns.”
“Insults a lot of men’s sisters, does he?” asked Mr. Caesar.
“Gets a lot of men killed.”
Not normally one to be back-footed, Mr. Caesar found himself without an answer. Present circumstances excepted, his experience of physical danger was strictly limited to the occasional visit to agaming hell and that one time he’d helped his cousin confront a murderously enraged goddess. “Perhaps I should have hit him harder.”
“Nah.” Captain James looked down at Mr. Caesar’s hand, still bloody around the knuckles. “You’d have broke your hand. Keep your wrist straight next time.”
“I’m hoping there won’tbea next time.”
A faintly rueful smile flickered across Captain James’s face. “You don’t know Major Bloodworth.”
“Nor do I care to.”
“Must be nice to have the choice,” replied the captain, and there was the rue again. “Now, you just sit tight and I’ll check on the ladies.”
All in all it was, for Mr. Caesar, a bit of a personal low point. He had gone from defending his sister’s honour to sitting on a wall while a man he’d just met—and a military man at that, so to be trusted only in a very narrow set of circumstances—checked on her actual well-being. And tempted as I was to lurk nearby and watch a man in a now rather disarranged cravat wallowing in self-pity, I elected instead to follow the captain inside. There was unlikely to be more violence that evening, but I hoped that I might at least hear some choice insults.
I did not hear any choice insults. But I got to see a young woman cry, and I take my victories where I may.
Miss Caesar was sobbing in Miss Bickle’s arms, while the vicomte stood a little way off doing his best to refocus his guests’ attention on less diverting matters. Miss Anne, meanwhile, was watching proceedings with the petulant expression of a young girlwho sees no reason why somebody else’s hurt feelings or bruised face should ruin her evening.
Despite the vicomte’s best efforts, a small crowd was gathering. As desultory as the fight had been, it was still an order of magnitude more entertaining than a band of old toffs dancing a reel.
“I say,” a redheaded fellow named Fillimore was observing, “this has been quite a scene.”
“How perceptive of you,” replied Miss Penworthy, who had come to discuss the works of the anonymous lady author with Miss Bickle and encountered far more excitement than she had bargained for. “Perhaps you should add that this sort of thing seldom happens.”
“Well, it does not,” Fillimore agreed. “I’ve never seen such a sight in all my days.”
Lord Hale smiled a grim smile. “It’s what comes of letting in the wrong sort.”
“Perhaps we should let in more of the wrong sort,” another guest suggested over the top of her fan. “It enlivens the evening.”
This suggestion went over poorly with the rest of the gawpers. “On behalf of my sex,” said an older man with wispy hair and a mild stoop, “I can safely say we’d prefer to all go home with our jaws unstruck.”
A little apart from the throng, a young officer—barely more than a child to my eyes, although being ageless and caring little for the life cycles of biological organisms I find these things hard to judge—was attempting to console Miss Anne as much as a gentleman could while remaining within the bounds of propriety. “Rest assured, miss,” he told her, “that no gentleman of good character will hold these events against you.”
That nobody, gentleman or otherwise, of good character or ill, offered similar reassurance to anybody else was not lost on MissBickle, Miss Caesar, or the newly returned Captain James, who pushed his way towards the front of the group with a relentless mission-focus that did as well for the social battlefield as the more literal one.
“You all right, miss?” he asked Miss Caesar and then, when she proved incapable of providing a coherent answer, looked to Miss Bickle and asked, “She all right?”
Miss Bickle gave a reassuring nod. “She will be. It’s just all been rather beastly.”
Still not especially coherent, Miss Caesar burbled something to the effect that she agreed with this characterisation.
