The Lawrence Browne Affair

by Cat Sebastian

  “I’ll be sure to parade it through the village later on, then. If your contraption hasn’t killed me, that is.” He smoothed one hand down his waistcoat, his long fingers as finely wrought as the embroidered flowers that swirled and twisted across the gray silk of the fabric. “And I’ll have you know that my sister, who is an expert in matters of dress, assures me that the thread is scarlet, not anything so vulgar as red.”

  He was joking, Lawrence realized. That arch smile was meant to be playful. It was for Lawrence’s own benefit. Lawrence could hardly remember a time when smiles were for him. Had Isabella smiled at any point during their marriage? Father and Percy had never smiled at anyone. Simon had smiled at him, though, toothless and absurd.

  He shook his head, clearing the thought, sending it back to gather dust with the rest of the things he wasn’t to think of.

  It was, he understood, his turn to talk. He needed to say something that matched Turner’s tone. He wasn’t capable of witticism; he could no more engage in banter than he could fly. “Your sister is an expert on dress,” was what he settled on, forgetting to make the words into a question.

  “She’s a dressmaker. A modiste,” Turner amended. “In London.”

  Lawrence imagined Turner surrounded by bolts of brightly colored fabrics, running his hands along smooth silk and soft velvet. Perhaps the sulfurous scent of the electrolysis was affecting his thoughts, because he could almost hear the rustle of the costly fabrics as they gave way under Turner’s touch. He must have let his reverie go on too long because Turner sat back in his chair and rolled his eyes.

  “Yes, I know. You expected to have a gentleman as a secretary, but you’re a shocking brute, so you’re stuck with me.”

  It took Lawrence a moment to grasp what Turner meant. “Oh, that’s not . . . Wait.” He furrowed his eyebrows, reaching for the question he needed to ask to make sense of this. “You’re not a gentleman’s son.” Of course he wasn’t. Lawrence ought to have known that any son of a proper English gentleman wouldn’t take kindly to being targeted with flying books or addressed in terse profanities. But then what was the man doing as a secretary, a position generally held by the third sons of impoverished vicars?

  Now Turner was regarding him with a look Lawrence recognized as exasperation. “I’m not a gentleman, full stop. And I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except that I don’t expect you care.” He looked strangely thoughtful now.

  This was why it was safer to communicate in scowls and monosyllables. Safer still was to avoid people entirely. He put his foot wrong as soon as he started a conversation. He ruffled feathers without even knowing he had encountered a bird.

  “No more talking,” Lawrence muttered. “I’ll send another message.” This time he transmitted the alphabet. No more waistcoats, no more friendly conversation.

  The alphabet transmission took bloody near forever, but it went through without a short circuit. Tomorrow he would try with longer wires and see if he could replicate this small success. Perhaps if he were farther away from Turner, everything would return to normal.

  Just then, an ungodly noise came from outside, shouting mingled with what sounded like the death cry of a wounded animal. “What the devil is that?” he asked.

  Turner was on his feet and at the window in a flash. “It looks like a cart got mired and overturned. The driver and your cook are unhitching the horse and—lord, she’s giving him quite the dressing down. She has a lot to say about the man’s intellect and parentage, and something about ‘in broad daylight,’ although I can’t imagine she’d prefer a cart to overturn at midnight. I almost feel bad for the poor bastard. Do you think you could go and help them set the cart upright?”

  Lawrence managed to choke out a rough, “No.” His heart was louder than the horse’s panicked neighing, louder than the cook’s scolds. Damn it. Curse his blasted brain. It was only noise—jarring and incessant but only noise. For God’s sake, nobody liked the cries of a wounded animal, nobody liked the distressed shrieking of a woman, but as far as Lawrence knew he was the only one who was provoked into fits by these commonplace disturbances.

  Instinctively, he dropped his hand to his side, groping for Barnabus, who seemed to have an instinct for knowing when he was needed. But the dog was in exile this afternoon, Turner having insisted that one errant wag of Barnabus’s tail would result in all three of them being killed and Penkellis burning to the ground. Lawrence struggled to fill his lungs with air.

