The Secretary (2 page)

“Phelps!” Anders Rennick, Earl of Stowe shouted, throwing open the door to his study. His butler came sedately up the steps, clearly unimpressed by the urgency in his master’s voice.

“Yes, My Lord?” he asked in his unflappable manner after he had come to a stop.

“Will you escort Mr. Carlisle out, please?”

Phelps looked past Anders to the man who was standing in the middle of the study, glowering. “Is he leaving already, My Lord?”

“Yes, he is, Phelps,” Anders huffed, trying not to sound exasperated. He failed miserably, which was a testament to the kind of morning he was having. If he got any serious business done today it would be a miracle.

Mr. Carlisle, much to his credit, chose to depart without any terse words. Since he was also leaving without a reference, his conduct was all the more to be admired. But his departure, just a week after he had begun at his post of secretary, was frustrating to say the least. As Anders watched the latest in a long string of failed prospects follow Phelps down the stairs and out the door, case and hat in hand, it occurred to him that perhaps the problem was not with the secretaries. Perhaps the problem lay a little closer to home.

“It’s your fault, Phelps,” he joked as his butler returned up the stairs. “You keep chasing them away with your stony unsociability.” Neither Anders nor his butler laughed for the very simple reason that they knew there was no truth in the joke. Phelps was too polite to speak the truth, and so Anders did. “It’s my fault, of course.”

“I wouldn’t say that, My Lord,” Phelps said, following his master into the study. “Now, shall we begin drawing up an advertisement for a new secretary?”

“What’s the point?” Anders groaned, dropping into his chair and surveying the mountain of papers on his desk. “That was number...what, eighteen?”

“Nineteen, My Lord.”

“Good God. Nineteen. Can it really have been that many? I only took up the seat two years ago.” He rubbed a hand against his chin, trying to absorb the thought. “Can it truly have been nineteen already?” He could hear the shock in his voice, but really it was a surprise that it hadn’t been more than that.

Anders knew that he set an exacting pace. He knew that he could be demanding and difficult. He knew that he asked a great deal of his secretaries. But he paid well—quite well, given what he had been told to expect to pay by the agency he had once used before they refused to continue sending him applicants. He simply expected the same level of dedication from his secretaries as he demanded of himself. Was that too much to ask?

Apparently it was, for he now found himself without a secretary two days before the next session of Parliament was set to open. It was deuced inconvenient, he thought, but there was nothing else to be done. “Yes,” he said after a long silence, “yes, I suppose we had better begin sending enquiries.”

“Very good, My Lord,” Phelps said, and he turned and left the room silently.

It was too bad he couldn’t take Phelps on as a secretary, Anders thought now. The man was remarkably efficient and never complained no matter how steep his workload became. But Phelps had stayed on with him after the previous earl, Anders’s uncle, had died, and that kind of loyalty meant something, though what he wasn’t sure. It
certainly
meant that Phelps did not deserve to be punished by having to take dictation and run back-room letters at two in the morning. Though where Anders was going to find someone willing to do those things as well as organize his papers and critique his speeches he had no idea. It seemed that he had been through every reputable secretary in London in addition to a few of the disreputable ones. There couldn’t be many more left unless he tried to poach someone from another member, and
that
could very easily end in disaster.

No matter how bad, there could be few disasters worse than the mess that waited atop his desk. He was staring at the pile when Phelps returned.

“Viscount Sidney, My Lord,” he announced as Anders’s oldest friend, Leo Chesney, swept through the door.

“Leo,” Ander said, rising to shake the man’s hand. “How was Sussex?”

“Stifling, as always,” Leo replied. “I came up as soon as I could. The twins are unbearable,” he added, wincing. Anders winced right along. Leo had twin sisters who were due to make their come-out in the spring. Anders had known them as long as Leo had, and he was rather impressed that his friend had managed to endure a whole month in their company. They were dear enough girls, but when exposed to ladies’ magazines and lace samples they became positive terrors.

