The Perils of Pleasure Read Free

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 in stead 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 fi ne, 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 fi ve decades.
    It was Ian who mistakenly thought Colin would fi nd 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 bur rowed 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 fi ttings 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 submis sion, 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 fl ed. Good Lord. Marcus