The ironic part was that Colin had at last managed to achieve what no Eversea in history had so far managed to do:
Get caught.
This made him the most legendary Eversea to date. The other irony, of course, was that he was entirely innocent of the crime. Then again, when the Charlies had found him with his hand on the knife protruding from the chest of Roland Tarbell, and when the sole eyewitness to the crime—Horace Peele, the man with the three-legged dog called Snap—had vanished into the ether, and when the only witness to the witness’s vanishing claimed fervently to have seen Horace Peele taken away in a fiery winged chariot…
Well, in all fairness, it was rather difficult to blame the jury.
The Everseas had found their petitions to the Home Secretary for Colin’s freedom mysteriously thwarted at every turn. Even negotiations for transportation instead of execution had been oh, so regretfully denied.
I’m innocent was a constant scream in his head, and the sheer effort to keep from screaming it aloud—humor was his armor, and pride was his breeding—perversely forged those glittering witticisms the guards sold to the broadsheets. Colin found himself trapped in a fine, sticky net woven of long, dark history…and his own suspicions.
For now it was Marcus Eversea, Colin’s oldest brother, the one who had fished a sodden Colin out of the Ouse several decades ago, who would wake up next to Louisa Porter for the next four or five decades.
It was Ian who mistakenly thought Colin would find comfort in this news. After all, Marcus had come to Louisa’s financial rescue, and she’d of course gratefully accepted his proposal. Instead, the knowledge had burrowed thornlike into Colin’s mind, ensuring that he never slept a night through. Though to be fair, Newgate was hardly conducive to restful sleep anyway.
But Colin had rather a gift for noticing things, a gift honed in part as a result of being the youngest son in a crowd of siblings. And so he knew he was probably the only other person in the world who was aware that Marcus had loved Louisa since he was thirteen years old, and that Marcus, like himself, had fallen in love with her at a picnic at Pennyroyal Green.
Marcus would marry Louisa in a week’s time.
And in an hour Colin would hang.
The Eversea town house on St. James Square was so resoundingly silent that the birds performing a duet in the garden might as well have been Covent Garden sopranos. It was a cheerful and complicated song, with runs and trills and pauses for grand tweets, and it echoed through the rooms.
Birds had no sense of occasion, Marcus Eversea thought.
Their father Jacob and their mother Isolde, siblings Ian and Chase and Olivia and Genevieve and Marcus—were perched on settees and chairs in the sitting room, motionless, already wearing mourning, in which they of course looked dashing. It suited the Eversea coloring, their dark hair and fair skin, the blue eyes that most of them had. A few, like Chase and Marcus, had dark ones. As for Colin…well, Marcus had always found Colin’s eyes difficult to describe. He was the exception, however.
Colin had ordered them not to go anywhere near the Old Bailey today.
“I won’t have it,” he’d said firmly. “Promise you’ll wait for me at St. James Square, speak of me if you can while you wait, and collect my body later. And mind you, I want the coffin with the brass fittings and a blue silk lining and a bloody good lock.”
Colin always knew what he wanted.
Louisa Porter was one of the things that Colin had wanted. And now, as she was soon to be an Eversea, she sat with them, together but slightly apart in a chair that enveloped her. Her hands lay very still in her lap, but she’d closed one tightly around the wrist of her other, as though she’d captured it and wrestled it into submission, or needed to forcibly restrain it from…
From what? Marcus Eversea wondered. Rending her clothing? Tearing her hair? No, Louisa’s beauty and breeding were all she had to offer by way of dowry, so she could scarcely afford to indulge in dramatic gestures—unlike, for instance, the beautiful Miss Violet Redmond, who excelled at them. Miss Redmond once threatened to cast herself into a well over a disagreement with a suitor, and she had one foot hooked over the edge before the suitor dragged her back by both elbows. And then—wisely—the man had fled. Good Lord. Marcus realized he was very nearly afraid of Violet Redmond, and he was afraid of nothing. She’d cast her fine eyes in his direction once before. He knew he wasn’t the man who could possibly contain her, and he’d quickly looked away.
