Page 3 of The Love Remedy (The Damsels of Discovery #1)

3

“She is a nice lady, Miss Peterson. Quite sensible. You will enjoy living in her building.”

One thing Thorne learned early on in fatherhood was that lying to your child was the key to domestic harmony.

Carrots were what dwarves ate to give them the ability to see in dark mines, and if you ate yours before they cooled, you, too, might be able to spot gemstones in the dark. Baths were necessary because they washed away any leftover bad dreams from the night before. If you didn’t go to sleep, you wouldn’t grow big enough to ride a unicorn. Unicorns lived in Cheshire and only let little girls who ate their vegetables ride them.

Thorne had no idea what would happen when his daughter, Sadie, grew old enough to see through his lies and he would have to rely on reasoned arguments.

At nine, Sadie must have known the bit about the unicorns was a lie, but she humored him in a way Thorne found both endearing and disconcerting.

“We like living here,” Sadie pointed out now. They sat at the table in the common room of their fourth-floor flat, having just finished a meal of cold chicken and bread.

A pile of peas sat shriveled on her plate.

“It’s too bad you couldn’t marry Mrs. Merkle,” Sadie continued. “It would’ve made everything easier, wouldn’t it? Did you get on one knee?”

Sighing, Thorne rubbed a hand over his eyes. To lie or not to lie?

Mrs. Merkle owned the building where they lived now, and Thorne paid her a small sum on top of the rent each week to watch Sadie when he worked long hours. A fellow member of his church, the widow had fit the definition of what Thorne believed was an ideal wife. She was plain of face, thrifty, and honest—to a fault.

“You’re not much to look on, and you never married the child’s mother,” Mrs. Merkle had said when Thorne paid her a call. Mrs. Merkle’s own flat wasn’t much larger than his, although it boasted a settee covered in a dun-colored paisley print and numerous samplers stretched and framed on the wall, all of which had proverbs cross-stitched on them.

She’d continued in an offhand manner as if she hadn’t just called him ugly and his daughter a bastard. “You’re a hard worker, but I don’t know how much bookkeeping will be in demand in a small town up north. You could take up a trade, I suppose.”

A trade.

Thorne had forced himself to nod slowly as if considering the suggestion.

He’d taken a perilous fall from grace since leaving his family’s home for a life of drinking and fighting.

This little widow’s dismal assessment gave him an appreciation of just how far down he’d fallen.

Setting aside the notion of a trade, Thorne had cleared his throat. “I will admit when I came to see you with intention of asking you to marry me, I had no idea your cousin had passed away and left you such a generous bequest.”

His proposal of marriage had been met with unexpected ambivalence. Mrs. Merkle had just received the news that her cousin in Scotland had passed away and left her a small house by the sea. It turned out that the practical Mrs. Merkle had a romantic streak in her and wished to return to the Scottish coast where she spent her childhood summers. A pale, thin woman with a sharp nose and a slight overbite, she favored dark colors and large shawls, always complaining of a chill.

“I’ve sold the building already and plan on leaving in a week’s time. Of course, you can stay on,” she had said. “The man who bought the building wants to cut the flats in half, though. I don’t know as he’d let you keep yours without raising the rent.” With a small sigh that might have held a note of regret, Mrs. Merkle patted her hair, tucked up in a heavy braid that she wound in a bun at the base of her neck. “Yes, a trade certainly would’ve come in handy.”

What might Mrs. Merkle’s reaction have been if Thorne had told her the truth? That he’d graduated with honors from Oxford, made and spent a fortune, and if he would only send his daughter away to a boarding school, his family would take him back and he could resume a life of privilege and power.

Thorne had said nothing in the end, taking his leave since the widow had much to prepare before her move. He’d searched the newspapers for rooms for let, but, not wanting to worry Sadie, he’d said nothing until he’d come home from his encounter with Miss Peterson, the opposite of his colorless landlady in every way.

“No,” he said to his daughter now. “I didn’t propose on bended knee. I assumed Mrs. Merkle would think such a gesture the height of foolishness.”

His daughter pushed her lower lip out, exhibiting an uncanny resemblance to his mother—slightly tilted teak-colored eyes, a tiny bump in the center of her otherwise straight nose, and flared cheekbones that gave her the look of a kitten. From her own mother, Sadie inherited the heart-shaped mole beneath her left ear, her copper skin, and her glorious black curls, which they were always wrestling into two plaits.

Thorne never searched for himself in her face.

“Miss Peterson and her sister are apothecaries,” he told her. “They live with their brother over the shop, and we are to take the apartment above them.”

“What has Miss Peterson done that you must go and fix her?”

