Page 76 of Confounding Oaths
“Still,” Miss Anne was saying, “you must have seen such wonders.”
There might have been laughter there, from Lieutenant Reyne, but it was muffled by the door and the distance. “War is manythings,” the soft-voiced man replied. “But it is seldom wonderful. It is a banquet for gods who delight in blood and chaos.”
To give the man his due, he wasgood.Not only was he entirely accurate about the nature of this world’s divine custodians but he had judged his audience well. There was little that appealed to Miss Anne more than tales of blood and chaos.
Tales, of course, being so very different from reality.
As she was soon to discover.
Chapter Sixteen
Knowing, or at least stronglysuspecting, that his youngest sister’s new suitor was a bloodthirsty cultist who had already sacrificed at least one man to Poseidon was little help to Mr. Caesar, because he had no sense of how to appropriately act on the information.
Having left the room, he and the captain could not very well slink back into it without looking very obviously like they’d been having a secret confabulation, and Mr. Caesar at least had no faith in his skills as an actor.
So they pretended that they had been intending to go for a walk all along, a perfectly acceptable thing for gentlemen to do. Of course, generally gentlemen going for walks were not wearing clothes still damp and muddy from a dip in the Thames, but in that moment at least they had far weightier issues on their minds.
“Quick solution,” Captain James offered, “we just get some of the lads together and kill him.”
Mr. Caesar looked doubtful. “I was hoping for something a little less murderous.”
“Such as?”
“We approach a magistrate and tell him what is happening.”
The expression on the captain’s face encapsulatedI can’t tell if you’re jokingwith remarkable efficacy. “You want to tell a magistrate that a respected officer from a good background goes around sacrificing people to the old powers?”
“It has the advantage of truth.”
“And the disadvantage of sounding like bollocks.”
Mr. Caesar pursed his lips, not fond of disorder even when his family’s lives weren’t on the line. “There’s a body, surely that constitutes evidence.”
“There’s a body. River police might find it, might not. And the god might have taken it; they do sometimes.”
They had rambled, in the end, in the direction of Hyde Park, which made an incongruously pleasant backdrop for such sinister matters. Although given their recent experiences, the cool waters of the Serpentine looked far more ominous than they would on any other day.
“I had thought it bad enough to have one sister in unknowable peril,” Mr. Caesar mused aloud. “Having two feels exceedingly unfair.”
“Not a fair world,” the captain semi-agreed. “But we do what we can. You should tell her at least.”
Mr. Caesar gave a hollow laugh. “And from what you’ve seen of Anne do you think she’d believe me?”
“Your parents would, and they could watch her.”
“I will inform Papa directly,” Mr. Caesar agreed, “but for Anne I think it might be wiser to work through an intermediary.”
Less comfortable in a ballroom than a battlefield, the captain looked uncertain. “Who?”
“She trusts Lizzie.”
“The silly one?”
“Yes,” Mr. Caesar conceded. “The silly one.”
It was an apt assessment, but there is a time, reader, when silliness is called for, and that time is most assuredly when one is in deepest danger. The roots ofsilliness,after all, are prosperity, happiness, and good fortune. And in adversity, one needs all of those things.
The Bickle residence was an unfashionably furnished house in a fashionable part of town, filled with an eclectic mix of objects that passed for art and often ringing with the loudly declaimed words of the lyric poets. The captain and Mr. Caesar were met at the door by a footman in ill-chosen livery and shown through to the drawing room where Miss Bickle was playing an unrecognisable discord on one of two pianofortes.
