Page 16 of The Ruin of a Rake
“Good God. And you’re going home on foot in the middle of the night? You’ll be killed.”
“Perhaps,” Courtenay said easily. He did not, as a rule, fret overmuch about his own personal safety. He had to have a cat’s nine lives to have gotten out of the scrapes he had found himself in. “I can’t see what good worrying about it will do.”
“Worrying might have led you to hire rooms in a slightly less unsavory quarter,” Medlock said crisply.
“Would it have summoned up the blunt I’d need to pay for such well-located lodgings?”
“You’ve been out of the country for too long—”
“Not nearly long enough,” Courtenay muttered.
“—and you have no idea what things cost. A couple of furnished rooms tolerably close to Mayfair wouldn’t be so very dear. I’ll arrange it tomorrow.”
“I can barely afford the rooms I have now.”
Courtenay chanced a look over at Medlock in time to see his mouth briefly hang open.
“You’re a peer of the realm, Courtenay. Surely you have an income from the land you own. You can’t be utterly penniless.”
“My affairs are complicated.” He hoped that would put an end to it. “And none of your business.”
“They most certainly are. My name is now tangled up with yours, so if you’re about to be thrown into debtors’ prison, we’ll both be tarred with the same brush.”
“One of the privileges of a title is that I can’t be arrested for debt. At least not in England.” It had happened once in Florence and the experience had not been very amusing.
“You’re in debt, then?”
“It’s possible.”
“Possible.”
“You’d talk a good deal less if you stopped repeating every damned thing I say. When I acquire a debt, I pay it off, but I’m not certain whether I have any debt, because my affairs are in some disorder.”
“Some dis—” He stopped himself, and Courtenay had to suppress a smile. “Do you have a man of business, or... No, of course you do not. I assume you have records of some sort?”
“I do. In my lodgings.” He threw them all into a trunk. Bills, inscrutable reports from land agents, letters from relations requesting funds. He tossed them in and shut the lid.
“I’m going home with you, then, and I’ll get everything straightened out. You can move somewhere less undesirable and stay at a hotel in the meantime.”
Courtenay sincerely doubted that. He was fairly sure he had no ready money, few assets, and little chance of those circumstances changing. “No.” They were now on a street that had no pretensions to gentility. The signs were the same the world over: animals and children roaming freely despite the late hour, something cooking in a pot over an open flame, laundry strung between two houses, and the general sense of orderly facades having dissolved into something more chaotic. This wasn’t outright a rookery, but the people who lived here were always thinking about the next meal, the next rent payment.
“Believe me, whatever it is, I’ll have seen worse. You should have seen the state of my father’s affairs. Shambles.” He wasn’t quite slurring his speech but Courtenay could hear the drink in his words.
“You’re very drunk, or you wouldn’t be telling me this.”
“I’m slightly tipsy, and I can tell you whatever I want, because you don’t matter.”
Courtenay had been insulted behind his back and to his face since being sent down from Oxford. He had been disowned by his family and cut dead by his friends. But the way his fists clenched of their own volition at Medlock’s jab proved that he still wasn’t immune to having his pride hurt. “I see.”
“No, that came out all wrong,” Medlock said quickly, waving his hand as if clearing soot from a window. “Let me see. What I mean to say is that I don’t need to impress you, because you don’t care about any of that.”
Surely he shouldn’t have been so gratified to hear this. “Quite true.”
“Anyway, let me at your books. I’ve been dying to see a real lord’s books for ages now.” He sounded like he meant it. This was the happiest Courtenay had ever seen the man. If Courtenay had a collection of dirty lithographs in his lodgings, Medlock could hardly have been more eager to get his hands on them.
“Fine,” he said, and laughed when Medlock clapped his hands together like a child who had been promised a special treat. “But you’ll be disappointed.”
Chapter Eight
