The Perils of Pleasure (11 page)

And not long, as it turned out. For his eyes soon began to take on a faintly surprised, abstracted . . .
inward
sort of look. His body, little by little, was regis
tering the softness and give of those sacks.

She’d seen that very expression before: on a cat when it crossed into a sunbeam. It was all about helpless, in
evitable surrender.

And then, as though invisible arms were languidly pulling him down, Colin Eversea drifted slowly back, and back, and back, and . . . back. Until at last he lay flat, and utterly still. The flour sacks bulged gently up around him, cradling his long body.

There would be an imprint of Colin Eversea in the fl our sacks by tomorrow morning.

“Now,” Madeleine said briskly. She sat down in the chair, leaned over, her elbows on her knees, and peered down into his face. “I shall count to ten. And if your
eyes are still open by the time I reach ten . . . I’ll allow you to keep watch.”

There was a long pause. As if his voice had to travel a long, long way, all the way from the land of sleep, before it could come out his mouth.

“Why you . . . you . . .
devil
woman,” he murmured, half resentfully, half admiringly. His words were al
ready slurring.

“One . . . ” she began, her voice a purr. “Two . . . ”

One of his eyes was twitching in a valiant struggle to stay open. The other had already given up the fi ght and lay closed, surrendered.

“ . . . three . . . four . . . ”

His hand gave a single halfhearted fl op, like a beached fish, just once. Then it lay still. His struggling eyelid, almost in resignation, fluttered closed. And stayed closed.

Two pairs of lashes now lay against that bruised looking skin. The tension eased from his face, his limbs gradually slackened . . . he exhaled a long breath.

“Damn . . . you . . . ” These last two words sounded more like a contented sigh than a curse.

He said nothing more after that. Despite his own wishes, Colin Eversea was asleep.

Madeleine smiled triumphantly. The devil woman would keep watch tonight.

Surprisingly, keeping watch over bags of potatoes, onions, and an escaped criminal turned out to be rather dull.

The lamp glowed low, throwing large and lurid shad
ows of homely pantry objects up on the wall. The air in the room was close now, but nearer to dawn would doubtless take on a chill, and she was glad they had blankets.

Colin Eversea’s breathing was deep and quiet, the sort that could lull her to sleep if she wasn’t careful. And if she closed her own eyes, it could become the sound of another place and time altogether, and an
other peacefully sleeping man, and for this reason, too, she didn’t dare close her eyes.

But she watched him, because he was easily the most interesting thing in the room. Beneath the solid, hard body of the man he was now, she could almost see the outline of the lanky boy he must have been before those shoulders spread and those strong bones of his face emerged from its youthful roundness. But Colin Ever-sea would never have been awkward. Not with a face like his, or eyes like his.

His palms were open and innocent now in sleep. She wondered which one of them would have driven the knife into Roland Tarbell. They seemed incapable of it, those long, quiet hands.

She wondered about this Louisa Porter. Why, if Colin loved this woman, was he so reckless with his affections?

Ah, you see, she told herself with bitter humor: a single sentence had forced its way through
—Tell me what happened
—and she had uttered it, and he had answered it, and like a cat’s cradle made of string, this was how humans became bound to each other, through this interweaving of confidences. And now because of that one sentence, a million other questions about him thought they were welcome in her mind.

Madeleine lowered her head gently into her hands, a luxury she allowed herself only briefly typically. But the weight of her thoughts seemed suddenly too heavy for her mere neck to hold up. She longed for a bath and her own rooms and her lavender soap . . . and a mirror.

And this last irritated her. She knew full well she possessed a singular sort of beauty; it was simply an
other of her tools, and she’d had no real use for vanity for some time. But Colin Eversea had seen her in an en
tirely different, very
specifi c
way. He had, in fact, seen through her.

She wanted to see what he saw, too. She wanted to know if somehow the events of the past few years had written themselves on her face, and she had been unable to see it.

And though Madeleine’s greatest strength was that she was a woman, and this had ensured her survival to date, she was all too aware that it was her great
est weakness, too. She’d been so very, very careful to protect that particular chink in her armor. She would spend the evening blacksmithing it closed again with thoughts of the future.

Right after she did one thing: she got up and gently spread a blanket out over Colin Eversea.

He never moved, but she thought he smiled faintly in his sleep.

nm

olin jerked awake, sat bolt upright, and thrashed and thrashed away at the thing covering his body as though it were a mortal enemy. A great moth? A bat? His heart was hammering, his palms sweating, and then the wool registered on his palms and he stared at it dumbly, embarrassed.

It was a blanket.

“I see you’re awake,” came an amused feminine voice from somewhere nearby.

Admirable understatement, there.
No
one was more awake than he was at the moment.

He gingerly set the blanket aside. Consciousness sifted back in disorderly, jagged pieces. He wasn’t in prison, then. He was in a . . .

“We need to leave now,” the voice added. It was pleasant but insistent.

