Chapter Six

They shared the good or, if you prefer, bad news with Lady Mary and Miss Anne at once, and with the elder Mr. Caesar the moment he returned home that evening.

"What does this mean?" was his first, and eminently understandable, question.

With a wisdom that few besides me understood her to possess, Miss Bickle kept her personal theories on what it would mean silent.

The younger Mr. Caesar, however, did not have that luxury. "It means that she is presently beyond our reach. At least, beyond our reach by any method that I know of. But it also means that she is not dead."

"Can you be sure of that?" asked Lady Mary, who despite several reassurances on this front had been all anxiety since that afternoon.

"Reasonably." It was not the answer the younger Mr. Caesar wanted to give, but they had never been a family that lied to one another. "As a rule, gods kill, fairies steal."

He was oversimplifying, but that did largely capture the essence of it.

"Our best hope, I think," put in Miss Mitchelmore, "is to speak with the Ambassador." For those readers who have had the ill manners to ignore my previous published work, the Ambassador to which she referred was the Ambassador from the Other Court, a mortal man in service to my master with whom she had dealt a little in the past. "He would have knowledge at least, even if he were not inclined to help us."

Less of an oversimplification, and largely true. And there was an element of solidarity between changelings that they might have been able to play upon.

"Do we have any idea how to actually contact him?" asked the younger Mr. Caesar.

To Miss Bickle, this was a trifling concern. "Well, no, but I am sure something will come up. Trust the system, John."

"Is there a system?" the younger Mr. Caesar asked, without a trace of uncertainty.

"Well, no, but I feel one should trust it anyway."

For the past two hours, Lady Mary had been pretending to work at needlepoint while actually twisting a needle between her fingers and wondering why she had been confronted with a problem so wholly beyond her resources. Now she looked up at her son with an almost pleading air. "At least tell me you are no longer going to fight that pointless duel."

"Things will go worse for us if I do not."

"Will they?" Lady Mary seemed wholly unconvinced. "Or will it only be worse for your pride?"

Privately, Mr. Caesar was unsure. It was what he told himself, certainly. But how was he to know what he believed and what he had merely been told he should believe? A gentleman did not back down from a challenge. A gentleman did not lie with other gentlemen. A gentleman was always courteous and well presented. A gentleman did not let his sister come to harm. He had failed in so many areas that he was not sure he could bear to fail in another. "We may need to take actions that require connections. If I am thought a coward as well as a ruffian, it will make maintaining those connections harder. I need to do this."

The logic was sound, and although none amongst the company liked the reasoning, they accepted it readily enough. And the same logic led to the conclusion that it would be best if the younger Mr. Caesar got an early night. Or at least, he got what passed for an early night in his circumstances, which was a night of lying in bed staring at nothing, trying to keep his thoughts from running to all of the terrible things that lay either behind or before him. He found himself wishing, absurdly, that the captain was there. Which was not a wish he was accustomed to making about men he'd fucked. If anything he was more accustomed to wishing they'd leave.

So silence fell early over the household, a quiet, waiting sort of silence broken only by the scribbling of the elder Mr. Caesar's pen nib in his study where he, like his son, tried not to dwell on the present misfortune and his role within it. And, like his son, he failed.

There were no more falling stars that night. Which suggested to me that the Lady was busy. Perhaps she had found in Miss Caesar what she had been looking for. A project she could work on. Even if I had been the sort to show concern for mortals, which I am not, I would have felt no fear for the girl. For her life at least. The Lady's way is only to give, and to give nothing that is not asked for.

Which is, of course, its own kind of cruelty.

Mr. Caesar made his way to Hampstead Heath alone in the small hours of the morning. Well, alone save for a swallow flying overhead and observing his every action with the meticulous attention to detail of a master narrativist.

He was, he realised, somewhat taking his life in his hands not only in fighting this duel but in approaching it. The patrols had largely suppressed the threat of highwaymen but there was still the danger of more regular footpads, to say nothing of such prosaic perils as falling in a ditch, breaking one's ankle, or staining one's jacket. And those were only the perils that mortals know about. If you had seen half the things that I have seen lurking in the shadows of even the tamest of wild places, I swear you would none of you ever leave your houses.

Still he made the walk across not-especially-rough ground in not-especially-deep darkness unscathed, and was rewarded with the gratifying sight of Captain James and the somewhat less gratifying sight of Major Bloodworth already waiting for him. The major, it seemed, had enlisted Mr. Bygrave to be his own second, probably because Lord Hale was not the kind of man who would get out of bed for a dawn rendezvous unless he stood to profit from it personally. Of course, by acquiescing to this arrangement, Mr. Bygrave was risking direct involvement in the death of the brother of a girl he was making at least some attempt to court. A fact that bespoke either an amusing obliviousness or a commendable callousness on his part. I lean towards the former.

