Page 5 of The Love Remedy (The Damsels of Discovery #1)

5

“I cannot concentrate in these conditions.”

Lucy glanced over at Thorne and raised her brows in question.

“How do you expect me to contend with your accounts while a chicken stares at me?”

“Stop staring at Mr. Thorne,” Lucy admonished the hen.

The chicken ignored her and kept her tiny little eyes on Thorne.

With a low huff, he bent his head back to his work for a moment, only to lean forward and put his pointer finger on the desk in front of him.

“Miss Peterson—”

“Lucy,” she said.

Thorne hesitated until Lucy shifted the hen sitting on her lap so that it had a better view of him.

“Lucy,” he said, clearly uncomfortable with the familiarity but even more uncomfortable with the chicken’s fierce regard. “Can you not put the chicken outside where it belongs?”

“I cannot,” Lucy said with false sympathy. “Mr. Gentry was quite clear that Andromeda has a delicate constitution and needs to be comforted while being left in strange places.”

“Mr. Gentry takes advantage of you.”

Lucy had taken an hour out of her day to sit with Thorne and go through a stack of scientific papers that he’d unearthed. While she’d insisted that none of them were her missing formula, he’d asked her to examine them all the same. As the hour of daylight she spent with him meant an extra hour of work that night, it had put her in a temper. Which was why, when Mr. Gentry came in with his pet hen, adither because he’d forgotten his newest list of symptoms at home, Lucy agreed to watch Andromeda so he could go back for it.

“Mr. Gentry is one of the few customers who pay on time,” Lucy said. “I am perfectly content to pet his chicken if he continues that habit.”

Thorne sighed. “Very well. I suppose I can tolerate—ugh. I’m certain it wants to peck me.”

The novelty of such a large, confident man being unnerved by a tiny little chicken intrigued her, but Lucy took pity on him and left. When she came back without the chicken, Thorne did not bother to hide his relief.

“I gave her to Katie to watch while she waits for Juliet to come back,” Lucy said. “We must be quick about it or that chicken will find its way into the Quinlavins’ stew pot.”

“Are they a particularly hungry family?” Thorne asked distractedly, sifting through piles.

“They are a spectacularly hungry family, and Katie is the main source of food for them all.”

Thorne looked up at that. “I’ve seen the books. She’s not paid enough to support a family.”

Lucy sighed. “She wouldn’t be paid at all if her father had anything to do with it. Her mam fell sick after her fifth child—an ailment of the blood that leaves her spent. Her father, Joe, sent us Katie in exchange for the medicine they need.”

He’d been in London long enough not to look shocked that a family would pay their bills with a child’s labor. In most parts of London, children were sent to work as soon as they could follow directions, and many a girl was sold into circumstances much meaner than cleaning up after an apothecary.

“She’s a bright girl,” Lucy continued. “Bright enough that we decided to pay her a wage. In the best of all worlds, we’d send her to school as well, but her father won’t spare her.”

“Indeed,” Thorne said. The sympathy in his eyes dimmed as he glanced down at the piles he’d made. “Speaking of best of all worlds—can you please explain these?”

Lucy came around the side of the desk and stood next to Thorne as he spread out a familiar set of papers.

“These are part of a failed experiment,” she said as she traced the formulas with her pointer finger. “I tried to make a long-lasting scented soap, but it wouldn’t come out right.”

Thorne examined her from behind his spectacles. The light from the window shone behind him, casting his face in semidarkness.

“Is it the same sort of ingredient list as you used with the salve? That might help me when I go to speak with your suppliers,” he explained. “If they have a new request from Rider and Son Apothecary for an ingredient only found in your salve, this will prove your suspicions correct.”

Lucy sighed. “I’m afraid not. I learned early on that it would take me time and money I don’t have to make glycerin work that way. I simply don’t have the time to experiment properly while I am running the apothecary. I will try to remember the original list and give it to you tomorrow.”

“How long have you been developing formulas?” he asked.

Lucy gave up trying to read his face and glanced back down at her work. “As soon as I understood that what my father and grandfather did was chemistry and not some magical art.”

