And then she realized what he was doing: He was making a bed.
Colin Eversea’s long limbs would droop over the edges of the flour sack arrangement, but her entire body would fit nicely on it. It sang a silent little siren song to her weary limbs.
Still, she wasn’t prepared to sleep unguarded and alone in a room with this man.
Which meant she was fully prepared not to sleep at all.
Colin turned to her in satisfaction. “And here we have a bed. You may avail yourself of it, and I’ll stay awake to keep watch.”
Another of those casually arrogant announcements that burrowed burrlike under her skin.
And then he began to casually reach for her pistol.
Madeleine moved it into the center of the table, out of his reach, and covered it with her hand.
“I’ll keep watch,” she countered evenly.
Colin Eversea went very still again. Then he drew himself up to his full height and fixed those fierce, brilliant eyes on her.
And thus another of their increasingly too-familiar stalemates ensued.
Clearly, neither of them trusted one another, despite revelations and Saint-John’s-wort. And after a moment the corner of Colin’s mouth dented wryly, acknowledging this. But there was no humor in his eyes.
The bloody man didn’t blink. Madeleine had thought she could stare anyone down. Three older brothers, he’d said. He’d clearly had a little practice with this sort of thing, too.
So she studied Colin Eversea the way she would any assignment, looking for useful details. His posture was as fine and erect as any soldier’s, but she thought she saw—ah yes, she did see—the very slightest of sways to his stance. There were semicircles of bruised-looking skin beneath his eyes and parentheses of fatigue bracketing his mouth. His face had a stretched, blanched look; his eyes were all the more vivid for their pink rims. He probably hadn’t slept a night through since being locked in Newgate some weeks earlier, and he was contending with a certain amount of pain, to boot.
In short, this man was exhausted, and until now had likely been propelled by some sort of auxiliary strength born of fear or anger or anxiety.
Madeleine knew how to make use of this.
“Lie down.” She purposely made the two words husky and inviting.
Colin’s eyes widened speculatively; his pupils flared. She could see the swift and vivid passage of scenarios through his mind flickering over his face, and she dug her nails into her palms lest she flush from imagining what he might be imagining.
Alas, the expression that finally settled in to stay was amusement. He was too clever, and he was having none of it. “Why should you want me to lie down, Mrs. Greenway?”
And this was the disadvantage of being saddled with a clever accused murderer. For an instant she was almost insulted. There hadn’t been a whiff of flirtation in the question. It was all suspicion.
“I should like to know whether the sacks are comfortable enough to sleep upon for an entire night.” She’d tried for a note of innocence. It didn’t come naturally.
He pondered this very briefly. “Funny, but you don’t strike me as a princess.”
“You wound me, Mr. Eversea.” She struck a mocking hand right over her heart, right between her breasts. His eyes followed her hand and he seemed to have some difficulty removing his gaze once it got there. Ah, that was better—a trifle more flattering. “It’s simply that I wondered if perhaps you preferred to sleep in the chair because the sacks are vermin-ridden, and you wished them upon me, instead. As you do strike me as something of a prince.”
This wasn’t true. And he narrowed his eyes suspiciously—he wasn’t convinced, and she couldn’t blame him, really—but he sighed gustily and indulged her by sitting down hard on the edge of the flour sack bed and flinging his hands out in illustration. See?
All she had to do now was wait.
And not long, as it turned out. For his eyes soon began to take on a faintly surprised, abstracted…inward sort of look. His body, little by little, was registering the softness and give of those sacks.
She’d seen that very expression before: on a cat when it crossed into a sunbeam. It was all about helpless, inevitable surrender.
And then, as though invisible arms were languidly pulling him down, Colin Eversea drifted slowly back, and back, and back, and…back. Until at last he lay flat, and utterly still. The flour sacks bulged gently up around him, cradling his long body.
There would be an imprint of Colin Eversea in the flour sacks by tomorrow morning.
