Chapter Two

The voice, as I am sure perspicacious readers have already surmised, belonged to Captain James. And never, in a long career of being rather glad to see members of His Majesty's army, had Mr. Caesar been so glad to see a member of His Majesty's army. Although admittedly, present circumstances took something of the shine off of his earlier fantasies of rescue.

"This is no concern of yours, James," spat the major. "Run back to your band of misfits."

Captain James looked from the major to Mr. Caesar, to the men, and back to the major. "No."

"Why, you insolent—Bailey, Roberts, deal with this reprobate. Then we'll get back to business."

There was something about the way Captain James stepped forwards that, to Mr. Caesar, read as a warning and, to me, read as a threat. There is a certain way of moving, you see, a certain mix of grace and confidence that is found only in a certain kind of person. Heracles had it, and Theseus. And several other overrated pricks. This, his movements said, was a man who could slay dragons. Not that there are any of those left to be slain anymore. Possibly because people kept slaying them.

Bailey and Roberts, for the moment, unhanded Mr. Caesar and turned their attention to the captain. Turned, but did not advance.

"What are you waiting for?" demanded the major. "Thrash him."

Ignoring the commentary, the captain looked to the taller of the men. "Bailey?" he asked. "It's not Jim Bailey, is it?"

"That's me," said Jim Bailey.

"I know your sister. Good woman, does laundry off Tower Street."

Jim Bailey hesitated.

"Not sure how she'd feel about you laying hands on gentlemen and officers," the captain went on.

"Man's got to work," replied Jim Bailey, sounding genuinely apologetic. And he was right—it's by far my least favourite feature of the mortal world.

"True that," the captain said. "Well, when next you see her, tell her I'm sorry I had to do this."

Before Jim Bailey could ask what, precisely, the captain was sorry he had to do, the captain had done it. He crossed the distance between them so fast that the major was still exhorting his men to start fighting several seconds after the fight had already begun.

I am not, as longtime readers will already know, an expert in matters of violence. But even I will admit that the captain had a wonderful poetry to his actions. His initial strike against Bailey had been a precise kick to the mark, which put the man down long enough that he could focus for crucial moments on Roberts, who came swinging wildly only to find his blow caught and answered with a sharp jab to the throat.

With his job on the line, Jim Bailey came back to the fight with what I personally considered a commendable lack of enthusiasm. Putting his head down, he threw himself into a half-hearted tackle that the captain sidestepped, jerking a knee into the man's ribs as he passed.

With the largely innocent working gentlemen dispatched, or at least severely incommoded, Captain James turned his attention to the major and said: "Try your luck?"

"Certainly not," Major Bloodworth blustered. "An officer, a real officer, does not stoop to brawling."

Straightening his shirt, Mr. Caesar regained at least some of his composure. "You mean he gets others to brawl for him?"

While it had been intended as a slight, the major didn't take it as one. "What do you think war is, you pampered fop?"

Mr. Caesar would admit to fop —indeed he rather relished the descriptor—but he had never been pampered. "A place where bold men give their lives so small men can make their reputations?"

Apparently being as unsuited to words as he was to actions, the major stood staring at Mr. Caesar and Captain James, occasionally glancing to his servants in the hope that they would be inspired to new violence on his behalf. They were not.

"I have friends at court," he warned, apparently deciding that threats were always de rigueur. "You will regret this. Both of you. By God, sir"—he directed his ire now solely towards the captain—"I'll have your commission and then your hide."

When neither Captain James nor Mr. Caesar rose to the provocation, the major huffed out one last "Good day to you" and, Bailey and Roberts hobbling in his wake, clambered into his carriage and left.

The immediate danger having passed, Mr. Caesar experienced that sudden enervation which biological creatures are prone to as adrenaline abates. All at once unsteady on his feet, he sat back down rather heavily.

"You all right?" asked Captain James.