“Come and sit down, if you can find another chair in this mess,” Anders offered.

As Leo plopped down into a nearby seat, he asked, “Wasn’t that your secretary I saw storming down the street just now?”

“
Former
secretary,” Anders muttered, returning to his desk to stare forlornly at the heap.

“Good Lord, Anders, hasn’t he only been here a week?”

“Eight days.”

“Do you think you could manage to put up with a man for a fortnight at least? Doesn’t this sort of upheaval wreak havoc on your schedule?” Leo looked genuinely concerned. “I suppose that means you haven’t had time to read the bill.”

Anders kept his gaze fixed on the mountain of papers. Somewhere in there was a bill his friend had asked him to read, but it would take some sort of excavating device to find it and right now Anders lacked the motivation for that sort of dig. “I will find it,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to read it all morning.”

“With this sort of organization, I’m amazed your whole study hasn’t fallen down around your ears. I came to invite you to the club, but it looks as though you have your hands full.”

“Indeed,” Anders said. “And now I must find a new secretary on top of everything else.”

“If I
had
a secretary I might be able to let you borrow him, but, alas, some of us choose not to work quite as hard as you.”

Anders glowered at him.

“Well, I’ll bid you good-day then. Think about coming to Barney’s this evening for cards, would you?”

“I’ll think about it,” Anders promised, though he was certain he would be working. Leo had an enviable ability to flit from one thing to another without getting too committed. Anders had not developed that talent. When he did something, he went all-out, which meant that he had thrown himself into the business of being in the House of Lords with a great deal more dedication than Leo had. But Leo also had a brain that naturally organized and compartmentalized everything, which was something Anders lacked. He
needed
a secretary to keep everything together. Otherwise, as Leo predicted, his study might just collapse around him.

When Leo had gone, he sat back down behind the desk and lifted one of the piles. Mr. Carlisle had, unfortunately, been too timid to rearrange anything without Anders’s permission, and so the pile had only grown during his tenure. Suddenly Anders felt overwhelmed by the task that lay before him.

“I think I’ll go and have a swim,” he said to no one in particular.

At some point in the history of the family one of the previous Earls of Stowe had had some sort of spinal deformity and had been advised by his physician that daily immersion in water might be beneficial to his health. When Stowe House had been built on the edge of Belgrave Square it had, therefore, been constructed with a strange feature, but one for which Anders was daily grateful. In the cellar, carefully separated from the kitchens, was a swimming pool. It was a long narrow affair that stretched the full length of the house, the water warmed with an ingenious mechanism that diverted heat from the nearby stoves, and Anders had found that it was perfect for working out his frustrations. Now, in the dim light provided by a few candles—for the previous Earl had been much more modest than his descendent and had not had any windows built into the room—Anders stripped and slipped into the cool water. He slid under and swam two full lengths before coming up for air and brushing his shoulder-length hair out of his face. He really ought to have it cut back—it would make swimming much easier, after all. But with its dark color he thought the length gave him a daring, rakish look without his having to devote the time to actual rakish pursuits.

Now Anders dove under again and allowed his mind to wander as he swam, losing track even of the lengths as he mulled over what he should do. He needed a secretary. He could not do without one. In Parliament a secretary not only organized one’s papers and set one’s schedule, they also served as an extra set of eyes and ears. A good secretary could listen to a speech and tell exactly which words should be changed for better effect. A
great
secretary could mean the difference between success and failure for a member of Parliament. Anders didn’t necessarily need a great secretary—he had only two years’ experience in the House of Lords but so far he had experienced enough success to satisfy him. He did, however, need a warm body capable of managing the myriad things for which Anders himself had not the time or the organizational capacity, especially now when time and organization were of the essence.