“Now,” Madeleine said briskly. She sat down in the chair, leaned over, her elbows on her knees, and peered down into his face. “I shall count to ten. And if your eyes are still open by the time I reach ten…I’ll allow you to keep watch.”
There was a long pause. As if his voice had to travel a long, long way, all the way from the land of sleep, before it could come out his mouth.
“Why you…you…devil woman,” he murmured, half resentfully, half admiringly. His words were already slurring.
“One…” she began, her voice a purr. “Two…”
One of his eyes was twitching in a valiant struggle to stay open. The other had already given up the fight and lay closed, surrendered.
“…three…four…”
His hand gave a single halfhearted flop, like a beached fish, just once. Then it lay still. His struggling eyelid, almost in resignation, fluttered closed. And stayed closed.
Two pairs of lashes now lay against that bruised looking skin. The tension eased from his face, his limbs gradually slackened…he exhaled a long breath.
“Damn…you…” These last two words sounded more like a contented sigh than a curse.
He said nothing more after that. Despite his own wishes, Colin Eversea was asleep.
Madeleine smiled triumphantly. The devil woman would keep watch tonight.
Surprisingly, keeping watch over bags of potatoes, onions, and an escaped criminal turned out to be rather dull.
The lamp glowed low, throwing large and lurid shadows of homely pantry objects up on the wall. The air in the room was close now, but nearer to dawn would doubtless take on a chill, and she was glad they had blankets.
Colin Eversea’s breathing was deep and quiet, the sort that could lull her to sleep if she wasn’t careful. And if she closed her own eyes, it could become the sound of another place and time altogether, and another peacefully sleeping man, and for this reason, too, she didn’t dare close her eyes.
But she watched him, because he was easily the most interesting thing in the room. Beneath the solid, hard body of the man he was now, she could almost see the outline of the lanky boy he must have been before those shoulders spread and those strong bones of his face emerged from its youthful roundness. But Colin Eversea would never have been awkward. Not with a face like his, or eyes like his.
His palms were open and innocent now in sleep. She wondered which one of them would have driven the knife into Roland Tarbell. They seemed incapable of it, those long, quiet hands.
She wondered about this Louisa Porter. Why, if Colin loved this woman, was he so reckless with his affections?
Ah, you see, she told herself with bitter humor: a single sentence had forced its way through—Tell me what happened—and she had uttered it, and he had answered it, and like a cat’s cradle made of string, this was how humans became bound to each other, through this interweaving of confidences. And now because of that one sentence, a million other questions about him thought they were welcome in her mind.
Madeleine lowered her head gently into her hands, a luxury she allowed herself only briefly typically. But the weight of her thoughts seemed suddenly too heavy for her mere neck to hold up. She longed for a bath and her own rooms and her lavender soap…and a mirror.
And this last irritated her. She knew full well she possessed a singular sort of beauty; it was simply another of her tools, and she’d had no real use for vanity for some time. But Colin Eversea had seen
her in an entirely different, very specific way. He had, in fact, seen through her.
She wanted to see what he saw, too. She wanted to know if somehow the events of the past few years had written themselves on her face, and she had been unable to see it.
And though Madeleine’s greatest strength was that she was a woman, and this had ensured her survival to date, she was all too aware that it was her greatest weakness, too. She’d been so very, very careful to protect that particular chink in her armor. She would spend the evening blacksmithing it closed again with thoughts of the future.
Right after she did one thing: she got up and gently spread a blanket out over Colin Eversea.
He never moved, but she thought he smiled faintly in his sleep.
Chapter 7
Colin jerked awake, sat bolt upright, and thrashed and thrashed away at the thing covering his body as though it were a mortal enemy. A great moth? A bat? His heart was hammering, his palms sweating, and then the wool registered on his palms and he stared at it dumbly, embarrassed.
It was a blanket.
“I see you’re awake,” came an amused feminine voice from somewhere nearby.
Admirable understatement, there. No one was more awake than he was at the moment.