Mr. Caesar looked up at the man he didn't quite want to call his saviour although he had, strictly speaking, saved him. In any light, and from any angle, he cut a remarkable figure, the clean military lines of his infantryman's jacket at odds with a slightly unshaven jaw and eyes that said he'd seen mirth and sorrow in equal measure. Realising that he was taking far too long to answer a simple question, Mr. Caesar stumbled into a "Sorry, what, yes."

"And your sister?"

The part of Mr. Caesar that expected everything to be a slight or a feint wanted to reply with something sharp. A has had her fill of soldiers, I suspect or similar. But it was late, and now the shock of the fight was wearing off he was realising how tired he was. So he tried honesty. "I don't know. I'd have checked on her but Alexandre—the vicomte—wanted me out and it would have been gauche to refuse him."

"I could go back if you like, do it for you?"

Fond as he was of military men, Mr. Caesar was beginning to grow suspicious. "You seem very keen to help me."

That earned a smile. And Captain James's smile was wide, sincere, and knowing. "There's not a lad in the regiment wouldn't lamp Bloodworth one if he thought he could get away with it. That's worth a couple of good turns."

"Insults a lot of men's sisters, does he?" asked Mr. Caesar.

"Gets a lot of men killed."

Not normally one to be back-footed, Mr. Caesar found himself without an answer. Present circumstances excepted, his experience of physical danger was strictly limited to the occasional visit to a gaming hell and that one time he'd helped his cousin confront a murderously enraged goddess. "Perhaps I should have hit him harder."

"Nah." Captain James looked down at Mr. Caesar's hand, still bloody around the knuckles. "You'd have broke your hand. Keep your wrist straight next time."

"I'm hoping there won't be a next time."

A faintly rueful smile flickered across Captain James's face. "You don't know Major Bloodworth."

"Nor do I care to."

"Must be nice to have the choice," replied the captain, and there was the rue again. "Now, you just sit tight and I'll check on the ladies."

All in all it was, for Mr. Caesar, a bit of a personal low point. He had gone from defending his sister's honour to sitting on a wall while a man he'd just met—and a military man at that, so to be trusted only in a very narrow set of circumstances—checked on her actual well-being. And tempted as I was to lurk nearby and watch a man in a now rather disarranged cravat wallowing in self-pity, I elected instead to follow the captain inside. There was unlikely to be more violence that evening, but I hoped that I might at least hear some choice insults.

I did not hear any choice insults. But I got to see a young woman cry, and I take my victories where I may.

Miss Caesar was sobbing in Miss Bickle's arms, while the vicomte stood a little way off doing his best to refocus his guests' attention on less diverting matters. Miss Anne, meanwhile, was watching proceedings with the petulant expression of a young girl who sees no reason why somebody else's hurt feelings or bruised face should ruin her evening.

Despite the vicomte's best efforts, a small crowd was gathering. As desultory as the fight had been, it was still an order of magnitude more entertaining than a band of old toffs dancing a reel.

"I say," a redheaded fellow named Fillimore was observing, "this has been quite a scene."

"How perceptive of you," replied Miss Penworthy, who had come to discuss the works of the anonymous lady author with Miss Bickle and encountered far more excitement than she had bargained for. "Perhaps you should add that this sort of thing seldom happens."

"Well, it does not," Fillimore agreed. "I've never seen such a sight in all my days."

Lord Hale smiled a grim smile. "It's what comes of letting in the wrong sort."

"Perhaps we should let in more of the wrong sort," another guest suggested over the top of her fan. "It enlivens the evening."

This suggestion went over poorly with the rest of the gawpers. "On behalf of my sex," said an older man with wispy hair and a mild stoop, "I can safely say we'd prefer to all go home with our jaws unstruck."

A little apart from the throng, a young officer—barely more than a child to my eyes, although being ageless and caring little for the life cycles of biological organisms I find these things hard to judge—was attempting to console Miss Anne as much as a gentleman could while remaining within the bounds of propriety. "Rest assured, miss," he told her, "that no gentleman of good character will hold these events against you."

