Just a few more hours of work after tea time, and maybe she could go home for the day.
Unless the internet caught Arthur Finch-Hatten whoring and drinking his way across Europe again.
ARTHUR’S DARK MISTRESS
Arthur and Elizabeth had walked out into the deer park behind Spencer House. Though it was January, the mild afternoon was cool on his face, and the air drifted through the thick sweater he wore.
Elizabeth—no last name given, and her first name was not Elizabeth—appeared to be in her late forties, judging from the broad streaks of silver that ran from her temples to the blond French twist on the back of her head and the beginning of softness around her chin. Arthur didn’t trust his approximation of her age, amongst other things.
The formal gardens checker-boarded the earth behind them, but out there in the deer park, wild grasses and trees grew in thickets of dense brush. In the distance, over by a copse of trees, a herd of over a hundred deer gamboled and grazed in the late afternoon sunlight. The males still had their antlers, as they tossed their heads and bawled. Arthur had seen them lose their antlers as early as late January, depending on the weather, so the shed might be soon.
The soft dirt under his feet gave off a whiff of good earth with his every step, and a breeze crackled through the bare trees at the edge of the field.
“Of course you’ll win this case,” Elizabeth scoffed at him. “Primogeniture has never been successfully challenged. Your parents could have left the bulk of their estate to anyone they wanted, and the eldest son is the usual heir. Christopher doesn’t stand a chance.” Her Swiss accent sounded like German tones softened with French slurs.
Arthur had known Elizabeth for over a dozen years, but the sibilance of her Swiss accent still disconcerted him. They were in Britain. She should have a polished English accent. When they were in public, her accent remained crisp and British, but she dropped the pretense when they were alone.
She sounded so foreign.
Arthur said, “The courts seem concerned with fairness, lately.”
“To hell with fairness,” Elizabeth scoffed.
“My barrister is worried about some of Christopher’s allegations. He’s evidently persuading someone from the National Trust to testify on his behalf.”
“Persuade them not to. You haven’t been mismanaging your estate too badly, have you?”
“I’ve put good people in charge of it. I’m rarely here to manage it, personally.”
“Blaming me for everything again, are you?” Her voice was light as she teased him.
He raised an eyebrow and one corner of his mouth. “You’re a convenient target.”
“Good thing our adversaries never agreed with you.”
“Indeed. My original barrister died, you know. He was an old hand, knew all the judges and the currents that eddied. My new barrister is pessimistic about my chances. She thinks I’m a waste of a human being. Told me to curtail my ‘escapades.’”
“Isn’t she sweet.” Distaste was evident in Elizabeth’s rough voice.
Arthur said, “She is attempting to rein in my activities and contacts.”
Elizabeth flipped her hand toward the sunlit trees. “You can’t.”
“She is adamant.”
“So retain a different lawyer.”
“A friend in those chambers has mentioned that all the barristers feel the same way. My file was evidently quite the hot potato when the Head Clerk was assigning out Horace Lindsey’s cases. No one wanted it, and a new lawyer might insist on my good behavior before taking my case.”
“So promise them what they need to hear.”
“And then they will remove themselves from the case when I don’t follow through.”
“I didn’t think they could do that. They have a rule about taking cases that are offered, don’t they?”
“In theory, but not in practice.” His friend had assured him that the so-called cab rank rule was often discussed but never adhered to, nor enforced.
“So cultivate your lawyer,” Elizabeth said.
“She’s not a Russian mafia princess or a minor sheik. She’s merely a London barrister who was given my case.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes, but subtly, just a flick of her eyelids and mascara-darkened eyelashes. She said, “Such sentiment.”
“She’s an innocent,” Arthur mused.
“She’s a lawyer. She’s hardly innocent. Shakespeare would have had her first against the wall when the revolution came.”
“It’s unethical.”
Elizabeth laughed. “When have we ever concerned ourselves with such luxuries?”
“I won’t harm this woman.”
“Do you like her, Arthur?”
