Chapter Ten

Miss Caesar's evening ended like a dream, the music at last dying with the dawn light, and the Lady, permitting herself to be visible once more, guiding her out into the carriage. The carriage which, I feel honour-bound to point out, had not transformed into any kind of vegetable overnight. The works of Titania's court are, of course, vastly inferior to those of my master, but that must be judged against the exceptional standards of fairy craft in general.

She nestled into place alongside her otherworldly patroness and, in a fit of whimsy, I took on the form of a tiny lapdog and leapt in after them. There, from my position alongside Miss Caesar's slippered feet, I was able to make out hairline cracks beginning to form at her ankles. But then what would one expect if one insists on dancing in glass shoes?

My chosen guise had been, to some extent, a calculated gamble. The Lady, of course, knew I was there, but I hoped that if I chose a sufficiently adorable form her client would defend me and the Lady would, by the laws that bind her as surely as my laws bind me, be prevented from arranging my expulsion.

And to test my theory, I sprang into Miss Caesar's lap, narrowly avoiding a sharp kick that the Lady had been aiming at me.

"Oh, how lovely," Miss Caesar exclaimed, looking down at me with restful happiness. "Although I am not sure I shall be permitted to keep him."

The Lady glared at me sourly. She was a very sour being, I felt. "On the contrary, you will find him impossible to get rid of."

I looked up innocently and shook my doggy head. " Rrruff? "

"What's his name?" asked Miss Caesar. And I realised just slightly too late what a poor choice this might have been.

"He's your dog," the Lady replied with an I've-got-you-now-you-fucker smile, "why don't you name him?"

Names have power, reader. Being given a name has power.

"I think"—Miss Caesar made a sound of musing that I did not at all like—"that I shall call him Ferdinand."

I attempted to signal my displeasure at this moniker, but it was to no avail. It had taken hold already and although it would bind me but little (names have power, reader, but not absolute power), it was a restriction I resented. As Ferdinand, I curled into Miss Caesar's lap and she stroked her fingers through my fur. Her hands were cold by mortal standards, but since I have danced with the North Wind's daughter in the Ice-Caves of the Utter Far my mileage, as you might say, varied.

While the sun was inching its way above the horizon, its soft rays dancing through Miss Caesar as all light now did, the carriage proceeded through the streets of London towards her home. In this much, at least, the Lady had not been lying. Her plan was not to take the child away. At least not directly. She only wanted her to go to the ball.

"You enjoyed yourself, I trust?" the Lady asked.

Miss Caesar nodded. "Very much."

"Then you shall be delighted to know that there will be more such dances in your future."

She should indeed have been delighted. But having no heart muted her capacity for joy. "And will Mr. Bygrave …"

The Lady didn't let her finish the sentence before breaking into a peal of beautiful laughter. "Forget him, child. You can do better now. So much better."

No lady of the era, however humble and pious, would be quite able to resist the obvious question. "How much better?"

"As much as you like. I have given you the Beauty Incomparable and with it you can have anybody you wish. Kings. Princes. Princesses if they take your fancy."

"They do not," Miss Caesar replied at once. "That is, I love my cousin, but—they do not. And I do not think I want to be a queen."

Mortal as she remained, despite her transformation, Miss Caesar did not catch the look of scorn in the Lady's eye. But I did. "As you wish. Still, you can set your sights higher than an ensign."

"He is a good man," Miss Caesar replied almost reflexively. "And from a good family."

"And your sister likes him." The reply was calculated. Not cruel exactly; cruelty has a different connotation for my people than for yours.

Certainly it was calculated well enough that it silenced Miss Caesar a moment. And made her denial sound weak when she made it.

"Come, come." The Lady patted Miss Caesar on the knee, and I took the chance to snap at her fingers. "It is no crime to desire what others have."

Hard as she was for me to read now, I could sense through her hands how dearly the girl wanted to believe that. Which meant she probably would, eventually. "Not a crime. But envy is a sin."

"According to one faith. There are many."

