The Lawrence Browne Affair Read online

  Still no answer. The cold wind smelled of the sea as it whipped across the courtyard, and the sun was low in the sky. He didn’t want to have to make his way back to the coaching inn in the dark and the cold. No, he wanted to get inside this miserable house and eat something hot while warming his feet by the fire. Even mad earls had to eat and stay warm, he reasoned.

  He leaned a shoulder against the door and thought he felt it budge, ever so slightly, but enough to make him try again, this time putting all his weight into it. The hinges groaned and the wood scraped against the flagstone floor. A few more shoves, and he succeeded in forcing the door open just wide enough to squeeze through.

  He found himself in what must have once been the great hall. No fire burned in the huge open hearth, despite the chill of the November afternoon. The curtains that covered the high windows were tattered and moth-eaten and had faded to an indeterminate shadowy hue. Random furnishings dotted the floor—an overturned chair, an old-fashioned clock, a harp without strings.

  “Is anybody here?” Georgie heard his own voice echo. Really, he ought to be ashamed of himself for the shiver that crawled down his spine, but as his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he wouldn’t have been surprised to discover dead bodies or puddles of blood. Georgie had seen houses that had been closed up—holland covers on the furniture, draperies drawn, carpets rolled up, valuables locked up right and tight to foil the plans of men like Georgie himself—and this wasn’t it. This looked like a house where the inhabitants had been killed in their beds or spirited away by kidnappers.

  His heart pounded in his chest when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flicker of movement in the shadows. But then he heard a soft and proprietary scuffling, the sound of an animal going along its merry way. Georgie was the intruder; the animal was quite at home. He dearly hoped it was a cat, but cats didn’t do much in the way of scurrying.

  It was as cold in here as it was outside, if not somehow colder. The wind had found a way into the hall, through bad chimneys or loose windows, and it whistled disconcertingly.

  There was no way out but through, he told himself, and he crossed the room, choosing a doorway at random. This led him along a series of equally derelict chambers, as abandoned as the great hall but filled with objects that Georgie instinctively inventoried. A pair of silver candlesticks, easily pawned; a painting that would fetch a few guineas at the right auction house; a pricey bit of Chinese crockery that would be just the thing for his brother’s Christmas present.

  It was like stepping into Aladdin’s cave, only one never thought of how dusty that must have been. The place was filled with things that simply begged to be stolen, and there didn’t seem to be a soul about who would be the wiser for it.

  He found a set of tightly spiraling stairs and started climbing. The sooner he got started, the sooner he could get out of here, maybe a few candlesticks the richer.

  Lawrence woke on the sofa in his study. Judging by the scant light making its way through the dirty windows, it was either dawn or dusk, but he couldn’t remember when he had finally fallen asleep, so it hardly mattered. Barnabus was curled before the fire, snoring deeply. Lawrence stretched as well as he could on the cramped sofa and was shaking out a sleep-numbed hand when he heard the sound of footsteps.

  Before he could even form a thought, he leapt from the sofa towards the noise, grabbed the intruder, and all but threw him against the wall, hard enough to bring flakes of plaster crumbling to the floor.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he growled, his voice hoarse from disuse and his mouth still dry from sleep.

  “I’m George Turner, my lord,” the man answered, his cheek flat against the wall, his back flush with Lawrence’s chest. The bones of the intruder’s shoulder felt fine, almost delicate, under Lawrence’s hands. “Mr. Halliday engaged me as your secretary.” He sounded almost bored, but Lawrence was close enough to feel the heavy pounding of the intruder’s heart. By all rights, he ought to be quaking in his boots, being attacked by a madman nearly twice his size.

  “Like hell he did. Halliday’s man isn’t due to arrive until the twelfth.” Lawrence took a deep breath, inhaling a scent that spoke of London parfumeries and time spent before a looking glass. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been this close to another person.

  Turner blinked, and Lawrence saw the flash of a cold obsidian eye. “Today is November twelfth, my lord.”

