The Perils of Pleasure

by Julie Anne Long

  “Colin Eversea was really too pretty to hang, anyhow,” Violet said, because she found it excruciating to let whole minutes go by without saying something scandalous.

  “Violet!” her young cousin gasped, obliging her. All eyes were once again on Violet, which is where she liked them to be.

  Isaiah thought this might have resolved the strained silence, but no: it snapped neatly back into place and lay over them for several more swings of the pendulum clock.

  So when Fanchette clapped her hands twice, it was nearly as startling as those explosions.

  A dazzlingly liveried chap—that wildly expensive blue and gold uniform was in fact one of the reasons he’d taken away Fanchette’s allowance—was next to her in a soundless thrice.

  “Would you bring in more sherry for everyone, Oswald? No reason you shouldn’t celebrate being a family, and together. But I fear you’ll have to do without me. I’ve another of my headaches coming on. I’ll be retiring to my rooms for a time now.”

  His children, all of them, were genuinely fond of Fanchette, and she rose and swept out of the room in a rustle of silk and murmurs of sympathy.

  Isaiah frowned faintly after her, then settled back down across from Miles. The game would go on.

  Through the fibers of the sack, Colin could only just breathe, only just see, and what he saw were shadows and blurs of color—people? buildings?—rushing by as his bearers forged through the throng. Noise was everywhere: A woman’s scream, a hoarse cascade of curses, the rumble of voices and feet.

  They passed a clot of men drunkenly singing:

  “Looks like we will never see

  the death of Colin Ever—”

  That bloody song had a life of its own.

  His bindings sawed at his wrists and his arms felt as though they might pop from their sockets, but he fought the reflex to thrash, as being carried away from the gallows was unarguably preferable to the morning’s previously scheduled events. He struggled to sift reason from pain and confusion, but thoughts burst in and out of his mind, scattered and ephemeral as fireworks. He gave it up. What use were thoughts when he could be skewered like a pickle on a bayonet any moment?

  But it didn’t happen.

  In the smoke and confusion he supposed he could have been any unconscious bloke toted away from the melee by his mates, and the dull camouflage of the sack covering him from head to shoulders helped matters. This chaos had been cleverly planned.

  All for me.

  His mind at last grasped upon the one thing he could do to impose order on his circumstances: count. He counted forty-one paces before he was suddenly roughly shifted upward as his bearers turned a corner, and seventy-three before they turned again, this one sudden and sharp, too. With each turn, the din of the crowd receded more.

  One hundred eight paces later they at last came to an abrupt halt, and Colin now heard only the bellows-like breathing of his bearers. He coughed once inside the musty sack. There was the click and squeak of a door being unlocked and pushed open, and he was hauled through it like a trunk about to be tossed into the hold of a ship.

  When the door slammed shut, he felt it like yet another sack drawn over him: a dense, airless heat. It occurred to him that he could no longer feel his arms, but his shoulders burned and strained in their sockets.

  The lock tumbled again with the turn of a key, and he was hoisted again and carried at a feet-first lurching tilt down a flight of wooden stairs. Every fall of the heavy boots worn by—judging by the strained thump and creak of the wood—very heavy men jarred him. He bit down on his lip against the pain.

  He tried a deep breath, but that was a mistake: inhaling merely sucked the sack into his nostrils. Colin managed to snort it back out again just as he was unceremoniously dumped into a chair, righted by two large hands planted on his shoulders when he began to tip, and abandoned.

  This last he knew because he heard the booted feet make their way back up the staircase again rather more adroitly than they’d come down it. The door closed hard behind them, the lock clicked, and the ensuing silence was so total it whined in his ear.

  Colin gave his head a shake, an attempt to sort his thoughts. They remained as anarchic as the crowd outside his hanging.

  His hanging.

  That did the trick: he was alive. Alive! That word sang in his head, and he decided to chance a deep breath, tipping his head down to clear it of the rough fibers of the sack. Dark smells came in with it: charred wood and tar, mildew and stale lamp oil. Lavender. Something fermented, like spilled wine.