The mortals of England were strange about religion. They knew, of course, that the gods of the ancients were real, physical beings while having no such reassurance about the one their Church claimed to speak for, yet they persisted in believing in him anyway. So it was in this spirit of human perversity that Miss Caesar took the talk of polytheism rather more to heart than the act of turning her into a statue of living glass.

"I shall not have you lead me astray," she protested.

"Really?" The Lady adopted a tone that I knew well, having so often used it myself. "But astray is where all of the best things are."

And though I am loath to admit it, she was right in this also.

"I like Mr. Bygrave on his own account," Miss Caesar replied. And in the moment at least I believed that she believed it.

The Lady, for her part, patted Miss Caesar's hand in an almost motherly fashion. "As you say, child," she replied. "As you say."

They returned to the Caesar house to find it not in uproar precisely, but in a level of disharmony uncommon in the era. The night-long absence of Miss Caesar had been trying enough, but it had been punctuated around midnight by the arrival of her brother, Captain James, and a limited subsection of the Irregulars, bearing news of the robed men and the attack on the Folly. Should you be concerned for the remaining soldiers, dear reader, rest assured that they were making their own arrangements back in St. Giles. Or perhaps they had gone to stay on a nice farm in the country.

There had followed a short debriefing in which both parties had apprised one another on the flavour of fuckedness that had descended upon them, and they had then, mutually, attempted to game through the ways in which those fuckednesses intersected and exacerbated one another.

This exercise had lasted until three, at which point the younger Mr. Caesar had retired—not, in this instance, with Captain James; there were some things one did not do in the house of one's father—leaving his parents to wait up anxiously while various soldiers littered the drawing room like toys discarded by a gigantic schoolchild.

When Nancy, who was not technically expected to go to bed before the household and thus getting rather the worst end of this deal, showed the returning Miss Caesar through to where her parents were waiting, the young lady reacted to the scene before her with less surprise than one might expect for a girl of her age and experience. Then again, she had just been transported to a ball by a fairy, so her tolerance for the unusual was likely heightened.

The arrival of Miss Caesar and the Lady provoked a flurry of motion amongst those still awake. Lady Mary (my apologies, reader, there happen to be a number of ladies present) rushed forward, moved to embrace her daughter, remembered what happened last time, and caught her by the hands instead. The elder Mr. Caesar rose more cautiously, with his eyes firmly on the more supernatural of the pair, and Captain James let his hand drift slowly to his sword.

"I am safe, Mama," Miss Caesar said, finding that it is hard to sound reassuring when your voice is a song from the cold side of eternity. "I danced and was—they saw me."

Although he had maintained his calm throughout the arrival and had shown admirable willingness to overlook the bit with the needle and the direct threat on his life, this last observation proved too much for the elder Mr. Caesar. "They did not see you, Mary. They saw glass."

"Glass," the Lady replied—not, it seemed, trusting her protégé to think or act for herself—"is beauty."

With the occasionally prim defiance that gave her such a Quakerish reputation, Lady Mary folded her arms. "Beauty is character."

The Lady curled her lips into a smile of exquisite cruelty. "That is a lie we tell ugly people to comfort them. Your daughter made a bargain, it will be kept. To her benefit."

Crouching behind the divan with a pistol ready, Callaghan mustered his strength of will and disagreed. "That's what King George said to me and the lads, we've very few of us felt he held up his end of the deal."

"She says I might marry a duke," Miss Caesar protested.

"I would sooner you married a tanner and were happy," replied her mother, "than a prince and were not."

A creature of her society to the core, Miss Caesar saw no sense in the assertion. "I do not know what happiness there can be in poverty."

"To be fair to the girl," observed Sal, who uniquely amongst the soldiers had not taken cover; she was resting in the window seat with a shiv concealed in her skirts, "she has a point. Poverty is fucking terrible."

Captain James glanced at her for a half a heartbeat before turning his attention back to the Lady. "It is, but she's not talking about proper poverty. She's talking about only having one servant."

This, Miss Caesar would not abide. "If I cannot marry, I may be able to afford no servants."

Sal barked an unimpressed laugh. "Imagine."

