The Perils of Pleasure Read Free Page B

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.”
    Chapter 2
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    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