The Perils of Pleasure (5 page)

This time it was Madeleine Greenway who under
stood what he meant, because she stood upright imme
diately, brushing her eyes.

She looked at Colin, the tall man with his improb
ably clean shirt and the secondhand hat pulled down over his forehead.

“We’ll just have to brazen it,” she said, half to her
self, half to Colin. She sounded grim.

Madeleine and Colin ventured out of the alley and merged into the lively if dirty and monochromatic crowds of St. Giles. They sidestepped more puddles, were nearly knocked over by a pig and then by the three boys chasing it, walked by a crowd singing about Colin Eversea, and had dust rained over them by a woman beating a carpet from the upstairs window of an ancient lodging house, which rather solved the issue of Colin’s
offensively clean shirt. He shook off the worst of the dust, and Madeleine shook her fist up at the woman, because to do otherwise would be almost to call undue attention to them.

“Sorry, lass,” the woman called down unapologetically.

“Head down,” Madeleine reminded Colin on a hiss when he looked as though he might look up. She was unnervingly aware of his height

“It
is
down,” he muttered. “Because that’s where all the more interesting piles of things are.”

It was Madeleine who kept her eyes on the front of buildings, crammed together as tightly as a crowd at a hanging, filthy and weather-beaten as the denizens of the rookeries.

The girl with the basket of paper-wrapped violets stood out nearly as vividly as the soldiers. Their eyes bounced from the girl up to a sign swinging on a pair of chains, the word
apothecary
ornately lettered on it.

Madeleine and Colin dove into the shop with some relief.

Inside, it was pungent and dark but for a pair of tall globed lamps burning like the moons of Mars on opposite ends of a wooden counter. They illuminated very little, but did a marvelous job of casting eerie shad
ows, which was doubtless the point. Things in varying stages of preservation—green-leaved stalks, roses and chamomile and lavender and hellebore and other herbs she had no hope of ever identifying—were bound with bits of string and suspended from the ceiling or fl oating in labeled jars lining the shop walls up to the ceiling. Other unidentifiable things bobbed in jars on the upper shelves. Eye of newt? Dragon’s teeth?

Small skeletons and skulls belonging to animal spe
cies Madeleine also had no hope of identifying were posed on shelves or suspended on cords from the ceil
ing, their empty eyes and harmless teeth somehow more poignant than eerie.

The proprietor stood behind the counter and between the lamps, and was handing a dark bottle to a gentle
man whose turned-up coat collar and pulled-down hat brim made it clear he was no more eager to be seen than Colin was.

“Good day,” the man gruffly said, patting a jingle of coins into the proprietor’s hand.

He turned abruptly, nearly clocking Colin in the ankles with his walking stick, and Colin turned swiftly toward the wall to admire the dark bobbing things.

Madeleine frowned slightly. She’d seen little more than a pair of eyes and part of a nose, but the departing man seemed familiar. In fact . . . well, she might have sworn he was an MP.

Interesting customers, McBride had.

Colin dutifully remained turned away from the pro
prietor, hat pulled down. He sidled down the wall a ways to examine a skeleton.

His gait was a trifle careful, Madeleine noted. Shack
les, she thought, jarred. He’d been shackled for weeks. He was still accustoming himself to walking without them.

“Good day, madam.” The proprietor’s voice was cheerful and Scottish, and the man was bony and be
spectacled. Sparse gray locks swung in long, gay stream
ers from his otherwise naked pate.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Madeleine replied. “Would you be McBride?”

“Aye, I’d be McBride. ’Ave ye been sent, m’dear?”

She hesitated, a bit surprised. “In a manner of speak
ing,” she said tentatively.

“’Ow may I be of assistance to you and . . . ” He cast a discreet glance at Colin, who had moved on and bent to peer at something that looked like it might have been a rat once upon a time. “ . . . the gentleman?”

For some reason, McBride didn’t seem to think it was at all unusual to be addressing the lady and not the gentleman. “’Ave ye come fer me . . . specialty?” he coaxed.

“And what would your specialty be?” Madeleine in
quired cautiously. She wondered if this was code this particular flash house used to identify customers. She hardly resembled the typical Seven Dials thief with something to fence, which perhaps was the reason for his circumspection.

McBride studied her, and Madeleine saw not his eyes but the lamps reflected in the lenses of spectacles. He must have concluded that she was being canny, for he straightened and launched into a speech.

“Madam, I ’umbly submit that I’ve an elixir what can solve nearly every problem of a”—his voice dropped discreetly, though as far as Madeleine could tell, there wasn’t another soul in the shop apart from herself and Colin—“masculine or
intimate
nature.”

Over near the might-have-once-been-a-rat, Colin Eversea went utterly still.

Time might be of the essence, but
this
was too much to resist.

“Would the problems you refer to, sir, be of the . . . marital . . . sort?” Madeleine’s voice was a discreet hush.

“Aye, madam. Me elixirs ’ave improved many a mar
riage. I can brew summat fer nearly every . . . ” He
cleared his throat. “ . . . difficulty.” And then he waved his hand about the shop, as if the very ingredients for such magic were visible everywhere. He reached behind him for one stoppered bottle and presented it to her as though offering up a fine vintage. “Fer instance—”

“But what if . . . ” Madeleine paused. “ . . . his—
it’s
—just a wee, tiny tadpole to begin with?” Just in case this was too cryptic a description, she held her thumb and forefinger apart about two inches.

Colin Eversea coughed.

McBride was momentarily transfixed by the pathetic little space between her fingers. And then he carefully lowered the bottle, cleared his throat and straightened his spine. “’Tis a wee, tiny tadpole, you say?” he said briskly. He made it sound like a scientific condition. He drummed his fingers on the counter thoughtfully.

