Sebastian had no idea what was in these boxes, for Abercrombie had packed them. But having been home a month, he couldn’t imagine these crates and trunks contained anything he might need now. Still, why not go through them? It wasn’t as if he had anything else to do.
He gave a nod, and the footman departed. Sebastian removed his jacket, unfastened his cuff links, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and set to work.
The trunks were filled with old clothes. The first two crates held books, and the third various stationery supplies. In the fourth crate, he found his typewriting machine.
Sebastian sat back on his heels, staring at his battered, once-beloved Crandall. Its black enamel was scratched and dented here and there, and the mother of pearl inlay was chipped, but all in all, it was in surprisingly good shape for a machine that had been pounded on a daily basis—sometimes with savage ferocity—for over a decade.
He stared at it, feeling nothing. Strange. This typewriting machine had once been the most important item he owned, and yet, staring at it now, he felt curiously detached from any emotion, as if he’d run into someone who hailed him as an old friend, but whom he did not even recognize.
He reached into the crate with both hands and pulled out the machine. Below it was a yellowed stack of paper tied with twine—an old manuscript. Sebastian froze, the typewriter in his hands, staring at the stack of pages nestled amid the bits of straw and shredded burlap used to pack the crate. A very old manuscript, he realized, noting the lines penned in his handwriting.
“He Went To Paris,” Sebastian murmured, reading the title aloud. A vague memory stirred and he began to laugh. “My God.”
This was the first complete novel he’d ever written. He set aside the typewriter and pulled the bundle out of the crate, and as he did, Sebastian’s mind went tripping backward to when he’d written it, back to the very beginning.
It was his first summer abroad, after Eton and before Oxford, and he’d spent it in Paris. There, he’d been able to write without any risk of his father’s censure or contempt. He’d sat in cafés, his quill racing madly across these pages, word after word pouring out of him, his seventeen-year-old heart so hungry, his writing so raw. He hadn’t been concerned with plot or dialogue, only with putting on paper the story in his head. But when he’d reached the end, he’d realized it wasn’t good enough to publish. He’d packed it away, gone on to Oxford, and forgotten it.
It was in his final year at university that he’d started his second manuscript, a far more difficult endeavor than his first, for he’d been determined that this time every word should be right, determined to succeed at writing and prove his father wrong. That manuscript had taken him three years to complete, and to his mind, it still hadn’t been worthy of publication, but Phillip had convinced him to send it off to their friend Marlowe, who had just started a publishing company. Harry bought the book and published it, launching Sebastian’s career as an author.
More novels followed, all of them immensely popular, along with a dozen short stories and three successful plays. He was showered with both literary acclaim and monetary success, and though his father scorned his profession and disowned him for it, Sebastian ceased to care what his father thought. He bought the Crandall and carted it across the globe, traveling and writing, and living out the dream he’d had as far back as he could remember.
But the dream had a price. Each story proved harder to write than the one before. Each year the writing felt more stale, the process more painful, until he couldn’t shut out the endless parade of self-criticism, until each word felt ripped out of him. But then, he’d discovered cocaine, and cocaine had changed everything.
So harmless it had seemed at first, an amusing experiment in a Parisian salon. But later, while living in Italy, he had discovered what it was like to write under the drug’s influence, and cocaine had become the magic elixir, warding off the crippling uncertainties that had come to plague his writing. With cocaine, writing became a joy again, as free and exciting as it had been that first summer in Paris, and what followed proved to be the most prolific period of his career, generating six more novels and four more plays.
He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when everything had started to go wrong, when the exhilarating joy of writing on cocaine became an addictive need for the drug itself. Instead of being the ruling passion of his life, writing became the irksome duty that interfered with his amusements. Italy, instead of being a source of inspiration to his work, became an endless round of parties and women and an elixir that wasn’t really magical at all.
