Page 4 of The Love Remedy (The Damsels of Discovery #1)

4

“I might agree to kill this Duncan even if he hasn’t stolen your formulas. If he is responsible for this , death is the least he deserves.”

Lucy would have laughed at Thorne’s attempt at humor if she weren’t so embarrassed when she lit the sinumbra lamp on a side table to reveal a mountain of books and papers.

She’d met Thorne at the threshold of the apothecary’s cramped office this morning. The room was off the shop, had but one narrow window, a set of shelves built into the wall, and two ladder-back chairs as well as the desk. At least she assumed the desk was there. All she could see was parchment-covered chaos.

“While I blame Duncan for my distraction these past weeks,” Lucy said, setting her hands to her cheeks to hide a flush of humiliation, “this mess is not solely a result of my inattention.”

“No,” he agreed. “I believe you said your brother, David, was in charge of your accounts.”

A tiny hammer pounded at the spot between her eyebrows, and she pressed a thumb there to silence the noise.

“He’s been busy with another business venture.”

That was what David had told her and Juliet with controlled excitement a month ago. While he wouldn’t disclose the details until he’d finalized them, this business venture was certain to change their fortunes. He swore it was legitimate and he’d found a trustworthy partner. He simply needed capital and some time.

Time Lucy didn’t have.

“It would help if you could show me some evidence of other formulas in your hand or, better yet, early notes you took before completing the formula,” Thorne said.

Lucy sucked her bottom lip into her mouth and stared at the mountain. “I’ve looked through for my notebook, but as for early notes... they could be in there. In the middle of the bottom part of the stack on the left... oh, goodness. It will take us days to find evidence and weeks to put this mess in order.”

Thorne shook his head before she finished her sentence, then walked toward the chair nearest the desk. As he passed by, he reached out and patted her shoulder in reassurance before taking a seat.

“Do you doubt, Miss Peterson, that I can do both?” With a sigh of contentment, Thorne sifted through the first layer of papers. “Some of the agents pose as housekeepers. Some as butlers. We are adept at our chosen roles, and I am quite capable of organizing your books. An accounting audit is as seductive a pleasure as the collection of evidence. Much the same process, really.”

Lucy said nothing. Partly because she found it inconceivable that a private agent—any person in their right mind, actually—would find enjoyment in accounting . Partly because she was frozen with apprehension from the sensations in the wake of his touch.

What terrible weakness lay within her that a brief, thoughtless contact felt so good?

When Lucy confronted Duncan at the theft of her lozenge formula, she’d accused him of seducing her. He, in turn, accused her of possessing unnatural carnal appetites that had unbalanced her brain, quoting an article from the Gentlemen’s Monthly Magazine to prove his point.

The publication was a voice for the Guardians of Domesticity, a group that blamed the scarcity of jobs on women taking employment outside of the home rather than the devastating effect mills and machinery had on the craft workers and tenant farmers of rural England. These men, who had been replaced by structures made of metal, now streamed into London looking for work—and for answers, perhaps, as to why their way of life was gone. The farther afield they traveled for work, the less their wives were able to venture from the home, and they became confined both physically and mentally.

Lucy and her siblings had made fun of the Guardians at first, but those men then turned their attention to the women of Athena’s Retreat. Recently some of them had been looking in her direction. The Guardians did not countenance a woman apothecary.

Their magazine, The Gentlemen’s Monthly Magazine , printed articles full of hatred toward women of science and listed imaginary ailments of the brain and body of women with unnatural desires for freedom. The articles were cleverly worded so while the intent was clear, the actual text could be explained away as pious concern for the women’s health and safety.

Thorne asked her a question, his attention still on the papers, but Lucy couldn’t answer. Could Duncan have been telling the truth? Was it a sign of a mental disease that caused her to crave the feeling of being enveloped in another person’s warmth and regard?

“What do you think?” Thorne asked. “Miss Peterson?”

He held a stack of papers out, one thick black brow raised in question.