Ever since becoming the eleventh Earl of Stowe two years earlier upon the death of his uncle, Anders had tried to live up to the title. His father had been the old earl’s younger brother, but his early death when Anders was only two had meant that Anders had spent little time with his uncle, especially after his mother remarried. In truth, Uncle Frederick had not been very interested in Anders either, or he might have taken the trouble to take his nephew and heir under his wing and guide him through the world that would one day be Anders’s own. As it was, Anders had spent most of his childhood with his mother in Devon and had not been educated in the finer points of the British peerage. He had gone, of course, to Eton and then to Cambridge, but the fine education he had received from those vaunted institutions had done little to prepare him for the wealth and privilege that had instantly been bestowed upon him when Uncle Frederick had died. He had been intimidated at first—in truth, he was still intimidated—by the mighty House of Lords, in which his uncle had made it clear he was expected to take up his seat. But Uncle Frederick had made a grave mistake in neglecting Anders’s education. The Earls of Stowe had always been Tories, but Anders was not. He supposed, when he allowed himself time to think about such trivial hypothetical situations, that if his uncle and not his mother had raised him, things might have turned out differently. But in that tiny village in Devon, Anders had had a far more liberal upbringing than his uncle might have wished, and had chosen to break with the age-old tradition of his line and side with the Whigs instead. He would have imagined Uncle Frederick turning over in his grave if the idea had given him any pleasure, but it did not. He held no grudges against his uncle—though the man had neglected Anders and his mother after the death of his younger brother, he had done nothing malicious or wrong. He had simply chosen to leave well enough alone, for which Anders usually felt grateful. It was only at times like this that he wished he had had more time to learn the ropes of this treacherous world before being thrust upon the stage.

He had met with mild success at least during his first two years in the House of Lords. But now he was no longer the young pup the others had perceived him to be. He had allies. He also had enemies. And he had goals—he had a vision. If that vision was to be achieved, he needed help.

He had done what he guessed was about forty lengths when he noticed a dark figure at the edge of the pool. When he came up for a breath, the figure spoke.

“My Lord.” It was Phelps. Anders put out one hand to stop himself against the edge of the pool and flipped his head back, water spraying satisfyingly over the two men who stood waiting. Phelps didn’t flinch. The newcomer did.

Anders blinked and stared at the young man standing beside his butler. He really was an extraordinary-looking creature. His ill-fitting suit was threadbare and worn, the elbows shiny and the cuffs beginning to fray—or perhaps they had just been poorly hemmed. His shirt, however, was startlingly white, as if it had never been worn before, and his shoes had been shined recently. Despite the fact that he had clearly been wearing the nondescript suit for quite some time, he looked uncomfortable in the clothing—or perhaps he was afraid of water?

It was only then that Anders remembered that he was naked, though the water covered him up to his waist. Phelps, of course, had the wherewithal to be completely unperturbed by his master’s nudity, but the young man must be embarrassed.

“My apologies,” Anders muttered as Phelps handed him a dry towel. He wrapped it around himself as he emerged from the pool. “I am not
usually
disturbed here.”

Phelps continued to look unruffled. “I must apologise, My Lord. But this young man was most insistent, and I thought, given the circumstances, it would be better for him to see you at once.”

Anders looked the man up and down—or, rather, just down. He was quite small, the top of his head barely level with Anders’s chin. And he could not have been more than twenty-two. What could such an inconsequential looking youth want with him?

The boy cleared his throat. “My name is…is…”

“You do know your own name, don’t you?” Anders demanded, feeling peeved at having his swim interrupted.

“Clarence Ford, My Lord.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit, Mr. Ford?”

“I…well, perhaps it could wait until you are…until you are not…”

“Oh, for the love of everything holy, Mr. Ford, just spit it out!”

“I understand you are in search of a secretary, My Lord.”

Anders stared at the little man, not quite comprehending. Phelps’s face was a mask of stoic impassivity. If this was a joke, it was being pulled off beautifully. But then, Phelps had never played a joke in his life. He had told Anders as much himself the day they had first met.

“How do you come to understand such a thing?” Anders asked. He glanced quickly at Phelps. “Do we have a gossip in our midst?”