Apprentices of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries had to train for five years. Once the apprenticeship was over, they were not allowed to practice unless they’d completed courses in chemistry, medical botany, anatomy, and physiology. Many apprentices made the decision afterward to enter the Royal College of Surgeons.

While the Peterson sisters could not be denied admission to the society on the basis of their sex, they were not exactly welcomed by medical educators with open arms.

Guy’s Hospital was the only voluntary hospital in London that allowed Juliet and Lucy to complete the education required for apothecaries, and even there they were not allowed to attend dissections. Lucy had been happy enough with this exclusion, while Juliet had disguised herself as a man and cut open as many corpses as could be obtained legally.

After her studies were completed, Lucy devised her own cures, marrying the knowledge passed down through her family alongside what she learned in modern chemistry.

“My father apprenticed my sister and me as apothecaries—for which he was considered eccentric and doomed to disappointment—but our pre-apprentice education was on par with any man’s. He made sure we had lessons at a girls’ school run by a remarkable woman, Madame Mensonge. Madame is a chemist, but she taught us physics, mathematics, and botany as well. Suddenly I had an entirely new language to describe my father’s and grandfather’s tonics and mixtures.”

“I have been sending Sadie to a school. She can read and do sums,” he said.

Lucy quirked a brow. What had this to do with anything?

“I never thought to educate her in science. I don’t know that many fathers would.”

“My father was...”

She tried to summon an image of her father, but it slipped away from her. Tiny glimpses of his face red with laughter or scrunched in concentration as he played a new piece on the spinet swam through her head like silverfish in sunlit waters.

“Madame still has her school,” Lucy said instead of finishing her thought. “It’s not far from here. Juliet passes by it on her way to the women’s clinic.”

“This clinic is in St. Giles,” he said, a statement rather than a question. Lucy swallowed surprise and a sudden misapprehension when she realized Thorne would learn a great deal about her family in the course of the investigation. She watched his expression carefully as she explained what Juliet did at the clinic.

“It is a clinic for women who haven’t the means to pay a physician, and who live in that area,” Lucy said slowly.

Thorne’s chin dipped slightly in acknowledgment of what Lucy had implied but hadn’t said aloud. The clinic treated women who might very well be prostitutes.

“They cannot afford a doctor, so Juliet and her friend, Mrs. Sweet, provide the same care as a physician might as volunteers. This includes taking care of... women’s private problems. The women pay what they can, and Juliet always manages to find sponsors when she needs them.”

Lucy used the common euphemism for gynecological and abortion care, but Thorne understood this well enough.

“Freely you have received; freely you give.” He quoted the Gospel of Matthew’s observation on healing the sick in an approving tone.

Outside, the clouds had thickened. Lucy hadn’t noticed how dark the room had gotten or how close they had been to each other, her hand nearly touching his where she leaned over the desk. He still wore gloves, contrasting with her own hand, stained yellow at the fingertips from mixing a tonic containing turmeric, nicked in a dozen places from the blades she used, glistening slightly from an earlier application of lanolin in a vain attempt to keep her skin from drying out.

“You could visit Madame’s school with your daughter and see if she’d enjoy it.”

“I shall consider it,” he said.

Lucy imagined him examining the idea the same way he examined the chaos of her office: methodically, rationally, unconcerned that whatever he chose might not be the right choice or please everyone.

Perhaps it was not wickedness nor a weakness for lust that fueled Lucy’s growing fascination with the man. Perhaps that confidence was what drew her toward him—a yearning to emulate such certainty.

If the alternative was true and the Guardians were correct that women such as her were powerless against base physical desire, she would remain forever alone. Desire was a form of blindness, smothering rational thought and self-preservation. Lucy had learned her lesson well and would never again believe that a kiss or a gentle touch meant anything other than a prelude to sex.

“What are you doing?” The voice came from behind her.

Nothing!

Still, Lucy jumped away from Thorne as if he were on fire, and turned to face her sister, Juliet, standing in the doorway.

