The Lawrence Browne Affair

by Cat Sebastian

  I owe him, Georgie had said. Bollocks on owing. Bollocks on debt. Georgie was his own man, free to live his own life, and anyone who argued otherwise would have to answer to Lawrence. Georgie had made that point to Lawrence again and again—that Lawrence didn’t need to repeat his father’s or brother’s sins or even atone for them. He was his own man, and he could live his own life. Lawrence was going to make that happen for Georgie.

  He knocked on the door and, when asked, uttered the inane password. The door was opened by a man in rolled-up shirtsleeves and dirty trousers who looked warily at Barnabus. Lawrence was momentarily astonished by the man’s dishevelment, before recalling that this was precisely how he had dressed only a few weeks earlier. Self-consciously, he smoothed his gloved fingers down the lapels of his spotless coat, a tangible reminder of Georgie’s care.

  The man gestured wordlessly for Lawrence to precede him up two steep, rickety flights of stairs. At the top was a sort of landing with nothing but a flimsy-looking door. Could Brewster be protected by nothing more than a few sets of stairs and a cheap door? But then again, Lawrence was learning that power wasn’t measured in fine buildings and armored doors but rather in what one could make other people do.

  The door swung open, revealing a dim room lit only by the late afternoon light that streamed through a few small windows. A handful of men stood around the perimeter, their watchful eyes turned to Lawrence’s entrance. In a chair, with his back to the window, sat a man whose features Lawrence couldn’t distinguish in the dark, but from his placement and the way the other men oriented themselves with regard to him, he had to be Brewster.

  “Mattie Brewster?” Lawrence asked, addressing the man in the chair. “You’re not to lay a finger on Georgie Turner.”

  The seated man laughed, a disconcertingly affable sound. “And who are you to be telling me what to do with my fingers?”

  Lawrence had been prepared for a rough accent, a voice that sounded of vice and crime. But this man sounded like a genial cockney costermonger.

  “I’m Radnor.” He wasn’t certain if the criminal classes were up to date on the peerage, so he added, “Lawrence Browne, Earl of Radnor.”

  But Brewster responded promptly. “I lent money to your brother when he was at Oxford. He was a nasty bastard.”

  “And I’m worse. Which is why you aren’t going to touch Turner.”

  “Oh, but it’s a bit late for that, you see.” He gestured to a shadowy corner that held a bundle of rags. The bundle of rags moved, and Lawrence saw that it was a person. A dirty, unshaven, badly—

  It was Georgie.

  Fear gripped Lawrence like a tight band around his chest, but he didn’t let any emotion show on his face. He was pretending to be a half-mad, ruthless, dangerous man, not a lovestruck schoolboy. He sauntered over to one of the windows and calmly put his fist through it. From somewhere behind him came the sharp intake of breath. Good. He was making precisely the impression he sought. “Let him go. Bow Street knows where I am.” Which was true—Lawrence hadn’t made any secret of his intentions. “You have”—he shook the glass from his glove and pulled out his watch—“a bit less than a quarter of an hour to make yourselves scarce before the thief takers show up. Give me Turner, and you’ll have just enough time to get out of here.”

  At the mention of Bow Street, a few of the men around the edges of the room shifted.

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then I take out my pistol, and presumably one of your men shoots me dead. You’re tried as an accessory to the murder of a peer. Not an enviable position.” He didn’t even look at Georgie but heard a faint sound of protest come from that corner. So very faint that Lawrence felt certain Georgie was hurt, but it would ruin his act if he showed the least bit of human concern. “While we’re on the topic, if any single hair on Mr. Turner’s head is hurt at any point in the remainder of his life, I’ll see to it that you pay. I have nearly unlimited resources and absolutely no scruples whatsoever. At the moment,” he said casually, “I’d gladly cut off your balls and feed them to your henchmen. I’ll almost regret it if I don’t get a chance to. Give me Turner, though, and perhaps I’ll get distracted.”

  When Brewster didn’t move immediately, Lawrence flashed him his fiercest, maddest grin and coolly punched another window. This was the value of pricey Italian leather gloves, no doubt. One could break an infinity of windows with no harm to oneself.

