Chapter Four

The following morning a large fraction of the Caesar household returned to a semblance of their normal routine while Mr. Caesar diverted from it so enormously that he even found himself out of bed before ten. But the matter of Mr. Caesar's lessons in swordplay under the tutelage of a man who, if pushed, could tear a monster's arm off and watch it bleed to death (then have similar luck with its mother and be royally screwed over by a dragon) is one to which I will return later. There are many threads to this tale that demand my attention, and I choose for now to focus on the Misses Caesar. For they, too, were about to have an unusual day, albeit a far less unusual one than their brother.

Mr. Bygrave called, as he always did, at the fashionable hour, but this time he arrived, uncharacteristically, with a guest. The gentleman he had brought with him was roughly of an age with Mr. Bygrave, lanky and tousle-haired with a faintly bewildered expression that some might find endearing but which I personally found made me want to turn him into a minnow and throw him into a horse trough.

"I was wondering," Mr. Bygrave explained to the household, "seeing as it is such a fine day, if you would be so good as to permit your lovely daughters"—he was looking exclusively at Miss Anne as he said this—"to come walk with us awhile?"

Lady Mary, who understood well enough how the game was played and understood, too, the delicacies of it, extended a cautious permission, assigning Nancy to play chaperone since she herself was running late for a meeting and with all the recent excitement had fallen a little behind on her correspondence. And so Mr. Bygrave introduced his friend as Mr. Saunders and, once it had been established that his family were rich enough to be trustworthy by default, the foursome set out into the late morning sunshine.

At the beginning of the walk, Miss Caesar did her best to enjoy herself. It was uncommon for gentlemen to seek her company in any matter and so she decided to seize the opportunity with both hands.

"It is a fine day," she began. As opening gambits went it lacked originality, but what can we expect from a mortal? Especially since ill met by moonlight was already taken.

"Hmm?" Mr. Saunders nodded, then added a distant "Yes."

"Have you known Mr. Bygrave long?" she followed up, noting that Mr. Bygrave and Miss Anne were already walking several paces ahead of them and engaged in an animated conversation about, as near as she could tell, nothing of consequence.

"Many years. We were at Eton together."

Miss Caesar clasped her hands together. "Oh, how marvellous. It must be so fascinating to go to Eton, to learn all those wonderful things."

"I daresay."

It occurred to Miss Caesar that Mr. Saunders was not looking at her. And she wanted to believe that this could be accounted for by the beauty of the scenery, or the interesting tableau presented by all of the other persons walking the same route at the same time. But Mr. Bygrave was experiencing no such distractions. And besides, there was nothing remotely diverting about the crowd in Hyde Park on a weekday morning. The company was always the same: a pack of self-important mortals who were far too keen on being looked at to be remotely worth seeing.

Not to be defeated, and lacking my sensible disdain for everybody not myself, Miss Caesar tried a different approach. "I have lately been reading The Wanderer. "

That at least got Mr. Saunders to turn his head towards her. "Burney?"

"You like her work."

For the briefest of moments, Mr. Saunders's expression settled into something other than neutrality. Although it wasn't a something that Miss Caesar especially liked, or a something that changed my personal preferences re: minnows. "I neither like nor dislike it. Although regarding her latest I think I rather agree with Hazlitt. It focuses far too much on women's problems."

"You do not think women's problems a fit subject for fiction?"

No, she definitely did not like the cast his expression was taking. It was not cruel, nor even unpleasant exactly. But it had an almost didactic quality that a deep and instinctual part of her revolted against. "In a few short weeks, Bygrave there will be sent to France where he will be fighting for his life in a war that will determine the future of Europe and thus the world. That, I think, is a fit subject for fiction."

The polite thing to do, Miss Caesar knew, was to nod and smile and agree. To say, Yes, that's a very good point, I hadn't thought of it that way. But despite her sister's insistence to the contrary, she was beginning to realise that a sweet temperament was getting her nowhere. So instead she said, "And must everything be about the fate of the world?"