He gingerly set the blanket aside. Consciousness sifted back in disorderly, jagged pieces. He wasn’t in prison, then. He was in a…
“We need to leave now,” the voice added. It was pleasant but insistent.
…a storeroom. He was in a storeroom. Who was talking…? Colin pushed his hands up through his hair and blinked in the direction of the voice, knuckling the kernels of sleep from them, his thoughts struggling to catch up with his senses and give names to the things he saw. Ah, yes. Greenway. Madeleine Greenway. Beautiful prickly woman with soft hands who’d tricked him into sleeping on the flour sacks in a storeroom. She looked very pale. She sat at the little table in front of a lit candle, and even in this light he could see faint dark rings beneath her eyes. Ah, yes. Fine eyes, he recalled. He thought she was smiling a little faintly, but that might have been wishful thinking, because he would have liked to wake to a smile.
Colin rolled from the flour bed and stood upright too quickly, felt myriad twinges everywhere in his body, stretched his limbs to unknot them, and then looked down on a perfect imprint of his body in the flour sacks. They’d made a death mask of Gerard Courvoisier after he was hung for murdering his aristocratic employer. Perhaps they could make a Colin Eversea out of bread.
He admired it for a moment, half grimly, half whimsically, then patted his shape out of the flour.
A horrified thought crossed his mind. He glanced down quickly to determine that, yes, he had slept in his clothes, when normally—when he was not in prison, that was—he might not have, and exhaled.
“Time?” His voice was raspy from sleep. Oddly, however, he felt altogether stronger than he had in months.
“Five o’clock,” she told him, her own voice a little worse for keeping watch all night. “The watch should circle around in a half hour’s time, so it’s best we leave.” She handed the skin to him. “Water.”
He took it, gulped a good half of it down, swiped his mouth, got his boots on, and reached for all he owned in the world: part of a cravat, a coat missing a button, and a waistcoat.
Madeleine Greenway paused to swiftly load her pistol: tapping powder down the barrel, pressing in the paper-wrapped ball, locking it, tucking it away in the pockets of her skirts. In the dim light of the room he could have been dreaming: watching this very feminine woman efficiently load a small firearm the way another woman might pin up her hair. She turned the handle on the door, and it occurred to Colin that most women would have deferred to him, or glanced back at him, or at least acknowledged his presence.
This was a woman so accustomed to being alone she didn’t give it a thought anymore.
And before he left, he signed the broadsheet with a flourish and sprinkled sand over it. He was a man of his word, and that broadsheet was their insurance of Croker’s silence.
They went out through the kitchen, which was quiet, apart from the crack and hiss of the low fire. Red glowed in the center of chunks of nearly completely consumed wood. The kitchen boy was sleeping next to the hearth, twitching in the depths of a dream, and when they passed him, he muttered in his sleep and rolled onto his side, toward the fire.
Colin watched in mild amazement as Madeleine stealthily tucked a coin into the boy’s shoe—astonishing that the boy had shoes, though Colin could see one small grimy foot through the hole in one—as she passed, scarcely pausing. The boy didn’t wake.
Colin watched Madeleine’s narrow back. A few tendrils of dark hair were coming down from their pins to trail the collar of her gown. This would have driven his sister Genevieve mad.
Almost as though she could feel his eyes on her, Madeleine Greenway’s hand went absently up and touched her hair. Colin half smiled. She was a woman, after all, albeit not like any woman he’d ever before met.
And then he went out into the grimy English dawn to find a hackney, he and his new partner, who hadn’t murdered him in his sleep or called the authorities down upon him, but who loaded a gun as efficiently as any soldier.
In Pennyroyal Green one could use metaphors about maidenly blushes and mother-of-pearl to describe the dawn. Not in London. The coal smut-covered skies merely grew steadily brighter, and sometimes took on a lemonlike shade. And then it grew hotter, and that’s how you knew it was officially daylight.