His five seconds were ticking by. Gen’s puckish sense of humor amused him. Her intelligence intrigued him. Her lush body aroused him.
He really liked that she hadn’t shrunk away from him but had turned around swinging.
His training had saved him from a nut punch or a black eye, barely. She had obviously been attacked, perhaps even abused, and he wanted to stand in front of her to protect her and to wrap himself around her to heal her.
That wasn’t like him.
Odd.
Arthur said, “She seems fragile.”
“Of course she seems fragile. She’s not one of us. I’m merely encouraging you to make certain that you win your case. Convince her. You’re the best at it.”
Arthur looked at the spongy sod beside his shoe. The grass was thin in spots, and the black soil marred the emerald green. “I’m not.”
“You learned from the best.”
“Certainly.” He had been seventeen.
She said, “All my contacts are the highest performers.”
“I may have poisoned that well.”
“Makes the chase that much more interesting.” Elizabeth drew a finger under Arthur’s jaw, almost cradling his face in her palm. He wanted to lean into her touch, but he sure as hell didn’t.
Elizabeth said, “You’re useless to us if you’re not the Earl of Severn. Cultivate her so that you get what we need, which is to win your case.”
And so, Arthur would cultivate Gen, just like he always did.
Elizabeth withdrew her hand, stroking her fingers under his jaw. “I would hate to lose my best boy.”
A LONG AND FLEXY MATE
Late at night, in the quiet stillness of the barristers’ chambers, Gen was leaning back in her office chair, reading the depositions for the case of that rascal Lord Arthur Finch-Hatten, the Earl of Severn. Her lamp cast a pool of light around her small pupil’s desk.
Gen was lucky to have been assigned a tiny office of her own, though the room was about the size of a broom closet and smelled odd, like dust and old polish. Its small window overlooked the twinkling night of central London. A draft sneaked in the edges of the window, bringing with it cool night air and green grass scent from the courtyard of Lincoln’s Inn. Her door opened to a small waiting room with couches and an admin’s desk.
From the waiting room, the double doors to her pupil mistress’s office loomed at the back, shut tightly now. Darkness leaked through the cracks around the heavy wooden doors.
No one had walked by her open door for forty-five minutes, though other pupil barristers rustled paper in the far offices, trying to appear more industrious, more earnest, than their peers. Gen was pretty sure that her two girlfriends from university, Lee and Rose, were still slugging away in their chambers where they were doing their first six-month internships, one floor down and a few windows over. Thank God they were doing their pupillages in different chambers, so they were not Gen’s direct competition to obtain tenancy. The competition was cutthroat. Gen had heard that some people sabotaged their fellow pupils, making it look like they had done something unethical or illegal, to boot them out of the competition for tenancy.
So far, nothing like that had happened in Gen’s chambers as far as she knew, but she was hopelessly naive. Even Horace had g
ently suggested that Gen might want to be a bit more conniving when the situation called for it. It was the British way.
Gen was so hopelessly American, believing that hard work and rigor would win others’ respect and allow her to get ahead in life. Horace had despaired when she had talked about it.
The clock on her computer clicked over to ten-forty. Time for another refresh.
Gen tapped the glowing computer screen of her laptop on the search bar, hoping and praying that nothing new popped up.
The top return for “Arthur Finch-Hatten Severn gossip” was still dated a month before and was the same picture, thank the law gods. He hadn’t managed to do anything gossip-worthy yet.
Damn it, the man was almost thirty years old. Maybe not all the way to thirty, but he was at least twenty-eight or so. Gen wasn’t sure. In any case, Lord Severn needed not to sabotage his own damn law case and leave her to pick up the pieces.
Maybe Lord Severn had gone home to bed, alone, like a good boy, despite the defiance in his pale gray-blue eyes when he had left the conference room that afternoon.
Yeah, it could have happened.
Gen snorted at her own feeble hopes and hit the refresh button again.
