Page 18 of The Love Remedy (The Damsels of Discovery #1)

18

An hour later, Thorne was still working in the small office, having closed the shop at Lucy’s behest, when he heard the treatment door open and women’s voices murmuring. He stood at the door of the office as Katie came out of the treatment room alone. She’d calmed some and gave him the ghost of a smile.

He remained still, not wanting to startle her, but nodded at her smile.

“Good night, Mr. Thorne,” she said.

“Katie,” he said softly.

She stopped, eyes wide, and once again Thorne regretted that when he spoke quietly, it sounded like grinding glass.

“When you are ready, if ever you should want me to...” He paused to swallow the surge of anger that clogged his throat. “When you are ready, I am here.”

Katie nodded once, then again. “Thank you, Mr. Thorne.” She fumbled with the lock, but Thorne kept himself from helping her, assuming she wouldn’t want to be close to any man at that moment.

Lucy was sitting at her worktable when Thorne found her after locking back up. She gazed blankly at a row of glass bottles and tiny tins of dried herbs.

“Will she be all right?” he asked.

A useless question. Nearly as useless as he felt.

What was he to do when the worst had already happened?

Lucy touched the top of each of the jars, then lined them up and sighed.

“Katie has... had a sweetheart. A boy from the next parish over,” she said.

Good. Thorne just had to get the lad’s name and he could commence the beating.

“He forced her?” Thorne said, the old injury to his larynx turning his words into spikes.

“In a way...”

Lucy shifted her body away from her workbench and turned around on her stool to face him. Her eyes were slightly red, and the flesh around her lips was pink and puffy. The sight of her pain undid him. Thorne folded Lucy in an embrace. Not in the way he’d wanted to touch her earlier. Instead, he pulled her up from the stool, wrapped her tight in his arms, and dropped a kiss high on her forehead.

She held herself stiffly, so Thorne shifted back and forth on his feet like he used to do when Sadie was little and needed consoling.

After a moment, Lucy let herself be rocked in his arms.

A longing so profound it made Thorne dizzy swept through him.

This.

This need to touch without desire, to hold and comfort; this unnameable sensation took hold of him and set the room to spinning.

Taking a step back, Thorne stared down at Lucy’s face and searched for neither flaws nor perfection. A whole person, both beautiful and flawed, stared back at him. He traced the line of her cheek with the back of his hand, unable to speak.

“His name is Timmy, and you are not to kill him.”

Thorne grunted. That remained to be seen.

“What happened?” he finally asked.

Lucy pulled his hands into hers, rubbing her thumb up and down his ruined fingers.

“Katie knows how to use preventatives. She’s asked about sex, and Juliet and I have told her how babies are made and how to protect herself against disease and pregnancy,” Lucy said.

It took Thorne a moment to digest her words. In the upper classes where he was raised, women were assumed to be ignorant about such matters until they were married. He’d never thought about it, nor wondered why this would be so, simply accepted it as truth, right and moral.

Most likely because he’d never had to worry about it.

In the demimonde, the circles in which he’d met Geneviève, she and her friends had known about prophylactics. The assumption he’d made, that everyone made, was that women who had done this could not be considered as wives.

Katie was a member of the working class and not the demimonde. Her husband would expect her virginity. The idea of educating a young woman about sex and prophylactics before marriage struck Thorne as dangerous.

“Shouldn’t you have also counseled her to wait until she married Timmy?” he asked.

Lucy’s hands froze.

“She asked me to educate her about her body and its functions, not to deliver a sermon.”

Thorne stared down at their hands, Lucy’s stained and scarred fingers entwined with his own, swollen and misshapen from violence.

“What I mean to say,” he said, “is that if you tell young women how to protect against disease and pregnancy, they have less fear of it.”

Even as Thorne spoke, he knew he’d said the wrong thing. How to describe the unease in his belly?

“Less fear of it ?” Lucy stepped away from him, pulling her hands to her side. She laughed without humor and shook her head. “Do you believe it’s for the best that women fear sexual relations?”

