Free The Perils of Pleasure by Julie Anne Long Page A

explosions—behind the scaffold, and in the crowd, and smoke, and chaos, and screaming—and then . . . ” He paused for effect. “ . . . Colin bloody vanished .”
    Resounding silence.
    Those damned birds were still singing, Marcus no ticed. As though they had suspected all along.
    “So he didn’t hang?” Jacob said slowly, fi nally.
    “He didn’t hang. And he’s not dead. At least, he’s not dead from hanging. Hasn’t been seen, Jacob. He bloody vanished .”
    “Smelling salts,” Marcus murmured to the house keeper who had trailed the messenger into the room. She was just as pale as everyone else, and breathing just as hard as everyone else, but she wasn’t going to faint, and it looked like half the women in the room were about to. The color had fled Louisa’s face
    Not his mother, however. She’d been through too many harrowing things with Colin in her life already. His mother’s face was bloodless, her dark blue eyes bright, despite the puffy arcs beneath them. But she looked almost unsurprised.
    He thought Jacob would go to her. But Jacob and his mother had seemed strangely separate this morn ing, as if they each knew a different kind of grief about the occasion and didn’t trust that the other would understand.
    So rivers would not reverse course, the sun would not rise in the west.
    The Everseas had once again prevailed.
    “Some are saying Satan took him back,” the messen ger elucidated. “Some are saying he really is innocent, and the Angel of Death came down to take him instead. The army is in an uproar. They’re more inclined to blame the Everseas than heavenly interference. I imag ine they’ll be here any minute,” he added on a practical note.
    Hoofbeats out in the courtyard bore this out. Sol diers were already descending upon the Everseas.
    Jacob had begun to look thoughtful. “So Colin isn’t dead. This you know for certain.”
    “Not by hanging,” the messenger confi rmed.
    And before their eyes, Jacob, who had seemed di minished over the weeks . . . took on that preternatural glow of confidence and joie de vivre that was uniquely his. Colin was the tallest of all the children, but one never seemed taller than Jacob Eversea, because the very presence of the man commanded so much room.
    All the boys, Ian and Chase and Marcus, were star ing at their father.
    “I swear I had nothing to do with it,” he murmured to Marcus. “Don’t you think you would have known?”
    * * *
    Colin wondered where on earth the authorities would begin to look for him. Soldiers were often bored and underemployed in the wake of the war, and he’d had his haunts, but then again, it wasn’t as though he was a migrating sparrow. He didn’t return to the same places over and over. He enjoyed sampling things. It would take several battalions to fan out over all of London, and soldiers had other duties, too. This is what he told himself, anyway, by way of comforting rationalization.
    Stone cold sober, it was hard to imagine he’d ever sampled the Tiger’s Nest, though he knew he had. The front wall of the inn was almost entirely a window, and the customers were on display. And what the clien tele of the Tiger’s Nest lacked in the way of limbs and teeth they generally more than made up for in weap ons. Pistols of every vintage and knives of every length and strength gleamed and glinted on the men crowded into the pub, all much better maintained than the cus tomers themselves. Hooks curved at the end of arms, wooden legs were parked next to booted legs beneath tables gouged and scarred from countless knives, and here and there a stump of an elbow, jauntily tied off at a sleeve, waved about in fierce debate. These were pirates of the streets, of the seas.
    In other words, it wasn’t the usual theater crowd.
    Colin wondered that he hadn’t been gutted at once when he dared show his face in here. They did admire a man who could hold his drink, however, and a man who bought drink freely and shared it. And