The Lawrence Browne Affair

by Cat Sebastian

  Through the threshold that led to the small parlor, the room where the ladies of Penkellis had once practiced the harp and worked on their samplers, he could see a man with a bucket of paint and three women scrubbing the floors. The drapes and carpets were gone from both rooms, and the windows had been cleaned to a shine.

  Lawrence had become accustomed to his house having a muted, blurred-around-the-edges appearance due to the accretion of filth and the spread of decay. He wasn’t used to this gleaming, glowing space. The house even smelled different, of sawdust and whitewash, lemon and lavender.

  In the middle of it all, lit by a shaft of light, stood Georgie Turner, his hands on his hips.

  “What the devil is going on here?” Lawrence roared over the noise, when what he really wanted to do was fall to his knees and thank God his secretary had come back. He ought to have returned days ago, and Lawrence had almost given up hope. It occurred to him that he had missed Turner. That was an unexpected novelty; he hadn’t thought himself capable of missing anyone. He hadn’t thought he’d ever have a chance to do so.

  The racket abruptly ceased, and a score of fearful eyes turned to look. Not at Lawrence, but at Turner. There was no doubt as to who was giving the orders here.

  “Good afternoon, your lordship.” Turner bowed slightly, with a mildly ironic air that sent a jolt of happiness through Lawrence’s body. Lord, but he really had missed the man. “Carry on, carry on,” Turner said to the workers, while gesturing for Lawrence to follow him through a set of doors into the library. This was where Lawrence’s father had met with his man of business. It was also where he had summoned Lawrence for regular whippings. He shuddered. There were reasons he didn’t traipse about the house. Too many memories, none of them good.

  Perhaps some of his unease showed on his face, because Turner looked up at him and continued straight out the French doors and onto the terrace.

  Lawrence closed the doors behind them, but cracked glass was not enough to muffle the noises from within. There was even more chaos outside: somebody was hacking away at the kitchen garden, another man was raking gravel smoothly across the drive.

  “The improvements are well underway, my lord.”

  “I cannot imagine how you expect to fund this nonsense,” Lawrence snapped, mainly because he was feeling disagreeable.

  Turner narrowed his eyes and sucked in a breath. “My lord, you wrote a letter giving me authority to do what was needful to ready the house.”

  “I thought you meant airing the bed linens, not refurbishing the entire ground floor.”

  “It is not the entire ground floor, but only a suite of five rooms that will, I hope, create the illusion of this being the home of a gentleman. The rest of the house will be quite the same, less a few squirrels and mice.”

  “What will it cost?” Lawrence was unfamiliar with the cost of paint and lumber. “A hundred pounds?”

  Turner cast him a pitying look. “Quite a bit more than that, my lord. But you can well afford it. I’ve seen your books. I’ve kept your books. You had no books until I came.”

  This was a gross exaggeration, as Lawrence was quite certain that his steward—a fellow who was far too canny to pester his employer with anything more than a quarterly report—must have some records that could be referred to as books.

  “And if you make a fuss when the bills come due,” Turner went on, “I’ll pawn every last gewgaw in this house.”

  Lawrence growled. “You are driving me out of my mind.”

  “Oh?” Turner, who had been studying his fingernails, looked up idly at Lawrence. “You concede that you were previously in your right mind?”

  “Turner, I cannot abide this racket. Or with any of the rest of it.” He rubbed his temples and squeezed his eyes shut. “I swear that I heard some sort of carpentry going on outside my window well before dawn.”

  “Nonsense, the carpenters could hardly have worked without light.”

  “Turner. Georgie, I’m begging you. Do something.”

  The silence stretched out, and when Lawrence opened his eyes he saw the secretary regarding him carefully, all traces of irritation and feigned boredom quite gone. “All right. Go for a walk. Barnabus is in the kitchens and could use a run. He has much the same opinion of carpentry as you do, Lawrence.” He froze. “My lord,” he corrected.

