The Lawrence Browne Affair

by Cat Sebastian

  Even the sounds didn’t belong: an owl called from far too short a distance, and wind rustled through bare trees only yards away. And further off, the sound of something like hoofbeats and carriage wheels, but it couldn’t be, since the roads all bypassed Penkellis. It wasn’t as if his lordship expected visitors, Georgie reflected gloomily.

  He crossed the room, blindly reached for a book, and found himself holding what was little more than a handful of pulp. Still gripping that sad corpse of a book, he turned on his heel and marched upstairs.

  Lawrence had very nearly fallen asleep when he was startled to full consciousness by a pounding on his door.

  “Radnor!” It was the secretary, damn him. “Radnor, open this door!”

  That was quite a lot of pounding. Perhaps the house was on fire. Lawrence very nearly smiled at the thought of Penkellis lying in a heap of rubble and ashes.

  The door swung open, revealing Turner poised on the threshold, lit only by the moonlight. “What’s the meaning of this?” Turner asked, waving something at Lawrence.

  Lawrence sat up in bed. Try as he might, he couldn’t smell smoke or detect any other signs of a conflagration. “How the fuck should I know?”

  “Then I’ll tell you,” Turner continued, undeterred by Lawrence’s coarse language. “You have a library of hundreds—if not thousands—of books downstairs, and you let them rot.” So it was a book Turner was waving about, brandishing like a weapon. “Do you have any idea what that does to any person of sense? It’s obscene, I tell you.”

  “I don’t give a damn about the library.”

  “Plainly not! But you could have given the books to a school, or . . . I don’t know, a lending library.”

  It was the middle of the night. Even Lawrence thought this a strange hour to discuss lending libraries. “But I didn’t, so kindly get out of my bedroom.”

  Turner made no move to leave. “It ought to be cleaned out, to check whether anything is salvageable. Why did the servants not see to it? I understood that you had more servants in residence until recently.”

  “Damned if I know. I’m not a housekeeper. Perhaps they were lazy. Perhaps they liked rotten paper. Perhaps you ought to get out of here before I lose my patience entirely.” Lawrence narrowed his eyes, a terrible idea occurring to him. “Unless you plan to share my bed. Perhaps all this fuss about a couple of moldy books was only a pretense for you to gain entry to my bedchamber.” Now, that ought to get rid of the man.

  Turner went utterly still, and for a moment Lawrence thought he might scurry away as he ought.

  But then Turner’s posture relaxed into something sinewy and dangerous. His mouth curved slowly into a smile that had Lawrence cursing himself for not keeping a fire or a lamp or anything that would illuminate the man. To Lawrence’s mingled horror and wonderment, Turner began to laugh, soft and low. “If that was meant to frighten me, you’re wide of the mark, my lord. To be frank, you’re punching above your weight.”

  Did that mean what Lawrence thought it meant? Or, rather, what Lawrence’s prick thought it meant? Because God knew his brain wasn’t capable of any thought whatsoever. Lawrence became intensely aware that he was in his bed, shirtless, in the middle of the night. And he had just told his secretary a good deal more than he meant.

  Lawrence would have sworn that Turner’s dark, dark eyes dipped low at that moment, to skim over Lawrence’s bare torso. But no, that couldn’t be. It had to be a trick of the moonlight.

  Years ago, immediately after his father’s burial, Lawrence had escaped Penkellis in order to join his brother in London. There, among Percy’s group of broad-minded friends, he had finally met men who shared his own inclinations. But Percy’s set had all been utterly crackbrained, a bunch of half-mad, thoroughly drunk, opium-eating libertines. Any practice or desire Lawrence found in common with them seemed proof of his own incipient madness. It had been a chaos of hedonism, of freedom, of all the things he had been denied. He had started to believe he was as bad as Percy, or perhaps even as deranged as his father had always insisted, and when one of Percy’s friend’s sisters fell pregnant by a married man, Lawrence had volunteered to marry the girl. They had fled back to Penkellis, and he had never left.