Sebastian set aside the manuscript and returned his attention to the Crandall. He ran the tip of his finger across the upper row of typewriting keys, thinking of that fateful afternoon in Florence three years ago when he’d written Girl with a Red Handbag. He’d fired off the three-act comedy in just twenty-four hours, pounding away at the typewriting machine with all the speed and cocksureness that only cocaine could give him. Afterward, he hadn’t bothered to edit it, or even read it. He’d posted it to Rotherstein in London, demanded his first payment on the contract, and rewarded himself with a three-day binge of drinking, debauchery, and more cocaine.
He didn’t remember inhaling the final dose. He didn’t remember losing consciousness. But he did remember waking up in a Florentine alley with the revolting smell of his own vomit in his nostrils. He remembered his friend St. Cyres kneeling beside him, shouting for a doctor in Italian that sounded strangely slow and slurred to his ears. And then had come a bright light that hurt his eyes, and a queer pulling sensation, as if someone had grabbed him by the pectoral muscles within his chest and lifted him off the ground; and yet, he felt no pain from the experience. That was when he’d realized he was dying.
He’d fought, he remembered, kicking and cursing and telling God and the devil to both sod off, that he wasn’t going anywhere with either of them because he didn’t want to die. He wanted to live.
He’d gotten his wish in the end, coming to his senses in an Italian hospital, racked with the pain of withdrawal from cocaine. It was there that a long-faced British doctor had refused to administer the drug required to ease his suffering, informed him cocaine would kill him if he continued to take it, and recommended a quiet, discreet place in the Swiss Alps.
Having fought so hard for his life, Sebastian intended to fight just as hard to keep it. He’d gone to Switzerland, he’d freed himself of his physical need for cocaine. But freeing himself from the emotional need for the drug had proved much harder. Even now, three years later, there were times when he longed to go back to his frenetic, quixotic days in Italy, to relive a time when all his doubts were silent and he felt invincible. No matter that the writing itself had been some of his worst—he hadn’t known that then, and he hadn’t cared; he’d loved the bliss of self-deception. His physical addiction was past, but the feeling that came with it, the euphoric feeling of being invincible—the craving for that never went away. It never would.
He tapped the tip of one finger against a typewriter key, and Harry’s words of a week ago echoed through his mind.
You have to sit down and type…one word, then another, then another, until you have a book.
If only it were that easy.
Sebastian grabbed the typewriting machine and stood up. Weaving amid the trunks and boxes, he made his way to his desk. He plunked the typewriter down on top of his blotter and pulled a stack of notepaper from the center drawer of his desk. He sat down, rolled one sheet into the machine, took a deep breath, and put his fingertips on the keys.
It came at once—that yawning emptiness, that stark, blank, irrational fear. He set his jaw.
Write something, he told himself. For God’s sake, write something.
The door opened. Relief flooded through him and he looked up, hopeful of possible distraction, but at the sight of his butler in the doorway, he knew his hope was a futile one. When it came to providing distractions, Wilton was hopeless. “Yes, what is it?”
“Y
ou have a visitor, my lord,” the servant informed him in that bored, superior fashion butlers were so fond of using. “A young woman.”
That was all having a title and estates did for a fellow. “Devil take it, man, haven’t I told you not to bother me with visits from silly marriage-minded debutantes and their matchmaking mamas?” He tapped the keys of the Crandall and donned a virtuous air. “I am working.”
“My apologies, sir, but I thought you might wish to see this particular young woman.”
Wilton’s insistence stirred Sebastian’s interest. His butler was not usually so presumptuous. “Why? Is she pretty?”
It was impossible to fluster Wilton, who had previously been the head footman in Aunt Mathilda’s household. Mathilda, his staunchly proper maiden aunt, expected her servants to display an unruffled demeanor at all times, regardless of any circumstances they might face. Trained by her, Wilton had become unflappable long before he’d been promoted to his current position as butler to Mathilda’s notorious nephew. “I believe any gentleman would consider her to be very pretty, sir,” he said with no change in expression.
There was a pause, and Sebastian sensed there was more information the butler wished to impart. “And?” he prompted.