"What shall I do for money if I cannot find a suitable husband?" Miss Caesar continued, demonstrating a persistent failure to—if you will forgive the anachronistic phrasing—read the room.

"Scrub floors?" suggested Callaghan.

"Take in laundry?" offered the captain.

"On Saturdays," Sal said, "there's Jewish folk need errands run. On account of the Sabbath."

"You're a well-brought-up lady," the captain tried again, "you could probably be a schoolmistress."

"Or," said Jackson, half-melted into the shadow of the doorway, "you could just sell your body."

Outraged as only a young woman infused with fairy majesty can be outraged, Miss Caesar glowered. "I would never. "

Shielded from the worst of the Lady's magic by cynicism and disinterest, Jackson raised an eyebrow. "Really? It doesn't sound that different from your first plan to me."

"More risk of the clap?" Sal observed.

"Depends on the duke."

While the Irregulars had been debating the various careers open to unwed women in the year of some people's lord 1815, the elder Mr. Caesar had been ruminating on the situation. When he spoke at last, it was over a room that fell swiftly silent.

"Mary," he said, "we are glad you have returned, and we want you to be happy. But this family knows as well as any that magic is treacherous. As are smiling strangers."

Still in the shape of Ferdinand the lapdog, I gave a gentle ruff of approval.

"My Lady," he continued, addressing the individual who went only by that moniker, "I thank you for returning our daughter to us safely. And I trust that you will continue to do so, should you procure her further … invitations. "

For a man with no especial knowledge of the Other Court, the elder Mr. Caesar had done a remarkably efficient job of crafting an insult. We hate to be thanked, at least with words, and we hate to have our future actions predicted even more. We know the power of even simple foretelling and take it seriously in a way your kind do not.

In reply, the Lady smiled her most magnanimous smile. And like all of her smiles it embodied the adjective that describes it with a completeness that mortal flesh cannot replicate. "Think nothing of it. And I assure you, sir, that your daughter will come to no harm while she is by my side."

"Good." Mr. Caesar nodded with a confidence that belied his circumspection. "But I ask you to go now. The hour is late, and the household has been much disrupted."

Disrupting households is, in point of fact, one of the twelve most beloved pastimes of my species. But while I personally find delayed gratification to be the wholly inferior variety, the Lady was made of different stuff, and played longer games.

So she swept a perfect curtsey, assured Miss Caesar that she would return, and vanished into the night.

When she was gone the soldiers stood down, and the whole company breathed a collective sigh of relief.

"Mary," Lady Mary told her daughter, "it might be best if you went to your room."

So she went. And I, like a good little dog, followed her.

The dog disguise would, I was sure, eventually grow tiresome. But puppies were stolen or ran away all the time, and while her naming me would have given Miss Caesar the power to call me back, I took comfort in the fact that she was unlikely to know the proper forms.

Upstairs, she stood in the centre of her bedchamber and looked down at me.

"Oh, Ferdy," she said, addressing herself as much as me. Not using the full name was a good sign. Nobody has ever said nicknames have power. "Why won't they just let me be happy?"

" Rruff? "

"Perhaps," she replied. What she thought I'd said I have no idea; maybe she was simply playing along. "But it seems so unfair. Mama and Papa are so overprotective."

" Rruff. "

"That's as may be, but I am not responsible for their uncertainties."

A vanity sat in one corner of the lady's room, a mirror above it, and she crossed over to it now and looked at herself, much as she had on the night the Lady first visited her. I remained at floor height, not wishing to accidentally reveal my true reflection.

Still, keen observer of humanity as I am, I could make out much despite my position. She was watching herself now with a melancholy that denied itself. Her reflection in the mirror was glass on glass on glass, fragments and echoes and motes of pale light.

Had she still breathed, I feel sure she would have sighed. Perhaps even let out an ah me as is, I believe, traditional. Instead she looked down and said, "Ferdy, I have chosen right, have I not? Whatever Mama and Papa may say?"

But I was already gone. From her sight, at least.

After all, this lady is not the only person our story is about.

