Chapter Eleven

By now, reader, you should know that little delights me more than chaos. And so I found the scene that unfolded in the Caesar household the following morning very delightful indeed. Poor Nancy—I say poor Nancy, but she is not the focus of this story and you should, therefore, discount her needs and feelings entirely; discounting the needs and feelings of others is a vital life skill and you should practice it early and often. Nancy, the inconsequential maid-of-all-work, had been required, on two hours' sleep, to rise, assist her various mistresses in dressing (the vitrification of Miss Caesar was a blessing in this regard since her clothes appeared now to be part of her person), and then start work on the breakfast.

She was, in this, either assisted or hindered, depending on how you might consider it, by the enthusiastic support of the captain's enlisted men.

"I do know," Callaghan was insisting to her, "how to boil an egg."

Nancy looked at him suspiciously. "Not men's work, sir. Nor guests'."

Sal, whose current presentation rendered one of those objections invalid if not the other, pried a pan of water from Nancy's stubbornly resisting fingers. "We're not guests. We're a pack of armed bastards burst into your house unannounced because one of us is fucking your master."

At that, Nancy coloured deeply. "Mistress Sally!"

"Just Sal. And I'm nobody's mistress."

Lurking in one corner and pointedly not offering to help anybody with anything, Jackson choked out a half laugh. "Sal, my dear, you're everybody's mistress."

"You'll not deter us, miss," Callaghan continued, ignoring the badinage that crossed the room. "We've been trained not to be deterred, you see. Leave the eggs to me and Sal, you just work on the bread, and Jackson over there will start seeing to the coffee."

From the look on his face, Jackson had no intention of seeing to the coffee. But from the look on Callaghan's face the coffee would be seen to whether Jackson willed it or no.

Leaving the downstairs to its downstairs business, I made my way up through the breakfast parlour, where Miss Anne was still remonstrating with her mother about the current state of the household.

"I thought you liked soldiers," Lady Mary pointed out with only the faintest of smirks.

"Officers," Miss Anne replied. "Gentlemen. Not infantrymen. I am sure they will have no conversation. And one of them is clearly Irish."

Her father looked up from his letters. "And what is wrong with the Irish?"

For the briefest of moments, Miss Anne adopted the perplexed expression of one asked to justify an unexamined assumption. "Well," she tried, "they just cause so many problems."

"Do they?" asked the elder Mr. Caesar, placidly.

Miss Anne nodded. "That's what Mr. Bygrave says."

"I thought you'd gone off Mr. Bygrave," observed Lady Mary.

At that, Miss Anne's face fell. "I think he's gone off me."

Her father, however, was not quite ready to change the subject. "Try to remember, Anne, that those who mistrust the Irish also mistrust me."

"Don't be silly, Papa," replied Miss Anne with a confidence born of limited experience. "Mr. Bygrave has never been anything but cordial to you."

"A man can be very cordial when another man has a pretty daughter."

This piety was boring me, and so I continued upwards. Miss Caesar, I suspected, would be doing nothing interesting until the Lady returned, and so I went to call instead on her brother.

The sun being well up, even Mr. Caesar's exhaustion and ideological commitment to the life of a gentleman could not quite keep him abed. The presence of Captain James might have provided him with some incentive, but the captain was already stirring restlessly, moving the arrangement from romantic to pointed.

Once the early morning birdsong was drowned out by the hoofbeats and cries of a busy London street, Captain James could justify indolence no longer. He swung himself out of bed, grabbed his jacket, and was instantly ready to face the day. Mr. Caesar propped himself up on his elbows and looked over at him.

"Going so soon?"

"We should be up. Have to keep moving."

Mr. Caesar looked sceptical. "Do we, actually?"

"Got a fairy to catch and a cult to outrun."

Accepting, albeit grudgingly, the necessity of activity, Mr. Caesar peeled himself out of bed and began to dress. Then he continued dressing. And continued to continue dressing.

Already jacketed and booted, Captain James watched with growing disbelief. "Do you do this every day?"

"Unless I'm in chambers. Then there's a wig."

Captain James considered the spectacle before him. Mr. Caesar had dealt with stockings and breeches and was now taking a moment to ensure that these latter garments hugged the contours of his thighs in the way that fashion dictated before moving on to the complex layers that would adorn his upper body. "Shouldn't you have somebody to help you with this?"