“She is unaccompanied, sir.”
Sebastian’s brows rose at this significant piece of information. A respectable young woman who was unaccompanied coming to call upon an unmarried man was one of those things that Did Not Happen. Therefore, she must not be respectable. His mind began imagining an interlude of amorous intrigue, he felt an immediate rise in his spirits, and any notions of trying to write went to the wall.
He smiled and stood up. “You always find a way to brighten my day, Wilton.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Does this young woman have a name?” Sebastian asked, brushing dust and bits of straw from his shirtsleeves as he glanced at the butler.
Wilton lifted the calling card in his hand. “Miss Daisy Merrick,” he read. “Thirty-Two Little Russell Street, Holborn.”
Sebastian groaned, his hopes dashed at once. “Not that saucy little baggage! What on earth is she doing here?”
“She is here at the request of Viscount Marlowe.”
Worse and worse. “I don’t care if she’s here at the request of the Queen! Miss Merrick is one of those modern, emancipated spinsters who speak their minds with impunity and absolutely no sense of delicacy. You see her sort forcing their way in everywhere, marching through the streets with placards, chaining themselves to railings, demanding the right to earn their own living.” He cast a resentful glance at the typewriter on his desk. “As if anyone with sense would want to earn a living.”
“Not spinsters, sir,” Wilton corrected him with complacence. “Girl-bachelors, I believe they are called nowadays.”
“Girl-bachelors? Ye gods, what a term. Call her what you will, but Miss Daisy Merrick is the worst thing any human being can possibly be: a critic. She imparts her pert opinions to all and sundry even when she doesn’t know what on earth she’s talking about. Marlowe obviously thinks it amusing to send her here to plague me.” He made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “Send her away.”
Wilton gave an apologetic little cough. “Begging your pardon, sir, but given the…umm…uncertain nature of things at present, and considering the fact that Lord Marlowe did send her himself, perhaps you might deem it wise to…ahem…give her a few moments of your time?”
He met his butler’s limpid gaze and remembered that he owed the fellow three months’ wages. Wilton, along with his cook, housekeeper, footman, housemaid, and driver had been sent down from Devonshire by his aunt to do for him upon his arrival home in February, but unfortunately, Mathilda hadn’t sent the blunt with which to pay any of them. If he couldn’t come up to scratch soon, all of them would leave his employ, a fact of which Wilton was delicately reminding him. Even Abercrombie, a loyal old bird who’d stuck by him through those dark days in Switzerland, might leave if he couldn’t pay proper wages.
Sebastian rubbed a hand across his jaw, considering. His play had closed, leaving him without a shred of income. Due to his father’s demise, he owed Her Majesty’s government an exorbitant amount of money in death duties, and given his current lack of writing success and his formerly lavish lifestyle, he had other debts as well. His estate in Devonshire was already heavily mortgaged, and what with the agricultural woes that had been plaguing the British economy, Avermore Park wasn’t likely to produce much in the way of income anyway. His financial situation was grim indeed.
Unlike him, however, Lord Marlowe was a very rich man, and Sebastian might soon be forced to request another advance from him on the nonexistent next book. Whatever joke Marlowe was having at his expense by sending Miss Merrick here, it was best to be civil. And though she might be an opinionated spinster with a devilish supply of impudence, she was far prettier to look at than a blank sheet of paper.
“You’re a wise man, Wilton,” he said. “Where have you put the girl? In the drawing room, I suppose?” When the butler nodded, he went on, “Very well. Tell her I shall be down directly.”
Wilton was not so ill-bred as to display any sign of relief, but Sebastian sensed it just the same. “Yes, sir,” the butler answered and withdrew.
Sebastian did not follow at once. Instead, he lingered behind, trying to fathom what Harry was up to, but after a few moments, he was forced to give it up. His publisher was an unaccountable fellow at times, and there was no point in guessing what crazy notion he’d gotten into his head. Sebastian rolled down his cuffs and fastened them with his cuff links, then gave a tug to the hem of his slate-blue waistcoat, raked his fingers through his hair to put the unruly strands in some sort of order, and smoothed his dark blue necktie. He went down to the drawing room and paused beside the open doorway.
