Too Dangerous For a Lady Read Online Free PDF

this part of Lancashire would hear more Spencean speeches. Waite would again be moderate, but Thistlewood could be depended upon to let rip. With the crowd well seeded with Brotherhood members, the inflamed mob would set out for London on what would be called, apparently spontaneously, the Spencean Crusade. The name had been another of Mark’s suggestions, andapplauded by the rest of the Crimson Band. Crusade or not, the marchers wouldn’t make it five miles, if they left Ardwick at all. The magistrates were ready and the military stood by.
    There could be trouble in the town, however, for many of the Brotherhood would be armed, and he realized Lady Hermione and her family could be in danger. He was tempted to wake her and warn her, but she’d think him mad, and she and her party could hardly leave in the middle of the night. He’d stir alarm early in the morning—once he got out of here. He tested his bonds. He’d suggested stockings because they had stretch, but she’d tied them thoroughly. Getting free could take a while.
    By the time the Crimson Band had sat to dine in a private parlor, they’d all been satisfied with the day. Waite, a gray-haired patrician man, had sat at the head of the table opposite his French wife, Solange. Despite her nationality, Solange Waite enhanced his apparent respectability.
    Her public story was that she had fled France in the Revolution as upper servant to aristocratic émigrés. She claimed to have seen vile Jacobins at their murdering, pillaging worst. In fact she’d been a Jacobin herself and in private boasted of bloody deeds. She played her part well, however, emphasizing her solid, middle-aged respectability with sober clothing and decent white linen.
    Pete Tregoven had been given the place of honor on Waite’s right, and Mark the seat on Waite’s left. The other two present had been Benjamin Durrant, scribe and speechwriter, and Isaac Inkman, the very odd young chemist.
    Waite had begun the toasts with a reference to his choice of inn. “To the King’s Head. Soon we’ll have the king’s head off on our guillotine!”
    Indeed, they had a beheading machine built and stored in a warehouse in East London, so everyone had drunk to that.
    Solange had added, “And the head of the monkey-faced queen and her far too many whelps.”
    The woman disgusted Mark, but he’d drunk and added, “Especially the fat Regent’s.”
    â€œAnd his p-pampered daughter,” said Benjamin Durrant. “B-before her whelp is b-born.” Durrant was a bitterly frustrated man. He had the words to be a great orator, but his stutter betrayed him. He could only compose speeches to be delivered by men like Waite, who had the voice and manner, but no true oratory of their own.
    Durrant might have had trouble commanding a crowd even without the stammer, as he was thin and bespectacled, with a high-pitched voice, but he blamed the injustice of fate. Perhaps that had turned him to the extreme of revolution, for in other respects he’d been given a comfortable life.
    None of the men in the Crimson Band had suffered poverty or hardship, and they were all involved in revolution for their own gain. Waite intended to be a British Napoleon, rising from the ashes to rule. Durrant needed to hear his words move crowds to action. Tregoven was a wastrel in it for the spoils, and Inkman enjoyed blowing things up.
    Only Solange was honest, and that made her the most dangerous of all. She proved it by saying, “If the revolution is delayed, we can make a grand display of dashing out Charlotte’s baby’s brains as we guillotine the mother.”
    The other men smiled, though perhaps uneasily. For sanity’s sake Mark had established a distaste for crude violence, so he was able to say, “The child is an innocent. It can be reared by a simple family to be of use.”
    â€œIts public death will be of more use,”