Page 17 of The Ruin of a Rake
Julian was horrified.
“Where are your things?” he asked. Courtenay’s lodgings consisted of two rooms, each approximately the size of a hen coop, both furnished in what could charitably be called a Spartan style. In the first room was a plain deal table, a single hard-backed chair, and a tatty-looking sofa. Books were stacked against the walls with a careful neatness that Julian felt was nearly tragic. The fire Courtenay lit illuminated a room that was clean and orderly but dismal. If one closed one’s eyes and summoned up the image of cheap furnished rooms, this was precisely the picture that would come to mind.
Through an open door he could see an equally depressing bedroom. Julian felt a wash of self-consciousness at the sight of the bed, and forced his gaze away from the open doorway.
“I’ve been traveling.” Courtenay leant against a wall, his hands jammed in his pockets.
“But you had a house in Italy, did you not? Where you lived with your sister and nephew?” Surely the man had more than this to show for the past decade of his life.
“Yes. I had a house there, but after Isabella died and Simon was sent to England, I had everything sold.”
There was a note of sorrow in Courtenay’s voice. Eleanor had said Courtenay was fond of his nephew and missed him terribly; persuading the child’s father that Courtenay was not an outright menace was in fact the entire point of the charade. But this was the first time Julian had seen the man’s sadness for himself. He imagined Courtenay suddenly alone, his sister dead and his nephew gone. Worse, he imagined a child having lost his mother and then being taken away from the only other relation he had known.
“I had a bad few nights at the card tables,” Courtenay added. “I needed the money.”
But Julian didn’t think that was why Courtenay had sold his things. He remembered the time he had arrived at Eleanor’s house to discover that she had put away nearly all the trinkets and mementos from her childhood; he remembered a jade figurine and beside it a tiger Standish had whittled for her when they had all been children. He wondered what she had done with them.
He quickly shook his head, as if to dislodge the unwelcome thought. “I see,” he said, and he knew it was an inadequate response, but it would never do to dredge up feelings. His gaze drifted again to the bedroom door, the unmade bed, the rumpled sheets.
“In Istanbul, I had a set of silk bedsheets made up in a green to match my eyes,” Courtenay said, as if he needed to apologize for the depressing state of his current bed linens.
“Impossible,” Julian said promptly.
“Extravagant, ill advised, and slightly vulgar. But not impossible,” Courtenay said.
“I meant the color.” InThe Brigand Prince, poor, witless Agatha had described Don Lorenzo’s eyes as being the color of emeralds. But Agatha was given to triteness rather than specificity. Courtenay’s eyes were the color of the darkest jade—the exact color of Eleanor’s missing figurine—with flecks of the green of a warm, foreign sea. Emerald, indeed. “There’s no dye that could match your eyes.”
Courtenay stared at him, and Julian realized he perhaps ought not to have admitted such an interest in Courtenay’s eyes. “Come now,” Julian said briskly. “People likely say all manners of nonsense about your person. Don’t act shocked. Why don’t you bring me whatever records you have?”
From the bedroom, Courtenay dragged a large trunk that he placed at Julian’s feet. When the lid opened, it revealed a heap of miscellaneous papers.
“I just throw everything in there,” Courtenay explained. “Done so for ages now.”
Julian managed not to rub his palms together in glee. For years, he had wanted to see for himself where aristocrats made their money. He had seen Standish’s accounts when negotiating Eleanor’s marriage settlements, but that had been six years ago and Julian had still been wet behind the ears; besides which, Standish hardly had a sou to his name—which was why he needed to marry in the first place. And even though Courtenay’s scattered finances and negligent record-keeping could hardly be representative of his class, it gave Julian a sense of what he had longed to know.
He had always suspected that the gentry couldn’t possibly afford to live exclusively on the income from their land in England, even though that’s what they liked to pretend, and the paltry income from Courtenay’s land proved it. Even accounting for the likelihood that Courtenay’s acreage was grossly mismanaged, even if the man had the worst farmland in the kingdom, there was no way even triple this income could allow for a townhouse, balls, dowries, and all the other expenses aristocrats considered necessary. In order to finance their lavish way of life, Courtenay’s peers had to rely on their investments in canals, factories, and enterprises not unlike Medlock Shipping. And a lot of them had income that came from holdings in the West Indies, a sordid business that made Medlock Shipping look like a May Day festival.
Well, Courtenay certainly did not have a damned farthing invested in anything, as far as Julian could tell. He had no valet, kept no horses, lived no better than a clerk, and yet he owned thousands of acres of land. Most of the land was either mortgaged to the hilt or entailed, and Courtenay wasn’t seeing much income from any of it. Julian gritted his teeth and made notes to himself about what precisely needed to be done.
Throughout Julian’s investigations, Courtenay lounged on the sofa. His eyes were shut but he couldn’t be sleeping, because whenever Julian asked him a question, he answered promptly, and when the candle burnt down, he noticed and lit another one.
“Why are you living here when you have a house on Albemarle Street?” Julian asked, shocked to find a letter indicating that Courtenay owned the property.
Courtenay, sprawled out in a way that made Julian think terrible, terrible things, lazily opened one eye. “I let that house years ago.”
“Indeed, but I have a letter here saying that your tenants left at the start of the year. You need to sell the house immediately.”
“It’s entailed.”
Julian groaned. It was sufficiently stupid to entail land, but to entail a townhouse—a property that required an outlay of expense rather than earning an income—spoke of immense foolishness on the part of Courtenay’s forebears. Perhaps bad management was in his blood. He had long suspected that he and Eleanor’s sense for business had been inherited from their grandfather in much the same way they had inherited his hair color. It had evidently skipped a generation.
“What are you thinking? You look like you tasted something sour.” Courtenay was looking at him with both eyes open now. His hands were hooked behind his head in a way that did interesting thing to his biceps and torso.
Julian tore his gaze away from the man’s body and focused on his face, but that was no improvement. He was too damned handsome, with his half-closed eyes and the edges of his mouth quirked ever so slightly up, his expression hovering in between sleepy languor and something obscene. Or maybe that was Julian’s imagination. He dragged his attention back to the letter he was holding.
“I can’t decide whether you’d be better served by the income from new tenants, or by the cachet of living in a proper house. Even if you only hire a skeleton staff...”
“How would I pay them?” Courtenay drawled sleepily, stretching his arms over his head.