Colin Eversea had recovered and was now ex
perimentally opening and closing the elongated bony jaws of some unidentifi able creature.
Creeeak
,
creak
.
Creeeak
,
creak
.

“Oh yes! You can scarcely even
see
it in the dark,” she confirmed for McBride. The skull creaking abruptly stopped. He clearly wanted to hear. “And as I am modest, I prefer not to engage in . . .
relations
. . . ” She lowered her eyes as though the very immodesty of the word had sapped her strength. “ . . . with lamps burn
ing everywhere in the room. But it seems we must, or there would
be
no relations at all.”

McBride rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “’Ow long ’ave ye been married, madam?”

“Well, it
seems
an eternity—”

“I imagine it would,” he soothed.

“—but two years, just.”

“And yer ’usband, ’e wants to please you?”

“He
lives
to please me.”

Colin put down the skull so hard the jaw of it clacked.

McBride made a clucking sound, part warning and part sympathy, both for Colin.

He returned his attention to the woman before him. “Admirable of him, admirable. And a challenge, fer the both of ye, to be certain,” McBride said gravely. “But
I
lives to satisfy me customers. I’ve brewed summat new what might ’elp the two of ye—’tis of Turkish origin. And one of me customers—I canna give ye names, ye ken, but ’e is of the
’ighest
of stature—’as already taken it away, and come fer more.”

“Well, sir . . . if you don’t mind my asking . . . how does it help? Does it address size or . . . ” She trailed off delicately.

“It ’elps wi’ inflation, madam.” McBride had appar
ently forgotten to be coy in his zeal for his product. “Through the magic of science and the natural world and me own skill, it will work with the gentleman’s ex
isting equipment and give ’im more to . . . wield.”

“’Twould take a miracle, indeed,” Madeleine said reflectively. “And we shall give consideration to your elixir. But he
will
keep trying, you see, with what he was born with. He does have his pride. But I’d heard of you, you see, and wanted to come in to speak to you, and he was willing to accompany me.”

“Admirable, as I said. Admirable,” McBride ap
proved of Colin’s gallantry.

“Thank you, sir, for your advice. And while I’m here, I’ve another matter,” Madeleine concluded.

“Verra good.” McBride sounded cautiously optimis
tic. Her first problem was nearly insurmountable; God only knew what her second would be.

She swiftly slid the brass coat button onto the counter.

McBride slowly lowered his head to look at it, then looked up at her sharply, and now she saw a pair of blue eyes glinting behind his spectacles.

“I’d like six shillings for it,” Madeleine said, again cautiously, in case they’d been misinformed by their friend in the alley.

“One,” McBride countered instantly.

Ah, very good. “What manner of fool do you take me for?” she said coolly. “Five shillings.”

“Five!” McBride was incensed. “If ye were not ’and
some, madam, I would . . . ” He was spluttering. It was a fine bit of acting. “Three shillings ha’pence.”

“Four shillings, and not a farthing less. You know ’tis a fine, rare brass button.”

They glared at each other across the counter.

Then McBride sighed, reached into his coat and pro
duced a velvet pouch. He counted four shillings out of it into Madeleine’s outstretched palm.

“Invigorating, madam. I thank you.”

“Think nothing of it,” Madeleine demurred. “We’ll also need a large coat in blue or black. Or a greatcoat or a cape. Have you anything of the sort?”

“Oh, ye’ve far to go fer that, I fear. I’m only buttons and fobs and fine metal, madam. The occasional book, perhaps, and those I do come upon I keep for a friend. Things small but grand, primarily, that’s me specialty. Mrs. Bandycross in Lorrimer Lane will sell ye a shirt or an ’andkerchief, but coats . . . ” He shook his head. “I canna think of where ye’d find a coat, unless it’s Bond Street.”

They both laughed at the absurdity of that. Bond Street was a universe away from St. Giles.

“Thank you, sir. I thought I’d ask.”

“’Twas a pleasure, ’twas a pleasure, madam.”

A bow and a curtsy were exchanged, and they parted company, each thinking they had gotten the better deal, which is always the sign of a satisfying negotiation.

Colin followed her silently out of the shop, back into noise and daylight.

They slipped back into the crowd and neither spoke for a time.

“Well,
I’m
humbled,” Colin Eversea fi nally said.

“I doubt that,” she retorted dourly.

He laughed at that, and she shushed him.

“Well, it
was
your objective, wasn’t it? Do you really think my ego is so
very
impenetrable, Miss Greenway? That it’s impossible to wound me?” He still sounded amused.

“Stop it,” Madeleine said through teeth all but clenched.

“Stop what?”

“Stop trying to
win
me over, Mr. Eversea. It’s . . . unnecessary.”

“Because you’re already won?” he suggested hopefully.

“Because it’s not possible.”

“But we might as well be friends, should we not? If we’re to help each other, that is.”

“This isn’t a lark. And I don’t want a friend, and you don’t want a friend, Mr. Eversea. You want to prove something to yourself by winning me over.”

This observation caused an abrupt silence.

And then Colin Eversea smiled an enigmatic little smile, and tipped his head back just a bit, as though at
tempting to swallow her words.

And then the bloody man actually began to quietly

whistle.

He was two bars into his tune when the brace of
soldiers striding up the street opposite them stopped it abruptly.

Twenty or so yards away, but vivid as cardinals in this gray place, bayonets in hand, heads turning this way and that, eyes sifting through the faces in the crowd, moving inexorably but not with any noticeable purpose toward them.