  Lavender?

  He went still. Perhaps he had died, and heaven—some might argue that heaven wouldn’t have been his destination, but he rather trusted the Creator to sort it all out fairly—smelled of lavender. He hoped not. His idea of heaven smelled of horses and brandy and the sea air exhaling rhythmically over the Sussex Downs and the back of Louisa Porter’s neck.

  He breathed in again, and it was still there: a single note of lavender, soft and faintly astringent amidst all the darker smells, as incongruous as a petal atop charred ruins. And unless a hothouse bouquet had been sent to wherever he was in honor of his arrival…

  There was a woman in the room with him.

  Seconds later, like a conjurer concluding a trick, she whipped the sack from his head.

  Colin twisted his head, but she was behind him before he could get a full look at her. He knew her only as deft movement and an impression of dark colors. Her clothes? Her hair? Her hands skillfully tugged at the cords that joined his elbows. Little by little they loosened until—

  Sweet merciful God.

  The sudden free surge of blood through his arms was a stabbing agony.

  He squeezed his eyes closed to isolate himself with the pain; he breathed through it in swift bursts, sweat beading his forehead, his teeth clamped on the inside of his lip. Still she worked away at the ropes behind him.

  As the pain evolved into something like fiery needles as his muscles and skin became reacquainted with circulation, Colin opened his eyes, willing the outlines of things in the dark room into clarity.

  Two thick rectangular pillars of splintering wood were strung with valances of cobwebs. A million particles of dust gyrated in a single narrow beam of light slanting into the room from…? Ah, there it was, a window—wooden crates stacked up to obscure all but about two inches worth of filthy glass. Barrels squatted in the shadows.

  So they were in a cellar of sorts.

  Questions crowded the exits of his mind. Who? Where? Why? All seemed equally important yet meaningless in light of one single, astounding fact: he was still alive.

  And then his mouth parted and a single, arid, astonishing word escaped:

  “Louisa.”

  Well. He was abashed.

  The woman behind him paused in the business of untying him.

  “No. I fear I’m not ‘Louisa.’” Ironic amusement in the words. “But as our acquaintance shall be short-lived, it hardly matters what you call me.”

  Colin went still, absorbing the timbre of her voice as if it contained decipherable secrets. It had depth and maturity, refinement, a husky edge that pleased. It betrayed no emotion—unless, that is, one considered amused irony emotion—and he detected no note of allegiance. The detachment and brisk confidence in it would have, in fact, done justice to any man.

  Colin could not recall a single woman ever regarding him with anything so neutral as detachment.

  It suddenly seemed important to ascertain whether she was pretty, in the same way it was necessary to know whether a man was armed.

  He heard the soft rush of her skirts as she stood; experimentally, he wagged his elbows: they were free. He could feel every inch of his arms now. But when he tried to move his arms apart…he discovered she’d looped one of the cords through the bindings on his wrists.

  In short, he remained tied to the back of the chair.

  And this was another clue that his freedom might have come at a cost.

 
Fortunately, he’d paid the hangman a shilling to make sure his bindings were loose.

  The woman shifted to the left of him now, and his eyes tracked her.

  Pretty, was his first optimistic assessment, though she was scarcely more than a chiaroscuro sketch in this dim room. Slim, quick, deft.

  He surreptitiously twisted his wrist in an attempt to free it; he was thinner now, not to mention dexterous. The wrist slid from its bindings.

  “Who are you?” His ravaged, nearly soundless voice appalled him.

  The woman paused, then took two strides toward a barrel and reached for the jar sitting atop it, crossing the narrow beam of sun as she did, crossing out of it again.

  Ah. Not pretty, he revised with regret. The harsh light revealed sharp angles in her face, and…too much forehead. Something stern about the jaw, too, perhaps?

  He continued with the business of freeing his wrists.

  Madeleine Greenway turned back to the cargo she’d been paid to liberate, otherwise known as the infamous Colin Eversea, the Satan from Sussex. She saw no evidence of actual horns, but then again, it was rather dark in here.

