How To School Your Scoundrel by Juliana Gray Read Free Book Online Page B

and dropped into the cane-backed chair. A small envelope lay before her, on which the word
Markham
was written in plain italic letters. She drew a wicked silver letter opener from the implements laid out neatly to the right of the leather blotter and sliced across the envelope’s top.
    A single ten-pound note lay inside.
    “Your weekly salary, paid in advance,” said Lord Somerton, without looking up, “with an additional allowance for ordinary expenses. Cab fare and the like. My business will require it from time to time.”
    “Very good, sir.” Luisa placed the note beneath the blotter and dropped the envelope into the wastebin at the side of the desk. “Shall we begin?”
    There was no answer. Somerton finished his writing with a distinct absence of flourish, folded the paper in two, slid it inside a waiting envelope, and set it aside.
    “Close the door, if you will, Mr. Markham,” he said.
    Luisa rose and went to the door, which was open the merest half inch of a crack. She pushed until the latch clicked softly shut.
    “Lock it,” said Somerton.
    She turned the lock.
    “You will find, Mr. Markham, that I will require you to close and lock the study door at the beginning of every session. You’ll save yourself considerable effort if you remember to perform these tasks upon your entrance.”
    “Yes, sir.” Luisa returned to her seat.
    “Now then, Mr. Markham. We will begin with a tedium of ordinary correspondence, I’m afraid, but that is the human lot.” He spoke crisply, without dropping a single syllable, sending the final
t
in
lot
pinging about the room. “The first letter goes to my solicitor, in reply to an inquiry of the ninth instant, which you will find at the top of the stack before you. Date, the twelfth of November, eighteen hundred and eighty-nine . . .”
    “Sir, today is the fourteenth of November.”
    “So it is. We shall, however, date it the twelfth.
Dear Mr. Townes. My most fervent apology for the delay in replying to your letter of three days ago. I am sorry to say that I know nothing of the matter you had the goodness to communicate to me, and furthermore I suspect that your complainant may harbor motives which do her little credit. I therefore instruct you to dismiss her complaint in the strongest possible terms, and if this letter should reach you too late to prevent this unfortunate crisis to which she alludes, you may represent our doubts to her nearest living relatives. I remain, etc., Somerton.
Have you any comment, Mr. Markham?”
    Luisa laid down her pen and stared at the plain black words before her. “None, sir, except that it is very brief.”
    “I have little time to waste, Mr. Markham. You may pass the letter to me for signature. The next several items on your desk—invitations to this or that—you may answer in form with regrets. That done, you will proceed to the Foreign Office and obtain a list of all steamships entering this country from the Baltic states during the past year, and . . .”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    Somerton looked up. “A list of all steamships entering this country from the Baltic states. We will say, from January the first onward. A straightforward instruction; surely there can be no confusion?”
    “I only wish to know why . . .”
    He lifted his right index finger. “Yours not to question why, Mr. Markham. Yours but to do or die.”
    The earl’s face was a perfect mask, betraying nothing, except perhaps a trace of acerbic surprise in the raised eyebrows. Surprise, no doubt, that Luisa should be so bold as to question him in the first place: an expression with which she was quite familiar. Her own father had worn it on a number of occasions, facing down councilors, secretaries, heads of state, wives, and wayward daughters.
    An expression that assumed total control over the person to which it was directed.
    For an instant, a tiny streak of imperiousness raced across Luisa’s chest. For an instant, she imagined ripping off her