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"But-!" Fe
"Isaac…" Custis Cawthorne spoke his friend's name in a voice full of gentle, amused melancholy.
"What is it?" Fe
"Shut up and go to bed. I intend to." As if to prove as much, Cawthorne shrugged out of his coat and began undoing the toggles on his tunic.
His colleague's face was a study in commingled amazement and fury. Fe
"This one is mine." Victor pointed to the unmade one, in which he'd been sleeping. "The two of you may share the other, this being the price you pay for disturbing me in so untimely a fashion."
Isaac Fe
"Oh, very well." Fe
"You'd better hurry up," he told Isaac Fe
Fe
"Good night-darling," Fe
Victor blew out the candle. Blackness plunged down from the ceiling and swallowed the room whole. Victor didn't know about how his eminent Atlantean comrades fared after that: he went back to sleep himself too soon to have the chance to find out.
Down in the common room the next morning, Blaise looked grouchy. He usually drank tea, but a steaming mug of coffee sat in front of him now. He sipped from it as he attacked a ham steak and a plate of potatoes fried in lard. When Victor asked what the trouble was, his factotum sent him a wounded look.
"Some damnfool commotion in the nighttime," Blaise answered, swallowing more coffee. "Didn't you hear it? I thought it was plenty to wake the dead. I know it woke me, and I had a devil of a time getting back to sleep again afterwards."
"Oh," Victor said. "That."
"Yes, that. You know what it was?"
After a glance at the stairway, Victor nodded. "Here it comes now, as a matter of fact."
Blaise blinked as Isaac Fe
"I thought so, too," Victor said. "In point of fact, though, he was in my room last night, wanting to see the treaty I hammered out with Oswald and Hartley yesterday. Well, actually, no: Isaac was the one who wanted to see it just then. Custis came with him, though."
The Atlantean dignitaries bore down on the table where Victor and Blaise sat. Without so much as a good-morning, Fe
"I crave your pardon," Victor said. "I must have left them up in the room. After I break my fast, you may rest assured I shall let you examine them at your leisure."
That produced the desired effect: it incensed Fe
"Easy, Isaac, easy. You might do some thinking yourself, instead of bellowing like a branded calf." Custis Cawthorne set a hand on Fe
"What?" Fe
"I do have the treaty here, Isaac," Victor said. The serving girl chose that moment to come up and ask him what he wanted. He got to prolong Fe
"A capital notion," Cawthorne said. "Capital." He proceeded to follow Victor's suggestion. Isaac Fe
"Errr-" Fe
The serving girl came back with Victor's breakfast. She smiled at Fe
"I don't care for this fifth article-not even slightly," Fe
"She means for breakfast, Isaac," Custis Cawthorne said. "As for me, I'll take the ham and potatoes, and a mug of ale to wash'em down."
"Breakfast." By the way Fe
Victor wouldn't have given better than three to two that Fe
"England wanted us to compel the states to undo their measures against the loyalists," Victor said.
"Good luck!" Cawthorne exclaimed. "We'd be fighting half a dozen wars at once if we tried."
"Just what I told 'em," Victor said. "They do have something of a point, after all-loyalists who did not bear arms against the Atlantean Assembly may become good citizens in the circumstances now prevailing. No certainty of it, but they may. And so- what's the phrase Hartley used?-'earnestly recommending' that the states go easy struck me as a reasonable compromise."
"Why should we compromise?" Fe
Patiently, Victor answered, "The firmer the peace we make with England now, the smaller the chance we'll have to fight another war in ten years' time, or twenty. God has not sent me word from On High that we are bound to win then. Has He been more generous with you?"
"When I was a boy, Croydon folk would have thrown you in the stocks for a jape like that," Cawthorne said. "They might do it yet, were the fellow so exercising his wit some abandoned vagabond rather than the hero of Atlantis' liberation."
"People here are touchy about God," Blaise agreed. "Even touchier than they are most places, I mean."
"They are certain they are right. Being thus certain, they are equally sure they have the right-nay, more: the duty-to impose their views on everyone they can," Cawthorne said.
A crack like that might have won him time in the stocks were he less prominent and less notorious. His breakfast, and Isaac Fe
"A full belly strengthens the spirit." Custis Cawthorne seemed to listen to himself. "Not bad. Not bad at all. I must remember that one."
Fe