Page 34 of The Lawrence Browne Affair
“Do I not? I was raised by . . . not a good man, although I dare say he did his best, for what little that’s worth.” From the way Turner pressed his lips together, Lawrence inferred that it was worth very little indeed. “My mother died when I was an infant, and my brother and sister worked, so I was mainly left to my own devices. My father was always late with the rent, and once I came home to find our rooms empty and my father gone. It took me days to find him. He was drunk and penniless, but I was so relieved because I had nowhere else to go, and even if he were bedding down on the street, I could at least be with him.” He paused to take a deep breath, his eyes flashing darkly. “And you, with all your money and all your many rooms, will not do as much for a few weeks? A few weeks, Lawrence.”
Maybe it was the sound of his name that made his resolve crumble. It had been so long since anyone had called him that, and it was patently absurd for anyone on earth to be speaking to him in such a way. Not because it was improper—which of course it was, but hardly the most improper aspect of this scenario, and Lawrence had given up on propriety years ago anyway—but because it implied an impossible level of intimacy. He didn’t have friends, for God’s sake. His mind was a thicket of thorns and weeds and nobody could get in far enough to achieve anything resembling friendship.
“A few weeks,” he repeated.
“Even if you were as mad as a hatter. Even if Penkellis were filled to the rafters with evil, a few weeks would not harm the child, and being sent away will harm him very much.” He spoke with such conviction, Lawrence could not dismiss him. Lawrence was unmoored and unhinged, sure of absolutely nothing, and here was his secretary, his lover, so utterly confident and sure. Lawrence wanted Turner’s confidence to be enough for both of them.
He let out a sigh. “Fine.”
Turner looked like he might sag with relief, but he simply nodded.
Lawrence made to leave, to retreat to the safety of his study.
“Wait,” Turner said. “I need your authority to make the necessary accommodations for the child. I’ll have to go to Falmouth to engage servants and tradesmen and purchase supplies. I’d hire local people but there isn’t enough time to win them over. I’ll return the day after tomorrow. Will you write to your bankers and give me that authority?”
Lawrence nodded. “You’ll have whatever you require.” He might agree to anything as long as he did not have to look at the raw earnestness that had momentarily returned to Turner’s face.
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
Lawrence flung down his pen when the pounding started anew. It was impossible to string two coherent thoughts together in these conditions. There was a disturbingly arrhythmic banging that he could feel vibrating through the floors and walls as surely as he could hear it. It was a wonder the castle was still standing.
Furious, he threw open the study door. “Stop that at once!” he bellowed, but there was no chance he had been heard. The noise, it seemed, was coming from downstairs. He descended the stairs two at a time and stalked towards the racket.
There were no fewer than half a dozen men in the drawing room, all strangers. One was shouting something up the chimney. Two others were using crowbars to pull up a rotten piece of floorboard. Another pair sawed lumber.
Through the threshold that led to the small parlor, the room where the ladies of Penkellis had once practiced the harp and worked on their samplers, he could see a man with a bucket of paint and three women scrubbing the floors. The drapes and carpets were gone from both rooms, and the windows had been cleaned to a shine.
Lawrence had become accustomed to his house having a muted, blurred-around-the-edges appearance due to the accretion of filth and the spread of decay. He wasn’t used to this gleaming, glowing space. The house even smelled different, of sawdust and whitewash, lemon and lavender.
In the middle of it all, lit by a shaft of light, stood Georgie Turner, his hands on his hips.
“What the devil is going on here?” Lawrence roared over the noise, when what he really wanted to do was fall to his knees and thank God his secretary had come back. He ought to have returned days ago, and Lawrence had almost given up hope. It occurred to him that he had missed Turner. That was an unexpected novelty; he hadn’t thought himself capable of missing anyone. He hadn’t thought he’d ever have a chance to do so.
The racket abruptly ceased, and a score of fearful eyes turned to look. Not at Lawrence, but at Turner. There was no doubt as to who was giving the orders here.
“Good afternoon, your lordship.” Turner bowed slightly, with a mildly ironic air that sent a jolt of happiness through Lawrence’s body. Lord, but he really had missed the man. “Carry on, carry on,” Turner said to the workers, while gesturing for Lawrence to follow him through a set of doors into the library. This was where Lawrence’s father had met with his man of business. It was also where he had summoned Lawrence for regular whippings. He shuddered. There were reasons he didn’t traipse about the house. Too many memories, none of them good.
Perhaps some of his unease showed on his face, because Turner looked up at him and continued straight out the French doors and onto the terrace.
Lawrence closed the doors behind them, but cracked glass was not enough to muffle the noises from within. There was even more chaos outside: somebody was hacking away at the kitchen garden, another man was raking gravel smoothly across the drive.
“The improvements are well underway, my lord.”
“I cannot imagine how you expect to fund this nonsense,” Lawrence snapped, mainly because he was feeling disagreeable.
Turner narrowed his eyes and sucked in a breath. “My lord, you wrote a letter giving me authority to do what was needful to ready the house.”
“I thought you meant airing the bed linens, not refurbishing the entire ground floor.”
“It is not the entire ground floor, but only a suite of five rooms that will, I hope, create the illusion of this being the home of a gentleman. The rest of the house will be quite the same, less a few squirrels and mice.”
“What will it cost?” Lawrence was unfamiliar with the cost of paint and lumber. “A hundred pounds?”
Turner cast him a pitying look. “Quite a bit more than that, my lord. But you can well afford it. I’ve seen your books. I’vekeptyour books. You had no books until I came.”
This was a gross exaggeration, as Lawrence was quite certain that his steward—a fellow who was far too canny to pester his employer with anything more than a quarterly report—must have some records that could be referred to as books.
“And if you make a fuss when the bills come due,” Turner went on, “I’ll pawn every last gewgaw in this house.”