No histrionics for Louisa Porter. Instead, everything she felt right now was evident in that grip and her bloodless knuckles.
Marcus traced her profile with his eyes. He wondered if there would always be this…barbed catch in his breathing whenever he looked at her. It was sheer wonder that anything or anyone could be so very…so very…
With his usual pragmatism and sense of economy, Marcus abandoned the search for the right word, for he knew he would never find it.
She turned toward him then and tipped her head up slowly, as though motion hurt her. Her eyes were a blue so absolute it made one want to invoke—oh, blue things, he supposed—and once again rue his vocabulary, comprised solely of land and horses and drainage ditches and investments.
He couldn’t help but think that Colin would have known precisely what sort of blue her eyes were. But Marcus knew that Louisa Porter hadn’t consented to wed him because of his ability to produce a metaphor. He absently fingered one of the mother-of-pearl buttons on his Mercury Club waistcoat instead, for reassurance. It was emblematic of the importance of what he could offer Louisa.
And it was Louisa who finally spoke into that awful silence.
“The birds are singing.” She said it very faintly, sounding surprised. As though she, too, found it an affront.
Isaiah Redmond squinted down onto the Old Bailey from his perch at the window. Without his spectacles, the throng was an undulating blur, calling to mind nothing so much as maggots feasting upon rotting meat. A smooth gesture later—all of Isaiah’s movements were graceful, studied, controlled, regardless of the urgency motivating them—his spectacles were out of his pocket and pushed up onto his nose, and the blur became the good people of London dressed in their Sunday best. Though scarcely less repellent for all of that.
Isaiah abhorred hangings. It was a sentiment he’d never before shared aloud, as it bordered on the radical. And if the Redmond family had spawned any radicals over the centuries, they’d been kept very good secrets indeed.
Then again, the Redmonds excelled at keeping secrets. Every Redmond came into the world equipped with a sort of Pandora’s box, courtesy of being born a Redmond.
Isaiah, the current patriarch, had a veritable storehouse of his own.
He intended to see this particular hanging through, however, as it represented a fissure in the pattern of history itself. Today an Eversea would at last—at last—die on the gallows. Who knew what could happen next? Rivers might begin to flow uphill. King George might become a Quaker.
Lyon might suddenly reappear.
Isaiah frowned suddenly. A man, over the years, grew to know the sound of his own family gathered in a room, the ebb and flow of voices blended in arguments and laughter. But a note was missing from it now. It reminded him peculiarly of the way birds fell silent before a storm.
He turned. Miles was still puzzling over his next move in the chess game he and Isaiah had begun, his long, handsome, typically Redmond face propped on a fist. Dark-eyed, like his mother, not green-eyed, like his father and Lyon. Not the man that Lyon had promised to be, Isaiah thought, with a rush of guilt and impatience. Though God knows Miles tried.
His other son, Jonathon, must be teasing their young cousin, Lisbeth, because her cheeks were pinker than usual and her voice was squeaky, no doubt in protest of some kind. His daughter Violet, his joy and his despair, was at her embroidery, and, he thought, also helping Jonathon torment Lisbeth, because a devilish smile played at the corners of her mouth. And his wife—
Ah: that
was it. His wife was silent.
He’d married a woman who possessed the improbable name of Fanchette, and as if to compensate for sounding like a French whore, she was perhaps the most upright example of aristocratic English womanhood ever born. Her chief loves were gossip, spending, and her children. Isaiah was no longer certain where he ranked after those three things, and he was also no longer certain he cared. They’d begun their married life as passionate strangers, they were both young and handsome and there were children to create, and they had evolved, over the years, into politely affectionate strangers. And though she was a handsome woman and a credit to him in public, if left unchecked, Fanchette would spend every last penny he possessed on things like livery and silver forks and kid slippers in every color.
