Page 8 of The Lawrence Browne Affair
“Radnor!” It was the secretary, damn him. “Radnor, open this door!”
That was quite a lot of pounding. Perhaps the house was on fire. Lawrence very nearly smiled at the thought of Penkellis lying in a heap of rubble and ashes.
The door swung open, revealing Turner poised on the threshold, lit only by the moonlight. “What’s the meaning of this?” Turner asked, waving something at Lawrence.
Lawrence sat up in bed. Try as he might, he couldn’t smell smoke or detect any other signs of a conflagration. “How the fuck should I know?”
“Then I’ll tell you,” Turner continued, undeterred by Lawrence’s coarse language. “You have a library of hundreds—if not thousands—of books downstairs, and you let them rot.” So it was a book Turner was waving about, brandishing like a weapon. “Do you have any idea what that does to any person of sense? It’s obscene, I tell you.”
“I don’t give a damn about the library.”
“Plainly not! But you could have given the books to a school, or . . . I don’t know, a lending library.”
It was the middle of the night. Even Lawrence thought this a strange hour to discuss lending libraries. “But I didn’t, so kindly get out of my bedroom.”
Turner made no move to leave. “It ought to be cleaned out, to check whether anything is salvageable. Why did the servants not see to it? I understood that you had more servants in residence until recently.”
“Damned if I know. I’m not a housekeeper. Perhaps they were lazy. Perhaps they liked rotten paper. Perhaps you ought to get out of here before I lose my patience entirely.” Lawrence narrowed his eyes, a terrible idea occurring to him. “Unless you plan to share my bed. Perhaps all this fuss about a couple of moldy books was only a pretense for you to gain entry to my bedchamber.” Now, that ought to get rid of the man.
Turner went utterly still, and for a moment Lawrence thought he might scurry away as he ought.
But then Turner’s posture relaxed into something sinewy and dangerous. His mouth curved slowly into a smile that had Lawrence cursing himself for not keeping a fire or a lamp or anything that would illuminate the man. To Lawrence’s mingled horror and wonderment, Turner began to laugh, soft and low. “If that was meant to frighten me, you’re wide of the mark, my lord. To be frank, you’re punching above your weight.”
Did that mean what Lawrence thought it meant? Or, rather, what Lawrence’s prick thought it meant? Because God knew his brain wasn’t capable of any thought whatsoever. Lawrence became intensely aware that he was in his bed, shirtless, in the middle of the night. And he had just told his secretary a good deal more than he meant.
Lawrence would have sworn that Turner’s dark, dark eyes dipped low at that moment, to skim over Lawrence’s bare torso. But no, that couldn’t be. It had to be a trick of the moonlight.
Years ago, immediately after his father’s burial, Lawrence had escaped Penkellis in order to join his brother in London. There, among Percy’s group of broad-minded friends, he had finally met men who shared his own inclinations. But Percy’s set had all been utterly crackbrained, a bunch of half-mad, thoroughly drunk, opium-eating libertines. Any practice or desire Lawrence found in common with them seemed proof of his own incipient madness. It had been a chaos of hedonism, of freedom, of all the things he had been denied. He had started to believe he was as bad as Percy, or perhaps even as deranged as his father had always insisted, and when one of Percy’s friend’s sisters fell pregnant by a married man, Lawrence had volunteered to marry the girl. They had fled back to Penkellis, and he had never left.
The room-spinning giddiness he felt at Turner’s hungry glance echoed that mad whirl of pleasure he had experienced in London. It seemed further confirmation that his mind was unbalanced. Surely it was not normal for the room to whirl about in such a way.
Apparently recovering his composure, Turner coolly tossed the book onto Lawrence’s bed and turned towards the door.
“If you must know,” Lawrence said, suddenly not wanting Turner to leave quite yet, “the library was already a lost cause when I inherited. My brother had a fancy for ruins and wished to see how long it would take for Penkellis to crumble.”
“A pity he’s not alive to see his dreams come to fruition.” Turner’s mouth was a tight line.
“No.” Lawrence’s jaw set. “Not a pity.” He picked up the book Turner had brought and examined its spine. The moon was full, but he could barely make out the faded title.The Discourses of Epicetus.“Are you much interested in Greek?” he asked, surprised.
“What? No, not in the least.”
“The library is mostly Greek, with a bit of Latin here and there. My grandfather bought books at random to fill in the shelves.” Lawrence had salvaged anything of interest to him at the first sign of Percy’s neglect. “Except the pornography, which my brother sold to one of his wastrel friends.” And if that wasn’t Percy in a nutshell, then nothing was. “But if you’re looking for something to read, you’re free to borrow anything you find in the study.”
Turner tilted his head a bit, as if he hadn’t quite understood. “Thank you,” he said, after a moment. “But I’ve already read most of your notes and correspondence, and I’ve made a dent in the scientific papers.”
If Lawrence had been standing, he might have fallen over. “You have?”
“Well, yes. Of course I have. Any secretary would.” Perhaps it was Lawrence’s imagination, but the man didn’t seem quite certain of that fact. “I would be of little use to you if I were ignorant of your work.”
An idea occurred to Lawrence, something even more daring and dangerous than his foolish jest about sharing a bed. “Are you by any chance interested in natural philosophy, Mr. Turner?”
The secretary shifted on his feet, looking discomfited for the first time since arriving at Penkellis. “Perhaps.”
“Because it seems to me that you’d have to be, in order to read that quantity of material in”—he wrangled with the always-slippery days and hours to calculate how long he thought Turner had been here—“two days.”
“I have a good many interests.” Turner sounded defensive, as if Lawrence were accusing him of prurient interests rather than scientific ambitions. In fact, when Lawrencehadsuggested that he had prurient interests, Turner had only laughed.
The prospect of conversing with an actual human being who shared his interests almost stupefied Lawrence. Imagine, being able to talk about the relative merits of brine and acid as electrolyte solutions, rather than depending on the post to communicate with Standish or one of his other correspondents. It was something he had never dared to so much as hope for.