  Damn. That happened to him sometimes. Whether it was because he was in the habit of working all night and therefore lost track of days, or because he simply was not in his right mind, he didn’t know and he didn’t care. It all came down to the same thing.

  He let his empty hands drop to his sides but didn’t step back.

  “And who the hell gave you permission to come in here?” Lawrence snarled, wanting to be left alone, without the reminder that he had somehow lost three days of his life.

  “I wouldn’t have thought a secretary needed permission to be in his employer’s study, my lord. Besides,” Turner went on in that same cool voice, still facing the wall, his palms resting against the chipped plaster by his head, “I knocked for a full minute before coming in, and then when I found you, I couldn’t shake you awake.”

  “You shook me?” This man had touched him? Lawrence could almost feel the echoes of that touch on his arm. One hand drifted absently to his own shoulder, as if to call back the unremembered sensation.

  “Would you have preferred a bucket of water on your head? For a moment I thought you were dead. That would have made things awkward for me. Did you take something? A sleeping draught? Laudanum?”

  Lawrence was about to respond that he never touched the stuff, his brother and father having provided cautionary tales of how badly madness and intoxication mixed. But before he opened his mouth to speak, Turner began to pivot slowly away from the wall. At that same moment clouds must have blown away from the setting sun, because Lawrence for the first time got a good look at his new secretary.

  He was—there was no way around it, as much as Lawrence might have wished—ridiculously beautiful, with fine features that looked carved out of ivory. Black hair and eyes that were blacker still, cool and polished and fixed on Lawrence. Lawrence wanted to stare, to admire this man the way one might admire a sketch tacked to the wall of a prison cell, an unlooked-for reprieve from the dismalness that surrounded him.

  Then he remembered himself.

  “To hell with you and your impertinent questions,” Lawrence snarled.

  They were still standing too close. Turner tipped his head against the wall and looked up at Lawrence with lazy indifference. Most unsecretarial. But Turner didn’t seem afraid, and Lawrence didn’t know how to feel about that. He was so accustomed to fear that the absence of it was unsettling.

  “I thought you were an intruder.” Lawrence took a full step backwards, bringing them to what he hoped was a normal conversational distance. “I might have hurt you.”

  “I’m not easily hurt. Are you expecting intruders? I should have thought any burglars would be quite satisfied to make off with the contents of the rest of your house. What do you have up here besides . . . ?” He gestured around the room, as if indicating that there was nothing worth stealing.

  Lawrence watched him survey his surroundings, one finely arched eyebrow lifting ever so slightly when he noticed the stacks of papers littering the floor, his slender frame going momentarily rigid when a mouse scurried clear across the middle of the room, nimbly darting between bits of debris as if it had made this journey often, which it likely had.

  “We have another hour or so of daylight, such as it is,” Turner said, and his voice was as cool and remote as the rest of him. “Shall I get to work straightaway, or would you have me wait until tomorrow?”

  At the reminder that he would have to actually work with Turner, Lawrence felt the too-familiar sense of rising panic, that even in this room he was not safe from the chaos of the outside world. The man meant to stay here, to meddle and t
alk and distract; he planned to smell good and be handsome and obviously Lawrence should never have agreed to any of this. “I told you to leave.”

  When Turner still did not move, Lawrence felt his chest tighten, his lungs constrict, as if he were being buried alive. He needed to be alone, to be in control, to do whatever he needed to make these sensations stop. Blindly, he reached for the first book he laid his hands on and threw it at the wall beside Turner’s head.

  Turner neatly sidestepped the book, as if he were used to people throwing things at him. A man so glaringly useless, so pointedly ornamental, shouldn’t know how to avoid getting hit by books thrown by madmen. Every inch of him was neat and tidy, despite having undoubtedly traveled by the common stage. He smelled clean and cool too. Lawrence found his thoughts drifting in a decidedly unclean and uncool direction before remembering that this way lay madness. Literally.