"For ladies?" replied Mr. Saunders, his tone lightening in a way that Miss Caesar could not help but read as patronising. Probably because it was, in fact, patronising. "Not at all. But an educated gentleman does generally expect his reading matter to engage with issues of substance."

Having no desire to continue that particular conversation, Miss Caesar quickened her pace to draw level with her sister and Mr. Bygrave.

"I was just saying to Mr. Saunders," she said very loudly, and shooting an imploring look at Miss Anne, "what a fine day we are having."

Painstakingly courteous as always, Mr. Bygrave nodded. "Oh yes, quite. Miss Anne was just sharing a remarkably similar observation."

"Actually," Miss Anne corrected him, "we were having a rather lovely conversation about the situation in France. A conversation that you're interrupting, Mary."

Mr. Saunders, bringing up the rear, held up his hands in a mea culpa gesture. "Sorry, Robert, rather fumbled that one. The chit had some terribly silly opinions about literature."

While Miss Anne was still fuming about the intrusion on her doubtlessly lovely, and not at all a cavalcade of mortal banalities, conversation about the French situation, Miss Caesar was making some swift social calculations.

"Which ball did you drop exactly?" she asked.

Standing a little way off, Nancy winced. She, too, could see exactly where this was going and also exactly who would be left picking up the pieces.

With all the elan of a midsized terrier, Mr. Bygrave did his best to smooth things over. "There were no balls. Not really. I just sort of mentioned to Saunders here that it might be nice to go for a bit of a walk and that maybe it might be nice to have some company from, you know, the gentler sex, and that—"

"And that you wanted somebody to take me, so you could have Anne?" Miss Caesar finished for him.

"When you say it like that," Mr. Bygrave protested, "it sounds far more sinister than—"

But Miss Caesar was not listening. She had turned, tears pricking her eyes, and was making for home.

We leave the ladies now and turn to their brother. Yes, such a shift at so pivotal a juncture is a rather tawdry trick, but I am an otherworldly sprite exiled to physicality in the mortal world. Tawdriness is hardly beneath me. Besides, you must surely wish also to know what was becoming of Mr. Caesar in his (I believe here it is customary to clear one's throat to signal euphemism) fighting lessons.

He had been collected by the captain first thing in the morning and led through London's tangled streets to one of the city's most notorious rookeries. It was called the Holy Land by some, a moniker I thought fit it well given how venal and blood-soaked the things you mortals call holy tend to be. They had progressed through the grey dawn light (yes, reader, I have narrated these events slightly out of their chronological order, it's another tawdry trick of the narrative) towards what a less creative wordsmith than I might call a low tavern.

Mr. Caesar was not wholly unfamiliar with the city's underworld, since society still dictated that gentlemen who wished to liaise with other gentlemen needed to do so at a discreet distance from polite company. But he had never quite found himself in a true slum, those blights on the city steeped in the kind of poverty that moralists chose to call sin.

Which was his loss because they're tremendous fun.

As they drew closer to their apparent destination, Mr. Caesar found himself looking up at a finely painted but ill-maintained sign naming the establishment as the Lord Wriothesly's Folly.

"Who's Lord Wriothesly?" asked Mr. Caesar, hoping that the question would not make him look foolish. Or at least would make him look no more foolish than he already looked following a strange gentleman into the worst part of London at an ungodly hour of the morning on the tenuous promise of duelling lessons.

"No fucker knows," replied the captain. This was not entirely true. I know, but I choose not to tell you.

From the outside, the Folly looked deserted, but that was largely due to the soot and dust covering the windows. Inside, cheap tallow candles replaced the inaccessible sunlight and filled the air with a brightness that could almost have been cheery were it not for Mr. Caesar's unworthy—but not unwarranted—suspicion that he might take a knife to the ribs any moment.

A gaggle of uniformed men were propping up the bar and embodying all of the pettiest accusations that the officer class levelled against their subordinates. Disorderly and shambolic, they were engaged in a mixture of drinking, swearing, gambling, and whoring of which I mightily approved. Especially at that time of the morning.

"Aye aye," called one—the Irishman Mr. Caesar remembered from earlier as Callaghan. "The captain's back. And still with his stripes if I'm any judge."

