The Perils of Pleasure (6 page)

There were no doorways or alleys to duck into; sudden movements would only make them conspicu
ous. Madeleine touched Colin’s arm; they slowed their pace. She surreptitiously dragged the fichu from around her throat, tugged her bodice down to tart levels, swept a hand over her hair to muss it from its pins, and hissed, “Hold the gin bottle in your hand and act just
slightly
inebriated, for God’s sake, no more—and lean on me.”

She concluded by pushing her bosom up against a surprised Colin Eversea and looping an arm through his. She caught a glimpse of darkening pupils in a sea of blue-green as his startled gaze met her cleavage. She
did
have an excellent bosom.

He recovered from his bosom glimpse quickly enough; his posture obediently became looser, his shoul
ders dropped, one hand swung free at his side with the gin bottle gripped in it. Arm in arm they fell in behind three men in lively conversation, close enough to appear part of a group, or perhaps not. Colin’s gait shambled but he didn’t succumb to any temptation to overact.

This was all very good. Strictly speaking, if one needed to be saddled with an escaped murderer, it was better to be saddled with a clever one.

“Lean your head in to talk to me,” she ordered sotto voce.

“What should I say?” he hissed.

She laughed as though he’d said something mildly witty. “And now I say something,” she added conversa
tionally. Her heart was thumping in her ears.

“And then I say something in response,” he mur
mured, catching on.

“And then I say something
else
?” This one she’d made a question, to mimic the rhythm of a conversation.

And in this manner, walking arm in arm and ex
changing meaningless sentences, they blended with the crowd, disguised by not seeming disguised. The sharp-eyed red-coated soldiers barely spared them a glance when they passed even with the pair of them. But Mad
eleine felt the graze of their eyes over her as surely as if her skin was burnt.

Long minutes passed in silence, and they walked on. They were each recovering, perhaps in their own way, from the moment.

“So odd to hide in plain sight,” Colin fi nally mur
mured. Sounding dazed.

“Don’t say things like that aloud ever again. Not even in a whisper. Not even here in St. Giles.” She was strangely furious, strangely exhilarated, strangely more terrified than she’d ever been. “In other words, don’t be a bloody fool.”

She released his arm abruptly.

Madeleine was the one who hailed the hackney, which had made its way up the street in fits and starts, threading its bulky way through the crowd. Hackneys were rare enough in this part of London. Not a lot of paying customers to be found in St. Giles.

The driver took one look at the two of them and made as if to crack the ribbons again.

“I’ve the fare, mate,” Madeleine protested in her best St. Giles patois.

“Show me,” the driver ordered bluntly, extending an open, gloved hand and raising his gray eyebrows. Clearly she was a little too convincing as a gin-addled doxie.

She showed him by dropping a shilling into his palm. The driver grunted and waved them inside with his chin.

“The East India Docks,” she told him.

He gave a bark of humorless laughter, and then a sigh, as if she’d confirmed something for him.

Then Madeleine closed the door and pulled the cur
tain shut over the miniature window, and they were alone in the relative dark. The hack lurched forward.

It was better somehow to be moving, away from St. Giles, but still nothing felt safe about the enclosed space. Madeleine released a long breath. Her heart still rabbit-kicked inside her chest, so she breathed steadily as she tugged her bodice up once more, rewrapped and tucked her fichu around her throat and bosom, and leaned back against the seat, which was a bit like lean
ing against the previous passenger, as it still smelled of rum, sweat, and poor-grade tobacco.

The wheels ground over the cobblestones, making slow progress in these narrow streets. It would be faster going soon.

They sat in silence for quite some time. Colin Ever-sea was looking down at the gin bottle and turning it about in his hand gingerly, slowly, as though it were an artifact.

“I do know it’s not a lark,” he said quietly.

And that was the extent of their conversation during the trip to the Tiger’s Nest.

nm

very one of the Everseas gave a start when they heard the hoofbeats thundering toward the house out in the square. The women closed their eyes tightly. Hands reached out for other hands and gripped, and Marcus had an impression of white knots against black clothing. The folded hands.

And then it suddenly occurred to him that urgency to deliver the news about Colin was unseemly, to say the least. Dead was dead, after all.

His father apparently had the same thought. He strode to the window with Jacob, Chase and Ian behind them. They looked down in time to see the messenger fling his reins out of his hands and bolt up the town house stairs.

Marcus could see the man’s brilliant, face-splitting smile from the upper fl oor.

Good heavens. Well,
that
was
defi nitely
inappropriate.

The housekeeper let the man in, and he barreled up the stairs before being announced. They heard him shouting on the way up, and then the shouts became coherent words. “He’s gone! He’s bloody gone! Explo
sions! Vanished!”