  Turner flicked a bored glance at the book, now lying in a heap on the floor, and then idly examined his fingernails. It ought to be easy enough to get rid of this fellow. The last secretary had been a mousy thing who packed his bags after the first faulty fuse, and he had come with references testifying to his diligence. Turner didn’t look like he had ever worked a day in his life. It really wasn’t possible to imagine a man like this even existing in the same world as Penkellis, let alone standing amidst the wreckage of Lawrence’s study.

  Barnabus, who had slept through the arrival of an intruder and the clunk of a book hitting the wall, now stretched lazily before the hearth. He must have finally grasped that there was a stranger in his midst, because he suddenly became a furry blur headed in the direction of George Turner.

  “Please have your mongrel desist,” Turner said, sounding slightly shaken. Good. Perhaps Barnabus would succeed where Lawrence had failed and send this distractingly exquisite specimen away from here.

  “He likes you,” said Lawrence, not moving to help. Barnabus might look like a hell hound, but really he was harmless.

  “He’d like to eat me, you mean,” Turner replied acidly. “Ha!” he said, finally getting a grip on the dog’s scruff and holding him at arm’s length. Barnabus shot his master a helpless look.

  “Come, Barnabus.” The dog wriggled free of Turner’s grasp and came, panting and confused, to Lawrence’s side. “Good dog,” he said, crouching to nuzzle the animal.

  When he looked up, he saw that the other man was staring at him. Well, there was a lot to stare at, so it stood to reason. Lawrence and Barnabus together exceeded twenty-two stone, and it was anybody’s guess which of them was hairier at this point. It had been a while since Lawrence had bothered with having his hair cut or shaving regularly.

  But it wasn’t fear or curiosity that Lawrence read in Turner’s gaze. He was familiar with both those expressions, and this wasn’t either of them. Lawrence might not have any interest in interacting with his fellow man, but he was a student of science and he liked being able to classify and categorize. This look of Turner’s didn’t fit into any of the looks he was accustomed to receiving. It was something darker and lighter and colder and warmer all at once.

  Disconcerted, Lawrence looked away. “Get out. We’ll start work in the morning.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Turner step over the ruined book and slip noiselessly out the door.

  Lawrence momentarily regretted having damaged the book, but he didn’t bother picking it up. It could join the collection of flotsam on the floor. When he stood, he thought he caught a trace of an unfamiliar scent, something refined and clean that didn’t belong in this musty study. Lawrence had become accustomed to the smell of dogs and explosives, with an undercurrent of dust and damp. This scent came from a bottle and had been carried in by Mr. George Turner.

  He was visited by the image of his new secretary readying himself this morning at an inn, stripping before the fire and sponging off before splashing himself with that eau de cologne. Lawrence couldn’t get his imaginings beyond a rough and unsatisfying sketch of slender limbs and graceful movements.

  Even after he set about lighting candles to work by, that half-formed image wafted across his thoughts as surely as the man’s scent had wafted into his nose. The picture would not shake loose from his mind.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lawrence was trimming what had to be the hundredth wool disk when a gust of wind blew his bedchamber door open, sending each painstakingly cut-out circle scattering across the floor. Damn it. The secretary must have opened or shut a window, or tampered with the flue, or done any of the dozen other things that caused draughts to turn into gusts in this house.

  Fuming, Lawrence stormed into the study, where he found Turner sitting amidst stacks of paper. “What the bloody hell are you about in here?” he growled.

  Turner flicked him a cool glance. “Sorting through your correspondence, my lord. Were those bedclothes especially unsatisfactory?”

  Lawrence looked down at the quilt and scissors he still held. “Electrolyte,” he muttered, not intending to deliver a lecture about voltaic piles or anything else. “You’d better not have lost or ruined anything.”

  “My dear fellow”—and why did such cheek sound more fitting than the correct my lord?—“half these papers are already ruined. I think a good number of them have been ruined for years. At least if you consider evidence of rat droppings to indicate ruin, which I do.”

  “It’s not a rat. It’s a mouse.” More likely mice, plural, but Lawrence couldn’t pretend to have made a thorough census.