There stood also with the company a man who Mr. Caesar belatedly realised was a military doctor, and it was his presence more than anything else that brought home to him the reality of what he proposed to do or, more to the point, to risk having done to him. The captain's slightly too enthusiastic descriptions of the things different kinds of blades could do to a human body crept up in him and hooked into his mind like ill-mannered spiders.

"Wear these" was Captain James's only greeting, slapping a pair of heavy leather gauntlets against Mr. Caesar's chest.

Mr. Caesar looked at his own gloves, which were a rather fine kidskin although he'd had the foresight not to wear his best pair. "Aren't they a little—"

"They're a little more likely to dull a cut, put them on."

He obeyed. Or, not being a man who relished the thought of obedience, was persuaded to take the suggested course of action independently.

While Mr. Caesar was making this small alteration to his attire, Mr. Bygrave came scurrying over. "Major Bloodworth wishes me to say," he began, juddering to a halt, "that you can still be reconciled if you apologise."

"Happily," replied Mr. Caesar. "As soon as he apologises to me."

Mr. Bygrave looked uncertain. "What would he need to apologise to you for?"

It was not entirely unreasonable that the lad didn't know. Mr. Caesar had deliberately kept the details from both of his sisters. Not that it had helped Mary, in retrospect. "For having his men accost me?" Mr. Caesar suggested. "But more pertinently for what he said about my sister."

"What did he say about your sister?" asked Mr. Bygrave.

"He … implied that she was ill-favoured."

Mr. Bygrave adopted a look of shock that Miss Bickle would have been proud of. "Surely not, Anne is one of the—"

"Not Anne. Mary."

The look of shock vanished. "Oh, well—I mean, look, military men can be indelicate and well …"

"Well?" asked Captain James, his voice soft and level.

"Well, I'd never say as much aloud, but not every girl can be a beauty."

It was, I feel, testimony to the general evenness of Mr. Caesar's temperament that he felt no desire to strike the gentleman. "He insulted her by specific reference to her … heritage."

Sometimes, you can see a gentleman walking towards a cliff edge from so far away you have time to fetch your trombone and start playing an appropriately farcical tune. This, with Mr. Bygrave, was one such time. "I suppose," he began. It was not an auspicious beginning. "That is … from the major's perspective you have to concede that African ladies do, on average, look—"

"Choose your next words well," warned Captain James. "And when you do, remember two things."

"What things?" asked Mr. Bygrave obligingly.

"Number one. That what you say next isn't just about Mary, it's about my mother. And her mother. And her mother's mother. Number two, that one day in the very near future I might be in a position where I must decide whether or not it's worth saving your life."

Mr. Bygrave blinked, unused to such frank discussion of death from the officer class but cowed as much by Captain James's heroic reputation as anything else. "Of course," he said, "I'm sorry. And I meant no offence."

"See how easy that was?" replied the captain. "Now, why don't you run off and see if the major'll do the same."

Mr. Bygrave dashed back to speak with the major but, as he did, I lost interest, because I saw a single star streak across the heavens, and heard a music like glass chimes in a gentle breeze, and felt the breath of the Lady on my neck.

"I am working," I told her.

"So you continue to tell yourself."

In my peripheral vision I watched Mr. Caesar walk over to the major and say … something. It was hard for me to make out while so distracted. "I have events to observe."

"Don't you just. I wonder if you realise how interesting those events are about to become."

I did not wonder. I was beginning to know for certain. The Lady had chosen to interject herself into my story and there was nothing I could do about it without sending the narrative careening off onto paths I could not predict.

"It's an officer's weapon"—the major was saying—"which you'd know if you'd ever fought for your country. Go on then, you upjumped vagabond, take one."

"The big reveal," the Lady told me, "is coming in three."

Mr. Caesar's fingers closed on a narrow-bladed cut-and-thrust sword …

"Two."

… and he retreated, uncertain, to a mark that Captain James was holding for him. …

"One."

… "En garde, sir, " the major began with a sneer. …

"And here we go."

… A gentle blue light filled the air, and from the shadow beneath two trees emerged Miss Caesar. And all eyes turned to her because, as she had wished, she was beautiful.

You mortals like to say that beauty is subjective, but you are, in this as in so many things, wrong. There is a beauty beyond words, beyond physicality, beyond truth itself. When Miss Caesar stepped forward from those shadows she was beautiful like a sunrise. Beautiful like a thunderstorm. Beautiful like a city on fire.

