Page 64 of The Lawrence Browne Affair
The wind whipped through the square, and Georgie halfheartedly pulled his coat tighter around his chest. His gloves had gone missing—which was to say they had been stolen—at Newgate, along with his coin purse. Georgie could hardly begrudge any fellow thief his takings. All the same, he was bitterly cold.
The door to the house opened, and he saw Ned Packingham load the old lady into her carriage. She appeared unaltered, which stood to reason; her fortune was intact, her nephew still danced attendance on her in hopes of inheriting her estate, and all was well—or at least as well as it had been before Georgie had arrived. He wondered if the nephew untangled her embroidery silks as carefully as Georgie had, or if he lazily snipped off any stubborn knot, leaving her with frustratingly short strands.
Tears prickled in his eyes. This was why he never let himself think about his marks after he was done with them.
Tired and miserable as he was, he knew that he was thinking of Mrs. Packingham to avoid thinking of Lawrence. He had very carefully not let himself wonder how Lawrence and Simon must be getting on without him, or about how Lawrence might be distressed by the arrival of Simon’s uncle. He was trying not to think about Lawrence at all.
One of Georgie’s earliest memories was of his sister’s cat. He couldn’t have been much more than a baby, if Sarah was still living at home. The cat had kittens, and Sarah and Georgie’s father had insisted that they needed to be killed. He had brought up a bucket and drowned them, one at a time. Georgie, confused by his sister’s tears and unsure why the soft kittens required a bath, had toddled over. “You hold them under until the bubbles stop,” his father had said, as if he were teaching Georgie how to toast a crumpet rather than how to drown a newborn cat. Georgie watched as the bubbles stopped, one kitten, then the next, then the next, all the while Sarah cried in the background.
That was what he was trying to do to his love for Lawrence, but no matter how hard he fought to push his feelings deeper, they kept bubbling up.
All he had to do was shut his eyes, and he could almost smell Lawrence’s scent, feel the pleasant coarseness of his beard against Georgie’s face, imagine the way he stroked that mongrel of a dog with his huge hands.
Georgie imagined Lawrence putting an arm around him, comforting and warm.
And then, out of nowhere, therewasan arm around him.
But it wasn’t Lawrence. It was Mattie Brewster.
CHAPTERTWENTY-FIVE
Under other circumstances, Lawrence might have been amused to discover how many doors were opened to him by virtue of his rank, his wealth, and his presumed dangerousness. But today he was too busy pretending not to be panicking to within an inch of his life.
He playacted the role of imperious aristocrat. When in doubt he simply channeled Percy—arrogant, entitled, reckless—and people promptly gave him whatever he desired. He wanted his secretary released from jail? It was done. He wanted to know precisely what his secretary had tried to confess to the magistrate? A runner was dispatched to find out, while Lawrence drank brandy in a cozy parlor next to Haversham’s office. He wanted a hackney to take him and his enormous dog to a warehouse in Cheapside? Not five minutes later he was headed along the Strand, Barnabus sitting beside him on the carriage bench.
Lawrence had never been inside a warehouse before. As far as he knew, he had never even beenoutsideone either. This particular specimen was a dirty brick building, boxy and unimpressive, with tiny windows barely breaking up the monotonous facade. As he climbed the short set of stairs to the door, he saw a faded, peeling sign indicating that the building was the property of some or another shipping company. But this was the address Georgie had given as Brewster’s headquarters.
Lawrence, figuring that a wretchedly unpleasant and harrowing couple of days could hardly get much worse, had decided to dispense with Brewster. Any man fearsome enough to make even the unshakable Georgie Turner flee on the spot needed to be done away with. Lawrence, after the misery of the past week, was in a foul enough temper to put a bullet through the head of a man far less deserving of death than Mattie Brewster. He patted the coat pocket where he had placed Percy’s dueling pistol.
Not that it would necessarily come to bullets or death. If Brewster could be dealt with in some other way, that would be acceptable, as long as the man never again had anything to do with Georgie.
I owe him, Georgie had said. Bollocks on owing. Bollocks on debt. Georgie was his own man, free to live his own life, and anyone who argued otherwise would have to answer to Lawrence. Georgie had made that point to Lawrence again and again—that Lawrence didn’t need to repeat his father’s or brother’s sins or even atone for them. He was his own man, and he could live his own life. Lawrence was going to make that happen for Georgie.
He knocked on the door and, when asked, uttered the inane password. The door was opened by a man in rolled-up shirtsleeves and dirty trousers who looked warily at Barnabus. Lawrence was momentarily astonished by the man’s dishevelment, before recalling that this was precisely how he had dressed only a few weeks earlier. Self-consciously, he smoothed his gloved fingers down the lapels of his spotless coat, a tangible reminder of Georgie’s care.
The man gestured wordlessly for Lawrence to precede him up two steep, rickety flights of stairs. At the top was a sort of landing with nothing but a flimsy-looking door. Could Brewster be protected by nothing more than a few sets of stairs and a cheap door? But then again, Lawrence was learning that power wasn’t measured in fine buildings and armored doors but rather in what one could make other people do.
The door swung open, revealing a dim room lit only by the late afternoon light that streamed through a few small windows. A handful of men stood around the perimeter, their watchful eyes turned to Lawrence’s entrance. In a chair, with his back to the window, sat a man whose features Lawrence couldn’t distinguish in the dark, but from his placement and the way the other men oriented themselves with regard to him, he had to be Brewster.
“Mattie Brewster?” Lawrence asked, addressing the man in the chair. “You’re not to lay a finger on Georgie Turner.”
The seated man laughed, a disconcertingly affable sound. “And who are you to be telling me what to do with my fingers?”
Lawrence had been prepared for a rough accent, a voice that sounded of vice and crime. But this man sounded like a genial cockney costermonger.
“I’m Radnor.” He wasn’t certain if the criminal classes were up to date on the peerage, so he added, “Lawrence Browne, Earl of Radnor.”
But Brewster responded promptly. “I lent money to your brother when he was at Oxford. He was a nasty bastard.”
“And I’m worse. Which is why you aren’t going to touch Turner.”
“Oh, but it’s a bit late for that, you see.” He gestured to a shadowy corner that held a bundle of rags. The bundle of rags moved, and Lawrence saw that it was a person. A dirty, unshaven, badly—
It was Georgie.
Fear gripped Lawrence like a tight band around his chest, but he didn’t let any emotion show on his face. He was pretending to be a half-mad, ruthless, dangerous man, not a lovestruck schoolboy. He sauntered over to one of the windows and calmly put his fist through it. From somewhere behind him came the sharp intake of breath. Good. He was making precisely the impression he sought. “Let him go. Bow Street knows where I am.” Which was true—Lawrence hadn’t made any secret of his intentions. “You have”—he shook the glass from his glove and pulled out his watch—“a bit less than a quarter of an hour to make yourselves scarce before the thief takers show up. Give me Turner, and you’ll have just enough time to get out of here.”
At the mention of Bow Street, a few of the men around the edges of the room shifted.
