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Let There Be Light

September 8, 1823

Earls Trip, day 1

“The Earl of Harcourt for you, my lord.”

Simon Courteney, the Earl of Marsden, put down his book, startled. He had merely intended to pass the time until Archie was due to collect him, but he felt as if he’d lived a lifetime in the quarter hour he’d been reading.

Novels: Who knew?

He shoved the book into his satchel, though he wasn’t sure why. He would be caught out, as he had been last year. He wouldn’t mind. He might even try to entice the boys to read this one. Perhaps it was time to incorporate a book club into Earls Trip.

“Good morning,” he said, standing as his friend, Archibald Fielding-Burton, the Earl of Harcourt, entered the library. “My apologies for having made you come inside. I intended to meet you out front as per usual.” Simon liked to think of himself as the sort of person who was at the ready when it was time to go. The sort of person who was prepared and therefore never surprised. He disliked surprises.

“It’s quite all right.” Archie looked around. “What is different here?” He squinted. “Perhaps nothing. I haven’t been inside your house for … nigh on a year? Can that be correct?”

It was. Simon rarely invited people over. He himself didn’t like being home, so why would he subject his friends to the place? He felt, though he knew he was being illogical, that it was better not to mix Archie and Effie with the ghosts of Number Seven Park Lane. He didn’t want the dead to taint the living. Well, he didn’t want the living to taint the living, but happily, there was no danger of that today. Mother was at Galecroft.

“I have taken down the family portraits that formerly hung in here,” he said in answer to Archie’s question.

“Ah, yes. Who was in here? Not your generation, I don’t think?”

“No. The library was home to my late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century forebears.” He smirked. “Shall I recite their names for you?” He’d been made to memorize them as a boy. The former residents of this room were John, the third earl, and his wife, Agnes, pictured separately and in various configurations with their children, the eldest of whom was also John and who would go on to become the fourth earl at the age of twenty-four. John begat James begat another James. And so on and so forth.

“Oh, goodness, no,” Archie said cheerily. “No recitations on my account.”

“I decided to lighten up the place, given that I spend so much time here. I have censorious ancestors staring me down in the rest of the house. A man’s library should be his sanctuary.” And it was. The library was the only room in the house that felt like his. “The walls have been repapered, too.” He’d chosen a cream damask that stopped just short of being yellow. “You may recall that the walls used to be papered in a rather aggressive, dare I say lurid, violet floral. Which was fine, as far as these things go—I don’t care overmuch what is on my walls—but the spots where the paintings had been were dark and the rest was quite faded. It called to mind a pugilist with his front teeth knocked out.” He hadn’t been able to countenance the pattern made by the unfaded spots. It had, somehow, been considerably less symmetrical than his perception of such when the paintings had been up.

“It looks grand,” Archie said. “Are you ready to go?”

“I am.” Simon had never been more ready for an Earls Trip, in fact, even though he had also never been more trepidatious about an Earls Trip.

“That’s all you have?” Archie inquired outside as a footman hefted a valise into the coach. “No trunk of books? No trove of papers? No weight of the world?”

That last question gave Simon pause, but he merely said, “I have adopted a new packing philosophy.”

“Have you indeed?” Archie looked as if he were trying not to laugh.

“I haven’t brought any books. Well, I’ve brought novels, but no real books.”

Archie did laugh then. “Are novels not real books? Clementine would scold you for saying as much.”

So would Miss Brown.

“You know what I mean.” Simon climbed into the coach and settled himself against the squabs. “My reading this fortnight is to be refreshing. Absorbing in a way my usual material is not.”

Although he was treating his reading of late as a forensic enterprise. He considered the latest bookmark. He had thought of nothing else since he’d found it last night. What did it mean?

“I am not planning on doing any work at all over the next fortnight,” he declared, perhaps to convince himself as much as Archie.

“Who are you and what have you done with Simon?” Archie teased. “You can’t fool me: You are a lookalike impostor with a fondness for novels and an eye for interior decor.”

“Oh, I am still myself. I have made this decision, but I guarantee I shall fret about it. I shall feel the loss of my books and papers as a visceral thing, akin to going about in society hatless and coatless.” Simon could tell from Archie’s quizzically amused expression that for him, the notion of appearing sans coat and hat was not quite the scandal it would be for Simon. “I tell myself, though, with a certain degree of sternness, that Parliament has just adjourned. Surely I can take a holiday. Well, we always take a holiday this time of year. You understand what I mean. A true holiday.”

At least for the first week. Simon suspected the second week wasn’t going to be very … relaxing.