Actually, they weren’t so much words as whooped syllables, accompanied by flailing arm gestures.

Jacob got the man by the arm and gripped him. “Slow down. What in God’s name—”

“Good God, but you should have seen it, Jacob—”

The family ringed the messenger now, and hope was an agony. Breathing suspended entirely.

“Why don’t you come to your point?” Jacob sug
gested, in a tone that implied a certain underlying glee. As though he already suspected what the news would be.

“Oh, you should have seen it,” the man said on a hush now, his face positively fulsome with the story. “Colin was on the scaffold. The crowd was cheering. And he was tied—” He saw the faces of the women and decided to forgo that part of the description. “And then there were explosions—behind the scaffold, and in the crowd, and smoke, and chaos, and screaming—and then . . . ” He paused for effect. “ . . . Colin bloody
vanished
.”

Resounding silence.

Those damned birds were still singing, Marcus no
ticed. As though they had suspected all along.

“So he
didn’t
hang?” Jacob said slowly, fi nally.

“He didn’t hang. And he’s not dead. At least, he’s not dead from hanging. Hasn’t been seen, Jacob. He bloody
vanished
.”

“Smelling salts,” Marcus murmured to the house
keeper who had trailed the messenger into the room. She was just as pale as everyone else, and breathing just as hard as everyone else, but she wasn’t going to faint, and it looked like half the women in the room were about to. The color had fled Louisa’s face

Not his mother, however. She’d been through too
many harrowing things with Colin in her life already. His mother’s face was bloodless, her dark blue eyes bright, despite the puffy arcs beneath them. But she looked almost unsurprised.

He thought Jacob would go to her. But Jacob and his mother had seemed strangely separate this morn
ing, as if they each knew a different kind of grief about the occasion and didn’t trust that the other would understand.

So rivers would not reverse course, the sun would not rise in the west.

The Everseas had once again prevailed.

“Some are saying Satan took him back,” the messen
ger elucidated. “Some are saying he really is innocent, and the Angel of Death came down to take him instead. The army is in an uproar. They’re more inclined to blame the Everseas than heavenly interference. I imag
ine they’ll be here any minute,” he added on a practical note.

Hoofbeats out in the courtyard bore this out. Sol
diers were already descending upon the Everseas.

Jacob had begun to look thoughtful. “So Colin
isn’t
dead. This you know for certain.”

“Not by hanging,” the messenger confi rmed.

And before their eyes, Jacob, who had seemed di
minished over the weeks . . . took on that preternatural glow of confidence and joie de vivre that was uniquely his. Colin was the tallest of all the children, but one never
seemed
taller than Jacob Eversea, because the very presence of the man commanded so much room.

All the boys, Ian and Chase and Marcus, were star
ing at their father.

“I
swear
I had nothing to do with it,” he murmured to Marcus. “Don’t you think you would have known?”

* * *

Colin wondered where on earth the authorities would begin to look for him. Soldiers were often bored and underemployed in the wake of the war, and he’d had his haunts, but then again, it wasn’t as though he was a migrating sparrow. He didn’t return to the same places over and over. He enjoyed sampling things. It would take several battalions to fan out over all of London, and soldiers had other duties, too. This is what he told himself, anyway, by way of comforting rationalization.

Stone cold sober, it was hard to imagine he’d ever sampled the Tiger’s Nest, though he knew he had. The front wall of the inn was almost entirely a window, and the customers were on display. And what the clien
tele of the Tiger’s Nest lacked in the way of limbs and teeth they generally more than made up for in weap
ons. Pistols of every vintage and knives of every length and strength gleamed and glinted on the men crowded into the pub, all much better maintained than the cus
tomers themselves. Hooks curved at the end of arms, wooden legs were parked next to booted legs beneath tables gouged and scarred from countless knives, and here and there a stump of an elbow, jauntily tied off at a sleeve, waved about in fierce debate. These were pirates of the streets, of the seas.

In other words, it wasn’t the usual theater crowd.

Colin wondered that he hadn’t been gutted at once when he dared show his face in here. They did admire a man who could hold his drink, however, and a man who bought drink freely and shared it. And that he could do.

“We’ll go in through the kitchens,” Madeleine or
dered coolly.

Interesting that she was intimate with the lay of this
place. But of course she would be familiar with it. It was where her
broker
resided.

Colin kept his head ducked into his chest and his hat pulled down and he slouched, and the irritatingly serious and confident Madeleine Greenway, without looking at him, strode to the kitchen entrance in the alley, eased through the door and stepped in.