“I don’t know,” she said aloud. In answer to his question or to her own, it was all the same. “I don’t know where anything is, I don’t know what I am to pay or what is to be paid to me. I am—”

Something like sympathy crossed his face, or perhaps it was pity and the scar smoothed away the worst of it.

“It is a good thing you have help,” he said, ever so gently, as if he thought a harsh word might break her.

Perhaps it would.

Help. Everything she wanted and nothing she could ask for.

Lucy reached for the papers and forced herself to read the top line of the first page.

“Forgive me,” she said to the invoice in front of her. “I don’t—didn’t—sleep well last night.”

David or Juliet had opened the shop. Sounds of people treading heavily on the old floorboards, the scratch of tin against wood as the canisters were pulled from the shelves, and the murmur of impatient voices filtered under the door. Lucy’s tension eased at the reminder that soon she would be in the workroom mixing cures—the one place where she was in control.

“Why would your formulas be mixed in with your financial papers?” Thorne asked as he pulled a pair of spectacles from his waistcoat pocket and set them upon the bridge of his nose, where they tilted slightly. He must be older than she’d guessed, unless whatever injuries he’d sustained to his face had affected his eyesight.

“There was a small explosion in the laboratory below my workroom at Athena’s Retreat last month,” Lucy said.

“A small explosion ?” he asked, peering over the rims.

Lucy waved away his concern. “Tiny, really. We only had to evacuate for a few hours, and no one was concussed. The floorboards of the workroom had to be replaced, so I took my work home until the repairs were finished.”

“So, your work has been sitting out on this desk for a month,” Thorne said now, flipping slowly through a ledger. “During that time, how many people could have come in this office?”

Lucy had no idea. She sucked at her lower lip in thought.

“Just David and I.”

Thorne’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure? That would certainly help implicate Rider.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Lucy promised. Who else would be so cruel? “David is the only other one.”

“Good morning, Miss Peterson.”

A tall woman dressed in a beautifully tailored blue wool paletot and a distinguished velvet bonnet opened the door without knocking, a covered basket over one arm. The gold rims of her glasses glinted in the lamplight as a smile lit her long, thin face.

“Good morning, Mrs. Parekh,” Lucy greeted her, hands rubbing together in anticipation. “What have you brought for me?”

“My husband’s cousin’s wife’s aunt arrived yesterday from Junagadh, right on time,” Mrs. Parekh said as she searched for a space to set her basket. Lucy dragged over the other chair, and Mrs. Parekh pulled back the cloth, exposing her treasure.

“Many of the pots broke in the voyage, but enough made it intact so I’ve some to share with you. We have two karira plants here, and I’ve included directions for how to grow. In addition, she brought a neem sapling...”

Twenty minutes later, Mrs. Parekh had left with Lucy’s profuse thanks and the promise that the precious plants would survive the harsh London winter.

“Now be sure to tell David to pack you up a bottle of rosehip oil and bring another to your relative as a token of our thanks.” Lucy waved goodbye, then turned back to the office. Her smile faded at the sight of Thorne balanced on the two back feet of his chair, hands over his chest and the expression of someone aching to point out the obvious on his face.

“The only people who come into this office are you, David, and Duncan Rider,” he said.

“Yes,” Lucy said. “And Mrs. Parekh, but only when she has plants for me. And Katie Quinlavin, the shopgirl, but she’s worked here for two years now and never would do anything untoward. Otherwise, absolutely no one—”

“Hallo. Who have we here?”

Lucy winced at Thorne’s raised eyebrows and turned on her heel to greet a man with thinning red hair and watery blue eyes who had entered the office without knocking. Dressed in a black wool coat and brown trousers too large for his lanky frame, he held his charcoal-colored felted cap in his long fingers and bowed quickly in Lucy’s direction.

“G’day, mum,” he said brusquely.

“Good day, Mr. Gentry,” Lucy said. “How unexpected to see you in the office.”

Gentry snorted as though she’d made a joke, and ventured farther into the room, leaning over to sniff at the neem sapling.