. . . a storeroom. He was in a storeroom. Who was talking . . . ? Colin pushed his hands up through his hair and blinked in the direction of the voice, knuck
ling the kernels of sleep from them, his thoughts strug
gling to catch up with his senses and give names to the things he saw. Ah, yes. Greenway. Madeleine Green
way. Beautiful prickly woman with soft hands who’d tricked him into sleeping on the flour sacks in a store
room. She looked very pale. She sat at the little table in front of a lit candle, and even in this light he could see faint dark rings beneath her eyes. Ah, yes. Fine eyes, he recalled. He thought she was smiling a little faintly, but that might have been wishful thinking, because he would have liked to wake to a smile.

Colin rolled from the flour bed and stood upright too quickly, felt myriad twinges everywhere in his body, stretched his limbs to unknot them, and then looked down on a perfect imprint of his body in the fl our sacks. They’d made a death mask of Gerard Courvoisier after he was hung for murdering his aristocratic employer. Perhaps they could make a Colin Eversea out of bread.

He admired it for a moment, half grimly, half whim
sically, then patted his shape out of the fl our.

A horrified thought crossed his mind. He glanced down quickly to determine that, yes, he
had
slept in his clothes, when normally—when he was not in prison, that was—he might not have, and exhaled.

“Time?” His voice was raspy from sleep. Oddly, however, he felt altogether stronger than he had in months.

“Five o’clock,” she told him, her own voice a little worse for keeping watch all night. “The watch should circle around in a half hour’s time, so it’s best we leave.” She handed the skin to him. “Water.”

He took it, gulped a good half of it down, swiped his mouth, got his boots on, and reached for all he owned in the world: part of a cravat, a coat missing a button, and a waistcoat.

Madeleine Greenway paused to swiftly load her pistol: tapping powder down the barrel, pressing in the
paper-wrapped ball, locking it, tucking it away in the pockets of her skirts. In the dim light of the room he could have been dreaming: watching this very feminine woman efficiently load a small firearm the way another woman might pin up her hair. She turned the handle on the door, and it occurred to Colin that most women would have deferred to him, or glanced back at him, or at least acknowledged his presence.

This was a woman so accustomed to being alone she didn’t give it a thought anymore.

And before he left, he signed the broadsheet with a flourish and sprinkled sand over it. He was a man of his word, and that broadsheet was their insurance of Croker’s silence.

They went out through the kitchen, which was quiet, apart from the crack and hiss of the low fire. Red glowed in the center of chunks of nearly completely consumed wood. The kitchen boy was sleeping next to the hearth, twitching in the depths of a dream, and when they passed him, he muttered in his sleep and rolled onto his side, toward the fi re.

Colin watched in mild amazement as Madeleine stealthily tucked a coin into the boy’s shoe—astonishing that the boy
had
shoes, though Colin could see one small grimy foot through the hole in one—as she passed, scarcely pausing. The boy didn’t wake.

Colin watched Madeleine’s narrow back. A few ten
drils of dark hair were coming down from their pins to trail the collar of her gown. This would have driven his sister Genevieve mad.

Almost as though she could feel his eyes on her, Mad
eleine Greenway’s hand went absently up and touched her hair. Colin half smiled. She
was
a woman, after all, albeit not like any woman he’d ever before met.

And then he went out into the grimy English dawn to find a hackney, he and his new partner, who hadn’t murdered him in his sleep or called the authorities down upon him, but who loaded a gun as effi ciently as any soldier.

In Pennyroyal Green one could use metaphors about maidenly blushes and mother-of-pearl to describe the dawn. Not in London. The coal smut-covered skies merely grew steadily brighter, and sometimes took on a lemonlike shade. And then it grew hotter, and that’s how you knew it was offi cially daylight.

But now it was still cool, the drunks and thieves nodding and rising in the streets from where they’d collapsed the night before, like dark little fl owers open
ing to the haze-masked sun, and Colin and Madeleine heard the telltale
clip-clop
of a hackney circling round.

He hailed it with a raised hand, grateful for the haze and relative dark and his big hat.

“Grosvenor Square,” Madeleine told the driver, who was just a little drunk, his nose red, because he was a hackney driver and he drank the night through to keep warm. He only looked at the money she handed to him; he didn’t look at the tall bloke getting into the hackney and pulling the door closed.

Meanwhile, the Eversea women—and one soon-to-be-Eversea woman—had been installed in a carriage and sent back to Sussex, while the Eversea men, with the exception of Marcus, opted for horseback.

Mrs. Eversea was reviewing the guest list for Loui-sa’s wedding, of all things, and Olivia and Genevieve were cheerfully arguing over what, precisely, should be served to the guests after the wedding.

How
did they do it? Louisa Porter wondered. But
then, they were Everseas, and they’d recovered from the emotional buffeting of the morning.

“You need to offer kippers, Mama,” Genevieve was saying practically. “You’re feeding the guests a midday meal, so you must give them something familiar.”

