The Perils of Pleasure by Julie Anne Long Page A

did, but most were dogged, because that’s all they knew how to be, and many were ruthless.
    No doubt his family was being thoroughly ques tioned by authorities right now. An image of his father, Jacob, strutting with glee, restored to his usual state of enigmatically confident bonhomie at having once more cheated fate, bloomed in Colin’s mind. He almost smiled. But that image opened a door on a great rush of impatience and longing. For his family, Louisa, Penny royal Green. All the things he loved, had been denied, had thought to never see again. And in that moment he didn’t think he could bear another second of the world thinking he had done murder, and his lungs seized.
    Moments later he took in a deep, long breath just to remind himself that he breathed free air. “Have you any more blunt, Miss Greenway?” Impatience made the question curt.
    He, of course, had nothing, because he’d paid the hangman to bind him more loosely and tug on his legs to kill him faster, and that was the end of his blunt. That thought made him look down at his legs now with a sense of vertigo. He could still feel the ghost of the shackles on them, feel the chafe of his boots where they’d ringed his ankles, but he could still feel his legs, and this meant he was alive.
    He hadn’t realized he’d so accustomed himself to the idea of dying that he now needed to accustom himself once again to living. The sensation wasn’t comfortable. It was akin to circulation returning bit by bit to blood-deprived limbs.
    He glanced up then and caught Madeleine Green-way’s dark eyes on him, an unidentifi able expression fleeing from them.
    “I would have had more blunt,” she said meaning fully, sharply turning her head back toward the street. He did like her voice, he decided—its richness and con fidence. Even if the resentment in it was all for him. “But now I haven’t enough for a hackney to take us to the Tiger’s Nest. And we can’t have you walking these streets looking like . . . like . . . ”
    She concluded her sentence by shaking her head roughly, as if to clear it of a nightmare.
    Perversely, this amused Colin. He was the nightmare in question. He looked like a damned gentleman. And this was the problem, when this had never before in his life been anything other than an asset.
    A hackney rolled by the end of the lane as she spoke, the privacy and speed of it a taunt to the two of them who stood trapped there in the gray, filthy lane. A tattered broadsheet came cartwheeling gaily across the ground and made a landing, graceful as a swan, atop that puddle.
    colin eversea, it said in large dark letters. Right above a boldly inked woodcut of the scaffold.
    Well, then. Colin jerked his head away from that. But the view at the end of the alley was hardly better. Like a droplet of blood, a red-coated soldier appeared in the crowd.
    And where there was one soldier, there were typically more.
    His heart gave one sickening thud, and then contin ued on considerably accelerated.
    “Your coat,” Madeleine Greenway said, her voice low with urgency.
    Without thinking, Colin handed over his corded bundle, and he watched, half bemused and half with a sort of pleasure, as her quick hands worked it open, un folded the coat, and pulled—and pulled and pulled, as the tailors at Weston were rigorous and thorough and the threads unwilling to give way—a brass button free.
    She closed it in her fist triumphantly. “We’ll pawn this.” She turned on her heel and returned to their now hatless friend against the wall.
    “I knew ye’d return to me, me dove,” their friend said sentimentally.
    Madeleine knelt. “Do you know of a fence near here?” She kept her voice low.
    If she’d asked the question in Pennyroyal Green, anyone might have pointed out Gerald Cutter’s fence. It was built of stone from crumbling castles and drift wood collected from the sea and sagged like Gerald Cutter’s jowls, and it did very little to actually keep the sheep