The top story was still that grainy photo of Lord Severn escorting a leggy blonde into a VIP area at a nightclub and pausing for a moment for the cameras before he walked in after her. Gen read the caption for the thousandth time: Earl Severn and Peony Sweetling out on the town, drunk and rumoured high on cocaine at the Tiger Bar.
Damn him. Seriously.
His brother, Christopher, was accusing Lord Severn of snorting both the estate’s principal funds and the money provided by the National Trust for the upkeep of the family’s palatial country home, Spencer House. Misuse of National Trust funds could land Lord Severn in jail.
This was intolerable.
Surely Gen had Lord Severn’s cell phone number in his contact information somewhere. She would just ring him up and insist that he stay in for the few weeks or months before his case was tried before a judge.
And surely it would go before a judge. Octavia Hawkes would argue the case and oversee Gen, of course, because Gen was still a pupil. Octavia was ultimately responsible for the case.
Surely Gen wouldn’t be thrown before the House of Lords while she was still a pupil. Maybe she should confer with her pupil mistress.
Octavia Hawkes would have to take over the case if it had to be argued before the House of Lords, of course.
Getting rid of the case and the responsibility for the naughty earl would be a huge relief, a metaphorical ton of weight lifted from Gen’s shoulders.
Which meant that it was absolutely the wrong thing to do.
Passing off a high-profile case because she couldn’t handle it would mark her as spineless.
Spineless pupil barristers did not receive invitations to tenancy.
No high-powered litigator wanted a sniveling, low-level lawyer in their office who thrust their difficult cases upon their betters. Barristers must contribute to the prestige and finances of the office, not hang around the necks of the other lawyers as dead weight that the others had to compensate for.
And so, Gen could not ask to be relieved of the incorrigible Lord Severn’s case, not if she wanted that job offer, and she had to get that job offer.
It was not overstating the case to say that her mother’s life depended on it.
The darkened office was eerily quiet at this time of night.
Gen sighed and hit refresh. Still nothing.
Somewhere down the corridor, a door slapped closed. High-heeled shoes clicked across the wooden floor outside.
Gen busied herself, positioning her hands on the keyboard and ducking her head in case Octavia Hawkes walked in.
The clattering of shoes resolved into two sets of footsteps, and Gen relaxed in her chair.
Her university friends Lee and Rose swung around the doorway and into Gen’s small office. Both were slim, limber ladies, wearing business trouser suits as pupil barristers ought to. Rose Pennelegion’s somber black suit was a few shades darker than her skin, and her hair was braided in a slick updo.
Lee Fox grinned hard and held up a plastic bag. “Thought you might want take away?” Her Cockney accent hollowed out her words because it was after eight at night. During the day, Lee carried on with an impeccable middle-upper-class accent, and no one but Rose and Gen knew that she had been born and attended government schools in the wrong part of London. She tossed her bright red hair behind her shoulder. The color was barely natural enough not to draw questions by the staid senior barristers but just bright enough to be fun.
Gen slapped her laptop closed and set it aside. “Oh, Lordy, you two are life savers. I thought I was going to have to eat my desk.”
They giggled and dragged chairs from Hawkes’s waiting room into Gen’s tiny office. The legs screeched on the wooden floor, but none of the barristers were around to complain about the noise.
Rose crossed her legs and folded her hands on her knee, waiting primly.
Lee unpacked the boxes, and the complicated scent of Chicken Tikka Masala rolled into the tiny room. The boxes were stamped with the red logo from Mumbai Take-Away, their favorite place, even though Mumbai was liberal with the red chili powder.
Gen’s stomach flopped over and growled so loudly that Lee and Rose laughed at her.
Within seconds, they were ripping apart the naan flatbread and sopping up sauce while they forked chicken chunks into their mouths. Gen liberated a few bottles of stout from the stash in the break room to cool the spice on their tongues. She was used to spicy food, having grown up eating Tex-Mex, but Lee and Rose were British to their Union Jack-wrapped hearts and couldn’t handle the heat.