It had been Juliet who found her and Duncan together and had known the truth of them in an instant. Juliet who was the most dependent on the income from the shop and most affected by Lucy’s stupid decision to trust a man who said he cared.

“Juliet, please come in,” Lucy said, forcing the words past her dry lips and tongue thick with embarrassment and nerves. “Allow me to introduce my sister, Miss Juliet Peterson. Juliet, this is Mr. Thorne, who will be keeping our books.”

Dressed in a thick woolen cape with a high collar and a deep-brimmed poke bonnet, all Lucy could see of her sister was her slight frown, the tiny backward Cs at the corners of her mouth. When Juliet untied her bonnet strings, she revealed smudges of fatigue beneath her expressive gray-blue eyes.

Having arrived early when she was a babe, Juliet had always been smaller than her siblings. Her premature appearance in the world was a harbinger of her ferocious will, which gave her the presence of a much larger woman. Her hair, the same color as David’s, fell in long waves when unbound. When she was little, she refused to have it cut, believing she would grow even less without it.

Juliet stared at Thorne without blinking, her eyes taking him in, from the scars on his face to the breadth of his shoulders, as well as the distance that now stood between him and Lucy. Thorne, for his part, observed her in return. Lucy tried not to draw their attention.

Rather like a mouse between two irritable owls.

“That you haven’t run screaming in the opposite direction once you saw the state of this office is a testament to your fortitude, Mr. Thorne.”

Releasing Thorne from her scrutiny, Juliet plopped her bonnet into the seat of a nearby chair and pulled off her gloves.

“I’m only home for a meal,” she said, tossing her gloves next to her bonnet and speaking to Lucy. “There is a terrible influenza going round that’s particularly bad in children. Mrs. Sweet and I are going to convert part of the clinic over to beds for the sickest babes.”

“Be sure you don’t get sick yourself,” Lucy cautioned.

“Is David here? I’ll need him to walk me back,” Juliet told them as she riffled through a stack of papers on a side table. Thorne said nothing, but his shoulders tensed. Lucy admonished her sister not to make more of a mess.

“I’m looking for something,” Juliet snapped, then sighed. “My apologies.” Her gaze returned to the pile as she spoke. “Some of those Guardians were by the clinic earlier, shouting at the women as they came in. Mrs. Sweet’s friend, Mr. Winthram, chased them off, but I don’t want to go back alone.”

Lucy glanced quickly at Thorne, but he showed no sign of recognition at the name of the fellow agent.

He must be practiced at such deceits.

Lucy, however, felt terrible for deceiving Juliet. She didn’t want her sister to know how dire the situation had become. Her guilt was jumbled up alongside worry for Juliet and for David and... Lucy put a hand to her chest where she often felt pressure, like a fist slowly clenching.

“The Guardians?” Thorne asked. “Would that be those men who follow Victor Armitage?”

“Yes. Victor Armitage believes women should stay in the home and that foreigners are to blame for the high price of corn. He even sent his Guardians to picket in front of Athena’s Retreat, and we are quite convinced they were behind the fire there last year.” Juliet’s eyes blazed, and her spine snapped straight. Papers forgotten, she set her hands on her hips, jaw jutting forward.

“They harass these women when they are at work, then follow them to the clinic and shout at them there. What is a woman with children and no man to do? Starve to death in order to placate them?”

She scoffed. “Now they are saying we shouldn’t give women preventatives or correct their menses. So, they should have more children they cannot feed?”

“A group of them were here last week, shouting that a woman couldn’t be an apothecary and we were duping our customers,” Lucy added. They hadn’t come inside and none of her patients had left, but the experience rattled her just the same. What more ill luck could rain down on her head?

Thorne frowned as his finger rubbed the edge of the desk. “Could the Guardians have anything to do with your missing formulas?” he asked Lucy.

Before she could answer, Juliet’s eyes narrowed. “Why would you be interested in Lucy’s missing formulas? I thought you were a bookkeeper.”

“I merely confided to Mr. Thorne that my formula has gone missing,” Lucy blurted.