  The room-spinning giddiness he felt at Turner’s hungry glance echoed that mad whirl of pleasure he had experienced in London. It seemed further confirmation that his mind was unbalanced. Surely it was not normal for the room to whirl about in such a way.

  Apparently recovering his composure, Turner coolly tossed the book onto Lawrence’s bed and turned towards the door.

  “If you must know,” Lawrence said, suddenly not wanting Turner to leave quite yet, “the library was already a lost cause when I inherited. My brother had a fancy for ruins and wished to see how long it would take for Penkellis to crumble.”

  “A pity he’s not alive to see his dreams come to fruition.” Turner’s mouth was a tight line.

  “No.” Lawrence’s jaw set. “Not a pity.” He picked up the book Turner had brought and examined its spine. The moon was full, but he could barely make out the faded title. The Discourses of Epicetus. “Are you much interested in Greek?” he asked, surprised.

  “What? No, not in the least.”

  “The library is mostly Greek, with a bit of Latin here and there. My grandfather bought books at random to fill in the shelves.” Lawrence had salvaged anything of interest to him at the first sign of Percy’s neglect. “Except the pornography, which my brother sold to one of his wastrel friends.” And if that wasn’t Percy in a nutshell, then nothing was. “But if you’re looking for something to read, you’re free to borrow anything you find in the study.”

  Turner tilted his head a bit, as if he hadn’t quite understood. “Thank you,” he said, after a moment. “But I’ve already read most of your notes and correspondence, and I’ve made a dent in the scientific papers.”

  If Lawrence had been standing, he might have fallen over. “You have?”

  “Well, yes. Of course I have. Any secretary would.” Perhaps it was Lawrence’s imagination, but the man didn’t seem quite certain of that fact. “I would be of little use to you if I were ignorant of your work.”

  An idea occurred to Lawrence, something even more daring and dangerous than his foolish jest about sharing a bed. “Are you by any chance interested in natural philosophy, Mr. Turner?”

  The secretary shifted on his feet, looking discomfited for the first time since arriving at Penkellis. “Perhaps.”

  “Because it seems to me that you’d have to be, in order to read that quantity of material in”—he wrangled with the always-slippery days and hours to calculate how long he thought Turner had been here—“two days.”

  “I have a good many interests.” Turner sounded defensive, as if Lawrence were accusing him of prurient interests rather than scientific ambitions. In fact, when Lawrence had suggested that he had prurient interests, Turner had only laughed.

  The prospect of conversing with an actual human being who shared his interests almost stupefied Lawrence. Imagine, being able to talk about the relative merits of brine and acid as electrolyte solutions, rather than depending on the post to communicate with Standish or one of his other correspondents. It was something he had never dared to so much as hope for.

  “I could . . . if you wished, I could teach you.” If there had been enough light in the room for Turner to see him, Lawrence might not have had the courage to speak. But since he was facing away from the window, all the moonlight fell on Turner’s face, not Lawrence’s own.

  And Turner’s face, coolly impassive as ever, revealed nothing. This was not the face of a man with a burning desire to hear about voltaic piles. It was certainly not the face of a man who was harboring carnal desires towards his employer. Of course it wasn’t. Lawrence must be growing even more delusional.

  “Never mind. I have neither the time nor the temperament for tutoring secretaries in natural philosophy.”

  There was a pause that lasted to
o long. “Good night, my lord.” And then Turner left, closing the door soundlessly behind him.

  Only later did Lawrence realize that for the first time in years, perhaps ever, he felt disappointed to be left alone. As sleep eluded him, he sought comfort in the certainty that he preferred solitude, that he hated being bothered with company, and that therefore he could not now be lonely.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Explain it again.” Slooooowly, Georgie wanted to add. He leaned back in his chair and waited for the show.

  At some point over the last few days, Radnor’s coat had gone missing. Probably Georgie ought to make some effort to find it. But he wouldn’t, not so long as the man kept working in shirtsleeves, rolled up to expose thick forearms that were dusted with hair.

  “No,” Radnor said, his voice gravelly and his tone rude. “I’ve already explained it twice. You don’t seem like an imbecile, which means you’re being deliberately obtuse.”