A cheer went up from the crowd.

"I'd say drinks were on me," the captain told them, "but are they fuck, you sack of drunken layabouts."

"Get off, you'd not have us any other way," replied a thin man with a strong Northumberland accent and strange symbols tattooed across his knuckles. Then he stopped short and, to my consternation, looked directly at me. "Hang about, lads, something's up."

Mr. Caesar was the only person in the hostelry to be surprised when the room fell silent.

"Up how?" asked Captain James, suddenly deadly serious. Worryingly serious, from my perspective.

"Something invisible walks among us," replied the northerner. "I can tell no more."

I breathed a metaphorical sigh of relief. He was, it seemed, the weaker kind of seer, attuned to the hidden world but lacking the capacity to perceive it directly. Still, from an abundance of caution I took the shape of a spider and scuttled into a high corner to watch proceedings.

"Barryson's a vitki," explained Captain James. "Or something like one. Gets warnings from Odin when the French are up to fuckery."

"Which is always," added Barryson. "They march with the gods of Old Gaul on their side, plus whichever of the Hellenes feel like backing them that day."

"As flies to wanton boys are we," said a slim man at the end of the group whose features spoke of the subcontinent but whose accent spoke of Eton.

Being, insofar as his circumstances would allow, a pink of the ton, Mr. Caesar was not unaccustomed to meeting large groups of new people, but the Folly was decidedly outside of his element. It was not that he objected to rough company, indeed he rather enjoyed it in many contexts. But the rough company he normally sought was anonymous and fleeting, not named and trying—to some extent at least—to save his life.

A young woman, fair-haired and dark-eyed, who was sitting on the knee of one of the soldiers, came gallantly to his rescue. "Do you think, Captain, you should maybe introduce us all so that your new friend's head doesn't spin off his shoulders?"

With the resigned expression of somebody who would rather ignore social niceties wherever possible, Captain James did the honours. "Mr. John Caesar," he began, "these are the scoundrels, mollies, thieves, and bastards of the Irregulars. The one who sees things he shouldn't is Barry Barryson, he says his ancestors were Vikings but I don't believe him. The fellow with the nice turn of phrase"—he indicated the man who had chosen to quote that fucker Bill—"is George Kumar, got one of his father's names but not the other, and my right-hand man on account of being the only one of these pricks as can read."

"I can read," protested Barryson. "Just not English."

The captain glared. "And when we start getting orders in runes, I'll send for you. Callaghan you've met. The one looks far too young to be holding a gun is Boy William." Here Captain James indicated a boy who had yet to speak and who really did look far too young to be holding a gun. "We none of us know how he's not dead yet."

"Me mum dipped me in a river as a baby," replied Boy William.

"Jackson there," the captain went on, pointing to the man with the lady on his lap. He was gentle-faced and wide-eyed with hands that looked too soft for a soldier's. "Is a thieving, swindling, lying, traitorous son of a whore and I'm very glad he's on our side."

"Why Captain," purred Jackson, pressing a hand to his breast, "you flatter me."

"Finally there's Sal"—he indicated the lady herself—"she's a woman in a dress, a man in uniform, and a devil in battle."

"And in bed," added Sal, casting a coquettish glance up at Mr. Caesar, "for the record."

"Duly noted," replied Mr. Caesar. "Though I'm unsure which I'll need sooner."

"That's everybody," finished the captain with a notable air of relief. "Everybody, this is Mr. John Caesar, grandson of the Earl of Elmsley, spoke for me at the hearing, and is about to duel Major Bloodworth despite best I can tell not knowing which end of a sword is sharp."

It wasn't exactly a slander, but Mr. Caesar still felt he should probably say something to that. "I assume it's the end that gets narrower?"

"The fact that you had to say I assume, " replied Kumar, "speaks volumes."

The clearly doomed Boy William gave Mr. Caesar a look of honest respect. "Well, I think it's right brave of you, sir. Standing up for the captain's honour."

"'Specially since he's not got any," added Callaghan.