He’d recently been shocked near to apoplexy by the sight of one of her bills from the dressmaker and had at last cut off her allowance.
The result was, for the first time in their marriage, coldness, distance, nervousness, and all manner of vague illnesses requiring lengthy retreats to her rooms. But Isaiah did not relent. He’d instructed his man of affairs, Baxter, not to give her a farthing without his permission, and to inform him of all of her spending.
Baxter was very nearly a member of the family, though clearly not one of Fanchette’s favorite members. In fact, for loyalty and service above and beyond the call of duty, Isaiah had arranged for Baxter to become a member of the Mercury’s Wings gentlemen’s club.
Never let it be said that Isaiah Redmond did not indulge the occasional egalitarian impulse.
He relaxed a little. So that was all. Fanchette would normally have been chatting away with her children, for she couldn’t abide silences, but for some reason she was simply watching him. Fixedly. She would recover, once her lesson was learned.
He gave her raised brows and turned back toward the window. The scaffold was a great black blight against that blue sky. In a few minutes Colin Eversea, the toast of London but the youngest and hardly the promise of that family, would be strung up on one of those hooks and killed.
A son for a son, Isaiah thought. There was a certain grim poetry to it.
Once the ordinary had sufficiently tormented the condemned, Colin and Bad Jack were ushered forward to have their shackles struck off.
And then it was time to be trussed for hanging.
Colin dutifully handed over a shilling to the hangman, a traditional small bribe meant to ensure that wrists were bound a bit more loosely and that the condemned would die the cleanest, quickest possible death. Which might mean the hangman would need to give a good tug on Colin’s legs after he’d been strung up. God only knew, that effort was worth a shilling.
A gust of emotion suddenly roared memories up, and countesses and horse races and war and duels and laughter and lovemaking and war and his family tumbled over each other as the hangman drew his arms back and looped the ropes through his elbows, yanking them closer together until they bent up behind him like wings, nearly meeting behind his back.
And as he looked toward that endless but all too finite flight of stairs leading up to Debtor’s Door and out onto the scaffold, Colin touched his fingertips together one final time, imagining one fingertip was Louisa’s cheek.
So be it, then: it seemed it was the last memory his body wanted.
With another cord, the hangman bound his wrists loosely and leaned forward to give one final cursory tug on the elbow ropes. Colin felt the man’s hot breath, redolent of his breakfast—coffee and kippers, if he had to guess—at the back of his neck.
And then, like figures from a fog, murmured words emerged from it.
“At the fifth guard…stumble and fall.”
Chapter 2
The words penetrated the numbness Colin hadn’t realized he’d cultivated, and he half resented it because he was painfully alert now.
At the fifth guard, stumble and fall.
Beyond that flight of stairs leading up out of the prison toward the black maw known as Debtor’s Door was the Old Bailey, the scaffold, thousands of riveted Englishmen, and eternity.
Or so he had thought.
Before he could mull it over, the hangman nudged him toward the staircase. His legs came with him awkwardly, as though phantom shackles clamped them. Time took on a peculiarly viscous quality. He pushed through it like a slow swimmer, confronting that seemingly endless but all too finite stairway, then scaling it, one torturous step at a time.
It was near the top of the stairs when he heard the low roar. For a disorienting second it sounded to him like the sea, which you could only just hear if you stood very still at the far edge of Pennyroyal Green.
It took him a moment to recognize it as the sound of the thousands of voices of the thousands of people massed to watch him hang.
Two steps later they were through Debtor’s Door and on the scaffold.
Fresh air and sunlight assaulted him. Colin flinched and his eyes scrunched closed in defense. He determinedly forced them open again.
The crowd saw him and erupted into the most astonishing sound he had ever heard. Cheers. All those faces turned up to him, all those mouths moving in the shape of his name, scattered pockets of people singing different verses of that bloody song. All that brilliant Sunday finery and festival mood for him.