Thorne did nothing to draw Juliet’s attention away from Lucy. In fact, as her sister’s fierce gray-blue eyes turned to examine what Lucy could only imagine was her very soul, he did something that turned him toward the shadow and nearly erased him from sight.

Amazing talent, that.

“In case he comes across any clues while he sorts through this mess,” she continued, pretending her cheeks were not burning bright enough to light the room. “We need all the help we can get, Juliet.”

Her sister’s fire dimmed at those words. If Lucy asking for help was rare, Juliet asking for help was unthinkable. Two more prideful and recalcitrant women probably never existed in the British Isles.

They stared at each other for a long moment, the truth of their plight between them. Already Juliet bore too heavy a burden with her work at the clinic and work in the shop. Why tell her the truth about Thorne? It would do no good to get her hopes up if he could not help them.

“Are you ready, Sniffles?” David popped his head into the office. “Oh, Lucy. I sent Mrs. Parekh home with some rosehip oil, like you asked. Mrs. Lonegan was there when I gave it out and I sent her home with one as well. She was grateful, but it turns out that was the last bottle, so...”

Lucy would wager a pint of lager that David had not charged for the bottle he sent home with the recently widowed Mrs. Lonegan. David had the same soft heart as his sisters, he just hid it better. He might persuade a housekeeper to buy a few jars of liniment to have on hand for household injuries, but in the next moment a gaunt-cheeked urchin would be scuttling out the door with a wink from David and a paper twist of boiled sweets.

“Coming, Squeaky,” Juliet said as she put her bonnet back on and tied the strings.

Lucy followed her siblings out to the shop as they squabbled between themselves. They were too intent on teasing each other to notice her standing in the doorway as they left, or at least, that is what Lucy told herself when she turned around and went back inside alone.

—

The only woman Thorne had ever loved had literally fallen into his lap seconds after he first saw her.

He’d won a massive purse at a fight somewhere outside of Bristol over ten years ago. After the obligatory post-fight celebration, he’d passed out and, when he woke, found himself in Bath with a noisy contingent of third sons and hangers-on. While still drunk, they’d decided a night at the opera was the highest form of entertainment. It turned out not to be as fun as expected, as he sobered up and found himself in need of headache powder, water, and a piss all at the same time.

The banging in his head had drowned out the opera, and Thorne had leaned back in pain only to meet the eyes of the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen leaning over the balcony railing above him, flirting with the men below.

Geneviève Fournier, the brightest star in the firmament of the demimonde. A courtesan famous enough to be immortalized in song—though not the kind of song one sang in mixed company.

In the middle of the second act, Thorne had been so overcome with amazement at her appearance—and still quite drunk—he’d held out his arms and cried, “She’s beautiful and therefore to be wooed; She is woman and therefore to be loved.”

Geneviève had smiled and, in a gesture that encapsulated her entire life, jumped off the balcony without a single glance backward. Thank God he’d maintained enough reflexes to hurtle to his feet in time to catch her.

Thorne’s visceral reaction to Genny’s beauty never faded.

His selfish pursuit of Sadie’s mother was a part of a past he’d spent years exorcising. That another beautiful woman had now entered his life, one in such obvious distress, gave him pause. If encouraged, would Thorne pursue this woman as well?

If he gave in to this vice, would he again take up his others?

His thoughts were still on Lucy as he sat down to dinner with Sadie that night.

“Science?” Sadie asked.

“Yes,” he said as he cut his meat. “There is a school Miss Peterson spoke of where girls learn science. We could visit if you’d like. It’s much closer than Mistress Addison’s school. I think you’ve outgrown your lessons there.”

Sadie chewed her bread and swallowed, her eyes studying Thorne’s face.

“I like glass eyeballs,” she said.

About to fork a piece of ham, Thorne stilled, feeling much like a rabbit who’d been placidly nibbling grass when it caught sight of a fox. There was an intensity in Sadie’s gaze that promised an inquisition was on the way.

“Do you like glass eyeballs, Papa? You seemed interested in them the other day. Your face got tight right around your nose like it does when you are interested. Or hungry. Were you hungry? Do you think Miss Peterson likes vegetables?”

