Page 71 of Confounding Oaths
“I was only asking.”
“Going to draw your own water? Carry your own tub?”
Mr. Caesar thought it over. “I’ll pass.”
Now that the rescue was over, a lot of the bonhomie had drained from Captain James’s manner. “That all you can say?I’ll pass?”
“I’ll pass, but thank you for the offer?” Somewhere inside the gordian mess of his heart, Mr. Caesar knew that this wasn’t quite what the captain was looking for.
“Oh, fuck off, Caesar.”
Mr. Caesar bristled. “I’m sorry. I’m tired. Can we save this conversation for tomorrow?”
It was the wrong thing to say. Even with anI’m sorryat the beginning. I mean, I’m an inhuman trickster from a culture that cherishes shamelessness and even I could craft a better apology. “No.” The captain was standing very still, his arms folded. Somehow he managed to make being drenched in glorified sewer water seem commanding. “You talk to me like I’m some fucking catamite. You storm out like you’re some fucking child. And then you leave it to me to save your fucking life and then you want me to wait until you’ve had a nap before we have it out?”
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Caesar said again. His tone suggested otherwise, but neither his words nor his delivery precisely conveyed the chaos that was festering in his head.
“You’re not though,” replied the captain. “Are you? You just want me to shut up. I’d thought you were different, but I’m starting to see that you’re just like every other rich fucker I’ve ever met, you just don’t have the money to make it look good.”
It would be churlish of me to suggest that the accusation of not looking good was what struck closest to Mr. Caesar’s heart. But notthatchurlish. “I have had,” he said, “a very hard day.”
“And you think I haven’t? You think the men haven’t?”
“No.” Defiance had never suited Mr. Caesar, at least not real defiance rather than the kind of acerbic counterfeit of it you saw in the ton, and the last of it drained away now, leaving only a damp morass of shame. Which was unfortunately still paralleled by a damp morass of Thames water. “I—that is, you’ve—I’ve been awful.”
“You have.”
“I mean utterly awful.”
“Yeah.”
“And not just to you.” Mr. Caesar flopped back onto the bed, leaving the sheets damp and not much caring. “Fuck me, if I’d not tried to order Mary around, she might have let us finish the job.”
Captain James looked doubtful. “Maybe, but plans go wrong all the time, no sense in dwelling.”
Unfortunately, dwelling was very much where Mr. Caesar was at this moment. “My father,” he said, “crossed the world twice, won his own freedom, and chose to fight for the freedom of others. My mother turned her back on her birthright for love and what was right. I can’t even treat a lover well or reach my sister when she needs me.”
“Can you do me a favour”—Captain James came closer and sat down beside Mr. Caesar—“and not put me and your sister in the same box? It feels wrong.”
There was a world where Mr. Caesar would have laughed at that. “I know you’re trying to be amusing, but—”
“I’m not,” replied the captain. Then, in a spirit of honesty that I thoroughly condemn, he added, “Well, maybe a bit. But this is still important. What’s between you and your family is for you and your family. And if you want me to be part of it,reallypart of it—then I will. But I’ll not be where you hide from your other life. You need to be with me because of who I am, not who I’m not.”
“Who you are is—God, it’s such a fucking cliché to say I’ve never known anybody like you, but it’s—I mean, you’ve met the kind of men I—we’re shits. That’s the sordid truth of it. We’re just shits, and you should stay far, far away from us.”
“That sounds like an excuse,” the captain told him in a tone that was veering away from sympathy and closer totired of your nonsense.
“It’s not. I—fuck—I should go. I’m never going to be able to be the kind of man you—”
With a sigh that was almost a growl, Captain James took Mr. Caesar’s face firmly but not forcefully and turned it so they were eye to eye. “John,” he said, “I’m going to say this once. Stop being a prick.”
Blinking back tears of which he was deeply ashamed, Mr. Caesar said, tremulously, “I don’t know how.”
“You do,” the captain told him. “You do.”
“I don’t.”
“Just tonight,” replied Captain James, “I’ve seen you be a brother, a lover, a lord, a son, a fool, a dandy, and a dozen other things besides. You’ve got a face for every room you walk into and you change them like you change your cravats. Just pick one you can be proud of.”