  True, Georgie already more or less grasped the concept, but as Radnor talked, he stroked his beard with those big hands. Georgie could watch him all day. It wasn’t a burden to listen to him either. Radnor didn’t have the slick and polished drawl of most of his peers. Instead his voice rumbled and slurred, lilted and skipped. He looked and sounded more like a blacksmith or a woodcutter than an earl.

  And somehow, without either of them ever alluding to their conversation in the earl’s bedchamber, Georgie had become Radnor’s pupil. Instead of grunting and swearing, Radnor favored Georgie with technical explanations and disquisitions on some Italian fellow. Georgie, who fancied himself more skilled in faking an education than in actually acquiring knowledge, was surprised by how drawn he was to Radnor’s world of invisible particles. He felt like he was in on a secret that few others knew.

  “Now you repeat it back to me,” Radnor commanded. “I’ll tell you when you’ve got it wrong.” He sat, propping his feet on the table that held the device he had finished assembling that morning. Composed of metal and wire, scraps of cloth, and fragile-looking tubes of acid, it looked like something that would be equally at home in a sorcerer’s workshop or a torture chamber. It was hard to say which looked more dangerous, the equipment or its burly, scowling creator.

  “All right.” Georgie smoothed his trousers and crossed the newly cleared floor. It had taken the better part of a week, but Georgie had made progress with this sty of a room. The papers were properly cataloged; the rubbish was burnt in the fire he insisted the earl let him light. He had even brought a kitchen cat upstairs to frighten away the mice, despite Barnabus’s vocal chagrin. He truly wished someone else were here to bear witness to all he had accomplished, because God knew Radnor didn’t seem to notice or care. But Georgie felt like a magician.

  For one reckless moment, he thought that maybe honest work wasn’t such a bad idea after all. But no. If a man were born in the gutter, honest work couldn’t take him far enough away from it. He would always be able to smell the stink of the gutter, waiting for him with one month’s missed rent, one costly doctor’s visit. Georgie wanted to be safer than that. Needed to be safer than that.

  “This,” Georgie said, pointing at one part of the apparatus, “is a stack of disks that will kill me if I touch them at the wrong time.”

  “It’s called a pile, or a battery, and the disks are copper and zinc electrodes.”

  “And I die if I touch them. Don’t forget that part.”

  The earl made a grumbly noise that Georgie took to mean that death was a trifling, petty scruple. “I may have exaggerated the danger. Or maybe I didn’t. Either way, don’t touch.”

  Georgie’s eyebrows shot up. Was that humor he had detected in the earl’s tone? Wonders never ceased. “In between each disk is a piece of your bed quilt that you cut up and soaked in seawater.”

  “Electrolyte,” Radnor corrected. When he frowned, which was almost always, his eyebrows were dark diagonal slashes across his forehead.

  “And this,” Georgie said, pointing to what looked like a pair of miniature trestles connected by wires, “is what will burn the house down or eat a hole in the floor, depending on how things wind up going awry.”

  “Electric telegraph.” If Radnor had detected the facetiousness in Georgie’s tone, he did not acknowledge it.

  “Right.” The trestle had thirty-odd wires, each in a glass tube filled with some doubtlessly poisonous liquid. The wires coiled together for a yard, then separated where they connected to another small trestle. At each point where the wires met the trestles, a letter or number was inked on the wood in Georgie’s own neat hand. “On one trestle, you apply the current to the wire for whichever letter you wish to send, and bubbles pop up on the other trestle next to the corresponding letter.”

  “More or less,” Radnor conceded.

  “Has anyone managed to make something like this work? To actually send a message, I mean?” Georgie tried not to sound as if he were really asking if the earl was deluded.

  When Radnor rubbed the back of his neck with one broad hand, a strand of hair the same color as the copper disks escaped his queue. “A fellow in Munich did something similar. And Standish will try once I send him the final plans.”

  By now, Georgie did not need to ask who Standish was. For all he was a hermit, the earl was an enthusiastic letter writer who maintained regular correspondence with several men of science. Every post brought a stack of letters.

