At Your Pleasure Read Online Free PDF Page B

brass fittings had been assembled in France. He had spent two quarters’ allowance on it and consequently lived a hard winter at La Flèche, dependent on the goodwill of his fellow collegians to keep him from freezing after his store of coal ran out.
    He’d given it to her without a moment’s thought for its loss.
    So full of wonder she had been, back then. To see it spread over her face when she’d first looked through the telescope had been like to seeing the sun rise for the first time in his life.
    Oft she had looked at him with the same expression. Perhaps the boy he’d been had even deserved it. In those days, his hands had been unstained, his sleep untroubled.
    One could envy the pleasures of innocence, he thought. But the fate of innocents—how easily their gullibility led them to slaughter—that was worth no envy. For the sake of his soul, he should pity those who trusted in the goodness of the world to safeguard them. But when he thought of the boy he had once been, pity was harder to feel than contempt.
    He had trusted her completely. What fool did such a thing, and then dared to mourn when betrayed?
    “Find something?”
    He looked up. Braddock, twisted at the waist atop a short ladder that rested against the bookcase, watched him quizzically.
    I have found a piece of foolishness, he thought. She should have destroyed the instrument. It would have been safer for her.
    The woman she had become . . . he would have sworn that woman would destroy it very easily.
    “Nothing of note,” he answered. Because he did not like the feel of the instrument in his hands, the solid, undeniable weight of it, he returned it to its stand. The odd feeling he put down to fatigue. He had not slept welllast night. This place, more than most, inspired twisted dreams. “And you?” he asked Braddock. “You’ve been poking at those books long enough to learn to read.”
    Braddock gave him a wry smile. “What do you reckon?” He leapt off the ladder, landing easily despite his bulk. Ruddy and dark, he was the son of a wherryman who had earned his living steering boats on the Thames. This made Braddock an unlikely man at arms, but sure-footed on any surface, with skill to navigate so long as there were stars.
    His complaints were not so useful. “Here’s a waste of our time, searching,” he went on. “A nice pantomime, when where we should be waiting is Dover, to hunt the bastard down like a dog.”
    Adrian lifted a brow. “Barstow’s son said much the same over breakfast this morning.”
    Braddock grimaced. “Now you wound me, you do. To sound the smallest bit like that puling milksop—”
    “Then distinguish yourself by using your brain. The cause here is not war but the prevention of it.” The recent Riot Act had gone far to quiet the disturbances that had swept England during the spring, but Adrian had taken note of the mood in the towns they had passed on their journey here. At the taverns, in the coffeehouses, an ominous silence had greeted their appearance, and he had seen more than one man pass his wineglass over water before offering up toasts to the king.
    These silent tributes to the pretender did not trouble Adrian so much as the boldness with which they were essayed. The kingdom was a powder barrel in want of a spark.
    “Slaying a man in the street would not be restful to the public mood,” he said.
    Braddock gave a sigh. “Aye, I suppose. So we sit here in wait of him like a cat at a mouse hole. Simple work, if a mite slow.”
    Adrian shrugged. This task was simple for those under his command, but for himself, there was danger in it. He understood that better, even, than the king did. George Augustus was shrewd, but he was not English. One day he would learn to divine the murky undercurrents of Parliamentary politics, but at present, his logic and intuition often combined to point him down the wrong path.
    The king himself recognized this weakness, and depended on English advisors. He had asked