The Perils of Pleasure Read Free Page A

realized he was very nearly afraid of Violet Redmond, and he was afraid of nothing. She’d cast her fine eyes in his direction once before. He knew he wasn’t the man who could possibly contain her, and he’d quickly looked away.
    No histrionics for Louisa Porter. Instead, every thing she felt right now was evident in that grip and her bloodless knuckles.
    Marcus traced her profile with his eyes. He wondered if there would always be this . . . barbed catch in his breathing whenever he looked at her. It was sheer wonder that anything or anyone could be so very . . . so very . . .
    With his usual pragmatism and sense of economy, Marcus abandoned the search for the right word, for he knew he would never fi nd it.
    She turned toward him then and tipped her head up slowly, as though motion hurt her. Her eyes were a blue so absolute it made one want to invoke—oh, blue things, he supposed—and once again rue his vocabu lary, comprised solely of land and horses and drainage ditches and investments.
    He couldn’t help but think that Colin would have known precisely what sort of blue her eyes were. But Marcus knew that Louisa Porter hadn’t consented to wed him because of his ability to produce a metaphor. He absently fingered one of the mother-of-pearl but tons on his Mercury Club waistcoat instead, for reas surance. It was emblematic of the importance of what he could offer Louisa.
    And it was Louisa who finally spoke into that awful silence.
    “The birds are singing.” She said it very faintly, sounding surprised. As though she, too, found it an affront.
    Isaiah Redmond squinted down onto the Old Bailey from his perch at the window. Without his spectacles, the throng was an undulating blur, calling to mind noth ing so much as maggots feasting upon rotting meat. A smooth gesture later—all of Isaiah’s movements were graceful, studied, controlled, regardless of the urgency motivating them—his spectacles were out of his pocket and pushed up onto his nose, and the blur became the good people of London dressed in their Sunday best. Though scarcely less repellent for all of that.
    Isaiah abhorred hangings. It was a sentiment he’d never before shared aloud, as it bordered on the radical. And if the Redmond family had spawned any radicals over the centuries, they’d been kept very good secrets indeed.
    Then again, the Redmonds excelled at keeping se crets. Every Redmond came into the world equipped with a sort of Pandora’s box, courtesy of being born a Redmond.
    Isaiah, the current patriarch, had a veritable store house of his own.
    He intended to see this particular hanging through, however, as it represented a fissure in the pattern of his tory itself. Today an Eversea would at last— at last —die on the gallows. Who knew what could happen next? Rivers might begin to flow uphill. King George might become a Quaker.
    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