  Turner still watched the show out the window. “I understand that it’s beneath you, but really I only have the one pair of boots, and I’m not ruining them. Besides, you’re nearly twice my size, so you’d be of more use to them than I’d ever be.”

  “I said no,” Lawrence ground out. “I cannot.”

  Turner looked over his shoulder and appeared to notice what kind of condition Lawrence was in. His eyes went wide. “No, I don’t suppose you can.” He stepped away from the window. Likely he’d come up with a pretext for leaving. But instead, he crossed the room and crouched beside Lawrence’s chair.

  Lawrence didn’t dare look up. He felt a hand on his shoulder, just the lightest touch, but so unexpected and so unfamiliar that it sent him careening closer to absolute panic. “Are you all right? No, that’s a silly question, of course you aren’t. What do you usually do when you’re, ah, discomposed?” Turner’s voice was as cool as ever, as if there was nothing alarming about being in close proximity to Lawrence. As if this was all totally normal and Lawrence wasn’t having an episode right here in front of his secretary.

  Lawrence shook his head.

  Turner squeezed Lawrence’s shoulder. Surely the gesture was simply meant to be reassuring, and it might even have worked on someone whose world wasn’t already tilting off its axis.

  “I need to lie down.” He stood up immediately, intending to shut himself in his bedchamber until he felt reasonably sane. But because he could not manage the simplest blasted thing without disaster, he knocked over his chair and lost his footing. He was going to crash into the table, ruining days of work. Suddenly he found himself supported by a pair of wiry arms.

  All Lawrence’s thoughts dissolved into a sea of Turner’s confounded scent and the warm puff of the man’s breath against his neck.

  “Whoa, there,” Turner said. “Steady now.” His grip shifted to Lawrence’s arms, the hot trail of his touch plunging Lawrence into further confusion.

  Lawrence should have looked away, stepped away, done anything to get away, but he bloody obviously wasn’t thinking straight that morning. Instead, as he righted himself, he found himself gazing down into the other man’s face, close enough to see the shadow of a beard on Turner’s jaw. What was that expression—not pity, not annoyance. Concern?

  Lawrence suddenly felt a flush of heat. He slid his fingers under the collar of his shirt, trying to free his burning skin. He ought to have gone outside to chop firewood or mend a fence minutes or hours ago. Hell, he ought to be locked in an institution where he could quietly go mad without anyone to bear witness.

  Turner pressed one of his hands against the small of Lawrence’s back, steering him towards the sofa. There was more strength in the secretary than he might have expected in such a slender man. Not a gentleman, he remembered, but he was too rattled to think about what that meant.

  “I’m fine,” Lawrence said, a bald-faced lie.

  “Quite,” Turner agreed, gamely playing along. “Sit anyway.”

  Lawrence sat.

  And then he felt a gust of fresh air, a blessed relief. Turner had opened a window.

  “There we go.” Turner’s cool, clipped London voice came from across the room. “And how about this one too? Your cook has everything under control, and there’s no more commotion.” More cold air as Turner threw the remainder of the windows open.

  It took him a few seconds before he remembered to breathe, before he could make himself believe that this moment would pass—at least this time. In the future, he’d be car
ried away by stray feelings and dangerous notions as surely as his father and brother had been, and it would end the same for him as it had for them: madness, followed by death.

  He tried to watch the motes of dust caught in the breeze that blew through the open windows. He forced himself to listen to something other than the drumming of his heart—the crows calling to one another outside, the wind whipping through the bare branches of the trees around Penkellis, the ivy scratching against the windows. Beneath his clammy fingers was the familiar rough, pilled damask upholstery of the sofa. After some time, his heart resumed something like a normal rhythm and his thoughts slowed down.

  Slumping, he tipped his head against the back of the seat. “Damn,” he said.

  “Indeed,” Turner said. He was somewhere nearby, a slim silhouette off to the side, but Lawrence did not allow himself to look. “Do loud noises bring on these episodes? Or is it something else?”