  Barnabus, his dander up and his teeth bared, was standing beside Georgie, snarling as if he were ready to devour anyone who came near. Lawrence would remember to buy him some buns as a reward.

  Brewster, his eyes briefly narrowing with speedy calculation, turned calmly to the man nearest to him. “Let’s go,” he said, as if he were suggesting a walk in the park. He didn’t spare a look for Lawrence or Georgie, or even for any of his men, who followed him single file out of the room as if nothing unusual had happened.

  As soon as the door clicked shut, Lawrence fell to his knees by Georgie. “Are you all right?” He pushed the hair off Georgie’s face. There was a bruise forming over one of his eyes, and he looked achingly pale and tired, but he gave Lawrence a shaky smile.

  “They only hit me a couple of times.”

  Lawrence earnestly regretted not having cut off Brewster’s balls while he had had the chance.

  “I thought I was seeing things,” Georgie murmured. “Are you really here? In London?” He reached out a hand and touched Lawrence’s jaw with cold, bare fingers. “With Barnabus? Where’s Simon?”

  “Hush. He’s with Lady Standish and bloody Courtenay visiting the Tower. I suspected that you were going to do something”—he nearly said foolish, but then realized he was talking to a man who had risked life and limb for him—“heroic, so I thought I’d help.”

  “You make a very good hero yourself.”

  Lawrence snorted. “They only listened to me because they were afraid I’d be as deranged as my brother.”

  Georgie’s eyes were shut, his head tipped back against the wall. If Lawrence kept blathering on, Georgie would likely nod off.

  “Come on,” Lawrence said. “I have a hackney waiting. You need food and a bed.”

  “You have a hackney waiting,” Georgie repeated, and laughed as if that were the most hilarious thing he’d ever heard. “A hackney waiting while you scare the life out of Mattie Brewster.”

  “You’re delirious.” Lawrence got an arm under Georgie’s knees. “Hold on to my neck.”

  “Very dashing,” Georgie mumbled into Lawrence’s cravat as he was carried down two flights of stairs. “Feats of strength.”

  Lawrence deposited Georgie into the hackney and gave the driver an address.

  “You’re not getting in?” Georgie asked, his eyes half-closed.

  “No.” He was barely holding himself together and had enough nervous energy running through his body to fuel a walk to Sussex and back. He didn’t think he could take being cooped up in a carriage. “Take care, Georgie,” he said, shutting the door.

  Georgie woke in an unfamiliar bed, but it was too dark to figure out precisely whose unfamiliar bed. That wasn’t so unusual—his life, thus far, had been a series of beds, very few of them slept in for more than a month at a time. But he had no recollection of falling asleep in this bed or anywhere else. He ran his hands over a quilted coverlet and smooth linen sheets, felt the plumpness of a featherbed. Not an inn, then. He took a deep breath, and his nostrils filled with the scent of lavender and the sort of laundry soap that had to be special ordered.

  His eyes adjusted to the dark, and he made out the faint pattern of stripes on the walls. He remembered having been with Oliver when he bought the paper. That put him in Jack and Oliver’s spare room, then.

  He was unaccountably disappointed to realize this. He knew he couldn’t be wherever Lawrence was staying. That take care, Georgie had been as definitive a good-bye as he’d ever heard. Lawrence was likely glad to wash his hands of a man who had been in business with the sort
of scum he’d seen in the warehouse today, Georgie included.

  It had never been meant to endure, this thing with Lawrence. Nothing Georgie ever had was meant to endure. Transient friendships, impermanent addresses, mutable identities, interchangeable lovers. How foolish he had been to lose sight of that.

  He must have fallen back asleep, because when he next opened his eyes, there was bright light seeping in from around the edges of the curtains. Too tired to move, he shut his eyes again.

  When he heard the squeak of door hinges, he cracked open his eyes.

  “Not dead, then.” It was his sister.

  “What are you doing here?” His voice was a dry croak.

