Page 5 of The Lawrence Browne Affair
“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.
The trouble was that Georgie’s mind had started assigning people to the wrong pigeonholes, and he had started to look on old Mrs. Packingham as a friend, and Brewster as an enemy.
As he didn’t know how to stop that disorder from occurring again, he tried to dismiss the thought and return to Radnor’s disgusting papers. In the window casement he found a spool of twine that would serve to tie the correspondence into neat bundles, keeping them organized even if the earl threw another tantrum.
Through the clouded window, he could see the earl and his monstrous dog in a garden that managed to look simultaneously overgrown and quite dead. The dog, predictably, was asleep. If Radnor kept that mongrel for any purpose, Georgie had yet to discover what it was, because the dog had slept straight through the two hours Georgie had worked that morning. There were rugs with more energy.
Radnor was fiddling with a blade of some sort—an ax by the looks of things. It took Georgie a moment to fully comprehend the incongruity of the sight. The earl was preparing to chop firewood, which wasn’t by any stretch a normal task for a peer of the realm. But Georgie hadn’t come to Penkellis expecting anything resembling normal. Nor had he seen any evidence of the earl’s madness, however. If untidiness, rudeness, and fits of mild violence constituted madness, then Mayfair was filled with madmen—just ask any lord’s servants.
As he watched, the earl began swinging the ax. The thwack of the split wood echoed off stone walls. Another thwack, and another, until he settled into a rhythm. Radnor was making fast work of it, only pausing long enough between swings to set up the next log. Well, it stood to reason that a man so large had to be strong.
Georgie let his mind linger on those adjectives a trifle too long: large and strong. Good heavens, was he ogling the Mad Earl of Radnor? No, he reminded himself, he was leering at the Mad Earl’s brother. That settled, Georgie folded his arms and leaned against the casement, enjoying the show.
Radnor’s hair, which had earlier been messily tied back in a hopelessly unfashionable queue, now hung loose around his shoulders in waves the color of caramel. He had several weeks’ worth of beard, which Georgie felt as a personal attack on order and cleanliness. Terrible. Simply awful. Really, he shouldn’t be wondering what it would feel like against his skin.
And then—oh, his kingdom for a pair of field glasses. The earl dropped the ax long enough to strip down to his shirtsleeves. That couldn’t be necessary, given the chill in the November air. But on another, purely aesthetic level, it was quite, quite necessary for this man to take off his clothes whenever the spirit moved him. Perhaps he ought to go the full distance and take his shirt off too. No sense in doing things by halves.
Georgie used his handkerchief to clean a bit of the window for a better view. It would have been a sin and a shame to let a sight like this go unseen. The earl filled out his dingy linen shirt quite nicely, and now the fabric was sweat-damp and clinging. Every swing of the ax caused the man’s muscles to ripple and shift. Strong thighs, solid chest, arms that simply beggared belief.
The man was a beast.
Georgie licked his lips. He had felt the solid mass of those broad shoulders under his fingertips, through layers of wool and linen, when he tried to wake the earl yesterday. When Radnor had grabbed him and pushed him against the wall, Georgie had felt that strength firsthand. Georgie had let it happen, had let himself be shoved and manhandled; a man didn’t keep the company Georgie kept without learning how to take care of himself in a fight. Lord, but being pressed into that wall had given him ideas, ideas that were crystallizing into something gratifyingly obscene now that he was seeing Radnor in action.
This wasn’t the first time Georgie had desired a man he intended to cheat or rob. Sometimes desire even added to the thrill of the swindle, as long as one made sure to keep everybody in their proper pigeonhole. It was like having a fine dinner served on a silver charger that one intended to steal later on. The trouble was that, looking out the window, Georgie didn’t know whether he was looking at the charger or the meal. His pigeonholes were in danger of getting disordered.
Besides, there was desire—simple, selfish, easily satisfied—and then there was whatever Georgie had wanted when he felt Radnor’s overlarge presence behind him. There was nothing simple about that.
He turned abruptly away from the window and surveyed the contents of the room. Radnor had expected housebreakers. Perhaps that was a mania of his, but perhaps he had something worth stealing. If so, Georgie couldn’t fathom what, unless there were thieves with a fondness for mouse droppings and stained papers. But who knew what might lie buried beneath the haphazard piles of books or within the half-decayed trunks. All the more reason to bring this room to some semblance of order.
Lawrence sluiced himself off with water from the well. The water was cold, but he was hot, and evidently he didn’t have any servants to draw him a bath, even if he’d wanted one. He wondered which brave, misguided souls had remained. Not that he was going to visit the kitchens and find out. They’d likely flee at the sight of him, shirtless and dripping wet, like something that had washed ashore. And, truth be told, he didn’t care who his servants were as long as they stayed silent and left his supper outside the study door.