She looked, in some ways, much as she always had. She was no taller or shorter, her eyes and mouth and nose were in the same place as they had ever been. But her whole body was glass. Pure, brilliant, colourless glass that caught the starlight and danced it and amplified it until she seemed to glow from within like angels are meant to but, sadly, do not.

Those who had known her more closely, and who had the wherewithal to see the parts of her rather than the remarkable whole, might have noticed one or two other changes. She looked rather more carved, rather less living. Glass leaves and crystal roses, wound wicked-edged and gleaming through her hair—or the glass that it had become—and twined to her shoulders on sparkling briars. She was robed not in the simple nightdress she had left in, but a gown of some strange vitreous silk, which scattered the light within her enough to allow for modesty, insofar as such things mattered to glass women.

I hated to admit it, but the Lady had excelled herself.

The arrival of Miss Caesar seemed to have put all thought of quarrel out of the gentlemen's minds. Both the major and Mr. Caesar lowered their blades and for a long minute just stared. Mr. Bygrave was, if anything, still more affected, gazing slack-jawed and rapt at the visitation.

"Effective, isn't she?" observed the Lady.

"Thoroughly. What do you intend to do with her now?"

"Observe."

In that regard the Lady's function was much like mine, although she was far more a setter-in-motion than I. Far more a meddler.

Mr. Caesar broke free first, familial affection falling under the same category of exemptions to our powers that covers true love, purity of heart, and seventh sons of seventh sons. Calling his sister's name, he stumbled towards her, still not entirely in command of his faculties.

"John?" Miss Caesar's voice, like her face, had changed little but utterly. It was as clear and as cool as crystal, sparkling like sunlight on deceptively fast water. "How did you come to be here?"

"How did you?" he asked.

And Miss Caesar had no reply. She just looked down at her hands as if seeing them—and for that matter seeing through them—for the first time. "I am not sure. I … I believe I made a wish."

"But are you all right?"

She nodded. "I think so. But"—she turned her eyes up to her brother, eyes that had now no iris or pupil but swirled instead with an endless depth of pearlescent mist. Still, there was hope there, for those who had the skill to read it—"am I beautiful?"

"You have always been beautiful," replied Mr. Caesar with fraternal conviction.

But this drew only laughter from the lady (the young lady, that is, uncapitalised, not the Lady, who was still watching by my side, although now I make the comparison there were similarities). And her laughter, like her voice, like her body, had become a thing of weaponised marvel. Of lethal delight. "Oh, John." She reached out a hand and touched him gently on the arm, and though he tried to hide it I saw the tiniest shudder run through him at the coldness of it. "You don't have to lie to me anymore."

And before he could protest, or indeed make any reply at all, she turned away to face the three men who remained. "Greetings," she said. And in my experience she had never been a greetings sort of person before her transformation. But time—even a short time—amongst our courts alters mortals and makes them, in some ways, more like us. Which is to say, more fun.

At the sound of the young lady's voice, the major and Mr. Bygrave sank at once to their knees. Captain James retained his composure thanks to the other exemption that providence saw fit to weave into our magics, that which protects persons of irritatingly heroic character.

Still at least slightly confused by the sight of four men on a heath at dawn with two swords between them, Miss Caesar asked the pertinent question. "What was happening here?"

In the tangle of his heart, the major knew that something was wrong, but there is a dazzling power to captured starlight, and he was, deep down, a man easily dazzled. "I was to duel your brother," he explained, almost as though fighting his own lips and larynx. "I had offered you insult, my lady, a choice I now deeply regret."

Like a saint in an old painting, Miss Caesar approached the major with an air of endless beneficence. Where she walked, stardust sparkled in her footprints a moment. "Rise," she said.

And he rose.

"You are forgiven," she told him. "Now go. We shall quarrel no further."

Somewhere deep in the knot of bile the major called a heart, I could see something rebelling against the power of the Beauty Incomparable. He had known, after all, for certain and for a lifetime that men such as himself were to be deferred to, not defied. But for now, at least, he surrendered to the glory of the Other Court and, averting his eyes, retreated.

"As for you"—she turned her attention to Mr. Bygrave, who was still on one knee and staring fixedly at the grass—"perhaps at our next ball, we shall dance."

With no further comment she swept past him, her gown a cascade of silver motes inside a shell of nothing. She did not make it far before Captain James interposed himself.

"And where're you off to now, miss?"

"Town," she replied with a certainty that surprised even her. "I wish to be among people."

"It's dawn," the captain reminded her, "and you've people at home."

Mr. Caesar had, by this point, caught up with them. "We should get you back at once," he agreed. "Mother and father have been beside themselves."

