“Major,” said the youth. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to this moment.”
“I wish I could say the same.” That had come out like an insult. So he had kept his jaw firm and damn well let it stand. “Where did they find you?”
The youth had seemed unperturbed. “Oh, in some dusty corridor of what one might still call reality.”
“This year’s model.” Hamilton couldn’t help but look at Precious rather than at his younger self. She was looking back at him too. He wondered in how many ways she was comparing them.
“Most people would be full of questions,” said the youth.
“It’s the nature of innocence to question, the nature of duty to accept.”
“And it’s the nature of age to be too sure of itself.” The boy had been ready to get angry if he felt he had to. He seemed very conscious of his honor. Sure he was being looked at too. Which was why Hamilton had poked him on the nose just then, to see his control, or lack of it. That rationalization, horribly, had come to Hamilton only after the fact.
Perhaps that was the point of this, to see which of them displayed the most grace? Had the boy been told what fate might await him if he failed whatever test this was? Could it be that Hamilton was, after all, being allowed to inspect his new … vehicle? Or was this his replacement? He couldn’t let himself dwell on that possibility. Hamilton had instead turned politely to Precious. She was petite, with long red hair set off by a green evening dress that … yes, the influence of the optional was here too, the dress had been, or still was, a sunlit meadow. To be in her presence wasn’t so much to see it as to be in the presence of it. She was used to being looked at and sought it. Her freckles didn’t look girlish on her, but somehow added to the passionate seriousness of those eyes, which held an expression of tremendous interest, a challenge to the world that equaled that of her dress. She had a welcoming mouth. “So,” he’d said, “where did you meet me?”
She’d smiled, but she hadn’t laughed. “We were introduced at the College of Heralds. Colonel Turpin brought him to visit. But I note that we haven’t been.”
“You’ll have to forgive me. I assumed we had already shared … a degree … of intimacy.”
He’d wondered if she would bristle at that. But she had smiled instead of being offended. Still, it had been a forced smile. She wasn’t quite on board for the anything goes of the new manners, then. Still a Herald at heart. Hamilton had found something he liked in her. Which should have come, he supposed, as no surprise.
“Why do you think,” the boy asked, “that Turpin wanted us to meet?”
“Perhaps he’s deciding on a suit, and wants to see both tried on.” He had looked back to Precious, as if suggesting she might be doing the same thing. She’d just inclined a fine eyebrow.
The boy had stepped between them then. He had decided on both a need to bring this intangible contest into the physical world and a way to do it. “Tell me, Major,” he said, “do you play cards?”
The Warden, no doubt encouraged by Turpin, had quickly warmed to the notion of a game. The select crowd, who had doubtless now realized what they were looking at when they looked between Hamilton and his younger self, had been intrigued, had talked at the top of their voices about it. He supposed, as the cards were prepared and he’d looked again at the throng, that there were clusters of people like this across Greater Britain now, in the most fashionable salons, changing their shapes and their ages and their appearances and the balance be hanged, and from now on they would all be grabbing at the novel and the extreme like they were bloody Icelandic. Perhaps the blockade had done this. Perhaps they were all starting to dance as the ship went down.
The game, someone had decided, should be clock seconds. Neither he nor the boy knew it. Which again, Hamilton supposed, was no accident. They had each taken a hand of ten from a new deck, one of a series being placed on the table. Hamilton took a glass of comfort while he was at it, a Knappogue Castle, from the Tullamore distillery, a pure pot still whiskey. Nothing served here or at High Table would be the kind of thing that the covers in his head could shrug off. That was the whole point of evenings like this. To get at the reality, that had been the thought, he supposed, back when those invited here had been interested in that. So now he was accepting a disadvantage. The boy, of course, had had to do the same, and, despite Precious’s warning glance, had taken the same measure.
The idea was to form tricks of differing value by discarding cards and picking new ones from another pack. But the nature of what constituted a legal trick changed depending on the time, each ten-minute arc on the Warden’s gilt bronze clock deciding the rules at that given moment. There was also a time limit of a few seconds on how long they could take to play a hand, so one couldn’t just sit there waiting until the terrain became favorable. So, Hamilton had realized as they waited for nine o’clock to chime on the chapel bell, one could either hold on to cards for long-term advantage, or keep burning one’s fuel steadily, playing the averages instead of waiting for some huge coup. Time and meaning in this game were freakishly interconnected. A somewhat garish intelligent projection of the rules was thrown onto the wall behind them, startling the deer. The projection had all the washes of color and blurred lines that suggested a courtier who was paying too much attention to His Majesty’s aesthetic tastes. It was said that the look of the ballroom at Hampton Court now changed depending on where you were in it, often just a blur of movement, as if it were seen from a carriage. Several ladies had already fallen as a result during one of the new dances, which had all struck Hamilton as being graceless gallops where the tempo was continually changing, people might collide at any moment, and it would be hard to tell where anyone was. They had been quick to blame their own shortcomings rather than question he whose perspective made all this. And well they should, of course that was the way they had to behave, what was Hamilton thinking? He had chided himself again.
They had taken up their initial hands. The boy had made eye contact with him again. No smile now. The obvious thing would be for Hamilton to underestimate him. He would not do that. That would be to lie about himself. He had let his eyes move upwards from his seated opponent, and linger, for a moment, where they should not.
“What are you looking at?” asked the boy, without turning to look.
“Nothing,” Hamilton had said, and had glanced back to his cards with a precisely calculated raise of his eyebrow.
* * *
In the first ten-minute round, Hamilton had surged ahead, his opponent failing to score while he put down some obvious, simple tricks. The boy seemed to always be waiting for something that was just one card away. Hamilton had recognized that in himself. That had been something that the service had beaten out of him.
A cheer and the Warden chiming spoon on glass had marked the end of the round, and the boy had immediately thrown down what he’d had but couldn’t previously score from, putting him in the lead and generating another cheer with the flourish of it. Hamilton had wondered if there were any in this crowd who were favoring him, or if to those who came to a party dressed as a mirage, the older version of an individual would be automatically the less interesting. He’d looked again to Precious and thought he caught something in her expression. Why did he feel she wasn’t quite of that opinion? She was biting her bottom lip, her eyes large with the excitement of the game. He’d turned back to the boy. “You know your fables?” he said, to conceal something that was brewing in his cards. “Slow and steady wins the race.”