The Lawrence Browne Affair Read online

  DEDICATION

  This book grew out of stories I had been telling my children about an inventor who had a giant dog and an anxiety disorder that closely mirrored my own. I probably don’t need to explain that I told my kids these stories to teach them—and maybe remind myself—that love and life are possible even when every fiber of your being wants to be in a pillow fort. This book is for everyone who needs that reminder, from my pillow fort to yours.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to my editor, Elle Keck, not only for being a delight to work with, but for possessing the uncanny ability to see what a story is, what a story ought to be, and how to bridge that gap. As always, I’m grateful for the enthusiasm of my wonderful agent, Deidre Knight.

  I’d like to thank Margarethe Martin, not only for untangling the utter confusion of the first draft, but for helping out with the scientific background. Any errors, omissions, and episodes of hand waving are entirely my own. Laura Tatum did an emergency beta read in record time, zeroing in with laserlike precision on the manuscript’s fatal flaw, and for that I’m very grateful.

  I’m endlessly thankful for my husband and children, both for their support of my writing and as a general state of affairs.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  About the Author

  Also by Cat Sebastian

  An Excerpt from Talking Dirty by Jennifer Seasons

  An Excerpt from Daring to Fall by T. J. Kline

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cornwall, 1816

  All this fuss about a couple of small explosions. As far as Lawrence cared, the explosions were entirely beside the point. He had finished experimenting with fuses weeks ago. More importantly, this was his house to burn to the ground, if that’s what he wanted to do with it. Hell, if he blew up the godforsaken place, and himself right along with it, the only person who would even be surprised was the man sitting before him.

  “Five servants quit,” Halliday said, tapping Lawrence’s desk in emphasis. Dust puffed up in tiny clouds around the vicar’s fingertips. “Five. And you were woefully understaffed even before then.”

  Five fewer servants? So that was why the house had been so pleasantly quiet, why his work had been so blissfully undisturbed.

  “There was no danger to the servants. You know I keep them away from my work.” That was something Lawrence insisted on even when he wasn’t exploding things. The very idea of chattering maids underfoot was enough to discompose his mind even further. “And I conducted most of the actual explosions out of doors.” Now was probably not the time to mention that he had blown the roof off the conservatory.

  “All I’m suggesting is a sort of secretary.” Halliday was dangerously unaware of how close he was to witnessing an explosion of the metaphorical variety. “Somebody to keep records of what you’ve mixed together and whether it’s likely to”—he puffed his cheeks out and made a strange noise and an expansive gesture that Lawrence took to represent explosion—“ignite.”

  The Reverend Arthur Halliday did not know what was good for him. If he did, he would have fled the room as soon as he saw Lawrence reach for the inkwell. Lawrence’s fingers closed around the object, preparing to hurl it at the wall behind the vicar’s head. Sod the man for even suggesting Lawrence didn’t know how to cause an explosion. He hadn’t invented Browne’s Improved Black Powder or even that bloody safety fuse through blind luck, for God’s sake.

  “Besides,” Halliday went on, “you said you need an extra set of hands for this new device you’re working on.”

  Oh, damn and blast. Lawrence knew he shouldn’t have told the vicar. But he had hoped Halliday might volunteer to help with the device himself, not badger Lawrence into hiring some stranger. The vicar was convenient enough, and when he wasn’t dead set on sticking his nose where it didn’t belong, he wasn’t entirely unpleasant company.

  “I’ve had secretaries,” Lawrence said from between gritted teeth. “It ends badly.”

  “Well, obviously, but that’s because you go out of your way to terrify them.” Halliday glanced pointedly at the inkwell Lawrence still held.

  And there again was Halliday missing the point entirely. Lawrence didn’t need to go out of his way to frighten anyone. All he had to do was simply exist. Everyone with any sense kept a safe distance from the Mad Earl of Radnor, as surely as they stayed away from rabid dogs and coiled asps. And explosive devices, for that matter.

  Except for the vicar, who came to Penkellis Castle three times a week. He likely also called on bedridden old ladies and visited the workhouse. Maybe his other charity cases were grateful, but the notion that he was the vicar’s good deed made Lawrence’s fingers tighten grimly around the inkwell as he plotted its trajectory through the air.

  “I’ll take care of the details,” Halliday was saying. “I’ll write the advertisement and handle the inquiries. A good secretary might even be able to manage the household a bit,” the vicar said with the air of a man warming to his topic, “get it into a fit condition for the child—”

  “No.” Lawrence didn’t raise his voice, but he slammed his fist onto the desk, causing ink to splatter all over the blotter and the cuff of his already-inky shirt. A stack of papers slid from the desk onto the floor, leaving a single dustless patch of wood where they had been piled. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a spider scurry out from under the papers.

  “True,” Halliday continued, undaunted. “A housekeeper would be more appropriate, but—”

  “No.” Lawrence felt the already fraying edges of his composure unraveling fast. “Simon is not coming here.”

  “You can’t keep him off forever, you know, now that he’s back in England. It’s his home, and he’ll own it one day.”