“Been thinking. Might not be anemia. Consid’ring the aches and sharp pains along with the exhaustion, might be an imbalance in my humors,” he said. He cocked his head and stared at Thorne, then asked, “What do you reckon?”

Thorne set his chair back on the floor with a heavy thud. “I beg your pardon?”

“Are you not an apothecary?” Gentry asked.

“I’m not,” Thorne said.

“What’re you doing in the apothecary office if you’re not an apothecary?” Gentry set his hands on his hips, lower lip pushed out and eyes squinting as if sizing Thorne up for a fight.

“This is our new bookkeeper,” Lucy said quickly. “Mr. Thorne, this is Mr. Gentry. He never comes into the office—”

“Not ’less I’ve something to say to Miss Peterson the rest of those know-it-alls out front don’t need to hear. I do some readin’ of my own.” Mr. Gentry tapped the side of his head with a skinny finger. “Miss Peterson and I have proper medical discussions ’bout my ailments.”

Thorne nodded and scratched his chin. “You have many ailments, do you?”

Behind Mr. Gentry, Lucy shook her head wildly and put a finger to her lips, but it was too late.

“Well,” said Mr. Gentry, “it started back in thirty-eight. Woke to a sore throat and tender nipples.”

It took another ten minutes for Lucy to persuade Mr. Gentry to leave off his recitation of five years’ worth of ailments and meet her in the treatment room for a “consultation” after lunch. During that time, Katie came in to fetch a box of lucifers, and Mrs. Patterson popped her head in to ask when her tincture would be ready.

Finally, Lucy shut the door behind her and leaned her body against it.

“I don’t know that I can ever unhear Mr. Gentry’s description of how to apply an onion poultice to one’s nether regions,” Thorne said slowly, his skin slightly ashen.

Lucy smiled sympathetically. “If it helps—”

Thorne held up a hand. “Nothing will help. Nothing. By God, the man has a gift for detail.” He rubbed his face and then shook his head quickly like a dog trying to dislodge a flea. “Miss Peterson,” he said with the air of a man exhibiting great patience. “Do you care to revise your statement about who exactly can enter this office?”

Lucy opened her mouth to reply, when the door behind her opened, pushing her forward into the desk, dislodging an avalanche of black-and-white pages everywhere.

“Miss Peterson, Miss Juliet says you are to come—”

“Miss Peterson, I’ve left you the herbs you asked—”

“A thruppence to pull a tooth? Highway robbery!”

Lucy examined the wreckage at her feet, then glanced at the mayhem in the shop beyond the door before turning to face Thorne.

“There is a possibility...” she began, surprised her ears weren’t literally aflame with chagrin.

“However slight it may be,” Thorne supplied dryly.

“Yes, exactly. A slight possibility someone might have ventured into the office other than me, David, and Duncan.”

“I see.” The resignation in his tone made Lucy wince.

“These people are my family’s customers. I’ve known them all my life,” Lucy said. She tried to keep her voice level and calm, as Duncan’s accusations of hysteria were still fresh in her memory. “They would never wish harm on me. Our apothecary is the only one that serves the East End of London with real cures instead of gin and opium. We never turn away a person in pain, whether they can pay or not.”

Stepping around the drifts of paper, Lucy clasped her hands together, pushing them into her skirts to keep from reaching toward him as if he were a raft and she was treading water in the ocean.

“Once you sort through this mess, you will see how close to ruin we are because of this. If I cannot sell my formula, I’ve lost everything my father left to me.”

—

London was a city of two extremes. During the day, commerce and the accumulation of wealth were the fuel that sent folks streaming down its streets at breakneck pace, humming with the energy necessary to claw a living from a tightfisted metropolis.

At night, the populace turned to pleasure.

The dimly lit streets of the nation’s capital held temptations for everyone, whether they found relief in a tin mug of gin, the joyous cacophony of the theater, or between the satin sheets of expensive brothels.