One deep breath gave the visitor an olfactory his
tory of the place: every cigar or pipe ever smoked, every fire ever fed to warm the patrons, every drop of spirit imbibed or blood spilled in a fight or fat dripped from meat turned on a spit lent their ghostly scent.

A narrow hall emptied onto the kitchen, where a filthy boy was languidly cranking a haunch on a spit over the kitchen fire. It was difficult to know what animal it once might have been, but it was glistening fat and smelled magical. The boy brushed a hand across a runny nose, glanced sideways toward the main dining room to see if anyone was watching him, then touched the same finger to the tempting grease on the meat.

“Young man,” Madeleine said quietly.

The boy nearly went airborne with fright and guilt. He whirled around to seek the person who’d spoken.

“I wasna touchink nuffink!” He pulled the fi nger back and stuck it in his mouth reflexively. Ah, sadly, this one was a poor liar. He would need to work on that if he was going to survive long here on the docks. He couldn’t have been more than seven years old or so, Colin assessed.

Madeleine’s mouth twitched. “Good sir, will you tell us where we can find Mr. Croker?”

And what a surprisingly gentle tone
that
was.

Colin looked at her, nearly as seduced by it as the boy clearly was, judging from the expression the little
creature turned up to Madeleine: yearning mingled with shrewd assessment. Kind voices were no doubt rare in his world, but he had that English bred-in-the-bone in
stinct to determine Madeleine’s class before anything else—first to determine what her presence might mean for him, and second, what he might then get from her.

The boy had arrived at some sort of conclusion, be
cause he decided to smile. And good lord, it was an angelic one. A charmer, this one.

“The Mr. or Mrs. Croker, mum?” He wanted to know.

“Your
master
, young man. Fetch Mr. Croker
imme
diately
.” Colin snapped the words. Each one a master
piece of glacial elegance.

The boy jumped straight up, his legs scrabbled in place for a moment, and he bolted into the main pub dining room.

Ah. And there you had a demonstration of the uses of an aristocratic accent.

Madeleine angled her head toward Colin; a vee of dis
approval between her brows. Colin touched the brim of his big hat ironically. He knew all too well what would make a boy jump and run, having
been
a boy who lied poorly and charmed easily, and he wasn’t interested in wasting time in wooing the little creature.

Madeleine Greenway turned away and absently reached out and gave the spit a crank so the fi re wouldn’t lick overlong at one side of the haunch. Some
thing about the homely gesture pierced Colin. Despite their fraught mission, despite her way with a pistol, it was such a very female thing to do, such an ordinary thing to do.

Colin wondered if there would ever be anything or
dinary about his life again.

They both looked up sharply when small pattering footsteps and heavy thumping strides came toward them, along with a piping whispering voice, saying, “ . . . big
angry
cove,” and then Croker and the boy appeared, and Colin stepped back into the narrow hall, deeper in shadow.

Croker, broad, bald as a mushroom, with a brow that went on for miles, looked irritated and weary, and was wiping his great hands on a stained apron. He saw Madeleine and froze mid-wipe.

And a dizzying sequence of expressions—pleasure and relief and terror and surprise and confusion— fought for supremacy over features.

At last his features reached détente. A pleasant neu
trality settled over them.

“Shoo,” he remembered to hiss down to the boy. “Go ’elp Mrs. Croker clean the tables.”

The boy fled off in the direction of the dining room.

Croker cleared his throat. “Well! Mrs. Greenway—” he began obsequiously, and stopped. He’d just caught a glimpse of the “big angry cove” standing in the shadows.

Colin tipped the hat up off his face with one fi nger and smiled winningly.

Croker stared, mouth dropped a little.

And then, to Colin’s astonishment, a peculiar radi
ant delight slowly suffused his large face. He looked very much like a moonrise.

An instant later this gave way—drained away, really—to rank terror.

And Croker spun on his heels to bolt.

Colin snapped out one of his conveniently long arms, gripped the man by his collar and got one of Croker’s thick arms pinned behind his back, too—convenient
move, that one. He’d learned it from Marcus, who’d used it on him any number of times over the years. Madeleine had her pistol out and poked into Croker’s mound of a belly.

“Where can we speak privately, Mr. Croker?” Colin murmured politely into the man’s ear.

“Storeroom,” Croker muttered, sounding resigned. He used his chin to point to a grayish door made of heavy wood slats, just visible where the kitchen bent into an el.

They ushered Croker past a long wooden table and two heavy stoves, past a thicket of hanging pots and pans and stacks of plates on an enormous sideboard mounded with piles of chopped onions and potatoes, and around the corner into the room. They walked into a narrow, earthy-smelling room and closed the door tightly.

Colin looked about for something to jam beneath the knob. There was a small wooden table and a chair in the room, and he wedged the back of the chair neatly beneath.