  Lawrence shook his head. Noise was only the beginning. “I need things to be predictable,” he said, all too conscious of how pathetic that must sound. But Turner only nodded and looked thoughtful. “You ought to leave,” Lawrence said. “Go back to London.”

  Silence. “Am I being sacked?” There was an edge in the man’s voice.

  He ought to say yes, and he might have, but for some reason he didn’t want to insult Turner. “No. What I mean is that you’re free to leave. I’m not safe to be near. Surely you can see that for yourself.”

  “What I see is a man who had a moment of . . . I don’t rightly know what. Nothing remotely unsafe, though.”

  Lawrence could have laughed at the man’s naïveté. “Go home, Mr. Turner.”

  Turner snorted, such an unexpectedly rude noise from the polished and tidy secretary that Lawrence turned to look at him before he could remember that it was a bad idea. The man was leaning against the wall between the two open windows, his ordinarily smooth hair ruffled by the wind.

  “Oh, how nice to be an earl,” he said, “and not have to worry your tangled head about how other people keep body and soul together. I was counting on this position, my lord.”

  “You’d rather stay here and be killed?” Lawrence challenged.

  For some reason this made Turner laugh. “Are you planning to kill me?” Bland unconcern, not a trace of fear. “Somehow I doubt it.”

  Lawrence stared at him. “I threw a book at you before I had known you even a quarter of an hour.”

  “Oh, you’ll have to do better than that. Where I come from people stab one another when they’re serious about doing harm. My own father was in the habit of throwing chairs when he didn’t get his way—when we had chairs, which wasn’t often by any means. The rest of the time he threw empty bottles of gin. A book? Six inches clear to the left of my head? Either you have pathetically poor aim—and it can’t be that, since you manage an ax competently enough—or you only wanted to pester me.”

  Pester? Pester? Lawrence stood and crossed the room in two easy strides. His sense of panic from earlier was quite gone, replaced by the urgent and inane need to prove that he was a threat to his secretary’s safety. “You’ve heard of my brother? My father?” He saw recognition in the secretary’s expression. “I am from the same stock. The same blood. The same brutish body, the same dangerous mind. You ought to go to London, I tell you.”

  Turner arched a single elegant eyebrow. “They say your brother murdered his mistress and disposed of her body and that he somehow contrived to kill his wife. Are you in the habit of murdering women?”

  Lawrence shook his head in frustration. “No, but—”

  “Men?” Turner asked, and surely it was Lawrence’s imagination that the man’s voice went silkily suggestive on that single syllable, as if he were not talking about murder but something else entirely.

  “I’m not in the habit of murdering anyone, for God’s sake.”

  “Do you wish you were?” Turner’s tone was now conversational, as if he were asking whether Lawrence took his tea with lemon or milk.

  “Of course not, but you’re missing the point.” With a single, menacing forefinger, Lawrence touched Turner’s chest. He had meant for the gesture to be intimidating, but it felt strangely intimate. Before he knew what had happened, Turner had taken hold of Lawrence’s large, calloused hands in his own fine ones. Lawrence didn’t know if the man was motivated by kindness or self-defense, but he found that he was holding hands with a person for the first time since he was a child.

  “Here’s how I see it, my lord.” Turner’s voice was cool and unconcerned. “You’re not quite cut from the same cloth as most people. But you’re hardly mad or dangerous.”

  Not cut from the same cloth? The sheer understatement ought to have been amusing. Lawrence tried to focus on the need to get through to Turner, but all he could think about was the warmth of Turner’s skin against his own. “You yourself pointed out that the telegraph and battery could kill us.” Which may have been a lie Lawrence made up to keep his secretary’s hands off the device, but it also served the purpose of convincing Turner that he was employed by a dangerous lunatic.

  Turner rolled his eyes. “Please. This time of year, men go about the countryside shooting pheasants and acting like it’s perfectly normal when one of them comes home peppered with shot. Nobody calls those fools mad.”

  “You’ve been here a week.” Lawrence tried to master himself despite the light pressure of his secretary’s fingers against his wrists. “You can’t possibly think this household is normal.”

