The Ruin of a Rake

by Cat Sebastian

  “Modestly appreciated. What a pleasant thing to say. This is a far cry from the charm you exerted at the dinner table this evening and, one presumes, which you also exerted to fuck your way across Europe and back again. Modestly appreciated. Thank you kindly.” Was Medlock pouting? If he knew how he looked with his hand on his hip and his lips pursed like that, he’d stop. Courtenay was suddenly very aware of how close they were.

  “But I’m not trying to get you into my bed.” Lord, he wanted Medlock to stop following him.

  “I gathered as much.” Medlock suddenly stopped walking and looked at his surroundings. “Where are we?”

  “I’m going to my lodgings,” Courtenay ground out. He was fast losing patience with Medlock, and didn’t want the man to know where he lived.

  “On foot?”

  “I was planning to fly but I only do that without witnesses, so kindly leave me be.”

  “We’re on the edge of St. Giles. I’ll see if we can get a hackney before we’re beset by footpads. You can’t possibly live near here. You’re lost. Where the devil are your lodgings?”

  “On the edge of St. Giles, in fact.”

  “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

  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.” In The 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.

  Julian was pleasantly surprised that Courtenay believed in paying his servants. “That’s what I’m working on now.”

  He also seemed to believe in paying tradesmen and settling his debts, judging by the canceled notes he found in the trunk. “Courtenay,” he began, trying to figure out how to phrase this as delicately as possible, “do you have any debts that perhaps I might not know about from the contents of this trunk?”

  A shadow passed over Courtenay’s face. “I pay my debts.”

  “I don’t mean to give offense,” Julian said hastily. “Most people don’t.” Hell, when Julian had moved Medlock Shipping’s principal offices to London in advance of selling off his India interests, he had needed to borrow money, which he hadn’t repaid until the last possible minute because that was how these things worked. Julian’s understanding of profligate gentlemen suggested that they were even less inclined to promptly repay debts.

  “I pay my debts. It’s one correct thing that I can do, so I do it.” Then he shut his eyes, and Julian was given to understand that the conversation was over.

  Later, long after a clock in the distance had chimed two, Julian reached over and tapped Courtenay’s shoulder to rouse him. “What’s this property near Stanmore?” It was very close to London, and if the house were halfway decent it could command a decent price. “Is it entailed?”

  “No. But I can’t sell it.”

  Julian narrowed his eyes. There were several letters in a feminine hand requesting funds for what seemed to be the running of this household in Stanmore. Had Courtenay pensioned off a former mistress? Was he supporting an illegitimate child? Surely he hadn’t been in England long enough to have acquired a new mistress, not when he spent all his time in London and seemed to haunt Eleanor’s house like a particularly alluring ghost.

  “Carrington Hall is where my mother lives.”

  Julian gasped. “You have a mother?” He collected himself. “I mean, a living mother?”

  “Alive and well and only a few miles away.”

  “Who is she?” He searched his memory for any recollection of a Lady Courtenay, and came up with nothing.

  “Mrs. Blakely.”

  Julian paused. “Your mother remarried after your father’s death yet lives in a house you inherited from your father? And you support her? What does your stepfather think of this?”

  “I couldn’t say, as I’ve never met him.”

  Julian checked the signature on the letters that tersely demanded funds. “Who is this Miss Chapman who writes on your mother’s behalf?”

  “I believe she’s the vicar’s daughter.”

  Julian pursed his lips in disapproval. “Your mother is very infirm, then? She cannot hold a pen nor even dictate a letter?”

  “As far as I know, she’s quite well. She disowned me a good ten years ago, so I’m not certain.”

  Julian barked out an astonished laugh. “Disown? You pay for her upkeep. She lives on your sufferance. She’s not in a position to disown you.”

  “I don’t suppose she’s bogged down by the technicalities.”

  “Well, I am. It’s admirable to support you
r mother, presuming she has no money of her own, and please don’t correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m not sure I can stand to hear it. But you might keep her in a considerably more modest style. You pay for over a dozen servants. And based on the grocer’s bills, which Miss Chapman helpfully encloses, she seems to entertain a fair bit.”

  “I believe Blakely’s children live there as well.” Somehow Courtenay delivered this information as if it were in the least bit normal. “I daresay they eat their heads off.”

  “And so do their horses. If I’m reading this correctly, she has three grooms and at least six horses.”

  Courtenay was silent for a moment. “I had to sell my own horse in January. Couldn’t keep him anymore.”

  Julian would not hear another word and held up his hand to stop Courtenay from elaborating. “Where’s your writing paper, Courtenay? I’m putting a stop to this nonsense immediately.”

  “You will not. It’s my affair.”

  “This here”—he nudged the now-empty trunk with the toe of his boot—“is testament to how unfit you are to manage your own affairs.” Julian took a deep breath. “Your mother evidently thinks she’s above your touch. Perhaps she is. But in that case, she and her husband and stepchildren don’t need to take your money.” Julian had never heard of such a preposterous arrangement. “I think not. I’ll write a very cordial letter informing Miss Chapman that you find yourself in straightened circumstances and will happily relocate your mother and her hangers-on to a cottage someplace more suitable.”

  “It needs to be near Somerset,” Courtenay said blandly. “That’s where my sister lives.”

  “I didn’t even know—Oh, I suppose she disowned you too.”

  “Correct.”

  Julian narrowed his eyes. “I suppose you support her in a style of great elegance as well?”

  Courtenay laughed with no rancor whatsoever, which was more than Julian was capable of. “No, thank God. She’s married and has a couple of children.”

  “How many other relations are you supporting?”