Chapter Seven

Strictly speaking, Mr. Caesar had no reason to return to the Folly. The captain and his men had done more than enough for his family already, and even when Mr. Caesar was in a mood for rough trade he did not ordinarily frequent quite such dangerous locales.

He had tried, on his way over, to ignore the figures huddled in doorways. Or at the very least to view them with compassion, as his parents might, rather than fear. But having come close to dying at the end of a blade once already he could not help but see knives up every ragged sleeve and in the folds of every torn skirt.

Had he not recently spent the night with Mr. Ellersley, he would have considered this quite the most self-destructive thing he had ever done.

It was early evening when Mr. Caesar arrived at the Folly, and so he found the place crowded but not raucous. Which was a shame. I for one would have preferred at least a touch of raucousness. Poking his head through the door, he scanned the room for the captain and, finding him absent, realised that he had not planned for that contingency. Of late he had been spending much of his time feeling a fool, although for reasons he could not quite articulate it was a foolishness he did not find wholly unpleasant.

As he stood dithering on the threshold, a voice called to him from a corner of the room. "Staying, or leaving?"

The voice had enough of Eton about it that it could only have belonged to Kumar. And sure enough, it did. While around him the ne'er-do-wells of St. Giles went about their business, he was sitting quietly beside them reading what from Mr. Caesar's angle appeared to be a copy of Voltaire's Candide.

Now that he had been seen, Mr. Caesar had little choice but to choose staying from the offered alternatives. And I stayed with him, in the hope that he might amuse me by getting himself stabbed.

Kumar folded his book closed. "Take a seat. We don't often get gentlemen here. It's almost refreshing."

"You don't consider yourself a gentleman?" asked Mr. Caesar. What people did or did not consider themselves was, he knew, a thorny question, but Kumar had a gentleman's manners and a gentleman's education.

"I'm a gentleman's bastard, it's quite a different thing. We're more likely to wind up in the army, for a start."

Mr. Caesar nodded his understanding. "But for the indelicacies of the wealthy I'm sure the regiments would be empty."

A smile played across Kumar's lips. "I see why the captain likes you. He's always had a weakness for a sharp tongue."

"Oh yes?" Mr. Caesar's tone became instantly guarded. It didn't seem decorous to ask further questions, but he wanted to rather badly.

"That and a challenge," Kumar added. And I could not help feeling that a tale hung thereby, though it was not one I had collected. "I assume it is him you came here looking for."

"Would you believe me if I said I was just keen to mingle with the salt of the earth and the pride of the British army?"

"Not for a moment."

"Good, because it would be a spectacular lie."

Kumar drummed his fingers on the cover of his copy of Candide. "Well, he should be along presently. He doesn't like to let us go too long unobserved. You never know what we'd get up to."

A pale shadow detached itself from the wall a few feet away, and Mr. Caesar saw Jackson, who must have been listening in the whole time.

"I could almost take that," Jackson said, "for a besmirchment of my honour."

"And what honour would that be?" asked Kumar, breezily.

Jackson grinned knives. "That's why I said almost. "

While he had been comfortable-ish conversing with Kumar, there was something about Jackson that still unsettled Mr. Caesar. Perhaps it was the perpetual undercurrent of murder.

To his relief, before he needed to choose a reply, the captain returned to the Folly and fixed the little group with a suspicious look.

"Something up?" he asked. Which gave Mr. Caesar a momentary pang of guilt since it did not, in general, bode well for one's relationships when the other party assumed you only wanted them when you wanted something from them.

Mr. Caesar shook his head with a little too much emphasis. "No more than usually. Which is to say that my sister is still in thrall to an unknown fairy, my best hope of assisting her lies in a plan that my least reliable friend is formulating to chase down a changeling we have met all of twice, and I am profoundly helpless to do anything to assist anybody until she has gathered herself."

"A sharp tongue," Kumar stage-whispered, "a challenge, and helplessness. You're on very good ground."

Either not hearing or pretending not to, the captain carried on with his not-exactly-interrogation. "So you're here for what, the beer?"

"I thought I might …" I was, I had to admit, aching to hear how Mr. Caesar finished that sentence. I had no idea what he thought he might.

"Might what?" asked Captain James with half a smile. "Take me to the opera?"

Kumar and Jackson burst into guffaws.

"Oh, you should. " Kumar was capable, it seemed, of smiling quite wickedly if he had to. "Captain, I would love to know your thoughts on Fidelio. "

"Fuck off," replied Captain James. Which was a shame because I also would have loved to hear his thoughts on Fidelio.

But despite everything, Mr. Caesar—perhaps from a lack of any other options—responded with a clear if ominous "Why not? We're a stone's throw from Covent Garden and it might be a welcome distraction."

Something glimmered in the captain's eyes. Something I found extremely promising. "All right," he said. "But I'd better not be letting myself in for anything awful."

He was. That isn't foreshadowing. I've just never been a fan of opera.