Time is different where we live—

"Do you absolutely have to tell them every little thing?" asked the Lady, but I ignored her.

—and so it was not surprising to me that Miss Caesar looked uncomprehending. "It has not been so long, surely?"

"A full day, Mary." Mr. Caesar's tone was sharp. It was, I suppose, the kind of sharpness that comes only from affection, but that distinction is so often lost on people. I myself find sharpness of all kinds delightful and appreciate the variety. "We have been frantic. The captain's whole squadron has been out looking for you. They spoke to the river police."

Another feature of our magics is that they can make mortals callous. So perhaps that was the reason that Miss Caesar seemed unmoved by her brother's admonition. Or perhaps it was just that she was sixteen. "Well, I am back now," she said, "and I was in no danger. The Lady took care of me."

"Nice to get credit for your work, isn't it?" the Lady said to me.

"Actually, I prefer to remain anonymous. That's why I let that awful mortal slap his name on—"

"Yes, yes, let's not talk about that particular incident now. You win some, we win some."

I took my eyes off my charges for a half a second to challenge her. "Which ones have you won?"

"This one," the Lady replied, "for a start."

When I looked back, the mortals were already leaving, Miss Caesar gliding with inhuman grace in the direction of town—although admittedly one direction out of the heath was as good as any other for that purpose—while her escorts kept pace and did their best to steer her.

Their best, by and large, proved lacking.

It is often said by chroniclers of this era that there are two Londons, and that they change places at sunrise. This is of course an oversimplification. There are, to my certain knowledge, at least 234 distinct Londons, some visible to mortals, some not, some literal, some metaphorical, some that if you enter you will never leave. But I do not wish to overload your fragile human minds, so let us keep to the more encompassable convention, that the capital of the Empire is merely a dual city, and that its nocturnal inhabitants change places with its diurnal ones at their appointed hours, passing only briefly through the shadows of the demimonde between.

So it was this daily changeover through which the trio now walked, chancers and cutpurses stumbling to bed while clerks and costermongers stumbled into work. As the sun rose, its rays caught Miss Caesar's new form and danced about within her, becoming a swirling, lambent permanence which would, when she moved just so, radiate out from her like a blessing from a particularly casual god.

She was, to put it bluntly, a distraction, and when she had been the proximal cause of two carts ploughing slowly but dangerously into each other, Mr. Caesar and the captain renewed their efforts to persuade her homewards.

"Look at it like this," the captain tried, "it's morning. Nobody worth seeing is out in the morning."

Mr. Caesar nodded. "He's right, this is hardly the visiting hour. Indeed it's hardly the breakfast hour."

"And proper rogues only come out at night," added Captain James, unhelpfully to Mr. Caesar's eyes.

Stopping in the middle of the street and causing, as a result, a tremendous snarl in the foot traffic, Miss Caesar observed the crowds and did, indeed, find them wanting. "I suppose," she conceded, "it would be rather fine to see Anne." She smirked to herself. "What will she think?"

In large part, Mr. Caesar already knew what Anne thought. She had made her opinions about how selfish Mary had been in running away quite plain over the last day, although he chose to attribute this mostly to displaced anxiety.

So with Captain James clearing away the gawpers and Mr. Caesar leading his sister gently by the arm, the three of them set out for home.

They arrived to find a house not in uproar exactly—neither the elder Mr. Caesar nor Lady Mary were given to uproar—but an obvious state of agitated expectation. And I will confess to the slightest pang of professional jealousy in this matter. Because the Lady had indeed orchestrated a wonderful chaos. And that is the entire purpose of our people.

When they came at last to the drawing room of the Caesar household, Lady Mary rose to her feet, embraced her son with an in my opinion uncreative cry of "John, I thought you'd been killed," and then stared over his shoulder at the transparent vessel of luminance that was her eldest daughter. "Mary?"

Miss Caesar nodded. "It's me."

"John said"—the elder Mr. Caesar remained sitting as he spoke—"that you had been taken by fairies."

"I made a wish," Miss Caesar replied. That this statement by itself did not evoke horror amongst all present is testimony to how little mortals understand of the truths beyond their reality.

Her father gave her a look that was not disapproving but spoke of a deep, private concern. "And you wished for this?"

"I wished for beauty."

From her window seat, Miss Anne made a sound of profound grievance. "Well, isn't that just like you."

"Just like me?" The tone Miss Caesar had been aiming for was, I think, hurt, but in her new fairy-touched shape her every word was touched with mirth, and so it came out cutting. "Whatever do you mean?"

With the aggrieved fury of all her fourteen years, Miss Anne gave her sister a look of withering accusation. "You couldn't let me have even one thing. You had to be the pretty one as well."