That nobody, gentleman or otherwise, of good character or ill, offered similar reassurance to anybody else was not lost on Miss Bickle, Miss Caesar, or the newly returned Captain James, who pushed his way towards the front of the group with a relentless mission-focus that did as well for the social battlefield as the more literal one.

"You all right, miss?" he asked Miss Caesar and then, when she proved incapable of providing a coherent answer, looked to Miss Bickle and asked, "She all right?"

Miss Bickle gave a reassuring nod. "She will be. It's just all been rather beastly."

Still not especially coherent, Miss Caesar burbled something to the effect that she agreed with this characterisation.

"Your brother's outside," Captain James explained. "He wants to know if you're well, and to be told if you're staying."

Raising her head a fraction from Miss Bickle's bosom, Miss Caesar looked around, her eyes blotched red with tears. "Stay? How can we stay after such mortification?"

"How can we leave?" Miss Anne protested, and then, turning soulful eyes to the young officer, added, "We shan't leave, I promise."

Miss Bickle looked uncertain. For a lady who lived in a world of rainbows and fairy dust, navigating so prosaic a dilemma as two young women with opposed preferences was quite discomforting. "I wonder if we might not be better off going. It has been a perfectly lovely evening of course but, well, Mary is clearly distressed and—"

Having decided, probably correctly, that his ball would be a complete disaster if he didn't do something about the crying girl in the corner, the vicomte waltzed into view. "Ladies," he began in his most charmingly Gallic tones, "I can see you have had a distressing night, pray let me give you the use of my carriage to return you home. "

The word of the host, being also the word of a vicomte or its continental equivalent, rather settled the issue, and the Misses Caesar, along with their accidental, Bickle-shaped chaperone, left with as little ceremony as could be managed given the highly ceremonial nature of the circles in which they moved.

Outside, Mr. Caesar was still waiting on the wall, and when his friend, family, and unexpected military benefactor emerged from the house, he rose hastily to greet them.

It was not, in the end, a warm greeting. Both of his sisters were, in their different ways, indignant at his role in their evening's premature end, and while Miss Bickle was more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, her peacemaking skills were rather limited.

"How could you?" Miss Caesar demanded, once she'd recovered enough to form sentences.

Doing his best to remain brotherly, Mr. Caesar looked down. "The gentleman was speaking impertinently."

"So you hit him ?" Miss Caesar seemed about to burst once more into tears. "Well, I hope your honour was worth it."

Miss Bickle, who had heard a little more of the exchange and the subsequent discussion of it amongst the guests, did her best to come to her friend's defence. "I'm sure John had his reasons."

" What reasons?" asked Miss Anne, who, like her sister, had remained largely ignorant of the cause of the disturbance.

"Good reasons." That was Captain James, who had thus far been standing quietly at the back of the group. "I know the man he hit, and I've no doubt he deserved it."

The appearance of Captain James presented something of a problem for the young ladies. On the one hand, his voice made it very clear that he was no gentleman, but on the other, a red jacket was a red jacket and thus worthy of respect.

"What did he do?" asked Miss Anne, ever the first to play up to an officer.

There had never been an explicit agreement in the Caesar household that the girls should be shielded from the harsher parts of their world. But ladies were expected to be innocent, and as the elder brother, Mr. Caesar felt a strong need to preserve that innocence. So he said simply: "He spoke ill of the queen."

That, at least, his sisters could accept as a valid reason to strike a man, although both remained disgruntled that he had not thought to make this clearer at the time. Still it meant that they consented to return to the carriage and to be escorted home without further fuss. And Mr. Caesar, with aristocratic reserve, formally thanked Captain James for his assistance. For a moment they made quite the picture between them, the soldier and the gentleman. Captain James stood tall and proud and just a little wary, watching the Caesars load themselves into the carriage with eyes full of life and fire. And a scant three feet away Mr. Caesar stood ramrod straight, his courteous fa?ade brittle as glass as he made polite reassurances that should the captain need the favour returned he need only ask.

It was not an offer he expected would be taken up, but he would prove wrong about that. As he would about so much else.