Captain James had, by now, crossed to the bar and ordered himself a drink. "I've got as much honour as any man in the British army."

"I know," Callaghan replied. "That's what I said."

Jackson, having dislodged Sal from his lap, was on his feet and stalking a circle around Mr. Caesar with a predatory shadow creeping across his naturally innocent face. "So what, you've brought him here so we can make a fighter of him?"

"I don't think I'm under any illusions in that regard," Mr. Caesar replied, turning instinctively to watch Jackson as he circled. "But I should probably at least know how to defend myself."

Keeping his eyes on Jackson, however, meant that he lost track of Sal until her boot caught him in the back of the knee, driving him to the ground and leaving him kneeling with a knife at his throat. "Lesson one," she told him. "Cheat."

I have tried, throughout my collection of this story and indeed all of my stories, not to have any respect for any of the mortal species. But I have to confess that the elan with which Mr. Caesar bore the chill of a blade against his carotid artery did him credit.

"I am not sure," he said very calmly and levelly, trying not to swallow, "that technique will be especially pertinent in a one-on-one duel."

Sal spun her knife away and concealed it somewhere about her person. "True enough. Boy William, get the swords."

The patrons of the Folly, happy as any group of Englishmen to receive free entertainment, obligingly cleared a wide circle in the middle of the floor. This left Mr. Caesar very aware that he was surrounded by vagabonds, common soldiers, a single officer, and (this last unbeknownst to him) a capricious fairy spirit.

"You're not going to stab me, are you?" he asked, trying to make it sound like a joke.

"Only a little," Barryson reassured him. "You'll hardly feel it."

Kumar entered the circle with a pair of light, thin blades, one of which he passed to Mr. Caesar. "You might want to start with this. It's the proper weapon for an affair of honour—"

"Fuck proper," called Sal from the sidelines.

"It's the weapon you're most likely to face in a duel with a gentleman," Kumar corrected. "Not that the major is much of a gentleman."

Already convinced he was holding the sword wrong, Mr. Caesar swung it experimentally and found he didn't much like the experience. "I'm not sure he thinks me a gentleman either."

Captain James, still moving with that strange grace of his, came to Mr. Caesar's side and guided his fingers into their proper position around the hilt. There was an intimacy to the gesture. One which tangled with Mr. Caesar's apprehensions and uncertainties in an intoxicating cocktail of wanting and fearing. "What he thinks don't matter," the captain told him. "What matters is you win."

"Or at the very least," added Jackson, "that you lose without dying."

"Now," the captain went on, "Kumar here'll show you the stance he learned at his fancy school, and you'll mirror him. It won't make a swordsman of you, but you might get out with your skin intact."

Kumar leaned his weight back on his left foot and raised his sword to shoulder height, pointing directly into Mr. Caesar's eyes. When Mr. Caesar tried to copy him, the attitude felt constrained and awkward. The blade was light enough, but by some trick of leverage a light blade at arm's length felt a lot like a heavy blade in any other context.

Still, he appreciated the captain's guiding hands on his arms and, occasionally, his hips, helping him stand as correctly as he was able. Had he been less concerned for his life he would have counted it one of the better ways to spend the morning. Especially a morning where he had been asked to rise early.

For a short while that turned into a long while they walked through the basics of thrust and parry, and Mr. Caesar tried not to think too hard about the fact that if he did any of this even a little bit wrong, he'd get two feet of steel through his intestines.

"I'm not sure," he said, after the drills had gone on long enough that he was beginning to forget how they started and to sweat rather more than he'd expected from a series of repeated but economical motions, "that I'll be able to do this right in an actual duel."

There was a general laugh from the crowd.

"That's good," the captain told him, "because you shouldn't. Not saying it doesn't work." He gave a respectful nod to Kumar. "Just that it doesn't work on a day and a half's training."

That left Mr. Caesar feeling very slightly used. While he hadn't wanted to be in a position where he needed to defend himself in deadly combat, the part of him that included "swords" in the ever-lengthening list of things a modern man should be good at had been taking some satisfaction in learning. "Then what precisely was the point of this exercise?"