He bowed just a little, and the songs stopped and cheers became roars, because from this distance the crowd wouldn’t know a sardonic bow from showmanship.
Below him the tips of bayonets and pikes winked silver in the sun, held up by soldiers queued along the scaffold to keep the straining crowd at bay.
The guards.
At the fifth guard, stumble and fall.
There had been counts in his life before. Counts before dueling pistols were fired. Counts before footraces and horse races. Counts in his head to postpone his release while some beautiful woman lay beneath him.
Never, admittedly, a count quite like this.
And while the crowd screamed “Hats off!” to those fortunate to be close to the scaffold, he began the count using the tops of bayonets to guide him. And as he walked he heard his name sung out from everywhere in the crowd, in different pitches, baritones, cockney sopranos.
He shuffled past the first guard.
Colin’s legs still felt peculiarly unattached to his body; some force outside himself propelled him forward past the second guard.
“Colin!” came a woman’s shrill voice. “God bless ye, lad!”
And then he was even with the third guard. Who turned and glanced up at him dispassionately. Colin saw a mole, hairy as a miniature hedgehog, in the pit of his cheek.
And now he no longer heard the crowd at all, no longer saw them. He only heard numbers in his head and the ring of blood in his ears sent by the violent beat of his heart.
Sun bounced off the pike of the fourth guard, turning it into a sliver of light. Momentarily blinded, Colin paused. He took in a breath.
Then stepped forward to the fifth guard, scuffed the toe of his shoe, stumbled and fell hard to one knee.
And an enormous explosion roared behind the scaffold.
Screams were swallowed in the boom of another explosion, this time in the crowd, which begat more screams. And then there was another explosion, and then another, and another, all in swift sequence, and with each one great plumes of acrid gray smoke rose and thickened and spread, wrapping ankles, wreathing faces, canopying the Old Bailey until the sky was gray.
In seconds the crowd of festive Londoners metamorphosed into a single, screaming, heaving entity with thousands of arms and legs.
Colin coughed and struggled to stand, but his bindings robbed him of balance; he dropped back to one knee. He threw his head back, gasping for breath. Through the smoke he caught a glimpse of soldier number five, mouth agape in a vain attempt to make himself heard over the chaos.
The soldier vanished when a sack was yanked roughly down over Colin’s head.
An instant later invisible hands were everywhere on him: jerk
ing him to his feet, whipping his legs from beneath him, scooping beneath his shoulders, dragging him head first off the scaffold.
His new captors dove into the sea of flailing humans, and through the heat and shoving of the throng who had come to see him hang, Colin Eversea was borne blindly away from the gallows.
“Son of a bitch!”
Isaiah froze. Of all the vulgarities he could have debuted in public, who would have guessed that one had been waiting in the loaded chamber of his mind? But really, when it came to the Everseas, he supposed it rather said it all.
He’d heard the explosion. He’d seen the smoke. He’d heard more explosions. And he had simply known.
There wouldn’t be a hanging today.
Resignedly, Isaiah turned slowly around.
Violet’s hands were frozen, her needle and thread pulled taut as a harp string between her hand and her embroidery hoop. His son’s hand was closed over the queen on the chessboard. Had he been about to win, then? Or cheat?
They were all staring at him. It was a bit like Pompeii, Isaiah thought, distantly amused. As though they had been rendered immobile for eternity by one epithet.
Isaiah flicked his gaze to Fanchette, expecting to see high reproachful color in her cheeks, or to see her fingers subtly tangling and untangling in her lap. She did that when he made her feel uncertain. He suspected it was both entirely unconscious and a metaphor for the puzzle she considered her husband.
But Fanchette’s hands were folded tightly on her dove-gray silk-covered knees. How much had that particular dress cost? he wondered. Doubtless she had it in every shade.
“I don’t think there will be a hanging today,” he said dryly, at last.
The Perils of Pleasure Page 2