  Lawrence wanted to say that he preferred the sound of his own name on Turner’s tongue, not the title or honorific that had been his father’s and brother’s. He wanted to say that it filled a spot in his heart that he hadn’t known was there, a spot he full well knew he didn’t deserve to have filled.

  “To hell with ‘my lord’ and ‘Radnor.’ Call me Lawrence or nothing at all. I want you, Georgie.” Lawrence watched the man’s dark eyes grow momentarily wide. “To work, damn you. I need you. I had a thought about zinc—oh never mind. I need you helping me, not scrubbing floors and mending things. I can’t get on without you.” He hardly knew how he had managed before Turner came here.

  “Speaking of mending.” Turner’s gaze raked up and down Lawrence’s body. “I need you to try on your new clothes.”

  “Absolutely not.” This was the outside of enough. “My clothes are fine.”

  “No, they are not. They are the opposite of fine. They are coarse and ill kept. Your son—do not look at me like that, Radn—Lawrence—your son will be embarrassed to see you so badly dressed. You need a valet—”

  “Stop this!” He must have shouted, because Georgie went still, and the noises outside momentarily quieted. “I apologize,” he said in a normal tone of voice. “I had a valet, but he left.”

  “I daresay he did, if you insisted on dressing like a convict and growing a beard.”

  Lawrence unthinkingly raised a hand to his chin. “I was under the impression you liked my beard.” The man had rubbed his face against it, for heaven’s sake. As if Lawrence were in danger of forgetting such a thing.

  “So I do.” A hint of arch amusement, but nothing more. “But it’s just the thing to strike terror into the heart of a schoolboy. When?”

  “Pardon? When what?”

  Turner cocked his head to the side. “When did your valet leave?”

  “I can’t rightly say. Two years ago? I noticed one day that he had gone.”

  “You noticed one day . . . ” Turner glanced away, brushing a strand of raven-dark hair behind his ear. He hadn’t had a haircut since coming here, and now the ends touched his collar. “How long would it take you to notice that I was gone, my lord?”

  “That’s a stupid question. You know perfectly well that I mark every moment you’re with me.” They were standing quite close in order to hear one another over the din of the sawing and hammering and gravel-raking. Beneath the smell of sawdust and cleaning polish, Lawrence could detect Turner’s scent, and he focused his mind on it as desperately as a drowning man might cling to a rope.

  “I don’t know anything of the sort,” Turner said, his eyes flashing darkly.

  Lawrence shook his head, dumbfounded that Turner hadn’t caught on. “I can’t help but notice you being there, so you’d damned well best believe I notice when you aren’t. The last few days when you’ve been away . . . I’ve noticed.” He let his voice drop on those last words.

  “Because you prefer being alone, no doubt.” Turner looked up at him with an expression that did not belong on his cool, calm face. He looked young, raw, vulnerable.

  “That’s not it.” It ought to have been, but it wasn’t. “I didn’t . . . I wanted you back. I . . . ” Lawrence was on the verge of telling Turner that he had missed him, that every moment without him was the pointless ticking of a clock that didn’t even keep proper time. But he had already revealed too much, to Turner and to himself. “As I said, I need your assistance.”

  That strange expression dropped from Turner’s countenance, replaced by his usual froideur and then some. “My absence was for a good cause, my lord.”

  “Leave off this ‘my lord’ gammon,
will you?”

  “Oh, you’re in a charming mood. As I was saying, my absence was for the very good cause of making your house suitable for your son.”

  “You don’t understand. This house will never be suitable for Simon or anyone else.” Including you, he wanted to say. “I had hoped to spare Simon the sight of this place.” He had hoped to spare Simon the sight of himself.

  Turner regarded him speculatively. “You have memories of this place that the child will not share.”

  “And thank God for it.”

  “My point is that to you, Penkellis is a horrible, evil place, because you have seen and known horrible, evil things here.” Somehow Turner knew this without Lawrence ever having said so. “The child doesn’t share that understanding.”