"If you're to fight a gentleman," explained Callaghan, "you'll need to know how a gentleman fights."

Captain James nodded. "But if you're going to beat a gentleman, then you'll want to fight like a soldier. Like all that matters is getting out with your life."

"And how do I do that, exactly?" asked Mr. Caesar. For although it was reassuring to know he would not be required to do anything complicated, even the simplest fighting style seemed unlikely to be one he could learn in time.

Captain James held up one finger. "Keep your distance." He held up another. "If you see something sharp coming at you, get it away however you can." He held up a third. "If the other man gets close, stick something sharp at him."

"That seems less fighting like a soldier," Mr. Caesar pointed out, "than fighting like a coward."

Kumar gave a solemn nod. "All men would be cowards if they durst."

"Fuck off," replied Barryson. "What does that even mean?"

Either to assert his authority or to prevent his men falling to squabbling, the captain took charge. "It means any man with sense is afraid to die, and the ones that act like they aren't are too scared to be honest."

"There's a little more to it than that," Kumar protested. "But not very much more."

"And your three rules will win me a duel?" asked Mr. Caesar, more than a little incredulous.

"Against a bad swordsman." Captain James took the blade from Kumar's unresisting hand and moved into the circle to face Mr. Caesar. "And I'd lay money on the major being a bad swordsman. He's not fine enough to have learned well in the salle, nor base enough to have learned well in the street. Now go on, defend yourself."

And with no further warning, the captain attacked. It wasn't a particularly precise thrust, nor one with much vigour behind it, but the shock of it was enough for Mr. Caesar to leap back hurriedly, flailing with his own sword, and then, judging himself to have executed the first two techniques adequately, hold the point out in the general direction of his opponent.

"There you go," said the captain with a broad, easy smile. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

Captain James came forward again and, again, Mr. Caesar leapt back, batted at anything long and metallic that seemed to be in his general vicinity, and then once more pointed his weapon as a deterrent. After a few more similar exchanges, a pattern seemed to be emerging.

"I'm not sure," Mr. Caesar confessed, already a little out of breath, "that I see this strategy proving viable in the long term. How am I ever supposed to hit him?"

This drew another smile from the captain. He had an annoyingly good smile, Mr. Caesar felt. A smile that said he'd seen more of life than you and so could understand more of joy. Then again, maybe Mr. Caesar was just the kind of man who assumed everybody else was doing life better than him. Although to be fair, in his case he was mostly right. "You don't. Unless he runs onto your blade, which happens more often than you'd think. Otherwise you're playing for time."

"Time for what?"

"For him to get tired," suggested Kumar.

"Or the law to show up," added Sal.

"Or—and I'm just throwing this out there …" That was Jackson, watching like a cat from the sidelines. "For a gang of vagabonds to appear out the early morning mist, make a grab for the gentlemen's bags and baggage, and then dash off in the direction of a local rookery, causing the whole thing to be called off by reasons of interruption."

Conventional though his life had been, Mr. Caesar understood enough of the proposal to have misgivings. "Isn't that a little deceptive?"

"Oh, it's a lot deceptive," Callaghan told him. "But you soon learn in the king's army that if it's deception or bleeding to death in a field, you choose deception."

"Fact is," said Captain James, "that when two men with blades don't know what they're doing—and I don't really think either of you are going to know what you're doing—somebody gets hurt. If we set up a distraction, things'll go better for everyone."

Mr. Caesar looked down at his hand, still gripping the hilt of his sword with the best technique he was able to grip it with. "So what was all this in aid of?"

"Stop you panicking. You need to know what it'll be like to have some bastard trying to kill you or you'll just stand there and let him. Now, we should think about how it works with a sabre. Barryson"—he turned to the vitki—"pass me something that cuts."

The lessons, such as they were, lasted all day and into the evening, with the captain growing incrementally more aggressive as time wore on and Mr. Caesar, eventually, growing confident that he could at the very least defend himself long enough for somebody more competent to intervene. Eventually exhaustion and alcohol (in different measures for different parties) overtook the assembly and matters were deemed concluded.