In his younger years, Thorne had sampled almost all that the city had to offer. The rhythm of life after midnight was more familiar to him than the day, no matter how early he woke and how hard he rode himself. On this night, the laughter in the street below grew louder as the public houses closed their doors and revelers made their way home, hurrying to end their stories and say their last goodbyes.

The aches and pains of poorly healed broken bones and torn ligaments from a youth of excess kept him from his bed until the early morning hours, so he was still awake and dressed when he heard the Peterson siblings come home from an evening out. Thorne first checked his daughter’s room and assured himself of her deep, uninterrupted slumber, then left their rooms and stood on the landing listening to the quiet merriment below.

From the slight slur of Miss Peterson’s command that her younger brother stop his fooling about and open the door, Thorne knew she’d been drinking. The disappointment that welled up was unfair. Simply because he’d become a teetotaler did not mean the rest of humanity must follow suit. Who was he, of all people, to begrudge a woman who worked as hard as Miss Peterson to have a glass of ale in the local pub with her family?

A high, light giggle floated upward—that would be Miss Juliet, whom he hadn’t met yet—and the Petersons finally closed the door behind them.

Waiting until all was quiet, Thorne made his way down the stairs, past the Petersons’ set of rooms and into the apothecary. A light burned in the back room, and Thorne carried it with him into the office.

He was still of two minds whether Miss Peterson was correct that someone had stolen her formula for the salve—that catastrophe in her office meant the formula could be sitting right there amid the copious scientific papers, recipes for cures on parchment from the last century, six-page epic poems dedicated to Miss Juliet, unpaid bills, and a myriad of invoices for goods like myrrh, lemons, camphor, and linen.

That was just the first layer of papers.

He tilted his head up as though he could see through the ceiling into the apartment above. For a long, dark moment, he imagined what she might be like—Miss Peterson... Lucy—after she’d had a drink or two. More cheerful, certainly, than the woman he’d spoken with this morning who seemed as though she held her life together with jagged stitches of tenacity and terror.

Drink will do that.

The memory of the weightlessness that came at the bottom of a beer settled behind his forehead, and he sat in the office, unseeing, until the oil in the lamp burned out.

The next morning, Thorne was up with the dawn, brushing out his clothes and polishing his boots. When he was done, he and Sadie breakfasted, then bundled themselves warmly. It took an hour to walk her to school, and they discussed finding a different school nearby as they nodded to the coffee sellers and walked round the newsboys. Truth be told, Sadie had outgrown the lessons in the tiny set of rooms where a former governess lectured a handful of merchants’ daughters on the basics of arithmetic and the structure of grammar.

As he waved goodbye, Thorne set the worry aside. He needed a clear head to begin the transformation this next step required. As he walked, his stride lengthened and slowed, shoulders back and chin up. The people around him morphed from individuals into indistinct figures deserving of acknowledgment only if they wore the right clothes or spoke with the correct dialect. The familiar sensation of privilege puffed up his chest. By the time Thorne reached the doors of Rider and Son, he’d regressed in empathy and increased his ego to reach the size needed for a proper aristocratic bearing.

That he’d succeeded was apparent the moment he entered the apothecary with the immediate deference shown by the shop boy in leaving a customer midtransaction and hurrying to his side.

“Good morning, sir,” the boy said. “How can I help you?”

The inside of Rider and Son was a far sight quieter than Peterson’s Apothecary. A few well-dressed women examined the contents of glass-topped cabinets and meticulously organized shelves. No sound could be heard issuing from behind the oak door at the side of the shop with a “consultations” sign hanging on it. Sunlight filtered through the windows onto newly swept floors.

At the center of the shop stood a large display. Atop a table covered in white linen were stacks of tin boxes lined before a sign that read “Rider’s Lozenges” in red letters and beneath it the boast “Exclusive Patented Lozenges for the Relief of Putrid Throat.”

“Have you heard of our famous lozenges, sir?”