"We can't afford a valet, and it would be both unfair and unseemly to ask Nancy."

With an indulgent half smile, Captain James picked up Mr. Caesar's shirt and held it out for him in a passing imitation of a gentleman's personal gentleman.

"You don't have to—"

"I do if I want to get out of here before noon."

So Mr. Caesar let himself be helped into his shirt. Then his waistcoat. Then his tailcoat. And while this would have been perfectly ordinary behaviour had his assistant been an employee, it was different when it was a man he had lain with, and who had saved him from violence. There was an intimacy to the interaction to which he was unaccustomed. The warmth of the captain's hands as he smoothed—inexpertly, if Mr. Caesar was honest—the creases from his clothes. The scent of him as he helped to settle his jacket.

"You'll need to do your own cravat," Captain James whispered in his ear.

This came as something of a relief; Mr. Caesar would never have trusted anybody else to tie his neckcloth.

Standing in front of a full-length mirror with Captain James behind him, Mr. Caesar tried to focus on his knots. It was proving more difficult than he expected. This, then, was another experience to which he was unaccustomed. As an avowed sodomite, Mr. Caesar had been with many men, had even liked some of them as people, but he had never once had a lover who could distract him from his personal grooming.

"Pretty soon," said the captain, far too close to be convenient but nowhere near close enough, "you and me are going to need to have a tough conversation."

A little embarrassed at the intensity of his own response, Mr. Caesar shuddered. "About what?"

"About whether we're using your sister as bait."

The fact that Mary's predicament had not, in that exact moment, been the first thing on his mind made Mr. Caesar feel like a terrible brother. Then again, if it had been he would have felt like a failure as a gentleman. "I'm sorry, I must have misheard. I could have sworn you said we needed to talk about using my sister as bait."

"Yes."

"Out of the question," replied Mr. Caesar with the kind of instantaneous decisiveness that implied he was uncomfortably aware of how easily he could be swayed from the decision.

"You want to catch the Lady, you need to know where she is. The only thing we know she comes out for is your sister."

He was, of course, right. That is, he was right about the limitations of his and Mr. Caesar's fragile mortal knowledge. He was wrong that Miss Caesar was the only thing that could lure the Lady into the material world, but the other things that could draw her out were by turns secret, illegal, drenched in blood, and in several cases all three.

Captain James let his hands come to rest on Mr. Caesar's shoulders. "She'll be safe. I promise."

"She's made of glass. I'm not sure how safe she can possibly be. Besides, I'm very uncertain she'd go along with it. She still says this is what she wants."

"Boy William thought he wanted to be a soldier. He's learning different."

"Then perhaps Mary will learn differently as well? And perhaps all she needs is time."

Standing close behind Mr. Caesar and laying his hands on Mr. Caesar's hips, Captain James frowned. "It might be what she needs. It might not be what she's got. I've had little experience with magic, but I've not met an enemy yet gives you the space you need to fuck about."

The part of Mr. Caesar that sincerely wished he could shirk every responsibility and live his entire life locked in a private room with a well-tailored coat and a well-proportioned soldier sincerely wished that the captain wasn't right, and that his rightness didn't mean they would need to go downstairs for breakfast and broach some very, very difficult subjects with the family.

But he was. And it did. So they did.

The Caesars' breakfast parlour was not well set up for entertaining. But since the only people being entertained were common soldiers and a single disreputable officer, this was less of a concern than it might otherwise have been.

Nancy had done her best to keep control of the service, but she was outnumbered by infantrymen who through forceful refusal to countenance formality had caused the whole arrangement to devolve into a kind of affable chaos. Which is not the best kind of chaos, but is certainly the best kind of affability.

"I must say," observed Lady Mary with a restraint that betrayed her upbringing, "this coffee is rather—I am not sure we usually have it this strong."

"It is vile," agreed Miss Anne, with a lack of restraint that betrayed her youth and general worldview. "And bitter. Nobody of refinement could possibly—"

"Anne." If the elder Mr. Caesar was growing weary of admonishing his daughter he gave no sign of it, addressing the girl with a properly reserved affection. "This is how it is served on the Continent. I assume Mr.—" He gave Jackson a sorry-didn't-catch-your-name look.

"Jackson."

"Mr. Jackson acquired his taste in Spain defending us from Napoleon. It is ill-mannered to chide him for it."

