Page 3 of The Lawrence Browne Affair
“Do you have something better to do?” Jack gestured around the empty attic. “Oliver wants to help his old friend, and I want to keep Oliver happy. Sarah would like to see you far away from anyone who wants to stick a knife between your ribs or a noose around your neck. The recluse needs a secretary. So, you go to Cornwall, and we all win.” A pause. “You’d have my fee, of course.”
Lurking beneath the surface of Jack’s offer was the unpleasant reminder that Georgie’s presence in London was putting everyone he loved in danger. “Send Sarah out of London. I don’t want Brewster going after her.” He scrambled to come up with a reason for flight that his sister wouldn’t balk at. “She can fit Oliver’s sister for some new frocks.”
“Is that a yes?”
He did need to get out of London until this mess died down a bit and he figured out a way to make it up with Brewster, some way to earn back the man’s trust and protection, which was the only way he’d be able to keep Jack and Sarah safe.
“Fine,” he said, ignoring the look of triumph in his brother’s eyes. “But I’ll take half the fee in advance.”
CHAPTERTWO
Georgie pounded again on what he hoped was the main door. Penkellis, a disorganized assemblage of mismatched wings and asymmetrical towers, was the sort of house that had no shortage of doors, but he’d be damned if he was going to spend what was left of the day trying each of them in turn. As he let the knocker fall, chips of half-rotten wood landed at his feet, joining the crumbling stone of the steps.
What was even the point of being rich if you lived in a place like this? Georgie’s old lodgings were kept in better shape than this hellhole. And it couldn’t be for lack of money—for all the things people said about the Earl of Radnor, nobody ever said he was poor. It had to be sheer bloody-mindedness.
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.
