Page 2 of The Lawrence Browne Affair
Heavy footsteps were coming up the stairs. Familiar ones, Georgie thought, but these days he didn’t trust his judgment enough to wager his life on it. The door swung open, and Georgie held his breath, wishing he had a knife, a pistol, anything.
“That had better be you, Georgie,” came the rough voice of Georgie’s older brother. “Of all the people for you to cross, it had to be Mattie Brewster?”
Georgie let out his breath in a rush that wasn’t quite relief. “I don’t think I led them here,” he said, hoping it was true.
“To hell with that. You think I can’t put Mattie off for a bit? He and I were pinching ladies’ handkerchiefs before you were even born.” Jack lifted a lantern and peered at Georgie’s face. “When was the last time you slept?”
“Not since leaving the Packinghams’ house.” Which somehow was only yesterday. “You know everything?”
“ ’Course. Mattie came here last night, all friendly like. I told him to bugger off, equally friendly like. He’s had a man across the way, watching the house, naturally.”
Georgie winced. It wasn’t right to bring his troubles to his brother’s doorstep. Jack could hold his own, but what if Brewster decided to pay a visit on their sister? A chill trickled down Georgie’s spine. “I needed to catch my breath, and this was . . . ” He let his voice trail off. This was the only place on earth where he wouldn’t be arrested as a housebreaker or murdered as a traitor. He had hardly anywhere else to go, hardly anyone else to turn to. He could have fallen from the rooftop and been equally lost. “I’ll leave in a few minutes. As soon as I catch my breath.”
“Like hell you will. Come down and have supper with us.”
Georgie nearly laughed. “This isn’t a social call.”
“Oh, were you engaged to dine elsewhere?” Jack paused, as if expecting an answer. “No? Then eat with us, and we’ll figure out what to do with you. I doubt your enemies want to murder you badly enough to poison my soup. Oliver will be glad to see you’re well.”
But then Georgie would need to endure the confused sympathy of Jack’s high-minded lover. Which wasn’t to say that Georgie objected to Oliver; he was fine enough, in a stiff-upper-lip sort of way. Georgie was in no frame of mind, however, to make conversation with a fellow who likely thought Jack’s wayward brother deserved whatever punishment he had coming his way. Hell, Georgie was inclined to agree.
“If it’s all the same, I’ll stay where I am, thank you.” He heard the edge in his own voice. Georgie wasn’t used to living off anyone’s kindness. He wasn’t the sort of man who inspired acts of benevolence, nor the sort to accept anything he hadn’t earned—or stolen. He knew he ought to be grateful to Jack, but he was only annoyed—mainly with himself.
He had earned himself a place among London’s criminal classes, and he had done it with nothing more than a bit of cunning and a complete disregard for decency. He stole and he cheated, he swindled and he lied. His favorite targets were overbred nobs who were too greedy to look closely at what Georgie offered, too blinded by visions of their own prosperity to ask the right questions. They were begging to be swindled, and Georgie was happy to oblige.
And then he had thrown it all away. He didn’t know whether this was what it felt like to have a conscience, but he simply couldn’t take that old woman’s money. He had tried to persuade Mattie to go after another mark. When Mattie refused, Georgie had taken matters into his own hands, and now Georgie was persona non grata in London, and probably everywhere else that wasn’t the bottom of the Thames.
Jack grumbled and disappeared downstairs. When he returned he carried a supper tray, which, Georgie noticed, held enough to feed two people. If Georgie would not go down to dinner, then Jack would take his dinner here in the attic. Georgie tried to muster up the appropriate gratitude but found his gaze shifting to the window he had come through and the darkness of the sky beyond. He wished he hadn’t come here.
“I got a letter from a vicar in Cornwall,” Jack said, and Georgie gathered that they were to attempt normal conversation. “Or rather Oliver did, and now he wants me to look into why some barmy fellow won’t leave his house.”
Georgie poked at his meat with a fork. “Vicars and lunatics aren’t in your usual line.” Jack made a living solving other people’s problems, but—as far as Georgie could tell—only if the problem was an aristocrat and solving it involved a fair bit of what Jack liked to think of as retributive justice.
Jack shifted in his seat, drawing Georgie’s attention like a hound catching a scent. Georgie had been swindling and stealing since he could walk, and he knew what a man looked like when he had something unpleasant to say. More importantly, so did Jack. There was no such thing as Jack Turner accidentally letting someone get a peek at his cards. If he looked uncomfortable, it was because he wanted Georgie to know it.
“The vicar went to school with Oliver,” Jack said, his gaze fixed on some point over Georgie’s shoulder. “The fellow who won’t leave his house is Lord Radnor.”
Now Georgie wasn’t a hound catching a familiar scent. He was a shark, and somebody had just dropped a bloody carcass into the water. For the first time in two days, he forgot about his predicament. “The Mad Earl?” Georgie had heard of him. Everybody had. “Tell the vicar the man won’t leave his house because he’s absolutely crackbrained.” And murderous too. There had been a missing courtesan, a dead bride, and so many duels it was nearly tedious. “And then charge your usual fee.”
“This fellow isn’t the Mad Earl. That was his older brother, who died a few years back. I think the father was mad too, but he wasn’t such a nuisance about it. Nobody knows much about the present earl, except that he’s nine and twenty and as rich as Croesus. But he can’t be as bloodthirsty a bastard as his brother was, or I suppose the vicar would only be relieved that he didn’t leave the house.”
“And instead the vicar is enlisting the help of his old school chum’spetit ami.”
Jack ignored that. Likely because he didn’t speak any French and didn’t care about Georgie’s barbs anyway.
“Sounds like a matter for a doctor.” Georgie’s interest was fast slipping. He made a great show of examining his fingernails, which were in a terrible state after the day’s mishaps.
“Trouble is how to get the doctor in there without the earl’s permission,” Jack mused.
“Are you going to take the case?” Georgie couldn’t see his brother leaving his snug townhouse long enough to travel to Cornwall to appease meddlesome vicars and investigate aristocratic hermits.
“I was thinking that I might send you, actually.” It wasn’t every day Jack Turner looked that shifty.
Georgie put down his fork and folded his arms across his chest, almost eager to hear whatever convoluted nonsense Jack was going to say next. “And why would I do that?”
“You could pose as his secretary, just long enough to let me know whether he’s right in the head.”
“There are a great many things Icoulddo.” He could step out the front door and wait to be attacked by his old friends and left for dead, for example. Or he could march right over to Bow Street and turn himself in. Georgie’s life was a positive cornucopia of bad ideas these days. “What I want to know is why you think I ought to.”