“Not fear them, but...” Thorne could not find the words he needed. “Women are at a disadvantage. They are the ones who die of childbirth, the ones who suffer if a man gives them a disease. I would think you wanted Katie protected.”

“She and Timmy used condoms,” Lucy interjected, speaking over him. “Today, she didn’t have any. That didn’t matter to Timmy.”

Sympathy and anger warred with each other in Thorne’s chest.

“I shall kill him.”

Lucy shrugged, her emotions spent. “You cannot, or everyone will know what happened.”

“Everyone will know what happened in nine months anyway,” Thorne retorted. “I won’t hurt him too badly; I shall simply ensure that he never fails to respect Katie’s wishes ever again. They can be married in a civil ceremony and—”

“Are you joking?” Lucy’s swollen lips twisted into a scowl. “There won’t be a pregnancy, and Katie will not be forced into marriage. She convinced him to pull out before ejaculation, but either way, I’ve given her a tonic to induce her monthly courses.”

Thorne’s mouth opened and shut as he tried to make Lucy’s comments make sense.

He wasn’t certain he’d ever heard a woman say the word ejaculation . It quite took him aback.

And a tonic to induce her monthly courses...

Thorne rubbed his chin in thought, brows drawn as he contemplated what that meant.

“You cannot wish for Katie to do nothing?” Lucy asked, her voice rising along with her brows.

Could he not?

“I thought you believed in the work Juliet and Mrs. Sweet do at their clinic,” she continued, taking a few more steps away from him.

“The women at Juliet’s clinic are not Katie,” he said.

“No, they did not have the benefit of a prior education about how babies are made and how to prevent them,” Lucy said.

“Katie is different,” he insisted, aware that he was unable to articulate himself better than this. “She is practically a child. She shouldn’t be... her father should...”

Silence expanded between them like thick fingers pushing her away as he mulled over Lucy’s words again.

“I... As you were speaking, I realized that I could not remember if Geneviève and I always used condoms. So many of my memories from back then are hazy,” Thorne said slowly.

Lucy wrapped her arms around her middle in a gesture that could be interpreted as soothing or protective. Thorne knew he should comfort her, reassure her somehow, but terrible scenarios were presenting themselves to him, and the sick feeling wasn’t going away.

“What if she did become pregnant one time when we did not use condoms?” he asked aloud. “What if she took a tonic, like Katie?”

Lucy tilted her head and examined him as though he were one of Sadie’s frogs, laid out before her to be dissected.

“What if she did?” Lucy asked.

“Then...” What was the answer? Thorne looked around the room as though it might be written somewhere on the sepia walls. “There could have been a child before Sadie.”

Now Lucy’s hands came up and covered her face for a moment. A chill started in Thorne’s fingers, and he rubbed his aching hands together.

Pulling her hands down over her face, Lucy breathed deeply, as though drawing from a store of patience, or perhaps anger.

“Before the quickening, there is only the biological possibility of a child,” she said, her face expressionless. “Inducing menstruation is just that—bringing on a woman’s natural flow.”

“But the possibility—” he said, breaking off at the way Lucy’s body clenched, her fists so tight that her knuckles turned white.

“The possibility ,” Lucy repeated. “Katie herself—her life, her body—is the reality . Katie did not have a choice. Timmy took that away from her.”

The truth of that statement sat like a brick in Thorne’s stomach.

Lucy’s hands unclenched and she took a tentative step forward. “Do you think you would have been as good a father back then as you are now? Can you imagine the life that child would have experienced at that time in your life, and whether it would have been anything like Sadie’s today?”

The churning wouldn’t stop, and his mind raced.

“No,” he admitted. “It’s why I need to find a good woman. A godly woman who will guide and care for Sadie. Who won’t fail her the same way I’ve failed.”

“Ah,” Lucy said, her smile so forced it bent to the side. “Someone like your Mrs. Merkle? A woman who would never do anything as immoral as take control over what happens to her body and her life. A woman who assumes a man will respect her wishes and provide for her.”

This wasn’t what he meant. Was it?