"Also," added Sal, dusting toast crumbs from her lips, "English coffee tastes like pisswater."

"It is also "—the elder Mr. Caesar turned his gaze to the guest—"ill-mannered to speak of pisswater in front of your host's fourteen-year-old daughter."

Unusually, Sal looked genuinely chastened. "Sorry."

The apology was enough for the elder Mr. Caesar but not for his daughter. "See the people you've connected us to, John. Were you a better brother you would—"

Ordinarily indulgent of his younger sister, Mr. Caesar was not, on this morning, in a mood to indulge. "Were I a better brother I would not have let Mary be taken by fairies, but I did, and I am now attempting to rectify the issue."

"I was not taken," Miss Caesar protested. "I am here. And I am well."

"You've never been well, " sniped Miss Anne from across the table where she was picking politely at a boiled egg.

In an effort to play peacemaker, Lady Mary laid down her coffee and intervened. "Whatever your sister may have been in the past," she tried, then turned to her other daughter, "Mary, you must understand that we are concerned for your well-being now?"

In her new state of crystal brilliance, it was hard for Miss Caesar to look huffy. Hard, but not impossible. "And where was that concern when the whole ton was sneering at me?"

"The men who would sneer at you," said the elder Mr. Caesar, "are not worthy of you."

At that, Miss Caesar let out a tiny scream. She had intended it primarily as a gesture of frustration but, through a throat that rang like a wineglass, the sound became piercing and otherworldly.

The rest of the company set down their cutlery with a range of clinks.

"I'm wondering," offered Callaghan, "if you might not be so well as you think you are."

A staunch adherent to the doctrine of me against my sister; me and my sister against my cousin; me, my sister, and my cousin against every other bastard, Miss Anne glared at the infantryman. "What Mary means, " she said, "is that whatever fine words Papa might say, it does not help us secure our futures."

"Your future," replied Lady Mary firmly, "is secure. Neither your brother nor your grandfather will see you starve, even if you do not marry."

"Grandpapa will have no say in matters once Uncle Richard inherits," pointed out Miss Anne with a shrewdness born of self-interest. "And John will have a lawyer's salary, not a gentleman's income."

"And not starving is a rather poor standard to wish for one's daughters," added Miss Caesar, insensible of the irony of the complaint now that she was beyond biological nutrition.

Captain James gave her a quiet smile. "With respect, lady, for some it's the most they can hope for."

If Miss Caesar was mollified by this, it was impossible to tell owing to her—for want of a better word—glassy demeanour. Miss Anne, however, was most certainly not. "You see, Papa, how low we are sinking. We are eating breakfast with the sort of people who think starvation to be an ordinary thing."

The elder Mr. Caesar folded his hands tightly together in front of him. "Anne, go to my study and wait."

"But—"

"Go to my study," he repeated. "And wait."

Although Miss Anne could be wilful, much of her wilfulness was grounded in a set of social expectations that also included obedience. So she rose, shot one last, poisonous glance at the insufficiently ranked soldiery, and departed, taking a defiant slice of toast with her.

"Now," the elder Mr. Caesar continued, turning to his other daughter, "we still need to discuss your situation."

"There is no situation, Papa," insisted Miss Caesar. "I have made a bargain and I am satisfied with it."

A coffee cup gripped delicately between her fingers, Lady Mary gave Miss Caesar a cool look. "You are not of age to marry without your parents' approval, child. Why on earth do you think yourself able to consent to a pact with an otherworldly potentate?"

"There is no age limit on wishes," Miss Caesar retorted, only a little stubbornly.

Jackson, who had not eaten, choosing instead to sustain himself on a single cup of very strong coffee, shot a calculating glance over the table. "No age limit on making them, no legal protection for taking them away. You think my sort are untrustworthy, miss, but I'll tell you we've nothing on the good folk."

His use of our polite name aside, this was slander.

"Whether you will it or no," the younger Mr. Caesar said, although both of his parents and most of the soldiers wished he hadn't—no persuasive argument begins whether you will it or no, "we shall find a way to disentangle you from this."

Sunlight, streaming now through the window, sparkled in the razor roses that wound through Miss Caesar's hair. "I do not will it. And I shall be no part of whatever schemes you might be hatching."

Before Mr. Caesar could respond, or before anybody else could tell him quite how badly he'd ballsed up, his sister turned on her heel, called for Nancy to get the door, and swept out into the London morning.

