Free The English Assassin by Michael Moorcock

yellow frock-coat with an exaggerated waist and flair, with brown braid at collar and cuff. He had a matching bowler with its brim tightly curled, a light brown cravat, and bell-bottomed trousers cut very tight at the knee. The trousers were in a mustard check some would have considered vulgar. His gold-topped stick was in his left hand and an empty amber cigar holder in his right. On the third finger of his right hand was a heavy gold signet ring. He seemed either unaware of the confusion around him or careless of it.
    Una Persson regarded him with interest. His black, soft hair hung straight to his shoulders in the style of the aesthetes of some years earlier. His long, lean face bore an ambiguous expression which might have been amusement or satisfaction or surprise. His black eyes were large, deep-set, unreadable. Suddenly, with a nod to her, he stepped sideways and entered the burning theatre. Impulsively she made to follow him. Then she felt Auchinek’s hand on her shoulder.
    “Don’t worry,” he said. “This can’t last for ever.”
    She looked again at the stage door. The dark smoky interior of the theatre was now alive with red flame. She saw the young man’s silhouette against the firelight before it disappeared, apparently marching without hesitation into the heart of the inferno.
    “He’ll die!” Una said softly. “The heat!”
    Auchinek said anxiously: “Are you sure you’re yourself, Una?”

THE SEDUCERS
    Mrs Cornelius settled her pink feather boa around her broad shoulders and patted it down over the green-and-white fabric flowers decorating her fine big bosom. She wasn’t doing too badly for thirty, she thought, giving her image a wink and dabbing at the rouge on her right cheek with a damp finger which protruded from the broderie anglaise cuff.
    “’And up me ’at, love.”
    The mean-faced boy of fifteen wiped his nose on the sleeve of his tattered Norfolk jacket and reached to the mock Georgian mahogany chiffonier for the extravagant pile of artificial roses, peonies and sweet williams topped off by a yard or two of pink gauze, some wax grapes and a pair of pheasant’s wings, which rested amongst her nick-nacks. In both hands he carried the hat to where she stood before the full-length fly-specked wardrobe mirror in its gilded cast-iron frame.
    “And the pins, love,” she reproved, donning the hat as if it were the Crown of England.
    He took the three long pins with their blue, red and gold enamelled butterfly wings and presented them in the flat of his unhealthy hand, his expression cool, like a nurse proffering a surgeon his instruments. One by one she picked them from his palm and slid them like a conjuror expertly into her hat, her hair and, apparently, her head.
    “Cream!” She was satisfied. She tilted the brim just a fraction to the right. She flicked at a pheasant feather.
    “Shall I be in this evening?” asked the boy. His accent while by no means educated was indefinably in contrast to the woman’s. “Or not?”
    “Better stay at Sammy’s, love. I think I’ll be entertaining tonight.” She smiled comfortably at herself and admired her large, well-corseted figure for a while, hands on hips. “You’re looking prime, girlie.” She gathered her pale green satin skirts and pirouetted on her matching patent leather boots. “You’ll do, you will.”
    The boy put his hands in his pockets and swaggered about the untidy, over-furnished bedroom whistling, without irony, ‘I’m Gilbert, the Filbert, the Colonel of the Knuts’. He marched through the open door into the gaslit parlour. The parlour was a dark jungle of aspidistra and mahogany. Opening the front door of the flat he spread his arms, running and leaping down the lodging house’s uncarpeted stairs and making a high-pitched whining sound as he pretended he was a fighting aeroplane making a death dive on its enemies. He rushed panting into Blenheim Crescent and was almost knocked over by the baker’s motor van