Miss Merrick’s appearance, he noted as he took a peek around the doorjamb, was much the same as before. The same sort of plain, starched white shirtwaist, paired with a green skirt this time. Ribbons of darker green accented her collar and straw boater. She was seated at one end of the long yellow sofa, her hands resting on her thighs. Her fingers drummed against her knees and her toes tapped the floor in an agitated fashion, as if she was nervous. At her feet was a leather dispatch case.
He eyed the dispatch case, appalled. What if Harry wanted him to read her novel and give an endorsement? His publisher did have a perverse sense of humor. It would be just like Harry to pretend he was publishing the girl and blackmail Sebastian into reading eight hundred pages of bad prose before telling him it was all a joke. Or—and this was an even more nauseating possibility—she might actually be good, Harry did intend to publish her book, and they truly did want his endorsement.
Either way, he wasn’t interested. Striving not to appear as grim as he felt, Sebastian pasted on a smile and entered the drawing room. “Miss Merrick, this is an unexpected pleasure.”
She rose from the sofa as he crossed the room to greet her, and in response to his bow, she gave a curtsy. “Lord Avermore.”
He glanced at the clock on the mantel, noting it was a quarter to five. Regardless of the fact that it was inappropriate for her to call upon a bachelor unchaperoned, the proper thing for any gentleman to do in these circumstances was to offer her tea. Sebastian’s sense of civility, however, did not extend that far. “My butler tells me you have come at Lord Marlowe’s request?”
“Yes. The viscount left London today for Torquay. He intends to spend the summer there with his family. Before he departed, however, he asked me to call upon you on his behalf regarding a matter of business.”
So it was a request for an endorsement. “An author and his sternest critic meeting at the request of their mutual publisher to discuss business?” he murmured, keeping his smile in place even as he wondered how best to make the words ‘not a chance in hell’ sound civil. “What an extraordinary notion.”
“It is a bit unorthodox,” she agreed.
He lean
ed closer to her, adopting a confidential, author-to-author sort of manner. “That’s Marlowe all over. He’s always been a bit eccentric. Perhaps he’s gone off his onion at last.”
“Lord Avermore, I know my review injured your feelings—”
“Your review and the seven others that came after it,” he interrupted pleasantly. “They closed the play, you know.”
“I heard that, yes.” She bit her lip. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged as if the loss of several thousand pounds was a thing of no consequence whatsoever. “It’s quite all right, petal. I only contemplated hurling myself in front of a train once, before I came to my senses.” He paused, but he couldn’t resist adding, “Hauling you to Victoria Station, on the other hand, still holds a certain appeal, I must confess.”
She gave a sigh, looking unhappy. As well she should. “I can appreciate that you are upset, but—”
“My dear girl, I am not in the least upset,” he felt compelled to assure her. “I was being flippant. In all truth, I feel quite all right. You see, I have followed your advice.”
“My advice?”
“Yes. I have chosen to be open-minded, to take your review in the proper spirit, and learn from your critique.” He spread his hands, palms up in a gesture of goodwill. “After all,” he added genially, “of what use to a writer is mere praise?”
She didn’t seem to perceive the sarcasm. “Oh,” she breathed and pressed one palm to her chest with a little laugh, “I am so relieved to hear you say that. When the viscount told me why he wanted me to come see you, I was concerned you would resent the situation, but your words give me hope that we will be able to work together in an amicable fashion.”
Uneasiness flickered inside him. “Work together?” he echoed, his brows drawing together in bewilderment, though he forced himself to keep smiling.
“Yes. You see…” She paused, and her smile faded to a serious expression. She took a deep breath, as if readying herself to impart a difficult piece of news. “Lord Marlowe has employed me to assist you.”
With Seduction in Mind Page 6