And suspecting that hers would be the more entertaining venture, I followed.

It was, in theory, unseemly for a young woman to be walking unescorted in London, but between a parlour full of soldiers and her physical transformation into colourless mineral, seemliness was rather less of a priority for Miss Caesar than once it was.

So with the spring sunlight shining past, upon, and through her, Miss Caesar made her way to Hyde Park. It was somewhat earlier than the fashionable hour for promenading, but that was not any great impediment in itself—she was there for the air rather than the company, and given her new status as a one-girl spectacle of the age, an excess of solitude was never going to be a concern for her.

Indeed she found herself attracting quite a following as she made her way along the banks of the Serpentine. The swans on the lake, most of whom really were just swans and not supernatural beings cunningly transfigured into a guise pleasing to mortals, drifted along in pace with her, and those walkers who had chosen to brave the early morning (or at least the early morning by the standards of that particular set, which was to say anytime more than an hour before noon) found themselves gathering behind her in an enraptured crowd.

When she stopped by the water's edge, flocks of swimming birds hopped out to gather around her, as though she were casting them bread. A not-terribly-discreet distance away, the crowd gathered, and gossiped, and wondered. But, if we're being honest, mostly gossiped.

Kneeling down with that eerily fluid grace she had possessed since her transformation, Miss Caesar gazed into the water and found her reflection broken and unfamiliar. She dipped her fingertips into the water and watched her face vanish into ripples. It felt appropriate somehow. The whole experience felt so much like nothing. Neither the cool of the water nor the warmth of the sun moved her as they once might have. Each was information without context. Sound without sense. Light without colour. Had she not firmly made up her mind to be satisfied, she would have been otherwise.

"Are you all right?" asked a voice behind her.

Rising and turning, she saw Mr. Bygrave. He looked a little flushed, either from the exertion of the walk or the complexities of approaching an unescorted gentlewoman. "Quite all right," she said at once, not bothering to actually interrogate her own subjective all-rightness. "It is a beautiful day, is it not?"

Mr. Bygrave nodded his agreement and once their consensus on the beauty of the day had been established, he made the slightly bolder suggestion that Miss Caesar might like to be accompanied on her perambulations. This she felt she would like very much, and so they progressed in company around the Serpentine, conversing as they went.

I would recount a little of their conversation for you, reader, but while I am bound to recount my observations honestly (well, honestly-ish) I am also sensible of my need for your good approval. And believe me when I say that you would not thank me for sharing the details of that stultifying dialogue with you.

In candour I could scarce believe it. He was a military man and, while he had seen no battle yet, was surely conscious that he would be sailing away to fight and perhaps die against the French. She, meanwhile, had lately been granted a supernatural capacity to sway the hearts of mortals and her entire body had been physiologically transfigured. Yet somehow they conspired to speak entirely of trivia. Of the weather, and the pretty way the light played on the water. Of ducks. I swear I have never heard anybody express so many thoughts about ducks. In other contexts, that would be perfectly acceptable—the Swan Queen and her courtiers are indeed fascinating people, and the intrigues that the Mallard Prince gets up to when mortals aren't watching are scandalous to a level that human society would consider abominable. But they knew nothing of that, and so their remarks were restricted to such banalities as "Oh, look, that one's dabbling" and "Do you think it too early in the year for ducklings?"

Dross.

But while it was torment itself for me to listen to, to Miss Caesar it was … something other. England is a banal country and English society is grounded in banality, and so to speak of nothing with a man who had little to no conversation, and not once to be asked if she might, perhaps, be prevailed upon to introduce anybody to her sister, was a kind of acceptance she had long yearned for.

"I have lately," she attempted, once the weather and duck-related conversation had grown too circular even for her, "been reading The Wanderer. "

Mr. Bygrave looked enraptured. "I'm not familiar with it. But may I say that the way the light shimmers from your eyes is the most remarkable thing I have ever beheld?"

With a shyness she did not even have to counterfeit, Miss Caesar looked down a moment. "You may say so," she said, "and indeed I like your saying it very much."

Propriety held that a lady should not promenade alone, but it held also that a lady should be cautious as to the amount of time she spent in the company of any gentleman to whom she was neither married nor related. But time, my friends, time is a slippery thing in the best of circumstances, and for those who have been touched by the powers of fairy kind it becomes positively liquid, pooling and swirling and running away from one in wholly unexpected ways.