  “He’ll hear of it all soon enough if he spends any time here. He’ll hear about what his uncle and grandfather were. He’ll hear about me.” None of them were truly the child’s blood relations. The Browne legacy of evil and madness wasn’t Simon’s future, but he didn’t know that. “It would have been better for him to stay away.”

  “Shove it.”

  Lawrence instinctively drew himself up to his full height and raised his chin. “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, it is very amusing how lordly you are when you choose to be. I might be intimidated if I didn’t know better. But you can shove it, nonetheless. Try and put yourself in the child’s place. He’s never been asked to visit here. Perhaps he’s already heard whispers of the mad earls from whom he believes he has descended. Surely you can see that he will be afraid. That is why we will make this house—and its master—as normal and friendly as we can. We will make it so he wants to come back.”

  “No!”

  “But he will come back, Radnor. Even if it’s half a century from now, when you’re dead and buried. He’ll come back. This will be his home. This is his future, and you need to make sure he is not afraid of it.”

  Lawrence let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Damn you.”

  “Quite. Still, Radnor, you understand that I’m here to help you get through this, don’t you?”

  Lawrence swallowed hard. Then he moved to clap Turner on the arm, whether in thanks or acknowledgment or dismissal, he did not know. But at that same moment Turner stepped towards him, and the result was that Lawrence’s hand skimmed down Turner’s back. It might have been unremarkable, but for Turner’s slight shiver. Lawrence couldn’t help but grin wolfishly. Turner’s lips were slightly parted, and if it weren’t for the fact that the house and grounds were crawling with people, Lawrence might have bent his head and kissed the man.

  God, he wanted more. The other night, that frantic coupling on the bare floor of Turner’s room, had been a revelation.

  Sodomites had been a favorite subject of his father’s rage-fueled tirades, in which he lumped it in with other crimes against nature, such as Catholicism and being French. When he noticed—or thought he noticed—his younger son looking at the curate in an unnatural way, he had locked Lawrence in his bedchamber for a fortnight and prohibited him from attending church indefinitely. When Lawrence suffered one of his spells—heart racing, palms sweating, the abiding urge to hide—the old earl had declared it all part of the same madness that had the boy ogling clergymen. He had refused to send Lawrence to school, on the grounds that madness and depravity ought to be concealed. Lawrence’s one feeble protest had been met with threats of madhouses.

  “Radnor?” Turner asked. He had a bit of plaster in his hair, and Lawrence reached out to brush it away, letting his thumb linger overlong on his ear.

  “It isn’t mad to want to touch you,” Lawrence said, his voice hoarse.

  Turner sucked in a breath. “No, indeed. I’m glad you know that.”

  One of the French doors cracked open and the yellow-haired housemaid stuck her head out. “Mr. Turner, the mason is here to see about the front steps.”

  “If your lordship will excuse me?” Turner spoke in a cordial, businesslike tone that Lawrence knew was meant for the housemaid’s benefit, so he didn’t complain about the honorific.

  “Very well,” he said.

  Lawrence watched him pass through the library and into the drawing room beyond, his slim figure silhouetted against the bright light that shone through the freshly cleaned windows.

  “Surely there’s no need for all those extra servants, Mr. Turner.” Mrs. Ferris’s brow was furrowed as she looked up at the ladder where Georgie attempted to wrangle the new drapes into submission. “Another girl would have been more than enough, maybe a woman from the village to come help on laundry day. His lordship hates being disturbed, and with all these servants and workmen bustling about he’ll be in a terrible state.”

  “I’ll see to his lordship,” Georgie said. “Leave him to me.” As far as Georgie cared, Lawrence could sod right off if he dared complain again about the preparations for this child’s arrival. Rendering the house habitable for a child who was legally and—as far as Georgie cared—ethically the earl’s own son was the damned least Lawrence needed to do. Even if Lawrence had only married the boy’s mother out of kindness, even if he had only been twenty when he had taken on the responsibility, it was his responsibility nonetheless.