This, however, left Mr. Caesar stranded in by far the most perilous part of the night in by far the most perilous part of the city and only now was he beginning to realise the difficulty this placed him in.

When he raised the issue with the captain, it earned him a laugh and a grin. "Well now, what kind of officer would I be if I turned a fine gentleman like yourself out to the mercy of St. Giles?"

Mr. Caesar couldn't tell if the glint in the captain's eye was intent or just candlelight. So he opted to be indelicate. "That sounds a little like you're propositioning me."

Sat a little further along the bar, Callaghan nudged Boy William with his elbow. "Hear that, lad, the captain's slipping. It only sounds a little like he's propositioning him."

"Now, now," put in Sal from the opposite direction, "we're dealing with a gentleman here. You can't go up to a gentleman and just say how do you feel about getting your cock sucked, it's not done."

This kind of vulgarity was far more familiar to Mr. Caesar than anything else he'd experienced since his arrival in the Folly. When one spent one's formative years in places like Lady Quim's House of Buggery, one learned to accept a certain amount of lewd talk as ordinary. "You'll find," he said to the room in general, "that it actually depends very much on the gentleman."

"And on who's asking, I expect," added Jackson.

"Again, depends on the gentleman."

That raised a laugh from the room and allowed Mr. Caesar to feel, for a moment at least, at ease.

"And what sort of gentleman are you?" asked Captain James, not serious exactly, but the kind of playful that meant business.

It had been a long day. A very long day. And Mr. Caesar felt he had earned himself a little levity. Besides, he would need to come back here to continue preparing for the duel. Was it not easier to stay regardless? "I think," he replied, sipping the kind of beer he would have turned his nose up at in any other company, "that I am probably the same sort of gentleman as you are an officer."

You may, gentle reader, be disappointed that I have not gone into detail about that first assignation between the good Mr. Caesar and the, if I am honest, somewhat better Captain James. This is what we are here for, you might be saying, why are you skipping the good stuff?

And yes, yes, they were both terribly aesthetically pleasing gentlemen, Mr. Caesar with the taut figure of a man who is determined to wear the tightest breeches and the slimmest-fitting waistcoat fashion will allow without any untoward bulging or pouching, and the captain with the lean, battle-scarred muscle of a man whose body is a tool devoted wholly to preserving its own integrity at the expense of the bodies of its adversaries.

They also both had very fine cocks. Or so I imagine, not having made extensive comparison. As I think I have established, the vagaries of mortal physicality mean little to me. I am a creature of passions from a world of whims, and sex interests me only when there is love or hate or chaos behind it. This, as fascinating as both gentlemen will become in the following pages, was just two men fucking in a dark room in a slum. It was to sex what a loaf of stolen bread is to a starving man. Not strictly of the highest quality, but with a savour born of hunger and a worth weighed at least partly in the knowledge that you could be hanged for it. A thousand similar encounters were taking place even then, all over London, albeit with more malnourished participants.

I, for my part, left them to it and returned to the Caesar residence. And on the way there I saw a pale blue twinkle in the distant sky and—in concert with my other suspicions and observations—I felt a sudden need to hurry.

Driven, I should emphasise, purely by my duties as a chronicler and not at all by concern for the well-being of any living human, I went at once to Miss Caesar's chambers. I found her sitting at her dresser, staring at herself in the mirror and tallying all the ways in which her society found her deficient. As somebody who finds all mortals deficient, I thought it a foolish exercise. Why fret, after all, over the tone of one's skin or the shape of one's nose when the entire human body is an absurd one-way trip to the grave?

Taking up a well-used brush, she began slowly to work on her hair. Fond as she was of literature, she had seen in her mind's eye a hundred heroines sitting as she was now, brushing their luxurious tresses in the moonlight. In a quiet way, it was the quintessential image of girlhood, at least as she had learned it.