I have, I think, already told you that my kind rarely watch mortals sleep (at least not from outside their dreams), since unconscious you are dull unless we are doing the supernatural equivalent of drawing a phallus on your foreheads with a magic marker. (This, you might recall, was essentially the plot of my best publicised escapade, albeit one for which I received no credit.)

But I went to check on Mr. Caesar anyway, because it seemed likely to me that he would be stirring soon.

And my timing, as ever, was flawless. You may think it vulgar, reader, that I keep reminding you of my own perfection, but your sensibilities mean little to me and I am extremely skilled at what I do.

Indeed so flawless was my timing that I arrived outside Mr. Caesar's bedchamber exactly in time to witness the approach of Captain James, and passed through it in my shape of mists and shadows just in time to witness Mr. Caesar, who somehow made even his nightshirt look immaculate, stirring with the ill grace of an earl's grandson asked to rise earlier than he is accustomed.

"What is it, Nancy?" he asked.

"Not Nancy," came the reply.

"Here to apologise for telling a man to shoot me?" asked Mr. Caesar, more acidly than he really felt. If there was one man he would trust to make such a life-and-death call, it was Orestes James.

"There was no way he'd reloaded that pistol," replied the captain. "Well, not much of a way. Anyway I thought you'd want to know your sister's back."

Abstractly, Mr. Caesar wanted to know this very much. In the moment, he wanted primarily to sleep for at least another two hours. "Is she well?"

"She's made of glass, John, how well can she be?" The use of Mr. Caesar's Christian name was a little informal given their relative stations. Then again, they'd fucked.

"Allowing for that."

"Whole, and seems to have her own will."

Thanking whatever gods he was comfortable thanking for small mercies, Mr. Caesar rose and inched the door open. "You should probably come in. It's not done to have conversations through doors."

As he entered Mr. Caesar's bedchamber, Captain James was shaking his head. "You're a strange man."

"I really don't think I am."

Without waiting to be asked, Captain James sat down on the edge of Mr. Caesar's bed. "You punch a man in the jaw at a ball, you suck cock like a trooper—and I've met a lot of troopers—but then you turn around and say ‘It's not done' about a chat through a bit of wood."

"That's different."

Captain James made no reply, but the expression on his face said Why?

"I'm at home now."

"And you're not yourself at home?"

As much as Mr. Caesar wished it could be, it wasn't that simple. "I'm one of my selves at home."

"How many've you got?" asked the captain, skirting the edge of playfulness.

"Two. Three? A hundred? I'm a gentleman and a molly and an Englishman though half the ton won't believe it and an African though I've never set foot on the Continent. I'm an earl's grandson, which means nothing except when it means everything, and a freedman's son, which means everything except when it means nothing. I'm my sisters' protector except I can't protect them and the last hope of my family name except I shan't marry. I'm a dandy who doesn't wear cotton and can ill afford to follow fashion, and a lawyer-in-training whose social set looks down on the law."

Deciding playfulness was not the right direction, Captain James just said, "Must be hard."

"It's the same for you, surely."

Captain James shrugged. "I'm a soldier."

"Yes, but—"

"My dad was a soldier. My mum was a soldier's wife. I serve with soldiers, fight with soldiers against soldiers. When I die I'll die a soldier and I'll rot with soldiers."

In some ways it took Mr. Caesar longer to wrap his mind around this than it had for him to accept his sister becoming a living vitreous statue. "It can't be that straightforward. What about other officers?"

"Fuck other officers."

"What about everybody else?"

"My everybody else isn't the same as your everybody else."

Mr. Caesar looked sceptical. "Isn't everybody's everybody else the same as everybody else's everybody else?" He checked himself. "Fuck, you've got me talking like Lizzie."

"Your everybody else," the captain explained, "is a bunch of rich bastards who've got everything and spend their whole lives scheming against each other to get more. My everybody else is regular people. And regular people have too much going on to care who you fuck or where your parents came from."

To Mr. Caesar, especially in that moment, it sounded unimaginably pleasant. Or perhaps just unimaginable.