  Georgie couldn’t remember the last time he had thought in terms of responsibility. Or ethics, of all things. He felt like he was in a strange land, trying to make his way through a new city in a foreign language. But here he was, regardless, and he was nothing if not adaptable.

  For God’s sake, he had even stripped to his shirtsleeves and set to work himself. He was likely filthy. They were running out of time.

  “One more thing, Mrs. Ferris. If there are any local people you think ought to be engaged as servants, please do so. That’s within your purview, and I’m afraid I overstepped by taking on that task myself.” He had hired servants in Falmouth to go beyond the reach of whatever superstitions afflicted the villagers. But if Mrs. Ferris could persuade some tenants to serve at Penkellis—and he dearly hoped she would, because anything to gain the goodwill of these people could only help—then those servants could simply join the ranks of those Georgie had hired. It wasn’t as if there was any shortage of work to be done.

  Mrs. Ferris appeared slightly mollified when she went back to the kitchens.

  “She’ll come around,” said Janet, who was holding the ladder in place. “Can’t have the little lad sleeping in his papa’s workroom, can we? He’d blow himself up, or get into whatever mischief his lordship conducts up there.”

  “He’d also believe his father to be stark mad, living in one tower out of a house this size. No, you’re right, Janet. We have no choice but to get this wing into a state of tolerable readiness.” He glanced around, suppressing a wave of dismay. The glaziers had not finished replacing all the cracked windows; the furniture had been taken away by the upholsterers, revealing badly worn parquet. The smell of paint and hartshorn lingered noxiously in the air. “There’s nothing to be done about the worst of the damage, not with such short notice. But we can have the place habitable for him.”

  Janet looked skeptical. “Seems a strange thing, for a child not to know his own home.”

  Of course young gentlemen were sent off to schools, nothing out of the ordinary there. It was no different from young boys from regular families being sent off as apprentices, or girls sent off to work as servants. For that matter, it was a hell of a lot better than being sent out to pick pockets, with the clear understanding that one must not return home without something to show for the day’s work.

  But all those apprentices and servants knew they had a place where they belonged, people who claimed them as their own. Simon Browne, bounced between the homes of his schoolmate and his aunt and reduced to writing a pathetic letter to the stranger who was his father, might not even have that.

  Georgie climbed down from the ladder. A patch of plaster landed at his feet. He sighed and kicked it away before carrying the ladder to the next window.

>   In Falmouth, Georgie had spent more money than he had over the course of his entire life. He had acquired everything from beeswax candles to the servants who would light them. He ransacked his memory for every convenience and ornament a gentleman’s house ought to have.

  Georgie was determined that the poor child—which was how he persisted in thinking of this heir to an earldom—feel like he was welcome and wanted.

  Extending a warm welcome to a young lordling ought to be the last thing in the world Georgie gave a damn about, but the necessity of making things right for this child was also the only thing Georgie knew to be an immutable truth, so he clung to it with both hands.

  He needed things to be right for young Simon Browne. More than that, he needed Lawrence to get it right.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Returning from his walk, Lawrence found Georgie in the study, tacking bolts of cloth to the walls.

  “What the—”

  “This felt will muffle the sound and give you some peace,” Georgie called over his shoulder.

  Lawrence trailed a finger over the lengths of coarse dark material that now lined his walls. It was true; he could hardly hear the commotion downstairs.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for thinking of it.” Thank you for knowing, he wanted to say. He shouldn’t be surprised that Georgie knew how much Lawrence valued his silence.

  Georgie spared him only a glance by way of recognition. “The maids will clean this part of the house on Wednesday afternoons, during which time you may make yourself scarce or scowl silently or whatever pleases your lordship. Regardless, I will be present to ensure that none of your more lethal equipment is interfered with.”

  This was less tolerable, but still Lawrence grunted his assent.

  “When the child comes, dinner will be served in the dining parlor at six o’clock.”

  No. “To hell with this—”