When all that was left were wiped-clean paper boxes and the smell of curry lingering in the air, Gen leaned back and grabbed her purse off the floor. She dug inside and held out a couple of notes. “That was so good. How much do I owe you guys?”
Lee waved Gen’s money away. “Forget it.”
“I’ve been keeping track,” Gen said. “You aren’t letting me pay my fair share. It’s not cool.”
“We’re fine with it,” Rose said, hunting in the plastic bag for mints. After the CTM, they all needed mints.
“Come on. Take a quid or two,” Gen said.
Rose laughed. “It’s so funny when you say ‘quid’ with that American accent. It’s just all wrong.”
“Take it,” Gen insisted. Lee and Rose were also tens of thousands of pounds in debt for their degrees and courses. They couldn’t afford it, either.
“No,” Lee said, looking out Gen’s small window. “Pay us back when we’re all barristers.”
“You won’t want the money by then,” Gen said.
“Have you got the money for your mother’s home this month?” Rose asked, using a paper napkin to wipe every trace of curry from her burgundy-painted fingernails as fastidiously as a noblewoman’s cat.
“Not quite yet, but I was going to do some devilling for Devereux this week. I’ll get it. I’ll be fine.”
Devilling is the practice of a senior barrister farming out work to pupil barristers—writing briefs and drafting precedents—for a cut of the hourly rate. Violet Devereux was a master at it, with dozens of little devils running in and out of her chambers every day, exchanging paperwork for cash.
So many little devils traipsed through her door every day that some of the pupil barristers had christened her office the Devilhouse. Gen thought it was a stupid name.
Lee looked out the small window at the glittering London lights in the dark. “I do wish you would just let us pay for things for a few more months without all this conversation. Can’t we be British about it?”
Oh, so that was it. Gen was being too American again. “I’m sorry.”
“And we’ll have none of that,” Rose said briskly, standing and brushing her pants as if a crumb might have fallen from her ruby-painted lips. Even though Rose ha
d eaten as much curry and naan as Lee and Gen, her lipstick was somehow perfect and glossy. “You can’t be apologizing for everything like a Canadian, either.”
Gen rolled her eyes at that. The British apologize for things even more than Southerners.
“How are you going to get an offer of tenancy if you’re not British enough? It’s up to us to teach you.” Lee’s accent rose to bitingly arch. “You must accept our well-intentioned gesture with grace and not mention it amongst us, lest it affront our pride.”
Gen laughed. “If you insist.”
She really should learn to be more British. At the most inappropriate times, her inner American, or worse, her inner Texan rose and ranted, usually when someone was doing something wrong.
The internet held all kinds of traps for her.
Oh, the internet.
Gen fished behind herself and propped her laptop on her knees.
“Don’t mind us,” Lee said. “We’re just the people who brought your supper.”
“Just a sec.” Gen tapped the screen to refresh the news search. “I’ve got this new client, Arthur Finch-Hatten, and he sometimes goes on a wild drunk and ends up on the gossip sites. It’s like he’s trying to lose his case.”
The same list repopulated on the computer screen with the Peony Sweetling picture at the top, and Gen blew out the air trapped in her lungs. Finch-Hatten hadn’t done anything publicly stupid yet.
She looked up.
Lee and Rose were both staring at her. Lee’s mouth had fallen open, and Rose had frozen with her hand in the air.
Lee asked, “Are you shitting me?”
Rose threw Lee a glare and asked Gen, “You got Lord Severn’s case?”
Gen looked back and forth between her friends. “What makes you think I can’t handle that ornery colt?”
“I rather think no one could handle him,” said Rose.
Lee snickered, “Actually, everyone has handled him.”
Rose ignored her. “Has he propositioned you yet?”
“No, of course not,” Gen lied. That was more believable anyway.
“He will,” Rose said. “He struts through the corridors and offices like—”
Stiff Drink: Runaway Billionaires: Arthur Duet #1 Page 4