"I'm not saying people aren't pricks sometimes," the captain continued. And there was a steadiness in his voice that Mr. Caesar wanted to cling to like a drowning man might cling to a piece of driftwood. "But I've never had to split myself in two. Your lot'll never let me in. My lot'll never let me down. You know where you are with that."

Mr. Caesar allowed the conversation to lull into silence. What, after all, could he say? That a world without contradictions was so alien to him that the mere description of it was humbling? Ordinarily in his assignations that kind of break in the conversation would be the cue to start fucking or leaving. Which had been—well, it had been a way to live a life. And it was the way that unmarried men were expected to live. Albeit they were generally expected to be seeking a different flavour of conquest.

"Thank you," Mr. Caesar said at last. "For caring. Mary isn't at all your responsibility."

When he wanted it to, Captain James's smile could be all kinds of wicked. "I've always had a weakness for a damsel in distress."

"I'm not sure I'd call her that."

"Wasn't talking about her."

Mr. Caesar did not look affronted, but he looked close to the front. "I'm not sure I care for damsel. I'm not that kind of Ganymede."

"Dandy in distress then?"

This was better, but not by much. "Nor am I in distress. "

"When we first met," the captain reminded him, "you were getting drug up off your feet by two men who'd have thrashed you bloody without breaking a sweat."

"That might, I confess, have constituted a modicum of distress," conceded Mr. Caesar. "But I had your back at the hearing. And I don't think I was entirely useless in the attack on the Folly."

Captain James laughed. "Hold on, I'll send a runner to Wellington, let him know we've another for the front. ‘Send John Caesar over right away, he's not entirely useless.'"

"That fire could have burned out of control."

"Or just burned out."

Deeply conscious that he was beginning to sound petulant, but not quite able to stop himself, Mr. Caesar said: "I thought I was tolerably courageous."

"Tolerably," agreed Captain James. "And there's officers who'd have done less."

Sensing a blessed opportunity to turn the conversation to other men's deficiencies, Mr. Caesar pounced. "Like Major Bloodworth?"

"And half the rest."

Not quite sure if theirs was yet a placing-a-reassuring-hand relationship, Mr. Caesar kept his hands very much to himself. "It was him tonight, wasn't it? The men in red."

Captain James nodded. "Probably wasn't with them, but rich fucks are up to their neck in cult bollocks. I think they learn it at them posh schools they go to."

"Having been to a posh school"—Mr. Caesar looked uncomfortable—"there were definite whispers, but I never saw anything myself. Then again I wouldn't have been invited. Wrong connections." With a frustrated groan he flopped back onto the bed. "Do you think," he asked the ceiling, "that if we sent the major a very polite letter he'd agree to stop trying to kill us until after I've worked out how to stop my sister being a statue?"

Captain James looked down at him and, apparently less concerned about propriety or the thorny question of what kind of relationship the two of them actually had, brushed his fingertips lightly over Mr. Caesar's arm in a way that wasn't quite friendly but wasn't quite sexual. "Shouldn't think so. He's not a very polite man."

Though the sun was well risen, Mr. Caesar shut his eyes and pretended it wasn't. "I think," he said aloud, "that I am going to ignore all of this until the morning."

"It is morning," Captain James reminded him.

"Proper morning. Proper morning involves bacon."

Laughed out for the night, the captain just exhaled amusedly. "Where I'm from, proper morning is a thousand Frenchmen coming over the hill with drums and muskets."

Mr. Caesar rolled over. "Where I'm from, I suspect we get a lot more sleep."

When Captain James rose to leave, Mr. Caesar felt rather than saw the motion. "You could stay," he suggested to the empty air.

"What about propriety?"

"I meant more … for company. Besides, Nancy will thank me for keeping your boots off the upholstery."

The captain sat back down. "You don't pay that girl enough."

"How do you know what we pay her?"

"I don't, but I know it's not enough. Balls to all hours, fairies, soldiers. She's had a right time of it."

Sleepily, Mr. Caesar murmured something about looking into it and, reasoning that little more would be achieved that evening, I let them be. The Caesars were, after all, not the only family I was observing at that time.

But those are different tales, for different occasions.