Page 7 of Confounding Oaths
“Your brother’s outside,” Captain James explained. “He wants to know if you’re well, and to be told if you’re staying.”
Raising her head a fraction from Miss Bickle’s bosom, Miss Caesar looked around, her eyes blotched red with tears. “Stay? How can we stay after such mortification?”
“How can we leave?” Miss Anne protested, and then, turning soulful eyes to the young officer, added, “We shan’t leave, I promise.”
Miss Bickle looked uncertain. For a lady who lived in a world of rainbows and fairy dust, navigating so prosaic a dilemma as two young women with opposed preferences was quite discomforting. “I wonder if we might not be better off going. It has been a perfectly lovely evening of course but, well, Mary is clearly distressed and—”
Having decided, probably correctly, that his ball would be a complete disaster if he didn’t do something about the crying girl in the corner, the vicomte waltzed into view. “Ladies,” he began in his most charmingly Gallic tones, “I can see you have had a distressing night, pray let me give you the use of my carriage to return youhome.”
The word of the host, being also the word of a vicomte or its continental equivalent, rather settled the issue, and the Misses Caesar, along with their accidental, Bickle-shaped chaperone, left with as little ceremony as could be managed given the highly ceremonial nature of the circles in which they moved.
Outside, Mr. Caesar was still waiting on the wall, and when his friend, family, and unexpected military benefactor emerged from the house, he rose hastily to greet them.
It was not, in the end, a warm greeting. Both of his sisters were, in their different ways, indignant at his role in their evening’s premature end, and while Miss Bickle was more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, her peacemaking skills were rather limited.
“Howcouldyou?” Miss Caesar demanded, once she’d recovered enough to form sentences.
Doing his best to remain brotherly, Mr. Caesar looked down. “The gentleman was speaking impertinently.”
“So youhit him?” Miss Caesar seemed about to burst once more into tears. “Well, I hope your honour was worth it.”
Miss Bickle, who had heard a little more of the exchange and the subsequent discussion of it amongst the guests, did her best to come to her friend’s defence. “I’m sure John had his reasons.”
“Whatreasons?” asked Miss Anne, who, like her sister, had remained largely ignorant of the cause of the disturbance.
“Good reasons.” That was Captain James, who had thus far been standing quietly at the back of the group. “I know the man he hit, and I’ve no doubt he deserved it.”
The appearance of Captain James presented something of a problem for the young ladies. On the one hand, his voice made it very clear that he was no gentleman, but on the other, a red jacketwasa red jacket and thus worthy of respect.
“What did he do?” asked Miss Anne, ever the first to play up to an officer.
There had never been anexplicitagreement in the Caesar household that the girls should be shielded from the harsher parts of their world. But ladies were expected to be innocent, and as the elder brother, Mr. Caesar felt a strong need to preserve that innocence. So he said simply: “He spoke ill of the queen.”
That, at least, his sisters could accept as a valid reason to strike a man, although both remained disgruntled that he had not thought to make this clearer at the time. Still it meant that they consented to return to the carriage and to be escorted home without further fuss. And Mr. Caesar, with aristocratic reserve, formally thanked Captain James for his assistance. For a moment they made quite the picture between them, the soldier and the gentleman. Captain James stood tall and proud and just a little wary, watching the Caesars load themselves into the carriage with eyes full of life and fire. And a scant three feet away Mr. Caesar stood ramrod straight, his courteous façade brittle as glass as he made polite reassurances that should the captain need the favour returned he need only ask.
It was not an offer he expected would be taken up, but he would prove wrong about that. As he would about so much else.
Chapter Three
I swear that I only turnedmy back for five minutes and when I looked again Mr. Caesar was standing on the doorstep of Mr. Ellersley’s London residence. Although if I was perturbed by this turn of events, I suspect that Mr. Caesar was even more so. He had, of course, no fit subject for his disappointment save himself, but that was perhaps part of why he had come in the first place. Having marred not only one of the few social events at which his sisters would be welcome but quite possibly their long-term prospects of a successful marriage, home was not especially appealing to him. And he knew where hewaswith Thomas Ellersley. Even if it wasn’t anywhere he wanted to be.
It was an unfashionable hour—indeed an unseemly hour—to be calling but Mr. Ellersley, while always fashionable, was never seemly, and was taking brandy in the drawing room when Mr. Caesar was shown up to him.
“Well,” he said, as Mr. Caesar lowered himself into an armchair, “that was a fucking mess.”
Mr. Caesar poured himself a drink. “By God, I’ve missed your wit.”
“Not half so much as I’ve missed your carefree demeanour. Though frankly, John, I swear you’ve deteriorated.”
Frankly, Mr. Caesar agreed with him. In some respects, at least. “Perhaps I’ve acquired more cares. Between an angry goddess nearly killing my cousin and my sisters fast approaching marriageable age I have a great deal to think about.”
“Isn’t your sisters’ future more your parents’ concern?”
That raised something like a laugh. “My father has no connections, my mother burned her ties to society when she married, and my grandfather is less and less often in London.”
“Still”—Mr. Ellersley swirled the brandy in his glass like a witch mixing a potion—“the old man won’t let them starve, will he?”
The old man, in this context, was Mr. Caesar’s grandfather, the Earl of Elmsley. A forgettable enough mortal, but a wealthy one. “He won’t,” Mr. Caesar agreed, “but Uncle Richard most certainly will, and Grandpapa won’t be around forever.”