  “With longer wires, messages could be sent over greater distances,” Radnor continued.

  “From the house to the village?”

  “From the coast to London, more like.”

  Georgie arched an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of wire.”

  “And a lot of tubing to protect it. Perhaps if it were only one wire,” Radnor murmured. “But I can’t see what use a single signal would be.”

  Georgie was about to open his mouth to agree but then remembered tapping a warning onto a closed door, the night watchman peering through the window of a warehouse Georgie’s friends were burgling. Before he even knew his letters, he had learned the taps and scratches that boys used to communicate with one another during robberies. Georgie was slight and dark and very quick, the perfect lookout. Three taps on the window pane meant the watchman was coming, hold still. Six taps meant cut loose and run fast. Four scratches meant all clear. But he couldn’t very well tell the earl any of that.

  There were other signals too. A finger held at the hip meant take care, this cove has a knife. A tip of the cap followed by crossed arms meant let’s dive into this bloke’s pockets. All these little gestures—a secret language used for centuries by thieves to ply their trade and keep one another safe. And it was all lost to him, maybe forever. He was as good as exiled, transported to a land where nobody spoke his native tongue.

  “Three taps could mean an unfriendly ship has been sighted. Two taps could mean a storm off the coast. That sort of thing,” Georgie suggested.

  Radnor was staring at him with an unreadable expression. Most of Radnor’s expressions were unreadable, to be fair. There was frustration and impatience, but the rest were totally opaque. Perhaps it was the beard.

  “And the message would travel faster than a horse?” Georgie asked, trying to return to a safe topic.

  Suddenly Radnor smiled, such a totally unexpected sight, Georgie very nearly smiled helplessly in return. “Yes, faster than a horse.”

  “Faster even than a very fast horse?”

  Now the smile was even broader, almost wolfish, and the earl folded his hands behind his head. “A message would travel from Penkellis to London in a matter of minutes, if only the wires could be placed.”

  Minutes. That sounded too good to be true. If Georgie were to gull marks into investing in this device, nobody would believe it. They’d spot him for a fraud immediately.

  An idea came to him, dangerous and brilliant, like a knife in the dark. He could sell this device. Or, better yet, he could steal the plans and give them to Brewster. There might be enough va
lue in the device to buy Georgie’s clemency, to earn his return to the world he missed, to protect Sarah and Jack. He could get his life back.

  But he couldn’t very well write a letter announcing his whereabouts and hinting vaguely at a contraption that might theoretically result in almost instant communication from the coast to London but might instead be the delusion of a madman. Brewster would send someone to kill him, make no mistake.

  Georgie would wait and see if Radnor’s device worked. Then he would draw up plans, complete and detailed, and use them to broker a deal with Mattie Brewster.

  Radnor wouldn’t like it, once he found out that his former secretary had deceived him, had stolen the fruits of his labor. But that was his problem; he was wealthy and titled and could do without one poxy contraption. Georgie stamped out any stray thought that suggested otherwise.

  “All right.” Georgie sat at one end of the table. “Let’s get this thing working. Send me a message.”

  Lawrence stared at the wires. If he were a proper man of science, instead of a tinkering eccentric, he’d have already thought up a suitable message, likely something in Latin, something fittingly grand for the first use of this device. He looked down the table at his secretary, as if Turner’s too-handsome face would hold an answer. But Turner only looked patient, expectant. Likely bored.

  Bugger Latin. He tapped out a few letters. Anxiously, he waited, watching the bubbles rise on the opposite end of the device, watching his secretary’s face as he deciphered the message.

  Turner’s mouth quirked up in a small, surprised smile. Not bored now. “Truly? You, you, my lord”—he raked his gaze over Lawrence’s sloppily attired person—“are commenting on my mode of dress?”

  Lawrence’s message had been short. Thirteen characters. Thatwaistcoat. Turner didn’t look the slightest bit offended, though. Likely he took Lawrence’s sartorial judgment for what it was worth—which was to say precisely naught. “I don’t think there’s been red embroidery within ten leagues of Penkellis in my lifetime.”