Page 90 of Confounding Oaths
Callaghan looked up from a corner where he’d been lounging and engaging in idle banter with the locals. “Not that we’ve a mind to keep a man from his appetites,” he explained. “And the Caesar lad seems a pleasant enough sort once you get to know him. But you’ve put a fearsome lot of effort into this one.”
A scowl settled onto the captain’s face, decided it was comfortable there, and stayed. “Are you forgetting that an innocent girl has been turned to glass?”
“Bad things happen to innocent girls all the time,” Jackson pointed out. He’d been lurking as he usually did in the shadows, waiting for the perfect moment to interject. “Why is this one different?”
“Because her brother had my back,” the captain told him. “Same as I’ve got all yours.”
It was hard to watch Jackson move without using the wordslink,and he slunk out of the shadows now, hands never quite where one could see them easily. “But have you?” he asked. “Because it’s beginning to look like you’ve roped us in to your private battles and we get nothing in return.”
Laying his cards neatly face down, Kumar rose and put himself between the two soldiers. “I wouldn’t go quite that far,” he said in the restrained tones of the Eton-educated, “but while Mr. Caesar seems a fine enough gentleman—”
“Take it from me”—Jackson’s voice was low, level, and sneering—“it’s easy enough to seem a fine gentleman. That’s how half the rackets in the world are run.”
Ordinarily, the captain would have taken his men’s concerns in the sincere-yet-blunt manner in which they were intended. But ordinarily, he would not have been drawn quite so much into either passion or fairy intriguing. “John’s not running a racket. And what I did for his sister I’d do for any as need it.”
“Like with that lass in Ciudad Rodrigo,” said Callaghan.
“Or the gentleman in Salamanca,” added Sal.
“Or that whole business near Talavera,” Callaghan continued. “The thing is, Captain, we know you make a habit of this sort of thing”—he was wrong-ish in this regard; the captain’s tendency to find those who needed him to find them was far less habit than it was destiny—“but normally it’s in wartime.”
Jackson nodded. “This though, this is in London. This is coming at us where we live.”
“Again, I wouldn’t be quite so dramatic”—Kumar raised his hands in the universal sign of placation—“but morale is becoming an issue. The attack rattled people, and the men are saying they don’t think that’ll be the end of it.”
“There’s been snooping,” Mistress Quickley explained. “Word is a man was pulled out the river with a bullet in his head. Folks are asking questions and I’ll not have my customers brung up before the magistrate.”
The brave men of the Irregulars, Captain James knew full well, feared not the French, nor the roar of the cannon, nor thecutthroats and partisans that had haunted the hills of Spain. But many of them had a profound fear of the law. “I’ll look into it,” he assured her. “But you know me. Youallknow me. And when have I ever steered you wrong? Ever let you down?”
“Never,” Kumar replied at once, Sal and Callaghan both agreeing in near-unison.
“Then again …” Jackson added afterwards, “there’s a first time for everything.”
And at that, Captain James nodded. He stretched, almost languidly, and then, pivoting sharply, he drove his fist into Jackson’s gut, blocked the other man’s instinctive counterblow, caught him by the hair, and yanked his head back, baring his throat like a lamb before the knife. “Let me remind you something, Thomas. When we met you were a harsh word and a nod from the gallows, and ever since I’ve trusted you with my life even though I’ve heard enough tales to know you deserve to hang six times over. You turn on me now, you’ll wish you’d danced with the hemp all those years ago.” He shoved Jackson hard away and watched him stumble into his fellow soldiers. “We clear?”
“As a mountain stream, Captain.” Jackson’s voice always had a whisper of menace in it, but the fact that his hands didn’t goimmediatelyfor a knife suggested that the matter truly was settled. For the moment at least.
With a comradely instinct for defusing tension, Callaghan gave Jackson a hearty slap on the back. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve been wanting to smack you one myself for a while now.”
“I hate to say it,” agreed Sal, “but youdobring it out of people.”
While the men debated the finer points of quite how badly Jackson had it coming, Captain James turned his attention back to Quickley. “Where’s Barryson? I need him.”
“In the back,” she replied. “But make it sharp. I’m beginning to think you’re bad luck.”
Captain James had never been considered bad luck in his life and did not like to be considered it now, but he refrained from passing comment. “Just get him out.”
As was typical in the Folly, Barryson was summoned by an informal but efficacious relay of people shouting to people who shouted to people until he at last emerged, dishevelled and drunk, from wherever he had been hiding.
“Need your advice,” the captain told him, without nicety or formality.
Barryson pressed his hands to his temples. “Not right now, Captain, it’s too early in the morning.”
“It’s after sunset.”
“Is it? Fuck.” Then, after a moment’s hesitation, Barryson looked suspiciously in my general direction. “Hold up, there’s something here.”
Around the room the Irregulars reached, quite uselessly, for weapons.