The unutterable ennui of Miss Caesar and Mr. Bygrave's conversation drove me back to the house where—now that both of the younger ladies had absented themselves—the matter of how to use an innocent girl to lure a creature of sapphire light and malice into an ambush was very much back on the table.

An hour or two after breakfast, the debate had been joined—if not necessarily enhanced—by the arrival of Miss Bickle, who had been making her rounds and, on finding the Caesar household overrun by common soldiers, decided that fashionable visiting could go hang.

It was at her suggestion that the party had sent for Miss Mitchelmore and Lady Georgiana, partly because Miss Bickle felt it would be—in her words— jolly and partly because they were the only people the Caesars knew who had any direct experience of thwarting supernatural malfeasance.

"Flattered as I am," Lady Georgiana was saying, "you do recall that I am not actually a witch, despite the rumours."

"Yes," conceded the elder Mr. Caesar, "but between you, you have defied a goddess. A fairy should be small challenge by comparison."

Normally I would object to the slight against the prowess of my people, but we enjoy being underestimated, so I will let it slide. By all means, readers, continue to fear us less than you fear gods. Such complacency will in no way be your undoing. I guarantee it.

And while I personally chose to make no objection, Captain James had no such reservations. "First rule of war, no small challenges."

"The first rule of war," Callaghan replied, "is wear comfortable boots. But no small challenges come soon after."

Lady Mary, who had insisted on being part of the council if her husband was, had been listening to the conversation intently and was only now prepared to speak her misgivings. "I am still uncomfortable about two elements of the proposed strategy. Proceeding without Mary's consent gives me pause, and sending a band of, well—"

"Armed bastards?" suggested Jackson, letting his face settle back into its natural smirk.

Lady Mary nodded. "Precisely. Sending a group of such people to a society event in the hope of incapacitating a guest seems extraordinarily likely to go wrong."

"And if we had any other option," Mr. Caesar told his mother, trying to sound authoritative and coming closer to success than I would have expected him to, "then we would surely take it. But there is one thing we have seen the Lady reveal herself for, and it is to bring Mary to a ball."

Although her recent experiences had made her rather less concerned with appearances than once she was, Miss Mitchelmore could not help but consider the obvious complaint. "Will it not make rather a scene?"

Sal batted her eyelashes. "Oh no, not at all. Swift and silent. Like a wind at night."

If she'd been at all intending to be taken seriously, the effect was rather spoiled by the captain's laughter. "It's a fight. There'll be gunshots."

"Gunshots," the elder Mr. Caesar pointed out, "around my daughter who is currently made of glass."

"The plan would be to lure the Lady away," explained Jackson. "Though what would lure her, that's another thing."

At last, the discussion had moved to Miss Bickle's area of expertise. Or at least to what Miss Bickle believed her area of expertise to be. "Oh, but that should be simple. The list of things fairies want is actually rather short when you start enumerating it. There's saucers of milk. People's firstborn children. Promises freely given. Things that you think are one thing but are actually a different thing and the thing it turns out to be is usually your"—she stopped and looked bemused—"actually, thinking about it, children come up rather a lot."

Lady Georgiana, still standing, partly because the table was growing crowded and partly because it let her play her fingers through Miss Mitchelmore's hair, frowned cautiously. "I should stress that I am not advocating such a course of action. But I believe that sourcing a disposable child would prove … not entirely impossible."

"Sourcing from where?" asked Lady Mary, although my personal suspicion was that she either already knew the answer or did not want to know it.

"Desperate women?" Lady Georgiana's tone was matter-of-fact. "Workhouses? It's not a common practice, but it's far from unheard of. You can buy a wife similarly if you've a fancy."

The elder Mr. Caesar shook his head. "We are to buy nobody. There is little I would not do to protect my daughter, but that is a line we do not cross."

"Then I suppose," said Miss Bickle after a short silence, "we are left with milk."

That this discussion was going better than Mr. Caesar had expected was a damning indictment of his expectations. "I refuse to believe," he said, "that a wish-granting spirit of otherworldly beauty and inhuman wit will be lured from her places of safety by milk. "

Miss Bickle blinked. "Milk is good for you. And we have some very fine milk in Cornwall."

