The Perils of Pleasure (2 page)

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 argu
ments 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 impa
tience. 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 in
dulge 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 hang
man, a traditional small bribe meant to ensure that wrists were bound a bit more loosely and that the con
demned 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 fi nite 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 fi nal 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.”

nm

he words penetrated the numbness Colin hadn’t realized he’d cultivated, and he half resented it be
cause he was painfully alert now.

At the fi fth 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 awk
wardly, as though phantom shackles clamped them. Time took on a peculiarly viscous quality. He pushed through it like a slow swimmer, confronting that seem
ingly endless but all too fi nite 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 fl inched and his eyes scrunched closed in defense. He deter
minedly forced them open again.

The crowd saw him and erupted into the most aston
ishing 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 differ
ent 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 dis
tance 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 fi fth guard
,
stumble and fall.

There had been counts in his life before. Counts before dueling pistols were fired. Counts before foot
races 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 fi rst guard.

Colin’s legs still felt peculiarly unattached to his body; some force outside himself propelled him for
ward 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, turn
ing 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 metamor
phosed into a single, screaming, heaving entity with thousands of arms and legs.

Colin coughed and struggled to stand, but his bind
ings 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: jerking him to his feet, whipping his legs from be
neath him, scooping beneath his shoulders, dragging him head first off the scaffold.

His new captors dove into the sea of fl ailing 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 fi n
gers 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
par
ticular 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.

“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 with
out 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 every
where: 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 fi reworks. 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 an
other sack drawn over him: a dense, airless heat. It oc
curred 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-fi rst 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: in
haling merely sucked the sack into his nostrils. Colin managed to snort it back out again just as he was uncer
emoniously 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 si
lence 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 out
side 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—