“What is it that Katie, and your Geneviève, and me for that matter—what is it we have in common that makes us less good than Mrs. Merkle?”

Thorne understood Lucy’s point. What all three of the women had in common was that they had sex outside of the legitimacy of marriage.

By every known measure—the church, public opinion, the philosophers he’d studied at university—Lucy, Katie, and Genny were in the wrong. No one would question that it was his right to think less of women who demanded a say in what happened to their bodies.

Thorne had tried so hard to live a good life since he’d stopped drinking and become a father. If Lucy was correct, that meant that other assumptions he’d lived by could also be unfair or unfounded.

How much uncertainty could a man live with and still keep his moral compass?

“Lucy,” he began, uncertain as to how he might repair this breach. How did you chart a course forward when the world kept spinning in unexpected directions?

“If you would please leave, Mr. Thorne. Your services are no longer needed today,” she said softly.

His services .

The disappointment in her voice made him slightly ill.

“I shall retire, then, if you’ve no need of my... services .” His ruined voice would never rise enough to attempt the icy inflection that Lucy had used, but his words had an impact, for she leaned back as though he’d pushed her away.

Which, Thorne reflected later, was for the best, as even after Lucy got up and put on her coat and bonnet and left the shop, he didn’t know what he could say to make any of this better.

—

With no idea of a destination, Lucy wandered down the high street.

How dare he?

How dare he?

Admittedly, educating a young woman about preventatives before she was married was considered immoral, but Lucy had believed Thorne would see things differently than everyone else.

There were times when he looked at her, when he touched her, that Lucy thought he could see inside her mind, feel the very blood beneath her skin. It terrified and exhilarated her at the same time.

Now?

What terrified Lucy even more was if she were to come face-to-face with him now, he still would be able to read her, while she’d badly misjudged him.

Thorne had not condemned her outright, but he hadn’t supported her, either. A godly woman was what he wanted.

Godly. What did that mean?

Lucy did not go to church services often anymore without her mother to prod her along. She remembered her psalms, though, as well as sermons that once moved her, and her favorite stories from the New Testament. She believed that God had created individuals in his own likeness. Whatever she did, Lucy tried to see that likeness of the divine, that expression of love, in every person she encountered.

What was more loving than protecting Katie from a fate she didn’t want, or giving her control over the path of her life?

In her ire, Lucy had forgotten to take a warmer bonnet. The wind roaring down the street had amused itself by blowing up underneath her old bonnet’s brim and pinching her cheeks while her eyes watered from the cold.

At first, Lucy thought she might go see Juliet to tell her of Katie and complain about the stupidity of the male race. The mud that seeped through the hole in her boots was cold, though, and the air smelled like rain, rather than snow.

The cold called up a twinge in her fingers that made her think of Thorne, and whether he was using her salve. His fingers, his hands, his scars—broken but eventually healed, like the man beneath them.

Not seeing the puddle in front of her, Lucy stomped into three inches of frozen, dirty water and felt it soak through her holey boots and into her stocking. The curse she let loose was not due to her cold, wet feet, however. Lucy cursed because the shock of the water was less intense than the realization that she’d gone and fallen in love with Jonathan Thorne.

Damn.

“I told you that I would buy you a bonnet to match the color of your eyes so you could leave off wearing that old coal scuttle.”

Lucy stumbled over the cobbles on the street at the memories the voice behind her evoked. By the time she’d turned to face Duncan Rider, he’d come up close enough to take her hand and place a kiss on the back of it.

“Duncan,” she said in greeting, filled with pride at the indifference in her voice. “You are looking well.”

He preened; his chest puffed up, and a satisfied smile made the corners of his blue eyes crinkle in an attractive manner that once made her weak in the knees. Duncan touched the rim of his hat, drawing her attention to the fine quality of the felt and the expense of the black silk hatband. A lock of his blond hair peeked artfully out from beneath his brim, and Lucy wagered he’d spent a good half hour on this look. Lucy wished her mother had been alive to warn her about the contents of a gift that came in pretty wrapping.