Thorne had considered lying to Sadie about what he did—it worked so well with vegetables. Though his ego had shrunk considerably from his time as the toast of the gentlemen’s clubs in London, it hadn’t disappeared altogether. He gave his daughter the truth in small bits, bits he hoped made sense to her nine-year-old brain, for it had occurred to him on one of his first missions that someday he might not make it home.

He wanted to be someone his daughter could admire and dreaded the thought that he might die and she’d hear only about his former life as a prizefighter—a wasteland of alcohol and violence. His attempt to forget that period was thwarted by the aches in his joints that kept him awake well into the night, the long hours spent reviewing his choices and resolving to live a better life going forward.

In the end, Thorne told Sadie that he worked as a bookkeeper but was occasionally called upon to right a particular wrong.

Thorne considered how he would explain Miss Peterson and how her hyperbole nearly had him convinced she was a murderer while the two of them cleared the remains of their supper and tidied the dishes.

“Miss Peterson suspects a certain person has taken her work without permission. I will be working as a bookkeeper while at the same time asking questions to see if her suspicions are correct.”

It had come as an unwelcome surprise how readily Thorne had caved and agreed to undertake the assignment for Miss Peterson. He still wasn’t certain how she’d persuaded him to accept lodgings in her building along with a paltry sum in exchange for both accounting and investigative services.

Perhaps old age had softened his brain?

Sadie yawned, and Thorne fetched their latest book from the low shelf beneath the street-facing window. While he swept the floor and put away the last of the crockery, Sadie prepared for bed. After their prayers, they ended their day as they did most nights when he was home to take dinner with her, immersed in the great world beyond the confines of their quiet home.

Tonight, they roamed the streets of Saffron Hill with poor Oliver Twist, marveling at the casual cruelties that people will inflict upon one another and secure in the knowledge that while they had each other, such hardship would never touch them.

—

“You say he keeps books?” David whispered in Lucy’s ear. “Are you sure he doesn’t hit them? With his face?”

“Shut up, Squeaky,” Lucy whispered back, deliberately using her brother’s hated nickname.

Luckily, Mr. Thorne appeared not to have heard that observation. He and his daughter were distracted by the task of opening every small drawer behind the counter and examining the contents. Their trunks and boxes stood forgotten by the back set of stairs while Lucy and David watched from the doorway of the treatment room, waiting to show them up to the flat.

Lucy’s younger sister, Juliet, had questioned the choice to hire a bookkeeper at first, but her trust in Lucy’s decisions about the business was absolute. The unwritten rule was that Lucy ran the shop and mixed the cures, freeing Juliet to diagnose the customers and work at her charitable clinic for women in the East End. Juliet had never once reproached Lucy about the loss of the formula—or even the affair itself—and for that, Lucy was eternally grateful.

David hadn’t been as sanguine as Juliet about Lucy’s affair with Duncan. Not so much because Lucy had an affair; mostly because he loathed Duncan. He hadn’t blamed Lucy for the loss of income, either. A man who often let his heart lead him, David understood Lucy’s naive trust in their rival.

Caring brother that he was, he’d thrown himself into searching out business opportunities to make up for their loss. Unfortunately, the first two “opportunities” included investing in a shipping company that didn’t exist and buying a farm that turned out to be in the middle of the Sahara.

Since then, David had kept mum about his activities, frustrated at his own gullibility and inexperience. More and more, his nature was as changeable as the direction of the winds, sweet and affable one day, brooding and brittle the next. Lucy had not bothered to upbraid him for neglecting the one duty he had at the shop, the accounting, for David was not meant to live in a back office going over figures. That hadn’t stopped him from grumpily questioning whether the expense of a bookkeeper could be justified.

If he weren’t her brother, Lucy might have described his attractiveness as disconcerting. With delicate bones beneath his skin and wide dark blue eyes, he resembled a knight from a Crivelli painting who’d traded his armor and sword for a waistcoat and topper. He loved children and stray dogs and hated hypocrites and vinegar.

Thankfully, he seemed to be in a good mood as Lucy had shown Thorne and his daughter round the apothecary. When Sadie had read the label on one of the drawers, gasping in wonder, Lucy had encouraged her to open the drawer to reveal its contents.

Just as Lucy expected, finding an entire drawerful of glass eyeballs never lost its thrill.

Sadie’s excitement had only increased with the exploration of other drawers, containing the likes of preserved earthworms and hunks of unpolished quartz.

“Crocodile poo,” Sadie squealed now. The hair escaping her plaits looked like puffy clouds, and she grimaced sweetly when her father reached over to tuck it back into the braids.