The shop boy retreated to the counter to finish up with his customer and was replaced by a blandly handsome young man with clear blue eyes and a ready smile. The young man’s blond hair was parted on the side, and he sported a set of fashionable muttonchop whiskers along his jaw that served to emphasize rather than hide a weak chin.

Thorne inclined his head in such a way that conveyed a tepid interest in something other than himself.

Obviously used to the affectations of the gentry, the man beamed.

“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Duncan Rider, the inventor of Rider’s Lozenges.” He paused as if waiting for applause to settle. “I am the first to discover how to cure a putrid throat in a lozenge. Why, Windsor Castle’s housekeeper has ordered some specially made just the other day, and we count the Earl of Westwood as one of our most valued customers. He says his household will never be without a tin of Rider’s Lozenges.”

Duncan appeared so obviously pleased with himself, with the lozenges, with the world in general that Thorne instantly took him in dislike.

There was no reason to be that cheerful.

Ever.

“I’m impressed. Tell me,” Thorne said slowly as he walked to the display and peered at the dozens of tins with their red and white labels. “What is the formula that gives the lozenges their potency?”

A blank look crossed the man’s face for a moment before he caught himself and displayed that smile again.

“That formula is a secret, sir.”

Thorne adjusted his top hat as he took in the rest of the shop. Like Peterson’s, there were shelves of canisters and jars with contents both familiar and more exotic, but more room here was given over to dried goods and attractive displays of cosmetics and toilet water.

“If it’s patented, it’s not a secret,” Thorne said when his gaze returned to Rider.

Again, the lines of the man’s face smoothed except for a small furrow that bisected his brow.

Interesting.

Duncan Rider was an idiot.

This made Thorne’s job a good deal easier, but it also made him wonder how someone as bright as Miss Peterson could stand to be in company with such a fool.

“Well, it’s exclusive,” Duncan said slowly, as if turning over the meaning of the word in his head. “That means no one else can make them. Only us.”

Thorne did not want to confuse the poor boy any further, so he nodded in agreement.

“Friendly with Westwood, did you say?” Thorne asked.

That Thorne was familiar with the earl put Duncan right back on firmer footing. “Great friends, as a matter of fact,” the young man said.

Westwood was a few years Thorne’s junior and had not been an earl when they were at Oxford. Westwood hadn’t been stupid, but neither was he especially bright, nor had he ever shown more than a nodding familiarity with morals or principles. He was also a gambler.

Just the type of man Thorne had allied himself with back then.

“You must tell him that Jonathan Thornwood sends his regards.”

Duncan shook his hand like a man pumping water but showed no sign of familiarity with Thorne’s family name, nor did he seem to make a connection between Jonathan Thornwood and Jon Thorne, the Gentleman Fighter.

Notoriety was a fleeting thing in London.

“I have a friend,” Thorne said, picking up a tin and examining it. “His baby is suffering a terrible case of croup. Do you have any special cure for that?”

Duncan’s brows rose. “No. Not that I know of. You can ask the shop clerk, I suppose.”

Thorne expressed his thanks, and Duncan pressed a tin of lozenges into his hand.

“Please, take them in good health,” the man implored.

“Exclusive patent,” Thorne said as if reading the label for the first time. “And you discovered this by yourself?”

Duncan spread his arms, palms open and facing the heavens, as if to say, Who else?

While it would please Thorne greatly if he could prove this fool had indeed stolen Miss Peterson’s salve, he could not base a man’s guilt on his weakness of character. The agents of Tierney’s were cautioned not to deliver justice if it could be sought through the common law. Their talents were used to help the helpless, not right petty grievances.

Tierney’s had given Thorne a means to redress the wrongs he had committed in his former life, and he would follow the rules set out to him when he took employment with the firm seven years ago.

When Thorne took his leave of Rider, the young man again smiled broadly and waved as though they were friends parting forever. By the surprised fear in Rider’s eyes as Thorne exited the shop, he assumed the scowl he wore matched Rider’s smile in intensity, if not impact.

Good.