  Turner’s inky eyes opened fractionally wider. “Oh, in that case I stand corrected. In any event, I didn’t destroy anything, no matter how foul or revolting.”

  Lawrence glanced searchingly around the study, as if he could possibly have noticed the absence of an important paper. Even on the best of days, locating anything in this room involved a good deal of guesswork. Orderliness was not Lawrence’s strong suit. But now there were patches of bare wood visible on his desk where yesterday it had been covered in a thick layer of unfinished correspondence and jumbled notes. He traced his fingers along the nicked and stained wood. “You can’t possibly have understood half of what you read.”

  “Quite right.” Turner’s voice was brisk. “Unposted letters go into this pile.” He gestured with a languor that seemed at odds with the geometric precision of the papers. “You have a dozen letters that have been franked and addressed, but never made it to the post. Most are addressed to some fellow in London.”

  “Standish,” Lawrence supplied. “He’s building a similar device.” No wonder Standish never seemed to know what was going on, if Lawrence wasn’t remembering to post the letters he had written to the fellow. Annoyed with himself, and with Turner, and—unaccountably—with Standish, he gathered up the unposted letters and tossed them into the hearth. Barnabus opened one eye to see what all the fuss was, then closed it again.

  “I gather that this device”—he gestured at the bits of copper wire that littered the work table—“is the explosive?”

  “Explosive? No, no.” Lawrence could hardly look away from his desk. Each stack of paper was arranged into a neat block. Turner must have picked up each pile and tapped it on the desk to align the edges and then arranged each stack equidistant from its neighboring stacks, as regular and symmetrical as if he had used a carpenter’s ell and a ruler. “That’s all done. Already in use in the mines. So is the fuse. What I’m working on now is a communication device.”

  None of this was right. These orderly papers felt like an intrusion, like a stone at the bottom of his boot. Goddamn Halliday and his good intentions, goddamn this secretary with his clean fingernails and precise diction. This room was meant to be Lawrence’s own refuge, silent and constant, safe from the unpredictability of the outside world. Having somebody rearrange his belongings quite defeated the purpose.

  Lawrence toppled one stack, just for the hell of it. “What’s the rest of it?”

  Unperturbed, Turner pointed to the next stack. “This is
anything pertaining to your estate. And this is anything in your own hand. Notes or plans, I gather.” Turner went on, placing one long finger on each stack in turn. Lawrence had a hard time attending to the man’s words.

  Turner himself was as much an intrusion as his stacks. Lawrence’s gaze drifted unwillingly to the secretary’s face, taking in the sweep of dark lashes, the dimple that appeared on one cheek as he smiled—oh, damn it. Now the man was looking at him, and with a sly expression that suggested that he knew exactly what Lawrence had been up to.

  Lawrence snapped his fingers to summon Barnabus and stormed gracelessly out of the room.

  Well, it wasn’t every day one drove a man into a towering rage simply by sorting some papers. Georgie still wasn’t sure what had gone wrong, and he didn’t care one jot. The earl could be as mad as a March hare and it wouldn’t make the least difference. Georgie would detail the earl’s behavior in a letter to Jack and then fill his own pockets on his way out the door.

  He bent to retrieve the papers from the hearth. There had been no fire—Cornish giants evidently did not feel the cold to the same degree as ordinary mortals—so the papers were intact. Sitting at the earl’s desk, he placed each paper into the proper pile and entered its description in the ledger he had tucked into his coat pocket. During a previous swindle, he had served as private secretary to a barrister, so he had a fair idea of what needed to be done. It was satisfying, too, to create order out of utter chaos. It was like untangling a thread or picking a lock.

  Georgie had always liked things clean and tidy. Maybe it came from growing up in confusion and squalor. He tried to keep his thoughts as organized as his desk. Marks and potential marks were in one neat little pigeonhole. Friends—which was to say criminal associates—were in another. Jack and their sister, Sarah, were the only two people who existed outside those two pigeonholes. It made things simple, keeping everybody where they belonged.