  “Of course it isn’t normal. You eat nothing but ham and apples, for God’s sake. You dress like a stableman. And your house is a shambles. But if none of that bothers you, then it doesn’t bother me.”

  “Bothering doesn’t enter into it, damn you—”

  “And I suppose if that’s what it takes for you to accomplish everything you’ve done, then so be it.”

  “Accomplish?” God damn it, Turner was stroking the inside of Lawrence’s wrists with his thumbs. And for some reason Lawrence seemed to feel this touch in his cock. Was there a nerve that went from the wrist to the prick? Another sign of incipient madness, then.

  “Your inventions. The communication device.”

  The telegraph. God yes. He tried not to think of how badly he wanted it to work, to have a way to remain in his refuge but perhaps not be quite so isolated. “Nearly all my servants have quit,” he said, returning the conversation to the solid ground of his lunacy.

  “Yes, well, that is interesting,” Turner said. “I’ve been wondering about that. Did you notice they left without pocketing any of your valuables?”

  “What?” Perhaps it was the way Turner was leaning against the wall, looking up at him through a thick fringe of lashes, that made Lawrence’s cock feel so heavy.

  “I assure you, the standard procedure when taking leave of a violent and despised employer is to nick a candlestick or, at the very least, a couple of teacups.” Turner’s voice was only loud enough to be heard a few inches away. “But that didn’t happen here. There’s such a quantity of dust and cobwebs around the house that one would see straightaway if anything had been removed, and it’s quite clear that nothing has been disturbed.”

  “What on earth does that have to do with anything?”

  “If you’re such a dangerous monster, such a trial to serve, then why wouldn’t a servant help himself to a bit of silver? In the name of justice, naturally.”

  “Justice?”

  “That’s what they’d tell themselves, you understand.”

  He certainly did not, but gathered that Turner did. Not a gentleman, Lawrence repeated to himself. Perhaps not a secretary either. “Even so, all but a handful of my servants quit over a month ago.”

  “Two. You have two servants left. A cook and a maid, both thoroughly indolent. Sally Ferris and a girl named Janet.”

  Sally Ferris. Lawrence’s mind reeled. Of all the people to willingly stay under this roof. Good God. He’d have thought she’d be the fir
st to leave under any pretense. “You’d do best to follow the example of the others. Most of them grew up nearby and know more than you do about the madness in my family,” he managed to say.

  “Precisely,” Turner said. “I intend to figure out what exactly they know and why they haven’t taken so much as a teaspoon.”

  Lawrence twisted his hands out of Turner’s strong grip, placing them flat on the wall next to the secretary’s head. He took a step closer, caging the smaller man in.

  “Do you not understand what I mean by danger?” Lawrence growled. “To hell with candlesticks and to hell with telegraphs. I’m talking about you and me. Do you not realize that I’m nearly twice your size?”

  Turner made a noise at the back of his throat. His lips were slightly parted, his breathing fast. Was that fear? If so, good. It was about time.

  They were so close. If Lawrence took another fraction of a step, his hardening prick would press into Turner’s belly, right against the brightly embroidered waistcoat that had started this trouble.

  “I could murder you without breaking a sweat, if that’s what I wanted to do,” he said.

  Ducking out from under Lawrence’s arm, Turner shot him a wry look that he couldn’t make heads or tails of. “But that’s not what you want to do to me, is it?” he asked, heading for the door. He threw a look over his shoulder, one side of his mouth curved into a sly grin. “Not even close.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  A stream of obscenities came from the table where Radnor assembled his machine.

  “Another short circuit, my lord?”

  “God damn it, yes, and you fucking know it.”

  Radnor had added more disks to the pile and for some reason the result was a series of short circuits and a very surly earl.

  “If I may say so, my lord, I seem to recall reading that another gentleman encountered this very problem.” Georgie had discovered that the earl hated any suggestion of deference or servility, so he heaped it on thick when he wanted to provoke a display of snarling profanity.

  “I know that, damn you, but I can’t remember what he did about it.”