“Good day to you,” she said, then turned on her heel and resumed her rapid pace down the muddied streets.

“Is Miss Juliet minding the shop?” Duncan asked from behind her.

Undeterred by her about-face dismissal, he followed on Lucy’s heels.

“Not your concern, is it?” she said.

Petty but satisfying to point that out.

“Lucy. Can you slow for a moment so I can speak with you?” Duncan asked, a slight whine pulling his vowels to the side and flattening them.

Turning the corner, Lucy spied the painted wooden sign for the Lion’s Den. The pub took up the first two floors of a slanted stucco built during the Tudor times, and it had escaped not one but two of London’s biggest fires. The exposed wooden beams were blackened and riddled with worm tracks, and the stucco had fallen off in patches, allowing for a bird to nest over the entrance. Regulars to the pub knew to look up when they opened the door and see if any of the nest’s inhabitants were home before they passed below. More than one patron had been caught trying to lie about their whereabouts with a telltale lump of bird poo unnoticed in their hair.

Rather than answering Duncan, Lucy grabbed hold of the door’s handle, looked up quickly to spare her old bonnet any indignities, and then made her way into the cheery confines of the Lion’s Den.

A handful of customers were there, some having come from work, some getting ready, and the rest most likely having spent the day at the round oak tables, their surfaces polished by two hundred years’ worth of elbows. Old women rested their feet by the fire, smoking clay pipes that spilled ash on their aprons, and a few of the men from a nearby warehouse sat in the far corner, playing a game of cards and insulting one another, sipping their pints as slowly as possible before they had to go back out in the cold.

“Miss Peterson, good day.” A large, square-jawed man, Joe Quinlavin sat with his back against the wall on a wooden stool at the bar, surveying the room with a proprietary air. Although he wasn’t the owner, Katie’s da knew more about the lives of the people in this community than they knew about their own families; he was a magpie of gossip, collecting the tidbits strewn about by drunken patrons and hoarding them, partly for his own enjoyment and partly for future use if a favor was needed.

How long would it be before some hint of what Timmy had done reached Quinlavin’s ears? Thorne wouldn’t need to kill the boy; Katie’s da would have already done it.

Sorrow for Katie outweighed Lucy’s anger at Thorne, and she greeted Quinlavin more warmly than she might have otherwise. She smiled at the barkeep, who had already pulled a pint of her favorite lager when she stepped through the door, and took the beer to a small table in an empty part of the room.

“What are you doing drinking beer in the middle of the day?” Duncan hissed, looking around him in disdain. Lucy had never stepped out with Duncan during their affair, so she’d no idea what sort of establishment he took his pint at—most likely someplace cleaner and brighter than the Lion’s Den. He picked up his foot and examined the bottom of his polished boot, frowning.

“I am a grown woman and answer to no one,” Lucy said, relishing the smooth licorice flavor of her first sip of beer. “I can drink a beer whatever time of day I like.”

Duncan pulled out a chair opposite her, took a handkerchief from an inside coat pocket, and wiped the seat before flipping the skirt of his coat up and setting himself down.

At the other end of the bar, Quinlavin let out a quiet snort, and Lucy shook her head.

When had Duncan become such an ass?

Or had he always been this way, and Lucy ignored it because she was grateful for his attentions?

She took a bigger sip, more like a gulp, and licked the foam from the top of her lip.

Duncan grimaced. “You answer to your customers. What will they think if they find you’ve abandoned your shop for the pub?”

Another sip, and Lucy’s shoulders fell. She removed her bonnet and set it on the table in front of her so there was no room for anything else other than her own pint glass.

“I suppose they’ll think me feckless and take their money elsewhere. Perhaps to Rider and Son, where they can buy a tin of lozenges.”

“Ahhh.” Duncan’s head dropped and he looked to the side as though the rest of what he should say might be written on the ancient wallpaper peeling into long strips that exposed the yellowed plaster beneath.

“You see, what happened was... what I mean is...”