Dedicated as I am to my calling, I drew the line at hours of singing in German, so I reconvened with the captain and Mr. Caesar as they were being disgorged, along with a hundred other patrons, into the streets of Covent Garden following the performance.

"What the fuck," the captain was asking, "was that all about?"

Mr. Caesar took a strengthening breath. "Well, you see, it tells the story of Fidelio who is a … a very faithful man … hence his name. But he's torn between his duty to, I suppose, his country? And his love for …"

"You haven't got a clue, have you?"

Sheepishly, Mr. Caesar shook his head. "Not really, no."

"Do you even know which one Fidelio was?"

"The tall one? Probably the one who did the most singing? The thing about opera is that nobody really goes for the show. They go to watch other people and gossip."

The captain considered this. "Seems an expensive way to go about it. I'd have thought you could do that anywhere you liked for free."

"But at the opera," Mr. Caesar explained, "you can do it exclusively to the sorts of people who can afford to go to the opera."

Had any further illustration been needed of the opera's primary social function, it was provided at once by a cry of "John, fancy seeing you here." A cry that emanated from an extraordinarily well-turned-out Mr. Ellersley. "And with company, no less. So good to see you showing your appreciation for the fine bodies of our fighting men."

"I think you mean ‘our fine body of fighting men,'" Mr. Caesar corrected him, knowing full well that it hadn't been an error.

"Oh, do I?"

"Who's this?" asked the captain, his hand going at once to a sword he wasn't wearing.

"Old friend," replied Mr. Caesar with a studied laconicity. "And I cannot overemphasise the word old. "

Mr. Ellersley curled his lips into a smile that Mr. Caesar had always been unsure if he wanted to kiss or punch. Although given how poorly punching had gone for him lately, he'd probably made the better choice overall. "Claws in, prince of cats. I just wanted to see how you found the show."

He did not, Mr. Caesar knew full well, want to see how he had found the show. "Delightful," he said. "So delightful that it almost distracted me from what Lord Wilmslowe was doing with that lady he swears is his niece."

"Oh, well deflected," replied Mr. Ellersley. And there was that smile again. "Although thinking about it, if she is his niece that makes things substantially more interesting."

I sometimes almost liked Mr. Ellersley.

Captain James, not especially interested in being caught up in a duel of manners between bitter exes, fell back on his training and looked for the nearest path of escape. "Do you reckon that if we put a sprint on we could make it somewhere fun before we get trampled by theatre folk?"

"Oh don't go. " A gleam came to Mr. Ellersley's eye. "Why don't you bring the captain to the club? I'm sure he'd go down wonderfully."

This kind of sniping was to be expected from Thomas Ellersley and normally Mr. Caesar would have taken it in stride. But the joke was not entirely at his expense, and while the captain, in any other circumstance, was worth twenty Ellersleys, to the opera crowd he was an upjumped slum rat from the ranks whose words would by definition be worthless.

"I think you'll find," Mr. Caesar began, but then his words ran uncharacteristically dry. That is but one of many areas in which he is your superior had been the retort that sprang instantly to mind. But that would have been for his defence, not the captain's. One could hardly defend a gentleman from the intimation that he was your catamite by praising his sexual technique. "I mean to say—" was the next fateful stumble.

"Shall I send a man ahead?" Mr. Ellersley continued. "Or do you want to surprise them?"

It should not have been this difficult. All he needed to do was to take what the other gentleman had just said, turn it around, and fire it back in a way that made him look foolish. He'd done it a thousand times. But never once in a way that required him to think about the well-being of another party.

"Having a bad evening?" Mr. Ellersley continued innocently. "You're usually much better sport. What has this creature been doing to you?"

He was failing. He was failing at the one thing he was meant to be good at. So Mr. Caesar took a deep breath, looked Mr. Ellersley in the eye and said: "Tom. Fuck off." Then before his brain could process the damage to his reputation as a wit and a gadabout, he turned to the captain. "Come on, let's go somewhere that isn't miserable."

"Paying your respects to the men in uniform?" Mr. Ellersley shot after them, having at least partially recovered from the sheer effrontery of having been dismissed so curtly.

"You know," Mr. Caesar returned over his shoulder. "I think I actually might."

So they went back to the Folly. It was not the kind of place Mr. Caesar would normally have gone after the opera, but it was nearby and it was mercifully free of the Mr. Ellersleys of the world.

The hour having grown later, the inn had grown more vibrant and the Irregulars were in attendance in greater numbers. Captain James threw himself down at the bar with Mr. Caesar companionably close beside him. He could probably have sat closer—the clientele of the Folly seemed to give zero fucks about who was and wasn't a bugger—but long habit kept him at a deniable distance.

"How was the show?" asked Kumar with a waggish tone, sidling up alongside the newcomers.

"Still got no idea," replied Captain James. "But according to this one"—he jerked a thumb at Mr. Caesar—"seeing the show isn't the point. On the other hand we did get to watch a rich man getting up to something that might have been incest."