  “Who I am is another thing we can add to the list of things that don’t matter, Mr. Eversea, as our acquaintance shall be—”

  “Short,” he interrupted curtly, in that raw scrape of a voice. “So you’ve said. Why—”

  She thrust the jar of water beneath his chin. “Drink. I fear I haven’t any answers for you, so you may as well save your strength. You’ll have answers soon enough.”

  His famed features were difficult to distinguish in the darkness, and nothing about him radiated any particular danger. What Madeleine saw was a lean, broad-shouldered man sitting bayonet-straight in his chair as though posture was a force of habit. The fit of his fine coat, surprisingly, wasn’t flawless; no doubt it was looser on him now than when he’d entered prison. Sweat-darkened ringlets clung to his temples and forehead.

  He cast a baleful pair of pale eyes up at her and sniffed at the jar she presented. Interesting. It was precisely what she would have done in these circumstances. Not a complete fool, then, Mr. Eversea, even if he stabbed a man to death in a brawl and had the great idiocy to actually be caught.

  “It’s water,” she told him shortly. “Only water.”

  Colin Eversea fixed her with those light eyes for a speaking second longer, then gave a curt nod. She tipped the jar, and his throat moved, greedily taking the water in. After a moment his widened eyes told her to stop tipping, and she pulled the jar away from his lips.

  He swallowed hard; his chest rose and fell in two deep steadying breaths.

  And then: “I would ask that you untie me.”

  It was a demand disguised as a polite request. Funny, that. Given his circumstances.

  “And I’ve been asked to leave you tied.” Madeleine didn’t trouble to hide her amusement. She knew Colin Eversea had been born a gentleman, and she could hear it in the low elegance of his every consonant and vowel, see it in the very angle of his head and set of his shoulders. He could probably no more control the arrogance in his voice than he could the color of his eyes.

  She slid the round watch she kept in her sleeve down to her palm and held it up to that narrow beam of light, squinting at Roman numerals. She’d planned to linger here only long enough to ensure that Colin Eversea was safely delivered and duly bound. She would then leave for the Tiger’s Nest by two o’clock to collect her final payment of 150 pounds from Croker—less Croker’s percentage, of course—and he’d been given strict instructions not to inform her anonymous employer of Colin Eversea’s whereabouts until half past one this afternoon.

  By the time her anonymous employer arrived here in this carefully chosen basement of an abandoned, burnt-out, Seven Dials inn, she would be gone.

  What became of Colin Eversea after that was none of her concern.

  Planning this mad, triumphant rescue had absorbed her days and haunted her nights for two weeks. The next few minutes would be the very longest in her life.

  But soon she would be on a ship, a speck plowing through the Atlantic Ocean, and some weeks after that she would land, tiny and anonymous as a seed, on American soil, and grow her life all over again from the ground up. Papers awaited her signature in a solicitor’s office in a part of London she could never afford to live in, and a farm—and the new life she’d planned for so long—awaited her in the state of Virginia.

  As long as she provided the rest of the money. And that she would do this afternoon.

  “Who asked you to leave me tied?” She heard him shifting in his chair.

  Eight minutes. She wished he would stop talking.

  “Patience, Mr. Eversea, and your questions will be answered apace.”

  Madeleine so seldom had an opportunity to use the word ‘apace,’” and she was rather pleased with the sound of it. She supposed there were some advantages to conversations with gentlemen.

  She reached for a broom she’d propped next to the barrels near the window. That window was about three feet wide and perhaps a bit more than a foot tall, and she’d artfully streaked it with dirt at intervals over the past week. It opened out onto a narrow, fetid little alley popular with whores and gin-addled drunks, and Madeleine had made certain that barrels meant to catch rain were lined in front of it, too, obscuring it, and at the moment they were brimming with stagnant water and God only knew what else.

  In short, as far as the world was concerned, the window didn’t exist.

