Page 15 of The Lawrence Browne Affair
A man stepped out of the cottage and looked back and forth between the woman and Georgie. “Any trouble, Maggie?” The words were addressed to his wife but the message was for Georgie: this woman was under his protection, and anyone who insulted her or caused her grief would pay the price.
“He says he comes from Penkellis and wants to buy eggs,” Maggie said. “Says he’s the earl’s secretary.”
The man looked directly at Georgie with open skepticism. “And would these eggs be for the earl?”
Barnabus began to make a low growling sound. Georgie, without taking his eyes off the couple, started to pet the dog’s scruffy head in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. “No,” he said. “They’d be for my supper.”
“Radnor has his servants fend for themselves, does he?”
“I fancied something different from his usual fare.”
“And you want Maggie’s eggs.” More skepticism.
“I’d settle for anything that wasn’t bread, ham, or apples. That’s the only food I’ve seen since I came here.”
The couple exchanged a glance. “Sixpence for half a dozen eggs,” the man said, a barely suppressed smirk on this face.
That was an outrageous price, but Georgie would let himself get fleeced for a good cause. “I’ll make it a shilling if you’ll also let me have some cheese, butter, and maybe a couple of mushrooms.” Georgie had seen a basket of mushrooms hanging on a peg near the door.
A minute later a girl of ten or twelve came out of the cottage with a parcel wrapped in cloth. “Mama put an onion in too,” she said, fingering the shilling as if she had never seen one. And maybe she hadn’t. “Do vittles cost so much where you come from?”
They certainly did not, but he was paying for something other than food. He was hoping to purchase goodwill, and maybe information. Because even though he had assured Jack that the earl was in his right mind, there was something else going on at Penkellis, and he didn’t want to leave until he knew what. “They look to be very fine eggs,” he said.
The girl shrugged and made as if to go back inside, but then turned a questioning face up at Georgie. “Is he a real devil?” she whispered.
“The dog?” Barnabus was enthusiastically rolling around in chicken shite. “He’s much the same as any other dog, only larger.”
“No,him.” She tilted her chin in the direction of Penkellis.
“The earl? No, he’s only different. He’s also very large.”
The girl tugged at one of her braids. “He stole Betsy’s caul.”
“Her what?” Was this a bit of colorful rustic vocabulary?
“Her caul,” she said, exaggerating the pronunciation, as if that would help the matter. “From when she was born,” she clarified. “He stole it.”
Oh, acaul. Good God. Georgie had never thought of a caul as something that anyone would want to steal. “How . . . unexpected.”
“It went missing before Mama had even finished drying it.” The girl’s tone suggested that this added to the infamy of the crime. It certainly added to its unsavoriness.
“Did he steal it away with his own hands? How”—he searched for a word suitable for a child’s ears—“dastardly.”
She seemed to need a moment to think about this. “I don’t reckon so. I never heard that he came here, only that the caul went missing. Mrs. Ferris said the earl took it. Who else would do such a thing? And a caul is a handy sort of thing to have if you’re doing witchcraft, Mama says.”
So, Radnor’s servants were spreading tales, were they? “Well, I can tell you that I’ve never seen a caul in the earl’s study.” If he had, he wouldn’t have recognized it. And if he had recognized it, he would have thrown it in the fire.
The cottage door creaked open and a very small child stuck her head out. “Mama says you’re to come in or you’ll catch it.”
Both children went inside, and Georgie whistled for Barnabus, eager to reach the kitchens before the sun was completely gone from the sky.
When Turner flounced out of the room, Lawrence was relieved. He was quite determined on that score: he was relieved to finally have some peace and quiet, and in no way did he miss his meddlesome secretary. Turner could be an exhausting fellow, forever tidying and rearranging, asking too many questions and taking endless notes, to say nothing of how his very existence was a distraction. He served as a fine reminder of why Lawrence preferred solitude in the first place.
Worse, he served as an incitement to the very sort of madness Lawrence found most tempting. Every time Turner came close, Lawrence was assailed by images of that lean body underneath his own bulky form or over him, alternately compliant and masterful. His imagination was evidently capable of infinite variety where Turner was concerned.
Butwasthat desire truly part of his madness? He was aware that his conviction on this point was sadly unscientific. He was relying on an unreliable source—the rantings of his deranged father and a couple of passages in a holy book he had never paid much attention to anyway. He had only a paucity of data, his own experiences in pleasures of the flesh being sadly limited. Perhaps this desire was a commonplace thing. Perhaps it had nothing to do with madness.
This left Lawrence as unsettled as if somebody had demonstrated that electricity was caused by fire sprites. Because if his desire for fellow men wasn’t madness, then perhaps none of his other oddities were madness either. As that seemed grossly unlikely, he hardly knew what to think about anything at all.
