Page 88 of Confounding Oaths
“I know, Ferdy,” she told me, “I have ruined everything.”
“Or,” the Lady commented from nowhere, “set everything upperfectly.”
There was an element of bravado to this, of course. And an element of circularity. Ours is an anarchic people, so when we say everything is going perfectly what we really mean is that the tumult that has followed from our actions is the kind of tumult of which we broadly approve.
“I have nothing,” she continued, a little overdramatically for a young woman still well endowed with friends, family, and social connections to the aristocracy. “And I fear I may soonbenothing.”
This was perhaps a more serious concern. The fissures that had begun in her feet had of late begun appearing also in her fingers, crossing the palms of her hands like too-short lifelines.
Before she could soliloquise further (people do, you know, at least in my experience), Miss Caesar was interrupted by a knock at the door and her brother’s voice asking for admission.
“Come in?” she offered, tentatively. In all her sixteen years on your dull material earth, she could not remember her brother once visiting her in her chamber. It was not unseemly precisely, but they had spent most of their lives in separate spheres and it was strange for them to begin colliding now.
Mr. Caesar entered almost timidly. His attire, for all the pressures acting upon him at that instant, was still immaculate, but his expression was drawn and his eyes downcast. “I wanted to be sure you were all right.”
It was churlish to laugh at that, but Miss Caesar was not above a little churlishness. I would offer her youth as defence, but I havenever especially felt that churlishness required defending. I have known a great many churls in my time and they are normally excellent value for money.
“You haveneverwanted to know if I was all right,” she told him. “Did it really take a bargain with a fairy for you to care about such things?”
The Lady gave a smile of smoke and shadows. “And will she be grateful to me? She will not.”
“I have always cared for your well-being,” Mr. Caesar told her. “But I think perhaps I have, in the past, had a clearer sense of what that entails.”
Miss Caesar’s fingers tightened, and a hairline crack spread an eighth of an inch further along her hand. “And what did it entail, in the past?”
“Preserving your reputation,” Mr. Caesar replied at once, “helping you seek a husband or, if necessary, some other means of securing a future income. Or of securing an income for myself by which I can support you if the worst befalls.”
“The worst”—his sister’s eyes were half glaring and half pleading—“being that I remain unwed.”
It was a blunt way to put it, but broadly correct. I gave an affirmingruff.
Her brother’s silence was all the affirmation that Miss Caesar needed. “And you wonder why I did what I did.”
Satisfaction gleamed in the Lady’s eyes as she watched Mr. Caesar’s discomfort. At the back of his throat, the part of him that had been raised a gentleman, that not merely saw the world as it was but accepted it, wanted to protest. To say that yes, he understood, but that things were as they were and though he liked it no better than his sister did, her actions had been rash and selfish. Because that approach had worked so verywellfor him thus far.
“I said clearer,” he tried instead. “Not more accurate. I—I may have been trying to help in the wrong ways, I think.”
“You think that, do you?” replied Miss Caesar. She did not sound entirely convinced.
“I know it,” her brother corrected himself.
“And when did you have this revelation?”
Rationally, Mr. Caesar knew this was a fair response. But rationality was not his first priority. “Mary, must you be difficult?”
The candlelight in the room danced through Miss Caesar’s body and gathered at her fingertips. “I’m not being difficult, John.”
“You’re being a little difficult.”
And now the light flared. “I swear, even when you’re trying to be kind, you’re insufferable.”
“Well, perhaps if you’d be a little easier to be kindto.”
Miss Caesar let out a tiny shriek, which, through a glass larynx, rang like a crystal chime. “That isn’t how being kindworks.”
This much Mr. Caesar had to admit was true. After all, the captain had persisted in being kind to him and he’d made that as difficult as humanly possible. So he stopped, took a breath, and said: “You’re right. I’m sorry. You’re right. And whatever we do from now on about”—he made an inarticulate gesture intended to expressthe fact that you have been transformed into a statue—“we’ll do it with you, not in spite of you. I promise.”
Miss Caesar remained silent and, inasmuch as she was capable in her new form, looked sceptical.