  She’d methodically scraped away at the outside of the wood frame with a sharp file, and now, with a tug on the brittle old ropes attached to it, she could pull the window intact right out of the wall. She’d stacked crates up to it to create a staircase that would take her weight. And that’s how she intended to leave: out the window, merging swiftly and anonymously into the St. Giles crowds, allowing the tide of them to push her toward Croker and her new life.

  She reached for a broom, but behind her the chair creaked; she turned her head swiftly just as Colin Eversea was turning his toward her. Her narrowed eyes met his bright pale ones in that sliver of sunbeam.

  He went oddly motionless then, as if the very act of turning had winded him.

  Beautiful.

  Colin knew this definitively at last, and it made no sense, given the algebra of her features. It was something his gut told him, rather than his eyes. And somehow the impression was so singular and total he needed a moment of stillness to absorb it.

  And then the woman used a broom handle to slide the crate over the window, and they were in total darkness.

  Just as he worked his wrists free from the last of his bindings. He touched one hand to the other, surreptitiously, one old friend greeting another.

  He heard a soft metallic clank—the sound of the handle of a lamp being lifted—followed by the strike of a flint, and then a feeble light flickered and pulsed into the room. The small lamp propped on the barrel illuminated a circle just large enough to encompass himself and her, and only just lit the things beyond that circle, including the stairway.

  She’d palmed the watch again and had just begun to hold it up to the lamp to review the time when the sound of a key rattled in the lock.

  The woman whipped toward it so quickly, Colin felt the breeze of her skirts.

  She went very still. Her surprise was palpable, and he could very nearly hear the hum of her mind as she reassessed her circumstances. Since her movements had thus far been obviously timed and precise and planned, this troubled him.

  Though he still hadn’t the faintest idea if she were friend or foe.

  He froze as the doorknob turned and the door opened. Slowly, inexorably, with the slightest of creaks. In came an expanding wedge of sunlight, a gust of air…and a single footstep.

  There was a brief pause.

  And then another footstep as their visitor committed to entering the room.

  The door began to creak shut under its own weight, but their visitor stopped it with a foo
t; they heard the soft, dull thud of an inserted boot. The rectangle of light remaining at the entrance threw a bulky, cloaked, and hatted shadow against the wall.

  The short hairs on the back of Colin’s neck rose. He tensed the muscles of his thighs and slowly, slowly, began to rise from the chair, which mercifully didn’t creak at all. The woman didn’t turn toward him; her eyes were fixed on the doorway.

  “Greenway?” The shadow spoke. Hoarse and baritone. A disguised voice, Colin would have guessed.

  The woman said nothing, but Colin heard a whisper of sound. His eyes sought the source: he glanced down and saw her hands moving subtly in her skirts.

  “Madeleine Greenway?” The hoarse voice seemed to need clarification.

  The woman’s uncertainty froze her. Nevertheless, at last:

  “Mission accomplished.” Her voice was low and steady.

  The shadow shifted slightly, as Colin suspected it would. It had needed only to properly locate Madeleine to carry out its mission.

  And Colin threw his body at her legs just as the pistol exploded.

  Chapter 3

  She went down hard just as a sickening crunch of wood told them the ball had struck the pillar just feet away from them. Splinters sprayed like shrapnel; Colin threw his palms over his face, felt thin spikes of wood strike off his hands and shoulders. Something metallic skittered across the floor. He uncovered his eyes and saw on the dusty floorboards the unmistakable outline of a pistol.

  Of course she would have a pistol. She must have dropped it when he’d thrown her to the floor.

  Madeleine Greenway had rolled onto her side and was propped on one elbow, her hand outstretched for the pistol. But his arms were longer. He stretched and closed his hand over it—a decent stick, this one, and where in God’s name had she hidden it on her person?—rolled onto his stomach, unlocked it—

  Only to find the crack of light rapidly vanishing as the heavy door swung shut hard.

  They were alone again.

  “Who else has a damned key?” he rasped.

  “Give my stick to me,” Greenway—if that indeed was her name—hissed.