But now it was still cool, the drunks and thieves nodding and rising in the streets from where they’d collapsed the night before, like dark little flowers opening to the haze-masked sun, and Colin and Madeleine heard the telltale clip-clop of a hackney circling round.
He hailed it with a raised hand, grateful for the haze and relative dark and his big hat.
“Grosvenor Square,” Madeleine told the driver, who was just a little drunk, his nose red, because he was a hackney driver and he drank the night through to keep warm. He only looked at the money she handed to him; he didn’t look at the tall bloke getting into the hackney and pulling the door closed.
Meanwhile, the Eversea women—and one soon-to-be-Eversea woman—had been installed in a carriage and sent back to Sussex, while the Eversea men, with the exception of Marcus, opted for horseback.
Mrs. Eversea was reviewing the guest list for Louisa’s wedding, of all things, and Olivia and Genevieve were cheerfully arguing over what, precisely, should be served to the guests after the wedding.
How did they do it? Louisa Porter wondered. But then, they were Everseas, and they’d recovered from the emotional buffeting of the morning.
“You need to offer kippers, Mama,” Genevieve was saying practically. “You’re feeding the guests a midday meal, so you must give them something familiar.”
Louisa could scarcely speak. In truth, she wasn’t any more surprised that Colin Eversea had vanished from the gallows in smoke and explosions than she’d been the night he was arrested for murder. She’d not for one instant believed Colin had killed anyone with a knife, not even a Redmond, and not even over a slur to his sister Olivia—but it had seemed an inevitable consequence of the way he lived his life, the extremes of joy and danger he always courted. And she supposed that even as her heart slowly withered in her chest as they erected the scaffold in the Old Bailey, some small part of her simply didn’t believe he would die that day.
After all, one couldn’t loop a noose around the sun and hang it from the gallows.
How long had she loved Colin Eversea? She supposed it all began the day of the town picnic at Pennyroyal Green, when she and Colin were both eleven years old. The day was warm and her bonnet ribbons had begun to chafe, so she’d untied them and left them to dangle. Moments later Colin snatched the bonnet from her head and made a run for it up the hill toward the sea.
Louisa remembered a ricochet of sensations inside and outside her: the sudden whoosh of the wind in her hair, a
nd the shocking, delicious blaze of the sun right on her face—her mother forever cautioned her over freckles—fury at the brazen theft; flattery at the brazen theft—handsome Colin Eversea had stolen her bonnet!—and deep, deep concern, as it was her best bonnet, after all, and there it went, vanishing over a hill in the hand of a lanky, beastly boy.
But this was Colin. He excelled at making her feel a dozen things at a time, all of them interesting, not all of them comfortable.
He brought a bouquet of wildflowers to her house the next day, his vivid eyes full of mischief and worship, his apology insincere, his departure rapid. Colin learned early on how to make entrances and exits and just the right grand gestures.
How could she not love him?
But it was almost a helpless thing. With Colin, she felt like a lake that reflected back the sun. He was the one who shone; she glittered only by virtue of his rays.
It was handsome, older Marcus Eversea who had coerced the return of the unharmed bonnet that day and presented it to her somberly, with sincere apologies for his brother’s behavior. Marcus had always been handsome, too. He’d always been kind, always attentive, never obtrusive—very like her, in many ways. His only fault was that he simply wasn’t Colin.
But by proposing, Marcus Eversea had once again, metaphorically speaking, handed her bonnet back to her. That was the sort of man Marcus was.
No surprises, really, from Marcus. Until, that is, the day he’d proposed.
And it had solved everything for Louisa. Her brothers could cease treating her with affectionate apprehension—unmarried sisters who possessed no dowries were burdens, regardless of how lovely and pleasant they might be. Her life would be as handsome and roomy and well sprung as the carriage taking them back to Pennyroyal Green. And she’d seen the look in Marcus’s eyes when he proposed, and knew she could always be certain of his affection in the way she could never be certain of Colin.
The Perils of Pleasure Page 10