  When Lawrence was safely dead and buried, Simon was welcome to come here and do what he pleased. “I don’t want him here.” Penkellis was no place for a child, madmen were not fit guardians, and nobody knew those facts better than Lawrence himself, who had been raised under precisely those conditions.

  Halliday sighed. “Even so, Radnor, you have to do something about this.” He gestured around the room, which Lawrence thought looked much the same as ever. One hardly even noticed the scorch marks unless one knew where to look. “It can’t be safe to live in such a way.”

  Safety was not a priority, but even Lawrence wasn’t mad enough to try to explain that to the vicar.

  “Villagers won’t even walk past the garden wall anymore. And the stories they invent . . . ” The vicar wrung his hands. “A secretary. Please. It would ease my mind to know you had someone up here with you.”

  A keeper, then. Even worse.

  But Lawrence did need another set of hands to work on the communication device. If Halliday wouldn’t help, then Lawrence had no other options. God knew Halliday had been right about
the local people not wanting anything to do with him.

  “Fine,” he conceded. “You write the advertisement and tell me when to expect the man.” He’d say what he needed to in order to end this tiresome conversation and send the vicar on his way.

  It wasn’t as if this secretary would last more than a week or two anyway. Lawrence would see to that.

  These past months of soft living had rendered Georgie Turner sadly unfit for an evening of dashing through alleys and capering across rooftops. His new Hessians were better suited for a tea party than for climbing up drainpipes and shimmying through attic windows.

  Still, he landed lightly on the bare wood floor and soundlessly closed the window behind him, not even daring to breathe until he heard the patter of his pursuers’ footsteps on the roof overhead, then receding into the distance. He had lost them.

  For now, at least. Georgie had no illusions about evading Mattie Brewster’s men for long. Georgie was a traitor, an informer, and the Brewster gang would make an example of him. And rightly so.

  Heavy footsteps were coming up the stairs. Familiar ones, Georgie thought, but these days he didn’t trust his judgment enough to wager his life on it. The door swung open, and Georgie held his breath, wishing he had a knife, a pistol, anything.

  “That had better be you, Georgie,” came the rough voice of Georgie’s older brother. “Of all the people for you to cross, it had to be Mattie Brewster?”

  Georgie let out his breath in a rush that wasn’t quite relief. “I don’t think I led them here,” he said, hoping it was true.

  “To hell with that. You think I can’t put Mattie off for a bit? He and I were pinching ladies’ handkerchiefs before you were even born.” Jack lifted a lantern and peered at Georgie’s face. “When was the last time you slept?”

  “Not since leaving the Packinghams’ house.” Which somehow was only yesterday. “You know everything?”

  “ ’Course. Mattie came here last night, all friendly like. I told him to bugger off, equally friendly like. He’s had a man across the way, watching the house, naturally.”

  Georgie winced. It wasn’t right to bring his troubles to his brother’s doorstep. Jack could hold his own, but what if Brewster decided to pay a visit on their sister? A chill trickled down Georgie’s spine. “I needed to catch my breath, and this was . . . ” He let his voice trail off. This was the only place on earth where he wouldn’t be arrested as a housebreaker or murdered as a traitor. He had hardly anywhere else to go, hardly anyone else to turn to. He could have fallen from the rooftop and been equally lost. “I’ll leave in a few minutes. As soon as I catch my breath.”

  “Like hell you will. Come down and have supper with us.”

  Georgie nearly laughed. “This isn’t a social call.”

  “Oh, were you engaged to dine elsewhere?” Jack paused, as if expecting an answer. “No? Then eat with us, and we’ll figure out what to do with you. I doubt your enemies want to murder you badly enough to poison my soup. Oliver will be glad to see you’re well.”

  But then Georgie would need to endure the confused sympathy of Jack’s high-minded lover. Which wasn’t to say that Georgie objected to Oliver; he was fine enough, in a stiff-upper-lip sort of way. Georgie was in no frame of mind, however, to make conversation with a fellow who likely thought Jack’s wayward brother deserved whatever punishment he had coming his way. Hell, Georgie was inclined to agree.

  “If it’s all the same, I’ll stay where I am, thank you.” He heard the edge in his own voice. Georgie wasn’t used to living off anyone’s kindness. He wasn’t the sort of man who inspired acts of benevolence, nor the sort to accept anything he hadn’t earned—or stolen. He knew he ought to be grateful to Jack, but he was only annoyed—mainly with himself.

  He had earned himself a place among London’s criminal classes, and he had done it with nothing more than a bit of cunning and a complete disregard for decency. He stole and he cheated, he swindled and he lied. His favorite targets were overbred nobs who were too greedy to look closely at what Georgie offered, too blinded by visions of their own prosperity to ask the right questions. They were begging to be swindled, and Georgie was happy to oblige.

  And then he had thrown it all away. He didn’t know whether this was what it felt like to have a conscience, but he simply couldn’t take that old woman’s money. He had tried to persuade Mattie to go after another mark. When Mattie refused, Georgie had taken matters into his own hands, and now Georgie was persona non grata in London, and probably everywhere else that wasn’t the bottom of the Thames.