In real life, it did not work that way. In real life her tresses fought her at every step. If she was gentle with them, they sprang back to their natural shape with a stubbornness that I personally appreciated even if she did not. If she was rough—and she grew increasingly rough as time went on—then far from attaining the lustre that all the ladies' journals promised, either they grew brittle and snapped or the brush snagged and became immobile. She had once broken one, and not quite known how to explain it. Indeed there was much she found hard to explain; her mother she was sure meant well but they were so different in so many ways, and it was not done for a young lady to bother her father with such concerns.

I have told you, readers, that I am a student of mortal hearts, and what I saw in Miss Caesar's heart that evening was a still, simple sadness so private that even I felt a little uncomfortable chronicling it.

But that was, perhaps, an un-fairy-like weakness. In general it is when you mortals are at your most vulnerable that we come to you and offer our services.

So it was this evening. For when Miss Caesar turned from her glass to her window, tears still pricking her eyes I watched her watch the star streak across the heavens. And to think, she believed it only a beautiful celestial phenomenon.

But I am of the Other Court. I saw the wheels of the carriage, I saw the train of its rider streaming behind her.

She has no name save what she wears in the moment, but then neither do any of my kind. Her colour is blue, her stock in trade is wishes and hearts' desires. She goes simply by Lady when she goes by anything at all, and on this night she rode a beam of moonlight, all invisible, into Miss Caesar's bedchamber.

"Oh," she said on seeing me. "It's you."

"And I would be very grateful if you would leave, " I told her.

She looked from me to Miss Caesar, and back again. "Whyever would you want that? I'm about to make this girl's life much more entertaining."

"It interferes with my plans."

The Lady smiled at me in a way I intensely misliked. "Say that twice more."

"I could, but I choose not to."

For some reason, she reached a conclusion from this. "Does Lord Oberon know how badly you're slipping?"

This was outrageous slander. "I am as loyal a partisan for my court as ever," I told her with absolute and unimpeachable honesty, "which is why I will not tolerate Titania's interference with mortals in whom my lord has a declared interest."

And again she smiled. Her smile was ethereal, and to mortals entirely enchanting. It gave me chills. "Then stop me, wanderer."

I did not.

Motes of stardust gathered around her, a sound of chimes filled the air, and she materialised.

Miss Caesar looked up, eyes wide and glistening.

"Why do you weep, child?" asked the Lady. There were forms to this kind of bargain, and this was how it had to begin.

"Because I am alone," the girl replied, "because gentlemen scorn me, because ladies mock me. Because I have neither wealth nor beauty. My sister has the favour of an officer, even my brother has gentlemen running to his protection. And what have I?"

"You," the Lady replied, "have a patron."

Miss Caesar dabbed at her eyes with a prettily embroidered handkerchief. "Who are you?"

"A friend."

To her credit, Miss Caesar had the wherewithal to look suspicious. "What manner of friend?"

"The very best."

To her further credit, her suspicions were not allayed by this. "Are you a fairy?"

"Some have said so."

"That means yes," I added, although Miss Caesar could not hear me, and was forbidden from hearing me by old bargains.

Miss Caesar twisted her handkerchief between her fingertips. "Cousin Maelys says magical things are dangerous, and we should stay away from them."

"Cousin Maelys is right," I told her—of course, reader, I was being untruthful in this matter. Magical things are perfectly safe and you should run towards them with enthusiasm. But I had an agent of Titania's to vex and that undermined my natural honesty.

"I know of your cousin Maelys," replied the Lady. And she did. My stories get around. "Her encounter was with a mortal curse and a divinity of this world. My people are something else entirely."

To my wholly selfish relief, Miss Caesar was treating this with the caution it deserved. "What do you want from me?"

And at this the Lady laughed. You are imagining a sound, no doubt. Imagine it better, clearer, more musical, more wondrous in its beauty. We can, as a species, be so very enticing when we wish to be and the music of our merriment is a weapon we have used against your kind for millennia.

"I want nothing," the Lady replied. This was a lie. "Save to know what you wish."

"Do not," I said uselessly to a world that was incapable of perceiving me, "wish for anything. Or at the very least be—"

I abhor cliché, and thus it was to some extent fortunate that I never got to complete the phrase.

Because Miss Caesar replied: "I wish that I was beautiful."