None of the Peterson siblings had married, and there hadn’t been a child in the apothecary since they were young. Even when Lucy was in the deepest part of her infatuation with Duncan, she’d never considered the possibility of children. The three of them had seen so many succumb to diseases endemic in the poorer districts of London, she doubted any of them had wanted to watch a child of their own suffer such a fate.

Lucy shuddered, the sudden weight of worry for this girl now attaching itself to her, and she resolved not to spend too much time with Sadie.

Sadie’s giggles had the opposite effect on David, for his expression lightened.

“Alas. The last of the crocodile poo was ground into a salve over eighty years ago,” David said.

Lucy held her breath, hoping he would have the sense not to follow up with the explanation that hundreds of years ago it was used as a pregnancy preventative.

Luckily, David still had some sense left in him.

He crouched next to Sadie. “Now, if you’ve the constitution for it...” He paused and peered at her in an exaggerated manner. “And I think you do... I will show you the more exotic ingredients we use in our work.”

Holding up a finger, he leaned forward an inch and lowered his voice. “You must promise not to breathe word of their existence to another soul, however. The contents of our cures remain a secret.”

Sadie’s eyes widened, then narrowed in understanding, and she nodded her agreement. David rose and took down one of the jars containing the gnarled root of the ginseng plant. The ends had split halfway like two limbs, and the way the tuber twisted on itself resembled a dancing man.

The shop took up one half of the ground floor, the other half divided into an office, a treatment room, and the workroom. Attached to the back of the building was a storeroom where they kept their barrels of herbs and enormous jars of oils and astringents.

While David began an embellished tale of where they’d procured the root and its medicinal effects, Thorne wandered over to examine the treatment room, and Lucy joined him, leaving the door open so they could hear David and Sadie chatter.

“He won’t tell her anything too frightening,” she assured him. “They’re the same tales our grandfather told us when we were small.”

Though Thorne was tall and wide of shoulder and chest, his movements were fluid. Through his woolen trousers Lucy made out the long line of his quadriceps, the muscles flexing when he knelt to examine the base of her treatment chair, running his gloved hands along the side of it. He’d worn gloves the other day as well, the mark of a gentleman. Or a man who wished to hide the skin covering misshapen knuckles, the outline of which could be seen even through the thick Woodstock leather.

David was correct that Thorne had suffered more than a few blows. She wondered idly how a bookkeeper would ever explain such injuries.

While Thorne scrutinized the mechanism that lowered and raised the chair, Lucy let herself stare, noting the simplicity of his frock coat couldn’t hide its fit, which spoke of excellent tailoring. His curling brown hair was recently cut, and the skin on the back of his neck was clean where the collar pulled away as he bent. Yesterday, she’d been too distracted to question how a man with a history of violence written across his face had acquired such refined speech and polished manners. Given the quality of the wool making up Sadie’s dress and her real leather boots, he spent money on the people he loved.

Thorne’s manner toward his daughter was gentle, but he watched every move she made with those inscrutable eyes of his, and Lucy envied that little girl’s certainty that her father kept watch. While he was not as handy as a carpenter, she felt strongly this man was a protector.

“You don’t need to worry,” he said.

Lucy pulled as much air as she could through her tight throat and forced her fingers to uncurl, smoothing the soft cotton of her skirts in a pathetic attempt to make herself appear unconcerned as she opened her mouth to assure Thorne that she was not worried, but he continued to speak.

“Sadie has devoured her share of frightening stories.” He stepped away from the chair and walked back to the doorway, pride evident in his face as he watched his daughter. “I’m afraid her taste in literature leans more toward Charles Dickens than Sarah Fielding.”

Lucy’s cheeks burned with embarrassment that she’d thought his concern directed at her. Why should Thorne care if she worried? If she was veritably drowning in worry? Lucy’s fears were not his concern. He was being paid to investigate a theft and hopefully collect enough evidence to bring charges against Duncan to the magistrate. That was all. Most likely, she and Thorne would have little contact while he was there.

That thought rattled round in her head like an abandoned wooden top as Thorne returned to his daughter’s side. David had helped Sadie up on the ladder, and he and Thorne stood, faces upturned and glowing as if blessed in a shower of the little girl’s laughter.

That night Lucy didn’t even try to go to bed. Instead, when the dishes were cleared and the floor swept, she pulled off her petticoats and corset, changed into a ragged old day dress, and went to the workroom. As the rest of London settled in to sleep, Lucy let the scent of fresh thyme fill her nose as she distilled it down to an oil for a tincture. Hours passed, and the sounds from the street were muted to the occasional splash of a horse’s hooves in a dirty puddle and the quiet tapping of the wind.

Two floors above, she fancied she could hear the heavy tread of a big man move about until even he fell silent, and Lucy carried out her work alone.