  “You ought to be glad I am. Jack and his gentleman were going to let you sleep forever and take turns spoon-feeding you your broth, or some such addlepated nonsense. I told them men have no place in a sick room, not that you’re sick.” Sarah flung open the window curtain, letting in a blinding stream of light. “And you’re daft if you think I’m going to hide away every time one of my brothers does something stupid. I grew up on the same streets as you and Jack, and I don’t need either of you treating me like a damsel in distress. What rot.” She leaned over the bed, tilting his head towards the bright light of the window. Her lip curled in dismay. “You look horrible. I’ll bring up Jack’s shaving kit. I’ve also got you a new waistcoat.”

  Georgie nearly smiled. “That’s your proposed course of treatment? Shaving and haberdashery?”

  Sarah regarded him with a gimlet eye, and Georgie was struck by how much he had missed her. She dressed in her usual subdued, although modishly tailored, dove gray. Her hair was smoothed into a sleek, dark coil. At a few years under forty, she exuded the sort of nonchalant gentility that made nobody question her origins. There were times when Georgie thought she was an even greater fraud than Jack and himself. “If you mean to act the part, you have to look the part,” she said.

  Which was more or less what Georgie had told Lawrence time and again. “What part?”

  “To start with, the part of a man who doesn’t lay abed for three days.”

  Three days! He had been here three days? His shock must have registered on his face, because Sarah responded, “You needed it. But now it’s time to get up.”

  He sat, feeling weak as a kitten. “Did, ah, anyone call on me?” Pathetic, pathetic.

  But Sarah didn’t go in much for pity. “No,” she said simply. “Jack said that your Lord Radnor was staying at Lady Standish’s townhouse but that he isn’t there with her anymore.”

  That explained how Lawrence had gotten to London; getting a hermit, a small child, and an enormous mongrel to London would be child’s play for a woman who built batteries and applied for patents in her spare time. She could likely masquerade as Wellington and command armies, if that struck her fancy.

  And now they had returned to Penkellis, leaving Georgie in London, where he belonged.

  Sarah stepped out when the bath arrived. Georgie soaked until the water cooled, then shaved and dressed in the new clothes Sarah had laid out. She had been right, of course, in the annoying way that older sisters often were. He did feel better now that he was clean and tidy. When he glanced in the looking glass, he saw his usual reflection: a neat and gentlemanly sort of person, perhaps slightly pale and with traces of purplish circles still under his eyes, but nothing jarringly different from what he always saw in the mirror.

  Had he expected to somehow look less like a swindler? More like a man stupidly, uselessly in love?

  Sarah knocked and entered the room, bearing a tray of muffins.

  “What am I going to do?” He wasn’t sure if he was asking his sister, his reflection, or neither.

  “First, you’re going to eat something.”

  He slowly chewed a few bites of muffin, gathering that they were not going to have a conversation until he complied. “I’ve, ah, burnt a few bridges.”

  “I’d say you have.” She pulled a length of ribbon and embroidery floss from her pocket. “Jack’ll give you work, though.”

  True. But Georgie had never wanted to be beholden to Jack, nor to anyone else. “It’s utterly humiliating,” he said.

  “What is?” She didn’t look up from her stitching, which made it easier for Georgie to be honest.

  “I’ve spent years scheming and lying, and now I haven’t anything to show for it. No work, no skills, no friends.” He was totally alone. “Only a trail of people I’ve hurt.”

  Sarah was quiet a moment. “I ran into Lily Perkins the other day. She looks about a hundred. Hardly any teeth. Her boy was born the year after you, remember?”

  Of course Georgie remembered Jimmy Perkins but didn’t know why Sarah was bringing him up. “He took the king’s shilling, I think?” Was Sarah suggesting that Georgie ought to have joined the army?

  “He died last year in Waterloo. His friend, the boy with the red hair—”

  “Jonas Smith.”

  “Right. He was arrested for petty larceny. Transported. Nobody expects him to survive the journey. He has a wife and two daughters—God only knows what will become of them.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Was he supposed to feel guilty for not having tried to earn an honest living, or ashamed that he wasn’t reaping the consequences for his misdeeds?

  “You didn’t have too many options. There wasn’t anyone to set you up as an apprentice, or teach you a trade. God knows you’re no saint, but throwing your lot in with Mattie Brewster wasn’t the worst thing you could have done.”