Louisa could scarcely speak. In truth, she wasn’t any more surprised that Colin Eversea had vanished from the gallows in smoke and explosions than she’d been the night he was arrested for murder. She’d not for one instant believed Colin had killed anyone with a knife, not even a Redmond, and not even over a slur to his sister Olivia—but it had seemed an inevitable consequence of the way he lived his life, the extremes of joy and danger he always courted. And she sup
posed that even as her heart slowly withered in her chest as they erected the scaffold in the Old Bailey, some small part of her simply didn’t believe he would die that day.

After all, one couldn’t loop a noose around the sun and hang it from the gallows.

How long had she loved Colin Eversea? She supposed it all began the day of the town picnic at Pennyroyal Green, when she and Colin were both eleven years old. The day was warm and her bonnet ribbons had begun to chafe, so she’d untied them and left them to dangle. Moments later Colin snatched the bonnet from her head and made a run for it up the hill toward the sea.

Louisa remembered a ricochet of sensations inside and outside her: the sudden
whoosh
of the wind in her hair, and the shocking, delicious blaze of the sun
right
on her face—her mother forever cautioned her over freckles—fury at the brazen theft;
fl attery
at the brazen theft—handsome Colin Eversea had stolen her bonnet!—and deep,
deep
concern, as it was her best
bonnet, after all, and there it went, vanishing over a hill in the hand of a lanky, beastly boy.

But this was Colin. He excelled at making her feel a dozen things at a time, all of them interesting, not all of them comfortable.

He brought a bouquet of wildflowers to her house the next day, his vivid eyes full of mischief and wor
ship, his apology insincere, his departure rapid. Colin learned early on how to make entrances and exits and just the right grand gestures.

How could she not love him?

But it was almost a helpless thing. With Colin, she felt like a lake that reflected back the sun. He was the one who shone; she glittered only by virtue of his rays.

It was handsome, older Marcus Eversea who had co
erced the return of the unharmed bonnet that day and presented it to her somberly, with sincere apologies for his brother’s behavior. Marcus had always been hand
some, too. He’d always been kind, always attentive, never obtrusive—very like her, in many ways. His only fault was that he simply wasn’t Colin.

But by proposing, Marcus Eversea had once again, metaphorically speaking, handed her bonnet back to her. That was the sort of man
Marcus
was.

No surprises, really, from Marcus. Until, that is, the day he’d proposed.

And it had solved everything for Louisa. Her brothers could cease treating her with affectionate apprehension—unmarried sisters who possessed no dowries were burdens, regardless of how lovely and pleasant they might be. Her life would be as handsome and roomy and well sprung as the carriage taking them back to Pennyroyal Green. And she’d seen the look in Marcus’s eyes when he proposed, and knew she could
always be certain of his affection in the way she could

never be certain of Colin.

But oh, now . . . now Colin was alive.

And even now, as the Eversea women discussed the wedding they all presumed would take place in a week . . . Forgive me, Marcus, she thought.

Louisa was no longer certain it would.

It occurred to Colin that the only thing Countess Malmsey and the woman sitting across from him in the carriage had in common was that they were both, to some degree, enigmas.

Madeleine Greenway was watching the streets roll by through the carriage window. She hadn’t said a word in some time. Colin wondered how she’d spent the evening in the storeroom. Watching him twitch in his sleep? Mulling his recitation of innocence? Guessing at the number of potatoes in the bins? Reviewing the story of her life, whatever that might be? He glanced down at her hands, linked loosely in her lap; she was wearing gloves now. He recalled those hands on his skin last night, devastatingly gentle, devastatingly femi
nine, matter-of-factly competent. Her fi ngers—he’d felt it—had trembled a little when they touched him, and God help him, he had almost reached down to touch her, because his body had its own instincts, which so often overrode whatever judgment he possessed when it came to women.

But what had moved her?

“Do you have a plan?” Madeleine Greenway’s voice was still husky from lack of sleep, but managed to sound ironic anyway. He wished she would do
something
he could interpret as flirting. He found fl irting soothing.

“I do, rather. I think a calculated risk is in order,” he
said firmly. “If I know Eleanor—the countess—she’ll be spending a good portion of the day sleeping off the effects of drinking away her boredom the night before, because God only knows drinking is the only way to endure Lord Crump’s monthly do’s, and there was one last night, as today is Sunday. I think we need to go straight to the countess to ask about that footman.”

“And I assume you . . .
know
. . . Eleanor.” Admi
rably dry sentence, that one. Very nice strategic pause, too.

“Oh, I know Eleanor.” Colin tried for an enigmatic smile, but the smile became crooked and real as he thought about the countess. He genuinely
liked
Count
ess Malmsey. She was lovely, which helped with the liking—she had English-rose skin and dark blue eyes, a tipped-up nose and a pink little mouth and a wonder
ful bosom, which he’d admired any number of times during a waltz—but her wit occasionally cut and sur
prised, hinting she might be hiding a more interesting brain than the blue eyes and bosom implied. Because she was young, the wit was considered more charm
ing than dangerous, like claws on a kitten, so it was indulged.