Page 67 of Confounding Oaths
“Not earls’ granddaughters.”
Mr. Caesar had no reply to that.
“We can go back out,” suggested the captain, “if you want. Though we’ll not have much chance tonight I don’t think.”
“No”—defeated, Mr. Caesar could barely even bring himself to shake his head—“no, I do not believe we would do any good.”
The door opened and, conjuring hope from nowhere, Mr. Caesar turned towards it. Not expectant, but alert. He had responded like this to every guest who had entered all evening, finding sometimes one of the Irregulars with discouraging news, sometimes a complete stranger looking for a drink or a bed or a combination of the two.
This time, however, the new arrival was his father.
“She is back,” he announced from halfway across the room. “I thought you should know.”
Guilt is an alien emotion to my species (we are, indeed, capable of feeling only six things: mirth, anger, curiosity, two sensations that have no equivalents for mortals, and one I choose not to name), but I have seen it often in humans, and I recognised it in Mr. Caesar now. “There was no need, Papa,” he said. “That is—you have come a long way.”
Not wanting to have this conversation from across a floor full of drunk strangers, the elder Mr. Caesar approached his son. “And who should I have sent? Your mother? Your sister? Nancy is a good girl, but we do not pay her enough to carry messages at this time of night or to this part of the city.”
“You still didn’t have to come yourself. I would have—”
“Come back eventually?”
“Tomorrow, Father,” Mr. Caesar insisted. “I would have come back tomorrow.” It wasn’t a lie. It was a prediction on the basis of minimal evidence.
The elder Mr. Caesar gave a slow nod. “Well, now you have no need. Be safe, John.”
And he departed, leaving his son not quite able to follow, not quite able to ask him to stay. Sat at a bar he wasn’t sure he wanted to be in, thinking thoughts he wasn’t sure he wanted to think, about a life he was only half-sure he wanted to be living. Since waking that morning, he had managed to drive away both a sister and a father and he could face no more demands, no more expectations, and no more choices.
“I believe,” he said at last, “I may be done for the evening.”
With that, he rose and made his way up to the, by his standards at least, rather squalid room he had taken to staying in when he had a mind to escape to the Folly. Halfway up the staircase, he turned, and noticed that Captain James was following close behind, like a friend or a lover.
“Not tonight,” he told him. “I’ve a lot on my mind and am in no mood to fuck a soldier.”
Before the captain could reply, Mr. Caesar—perhaps knowing he had not been entirely tactful—turned and fled to the room.
In more polite company, that would have been the end of it. But he was not in polite company, he was in the company of infantrymen. So as he tried to hide in bed, a persistent pounding at the door dismissed all his hopes of oblivion. Still, with gentlemanly resolve, he did his best to ignore it.
“Do you really think I’d let you say that then walk away?” asked Captain James through the door.
“You think it’s your place toletme do anything?” Once again it had been the wrong thing to say, but sometimes saying the wrong thing felt soright.
“Oh no you don’t. You want to play the lordling with societybrats and thief-catchers that’s one thing, they were asking for it. You don’t play it with me.”
“Go away, Orestes.”
“Captain James to you, Caesar.”
“Go away,Captain.”
The doors in the Folly could, if necessary, be bolted from the inside. But Mr. Caesar was not of a mind to pay attention to details and was, in any case, accustomed to propriety providing greater protection.
It did not, in this case, provide greater protection.
The door opened and Captain James slipped through. With the courtesy of a dangerous man, he kept a respectful distance from his sometimes-lover, but still his displeasure was evident to anybody with eyes to see. Even those limited by mortal perception.
“That’s a very strange definition ofaway,” Mr. Caesar complained. “I might almost categorise it astowards.”
“Don’t be pretty with me. I’ve not the patience.”