  “I could have tried to become a clerk. I’m very good at sorting papers and keeping records, it turns out.” It was pitiful that this was the only honest talent he could name.

  Sarah laid her work in her lap and looked steadily at him. “Why do you think you were good at what you did?”

  He heard the past tense there and didn’t argue. “Good at swindling? Because of my natural distaste for honesty, I suppose,” he quipped.

  “No, that’s not it,” she said seriously. “You like helping people. You like making them happy.”

  “And then stealing their money.”

  “No, you aren’t listening to me. I know you stole money, and if you want to figure out a way to live honestly, I’ll be glad of it. But why were you good at it? Walk over to St. Giles and ask any lad if he’d tell a few lies in order to put food in his mouth. Half of them would merrily stab you if it meant they’d have a guarantee to see next summer. You aren’t any more or less dishonest than the next person with an empty belly.” She bent her head over her work. “I always felt bad that you had to leave after a job.”

  Georgie goggled at her. “What?”

  “You became fond of your marks. At least a little. And then you had to take their money and disappear. That’s not easy on a man like you.”

  Georgie reeled. “I dare say it wasn’t easy on them either.”

  “Enough!” she snapped. “You can feel guilty to your heart’s content after I go back downstairs.” She rose to her feet, tucking her embroidery back into her pocket. “But so help me, Georgie, figure out a way to live your life so you’re not always saying good-bye.” She swept silently out of the room.

  Sarah was right, of course. It had always taken him so much effort to convince himself that he didn’t care for his marks, that his interest and liking for them were only part of the act. In the end he fooled himself better than he ever tricked one of his marks. He had stolen their money, but without even realizing it he had swindled himself out of a life, out of friends and purpose and meaning.

  But what had happened with Lawrence was of another magnitude entirely. Georgie had known almost from the beginning that he wouldn’t have the heart to harm Lawrence. He had gone out of his way to do the opposite—to help him, to help Simon. Lawrence had repaid him in kind. He had somehow traveled across the country to rescue him.

  And then he had left.

  Georgie stood and walked to the window on weak, shaky legs. Three days i
n bed had taken their toll. The window looked over a quiet side street lined with a few spindly trees. He could stay here, he supposed, in this small room with pretty wallpaper and a cozy feather bed. He could do a bit of somewhat honest work for Jack and try to build a sort of life for himself.

  Still fully dressed, he lay on the bed again, drifting in and out of sleep. He was tired to the marrow of his bones. Only when the shadows on the wall had shortened and then lengthened again did he rise, and even then he still felt sapped of strength.

  When he opened the bedroom door, he heard voices and the clink of china and glass that meant a meal was in progress. Suddenly, his stomach seemed to remember the past week of irregular meals. As little as he wanted company, he couldn’t ignore the rumbling of his belly.

  Pausing on the threshold of the tiny downstairs parlor his brother and Oliver used as a dining room, he saw that Sarah had stayed for dinner. They had neared the end of the meal, by the looks of things, and were now lingering at the table over the last few bites and some easy conversation. Jack and Oliver kept the bare minimum of servants—fewer servants meant fewer chances of their relationship being exposed for what it was—and the maid hadn’t come to clear the table, so the cloth was littered with napkins and crumbs and the detritus of a meal well enjoyed.

  Jack’s arm was casually slung over the back of Oliver’s chair, as if that were where it belonged. As Georgie watched, Oliver tipped his head back against Jack’s arm and turned a bit to smile lazily at his companion. To Georgie’s amazement, Jack smiled back. Georgie could count on one hand the number of times he had ever seen his brother smile. But here he was, giving Oliver as soppy a grin as Georgie had ever witnessed in his life.

  It was Sarah who first spotted Georgie. “Finished your beauty sleep?”

  All three of them ignored Georgie’s protests, shoving him down into a chair and heaping food onto his plate. He had a few bites of pigeon pie, and then before he knew it, he had eaten every last scrap of food on the table. He must also have consumed a fair bit of wine, because his head was pleasantly muzzy.