Lucy contemplated the surface of her lager. The dark liquid held an image of her face, her mouth distorted and eyes overlarge. Small bubbles huddled at the side of the glass, and the scent of coffee and malt filled her nose, alongside the fug of the old women’s pipes and wet wool drying by the fireside.

Did it matter what excuse Duncan came forward with? It wouldn’t change a single consequence of his betrayal.

And what were the consequences?

Lucy immediately thought of lying in Thorne’s arms, feeling a freedom she hadn’t known existed. She thought of Sadie sitting in the workroom and asking about the anatomy of a toad, of the painstaking lettering on the name cards at dinner last week, of Mr. Gentry’s expression as he presented Sadie with a posy of violets.

On the other hand, she saw David’s growing frustration with the tedium of bookkeeping and the worry lines that creased Juliet’s forehead when she dragged herself home from the clinic, exhausted and disheartened.

“...and my father has agreed.”

Lucy glanced up from her drink. “Your father has agreed to what, Duncan?”

A flush spread along his cheekbones as he gaped at her. “Have you not heard a word I’ve said?”

A sudden urge to take Duncan by the shoulders and shake him grew so strong, Lucy sat on her hands. If Thorne were here, he might once again accuse her of plotting murder.

“I work eighteen hours in the day, my brother has disappeared on me, and my sister is working herself sick. The Guardians have been protesting outside my shop and scaring patrons, and I’ve no money to hire an apprentice because my spurious lover stole my formula. Forgive me, Duncan, if I’ve so much on my mind I cannot concentrate on your complaints about the cleanliness of the floor or my irresponsibility in having a single pint after a difficult day.”

There was no hint of a whine in her complaint, simply a recitation of facts.

Such as the fact that Duncan had lied and cheated her, and Lucy didn’t owe him the courtesy of paying attention.

Slapping his top hat against his crossed thigh, Duncan then ran his gloved fingers through his perfectly pomaded hair.

“I said, I asked my father if we could be married, and my father agreed.”

What?

Lucy set her glass down on the table and quickly glanced in Quinlavin’s direction, but she’d chosen her seat well and he seemed not to have heard anything.

“What?”

A long-suffering sort of sigh issued from Duncan’s lungs, and he rolled his eyes. “If you’d been listening to me—”

Lucy made a circling motion with her hand, and he huffed.

“I’m sorry about what happened with the lozenge formula. I feel terrible, Lucy.”

Terrible? He should feel the tortures of the damned nipping at his toes.

“The time for apologies is long past,” Lucy said. “You stole my work.”

Examining the slick stains of pomade on his gloves meant Duncan avoided looking her in the eye.

“It wasn’t like I stole it on purpose. You have to believe me. I took the formula back to the shop to experiment, like I said, and my father asked what I was working on.” The flush grew until Duncan’s face glowed red with chagrin. “I didn’t want to tell him about us, so I told him...”

The handsome features that Lucy had dreamed about for so long crumpled and sagged. She caught a glimpse of what Duncan would look like twenty, thirty years from now when the patina of youth had worn away and his character had seeped into his features.

The picture wasn’t pretty.

“You don’t know what it’s like, Lucy. Before this, I could never please him.” Duncan’s slightly fleshy lips sunk in a frown, his gaze unfocused. “I’m not like you. It takes me forever to mix a cure. My measurements are always wrong, and I am no good at diagnosing the imbalance of humors.”

Lucy remembered Duncan’s laments about his father and how difficult it was to gain the man’s approval. The honesty about his failings was part of her attraction to Duncan. He never pretended to be smarter than her or became offended when she explained things to him.

Most men of Lucy’s acquaintance were intimidated by a woman’s success. Duncan, instead, had been admiring.

“When he thought I’d developed the lozenge, he was so proud, but...” Duncan’s eyes squinted as though he were in pain. “It was terrible of me to let that happen, Lucy. I cheated you.”

The bite of the lager and familiarity of his features—the sincerity in his voice—all conspired to loosen Lucy’s muscles. Her hand unclenched around the glass, and she sank into her chair, studying Duncan’s face.