"What if we kept the milk for a backup?" suggested Captain James, leaning back in his chair and stretching like the world's least domesticated cat. "And thought more about giving her something she can sink her teeth into."

Lady Mary raised an interposing hand. "I concur with my husband. We cannot stoop to deliberately imperilling children."

"Never been in a textile mill, my lady?" asked Callaghan.

If he'd expected to shock his hostess, or to catch her out, he was bitterly disappointed. "I have, in fact. Many millworkers are friends of the abolition and I hope that the abolition is a friend to the millworker. I may not walk the streets naked in protest, but I am fully sensible of where my clothing comes from."

Easily distracted as ever, Miss Bickle stared intensely at something nobody else could see in a corner of the room. "I declare," she declared, "it sometimes feels as if there is truly no morally sound way of purchasing goods or services under our present social and economic system, and I rather feel there should be an efficient way to express that idea."

Sal smiled at her in a way that I might have been inclined to call flirtatious. "No ethical consumerism under colonialism?"

"Please don't encourage her," warned Mr. Caesar, "half her speech consists of made-up words already."

"Those aren't made-up words," Miss Bickle insisted, "they're perfectly well-formed words whose meaning is plain."

The elder Mr. Caesar leaned forwards. "The impossibility of perfection in an imperfect world aside, can we all agree that it would be wrong to sacrifice one child to save another?"

There was a chorus of agreement from everybody except Jackson.

"I mean, you say wrong, " he opined. "Comes out a wash from where I see it."

"Where you see it from," replied Captain James, "is a very dark place."

"Safest place to be."

Her head resting against her lover's body, Miss Mitchelmore craned her neck upwards to look at her. "Good Lord, Georgiana, somebody's said something cynical and you haven't even tried to outdo them. It's almost like you've grown as a person."

"I know, I'm disgusted with myself."

As the ranking officer, albeit ranking officer in charge of less than half the company, Captain James did his best to wrangle the discussion back in the direction of a plan. "Children are out," he agreed. "But we might need somebody who looks like a victim. Somebody who seems innocent, trusting, and like they'd jump at the chance to be snatched away by some shit from another world."

Miss Bickle's eyes grew wide as she stared at her companions. "But where would we find such a person?"

And the rest of the party stared back.

Satisfied that the team who were planning to go toe-to-toe with a mysterious being of unknown and subtle power had the beginnings of a plan, albeit one that stood a better-than-average chance of getting them killed, I lost interest and went to check on Miss Caesar.

She was still walking with Mr. Bygrave—something that would have been quite unforgivable had she been at all in a position to care for the opinions of the ton—and I recognised in him that enraptured look that mortals got when confronted with the Beauty Incomparable.

The sun was setting over Kensington Gardens, but its last rays danced inside Miss Caesar and spilled out of her as she walked, like the opposite of shadows.

"It's dark," Mr. Bygrave observed as if in a daze.

"Yes."

"We must have lost track of time."

"Yes."

Their voices echoed, as if from far away. An effect attributable entirely to the romantic atmosphere and not at all to the intervention of any—

"Going rather well, isn't it?" asked the Lady, freshly arrived from a place at ninety degrees to the mortal world.

"My compliments."

I watched the couple awhile. They were both, in their own ways, lost in the magic of it all. Which was, by and large, exactly where my people want your people—the more befuddled and confounded you are, the more it amuses us. Of course, having watched the young lady and her family for so long I could not quite help—but I am digressing. My kind are beings of whim who hold cruelty an art, comedy a virtue, and find our deepest delight in the combination of the two.

"What do you have planned for her?" I caught myself asking.

"Watch," she told me. "And find out."

That was the trouble with Titania's court. No professional courtesy.

"I should probably return you to your father," Mr. Bygrave continued, rather hesitantly.

With equal hesitancy, Miss Caesar nodded.

"It is not proper"—he flushed, gazing enraptured at the quasi-animate marvel that was Miss Caesar's new form—"but I should very much, that is—"

He got no further, because she kissed him.

It was a chaste affair by modern standards, but shocking by those of the day. Although of course the extent to which the standards of the day still applied when one was a fairy-wrought being of otherworldly substance was very much debatable.

Since she had no heart, I could read Miss Caesar's feelings on the exchange less well than those of most mortals, but I could still see triumph in her, and validation, and hope.

And, simmering beneath it all, questions.