"Not wishing to speak out of turn," said Captain James very gently, "I don't think that's what we should be worrying about right now."

"Well, of course you don't," replied Miss Anne. "You're not even a proper officer. How would you understand these things?"

By the door, Nancy cleared her throat. "Saving your presence, miss, and yours, miss"—she bobbed curtseys to both of her young mistresses—"I wouldn't know a proper officer from an improper one, but he's right. I knew a lass made a wish once and it went bad for everybody."

Reader, I have left the following exchange intact out of my peerless personal integrity, but I should remind you that incidents like the ones described in these pages represent an unrepresentative minority of mortal-fairy interactions. The vast majority of them end extremely satisfactorily for both parties and with hardly anybody dead, transformed to sea-foam, or ruing their choices until death and beyond.

"What did she wish for?" asked Lady Mary, releasing her son from her embrace.

"For her brother to not die of the scarlatina."

"And did he?" asked Mr. Caesar.

"No," replied Nancy. And there was an ominousness to the syllable which begged for follow-up.

"Did he …" Lady Mary was trying her very best to formulate a question whose answer would not be devastating to hear. "Did he die of something else instead?"

Nancy nodded. "Shot by three Bow Street Runners."

For a moment the detail meant nothing to anybody present. But then Miss Anne, who paid rather more attention to lurid rumours and broadside ballads than most of her family, put her hands to her mouth. "You mean he was the Red Death of Clapham?"

Mr. Caesar turned to his youngest child. "What is that, precisely?"

"He was a spirit," Miss Anne explained, still slightly too shocked to recount the tale properly, "or a demon, or a monster of some kind. His touch spread the scarlet fever and he killed twenty men before they found him and—"

"I do not," Miss Caesar insisted, "spread scarlet fever. I am just"—she stood for a moment looking down at herself, at the light spilling out from where her heart had been—"I'm just me."

And that observation hushed the room. Presumably because nobody wanted to voice the doubts they were experiencing over that exact question.

Lady Mary, aware that on that matter at least her silence was speaking as loudly as any admonition, crossed the sitting room to wrap her arms warmly around her daughter. But this nauseatingly affectionate action was cut off by a cry of pain, and she withdrew, blood flowing freely from lacerations on her palm.

"Mama?" Miss Caesar looked quite distraught, as might any child in such a situation.

Lady Mary, still nursing her injury, couldn't quite look her daughter in the eye. "Don't worry, it's just—those leaves are very sharp."

Cautiously, Miss Caesar raised her fingers to her hair. But glass does not cut glass and so she felt nothing. "I didn't mean to," she tried.

"No doubt." The elder Mr. Caesar had yet to move, but he stood now to inspect his wife's injury. "Nancy, this looks deep, you may need to fetch a doctor."

Miss Caesar looked close to tears. Close to, but not actually crying, and I wondered, idly, if she still could. "I'm sorry," she said, "I'm sorry."

"You should be," snapped Miss Anne from the window. "Look what you've done."

That earned her a harsh "That's enough, Anne" from Lady Mary, but it was too late. There is little that hardens the heart like a reprimand from a younger sibling.

Nancy returned with water, lint, and bandages, and Lady Mary sat down, a little unsteady, her husband supporting her.

"This is not Mary's fault," the elder Mr. Caesar told his daughter with a certainty honed over years of public speaking. "This is something that was done to her."

It was, by all accounts, a reasonable statement, but he had reckoned without the wilfulness he and his wife had, with some consideration, instilled in all of their children.

"It was not," insisted Miss Caesar. "This is what I wanted. What I asked for. The Lady—"

"Who is this Lady?" asked the younger Mr. Caesar. He knew in general, of course. Just not in particular.

"My patron."

Miss Anne gave an uncharitable giggle. "Mary, that makes you sound like—like a woman of questionable reputation."

"Anne"—Lady Mary gave the girl a very reproving look—"you have been warned."

"But she does sound dangerous," the younger Mr. Caesar observed. "Mary, what do you really know about this"—his hesitation to use the word person wounded me to my core; fairies are people too—"individual?"

"I know," replied Miss Caesar, "that she heard me when nobody else would. That she helped me when nobody else would."

Lady Mary's hand tightened around the bindings on her wound. "Are you really sure that this is help?"

Miss Caesar's eyes being pupilless, I could not quite tell where she was looking, although her focus seemed to be on the blood still seeping through her mother's bandages. But she had come a long way, and passed a timeless while amongst the Other Court, and so whatever doubts or uncertainties she may even then have harboured she still answered: "Yes."

And in the moment, she meant it.