“I cheated my father, too,” he said. “Mostly, I cheated myself of the chance to earn his regard on my own merits.”

Lucy’s prediction of rain rather than snow had come true. A blanket of gray draped around the pub, and a steady tapping of the rain sang a melancholy tune against the buckled glass window behind them. The old women cackled in the corner as the occasional raindrop found its way down the chimney and was caught by the coals in a quiet hiss.

Strange how the world works , Lucy thought. The same day that Thorne disappointed her, Duncan showed up and tried to redeem himself.

Of course, there was still a world of difference between the two men. On the face of it, quite literally, Duncan resembled a prince while Thorne more resembled a villain the prince might slay. Beneath their skin, too, the two men could not be less alike. Thorne walked through the world with the confidence of a king and the humility of a peasant.

Duncan, for all of his twenty-five years, was still a child.

A child who hadn’t the intellectual wherewithal to break into the apothecary, read through the piles of scientific papers on her desk, and figure out which was a formula for a croup salve.

Draining her pint, Lucy swallowed the bitter truth along with tasteless foam and the knowledge that nothing could change the course of her life. She’d gone and lost her chance at a fortune and then, even worse, lost her heart. Nothing else would matter until Lucy found a way to recover from that.

“Are you too high in the instep to join me in a pint?” Lucy asked him, weary and thirsty. “This might go easier if you did.”

Blowing out a long breath, Duncan nodded, and Lucy went to the bar. As she waited for the barkeep to draw a pint of blond ale, she smiled grimly at Quinlavin, whose eyes were wide with curiosity.

“You don’t have to marry me,” she said when she returned, setting the glass on the table in front of Duncan. “You can just put my name on the lozenge patent.”

Duncan frowned. “But I want to marry you.”

At first, Lucy did not know whether to laugh or scream at his self-absorption. Instead, she said nothing, her face frozen in ambivalence.

More surprising was the question she asked herself in the next second. Would that be so terrible?

Lucy would never love Duncan again the way she had before he’d broken her heart. The power he’d held was long gone. Rather than being a detriment to marriage, though, this would be an asset.

There was no depth to Duncan that she would need to plumb, no secrets, no sordid history. Marriage with him would be simple and uncomplicated.

In fact, if Lucy suspected that she could ever fall back in love with him, she would never consider marriage.

Giving a man your heart meant giving him the power to hurt you.

The ache in Lucy’s chest at Thorne’s ambivalence this afternoon was still throbbing in her chest. Why carry such pain?

“I do not love you anymore,” she told him without rancor.

Taking no umbrage, Duncan merely nodded. “I expect not after what I did.”

“I am not, as you said,” Lucy continued, “unnatural in my urges nor powerless to my desires.”

Apple-shaped splotches of red appeared beneath Duncan’s cheekbones. “It’s not just my word. The Guardians say...”

Lucy finished the last of her lager and set the glass down on the table a little too hard. Quinlavin looked over from his hushed conversation with the barkeep, and Duncan’s flush deepened.

“Never again quote the Guardians’ assertions to me,” Lucy said through gritted teeth.

His mouth opened, then closed. After a moment, Duncan took a sip of his beer, then shuddered at the taste.

“The leaders of the Guardians, they are men of high station. We do business with them,” Duncan said. “That cannot change.”

Lucy shrugged. “I will take their money. I am simply sick of their words. Do not repeat them to me and we shall get on famously.”

Eyes narrowing, Duncan pushed his glass away, no longer pretending enjoyment. “Does that mean you will do it? You will marry me?”

Arms crossed, Lucy met Duncan’s stare with a bold one of her own.

“That means you may fetch me another pint, please,” she said.

“Excellent. I’ll buy you as many pints as you wish, if you’ll just hear me out. We have much to discuss,” Duncan said, his smile suddenly bright.

Lucy just shook her head at his back as he made his way to the bar. She’d listen to Duncan for as long as he was buying, but doubted any argument he could concoct would convince her to trust him again.

A heart could only break so many times before it lost its original purpose.