Feeling some need to come across as less of a total cultural vacuum, Mr. Caesar made a tokenistic effort to defend himself. "Obviously we also appreciated the music," he said. "Which was very … sweeping."

Sal slipped herself onto the captain's lap, a gesture which stirred irrational jealousy in Mr. Caesar despite its being clearly a more familial gesture than a carnal one. "Was Anna Milder still in the title role?" she asked.

"It was Fidelio, " replied Mr. Caesar with a fatal lack of thought.

"John reckons he was probably the tall one," added the captain with still more fatal helpfulness.

Sal smirked. "Fidelio is a girl."

"Are you sure?" She was clearly sure. And Mr. Caesar knew she was sure. And she knew he knew she was sure, and I knew that they both knew that they both knew. I found opera in general as dull as an ill-used sabre, but this was showing all signs of being a delightful evening.

Captain James made a perfunctory attempt to suppress a grin. "Sal used to be on stage. She knows what she's talking about."

"It's a gentleman's name," protested Mr. Caesar, rather limply.

Sal heaved the sigh of a woman who has needed to explain opera to people many, many times. " Fidelio is the story of a young woman named Leonore who disguises herself as a boy named Fidelio in order to search for her husband who has been cruelly imprisoned by the wicked Pizarro."

"So not," the captain faux-asked, "about a very faithful man who is torn between duty to his country and something something something?"

Ordinarily accustomed to the restrictions of his linens, Mr. Caesar was grown uncharacteristically hot in the collar region. "In my defence, I don't speak a word of German."

And Captain James laughed. And the Irregulars laughed. And in spite of himself, Mr. Caesar laughed. It was only later in the evening that it would strike him how rarely he had done that of late.

They fucked again that night, obviously. And although it was not unknown for Mr. Caesar to dally with the same soldier more than once, it was different this time. Partly, probably, because they had just been to the opera. And partly because the captain was an officer and so not so unambiguously below his own station as to make things simple. And partly because … because of a whole mess of unseemly human concepts that my people do not truck with.

Afterwards they lay sweat-slicked and satisfied on sheets that Mr. Caesar would not normally have touched with a barge pole that was on fire.

"So who was that feller at the opera?" asked the captain, staring at the ceiling cradling Mr. Caesar's head against his shoulder.

"An old friend. Of the"—he waved a hand—"intimate variety."

"He's a prick."

"He is. And I'm sorry you became the target of his … prickishness."

Although he tried to look blasé, I could still read the memory of discomfort in the captain's heart. "It's fine. You had my back, that's what matters."

"In an ideal world, your back wouldn't need having."

The captain's lips curled into a rueful smile. "In an ideal world, a lot of good men would still be alive who aren't. Don't see the sense in worrying about ideal worlds." For a moment, they lay in silence, then the captain continued "What were you doing with a shit like that anyway?"

"We suited each other."

Captain James turned his head sideways. "You're not a shit, Caesar. You pretend to be, but you're not."

"Thank you, that's the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me."

"You know the sad thing," the captain replied. "I think that might actually be true."

That wasn't a road Mr. Caesar was especially keen to go down. And it wasn't true in the absolute sense. Within his family, at least, affection had always been freely given, at least until he and his sisters had reached the age of considering such things beneath them. Outside of it, however, that was rather a different story. "I suppose we all have our … difficult former lovers," Mr. Caesar mused, in the hope that it would prompt the captain to change the subject.

"True. Had one try to sell me out to the French once. That was pretty difficult."

"What happened?"

"Shot him."

Mr. Caesar had been hoping for a touch more detail, and said as much.

"He had debts," the captain explained. "From gambling. And Bonaparte has spies. Not a gambler, are you?"

"Never more than I can afford to lose. Which in practice means never very much at all."

"Good." The captain gave the best approximation of a nod he could give while horizontal. "Because I've still got the pistol."

It was, Mr. Caesar was sure, mostly a joke. "Even if I owed a fortune, I don't think Napoleon would find me useful enough to subvert."

"Then we should be all right," said the captain. Apparently to himself as much as anybody.

After that they lapsed into a relaxed silence, the furtive nighttime sounds of St. Giles drifting in from outside in a way that, in any other company, would have left Mr. Caesar determined to be a mile away at least but with Captain James beside him seemed almost comforting.

"I don't suppose," Mr. Caesar said eventually, "that you'd like to join me for a picnic tomorrow?"

"The opera and a picnic?" The captain laughed again, and Mr. Caesar let himself enjoy it. "You're trying to turn me respectable."

"I say picnic. It's more sort of an ill-fated effort to make contact with the Ambassador from the Other Court concocted by a young lady who leaves far too much to chance. But she is bringing a hamper."

"Oh." The captain made a great play of suasion. "Well, if there's a hamper, you can count me in."

It was not the kind of mockery Mr. Caesar was used to, being gentler and less grounded in specific knowledge of his personal weaknesses. But it was the kind he could get used to. So he leaned over to the captain and demonstrated his gratitude.