  Jack grumbled and disappeared downstairs. When he returned he carried a supper tray, which, Georgie noticed, held enough to feed two people. If Georgie would not go down to dinner, then Jack would take his dinner here in the attic. Georgie tried to muster up the appropriate gratitude but found his gaze shifting to the window he had come through and the darkness of the sky beyond. He wished he hadn’t come here.

  “I got a letter from a vicar in Cornwall,” Jack said, and Georgie gathered that they were to attempt normal conversation. “Or rather Oliver did, and now he wants me to look into why some barmy fellow won’t leave his house.”

  Georgie poked at his meat with a fork. “Vicars and lunatics aren’t in your usual line.” Jack made a living solving other people’s problems, but—as far as Georgie could tell—only if the problem was an aristocrat and solving it involved a fair bit of what Jack liked to think of as retributive justice.

  Jack shifted in his seat, drawing Georgie’s attention like a hound catching a scent. Georgie had been swindling and stealing since he could walk, and he knew what a man looked like when he had something unpleasant to say. More importantly, so did Jack. There was no such thing as Jack Turner accidentally letting someone get a peek at his cards. If he looked uncomfortable, it was because he wanted Georgie to know it.

  “The vicar went to school with Oliver,” Jack said, his gaze fixed on some point over Georgie’s shoulder. “The fellow who won’t leave his house is Lord Radnor.”

  Now Georgie wasn’t a hound catching a familiar scent. He was a shark, and somebody had just dropped a bloody carcass into the water. For the first time in two days, he forgot about his predicament. “The Mad Earl?” Georgie had heard of him. Everybody had. “Tell the vicar the man won’t leave his house because he’s absolutely crackbrained.” And murderous too. There had been a missing courtesan, a dead bride, and so many duels it was nearly tedious. “And then charge your usual fee.”

  “This fellow isn’t the Mad Earl. That was his older brother, who died a few years back. I think the father was mad too, but he wasn’t such a nuisance about it. Nobody knows much about the present earl, except that he’s nine and twenty and as rich as Croesus. But he can’t be as bloodthirsty a bastard as his brother was, or I suppose the vicar would only be relieved that he didn’t leave the house.”

  “And instead the vicar is enlisting the help of his old school chum’s petit ami.”

  Jack ignored that. Likely because he didn’t speak any French and didn’t care about Georgie’s barbs anyway.

  “Sounds like a matter for a doctor.” Georgie’s interest was fast slipping. He made a great show of examining his fingernails, which were in a terrible state after the day’s mishaps.

  “Trouble is how to get the doctor in there without the earl’s permission,” Jack mused.

  “Are you going to take the case?” Georgie couldn’t see his brother leaving his snug townhouse long enough to travel to Cornwall to appease meddlesome vicars and investigate aristocratic hermits.

  “I was thinking that I might send you, actually.” It wasn’t every day Jack Turner looked that shifty.

  Georgie put down his fork and folded his arms across his chest, almost eager to hear whatever convoluted nonsense Jack was going to say next. “And why would I do that?”

  “You could pose as his secretary, just long enough to let me know whether he’s right in the head.”

  “There are a great
many things I could do.” He could step out the front door and wait to be attacked by his old friends and left for dead, for example. Or he could march right over to Bow Street and turn himself in. Georgie’s life was a positive cornucopia of bad ideas these days. “What I want to know is why you think I ought to.”

  “Do you have something better to do?” Jack gestured around the empty attic. “Oliver wants to help his old friend, and I want to keep Oliver happy. Sarah would like to see you far away from anyone who wants to stick a knife between your ribs or a noose around your neck. The recluse needs a secretary. So, you go to Cornwall, and we all win.” A pause. “You’d have my fee, of course.”

  Lurking beneath the surface of Jack’s offer was the unpleasant reminder that Georgie’s presence in London was putting everyone he loved in danger. “Send Sarah out of London. I don’t want Brewster going after her.” He scrambled to come up with a reason for flight that his sister wouldn’t balk at. “She can fit Oliver’s sister for some new frocks.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  He did need to get out of London until this mess died down a bit and he figured out a way to make it up with Brewster, some way to earn back the man’s trust and protection, which was the only way he’d be able to keep Jack and Sarah safe.

  “Fine,” he said, ignoring the look of triumph in his brother’s eyes. “But I’ll take half the fee in advance.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Georgie pounded again on what he hoped was the main door. Penkellis, a disorganized assemblage of mismatched wings and asymmetrical towers, was the sort of house that had no shortage of doors, but he’d be damned if he was going to spend what was left of the day trying each of them in turn. As he let the knocker fall, chips of half-rotten wood landed at his feet, joining the crumbling stone of the steps.

  What was even the point of being rich if you lived in a place like this? Georgie’s old lodgings were kept in better shape than this hellhole. And it couldn’t be for lack of money—for all the things people said about the Earl of Radnor, nobody ever said he was poor. It had to be sheer bloody-mindedness.