Thorne returned his daughter’s stare. He was the adult, and she was the child. Therefore, he would take control of the conversation.

“She likes science, and she attended this school. She uses chemistry to decide the ingredients in her cures. Would you like to learn about chemistry and how to make tonics and salves and such?”

Sadie put down the heel of bread she’d been eating and set her elbow on the table, chin in her hand.

“I like these rooms. They’re much nicer than Mrs. Merkle’s and it smells good here.”

Slippery as an eel, this girl’s brain. Still, he would wrest them back from the brink of where Sadie would like to push the conversation.

“You can learn about physics. Do you know why the sun hangs in the sky and never falls to earth?” he asked.

Aha. This flummoxed her. Thorne watched her tiny eyebrows lift and drop as she debated which was more fascinating—the question of gravity or the question of whether he found Miss Peterson a marriageable prospect.

Sadie had been the one to precipitate his proposal to Mrs. Merkle, although not as enthusiastically as she’d advocated for him to marry Miss Highland, the milliner (she had a nice smile and Sadie would always have new bonnets), or their neighbor Mrs. Downwith (septuagenarian she might be, but she enjoyed baking biscuits and had a lapdog Sadie found charming).

“Why do you keep trying to get me shackled?” Thorne had complained on their walk home from church one Sunday, holding a basket of Mrs. Downwith’s scones with one hand and Sadie’s warm palm in his other.

“Because you missed your chance to marry Mama,” she’d said, skipping every so often to keep pace with his strides. “I know you are sad she is dead, and so am I, but if you marry someone else, I can have brothers and sisters. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“You are all the children a man could want,” he told her.

Vegetables and cleaning behind the ears might require made-up stories, but the question of Sadie’s mama was not suited for outright lies. Sadie would grow up and, despite Thorne’s best efforts, might hear some old gossip or rumors.

He’d told her that Geneviève died before they could be married.

This was true. What he didn’t tell her was that even though his family had all but disowned him for prizefighting, Thorne had kept many of their highborn prejudices and would never have considered marrying Geneviève, a former courtesan. A gentleman simply didn’t marry his mistress.

He’d been a selfish fool.

Since Genny’s death, Thorne had learned that what makes a woman worthy of being a wife or a man worthy of being a husband and father had nothing to do with birth or class and everything to do with the state of their soul.

Thorne fought every day to be worthy of his daughter.

He would take care of Sadie and never again confuse lust for love. As for his own life, it would remain free of temptation. Beautiful women, parties, song, and drink—they were part of the past and would stay there, buried.

As if to mock him, a song started in the rooms below their feet.

The strains of a reel rose between the floorboards, a fiddle and flute slightly off-key but charming enough. Sadie’s eyes widened and she tapped her feet on the chair rail as he cleared away their dinner. Thorne said nothing about it when they settled into bed with Oliver Twist , and the music stopped after a while.

The long walks to and from school had exhausted her, and Sadie was asleep before he’d finished a chapter. With nothing to occupy him, the aches and pains from the cold and damp of the autumn night pushed themselves to be attended.

Thorne wanted a drink.

Instead, he left a note in case Sadie woke, and took a long walk. Temptation faded as an hour, two, three passed by in a blur until he found himself back outside the apothecary. A low light burned in the Petersons’ window, and all seemed silent.

Thorne and Genny had been the most scandalous couple in Somerset. He’d bought a town house, and every musician and artist that made their living entertaining sedate crowds during the day would find their way to the Gentleman Fighter’s abode at night. Many a time they’d had a piper and fiddler play reels with dancing until dawn.

“Let’s have company tonight, Jonny,” she’d say.

One night’s revelry would bleed into two, two nights became two weeks, until he could barely remember when it began or why it should end.

Above the Petersons’ home, his own window lay dark, his daughter asleep in her bed, her world circumscribed to their set of rooms, the schoolroom, and church on Sundays.

There was a way to live that sat somewhere in between the two, but Thorne had no idea how to find it.

Checking the lock to see if anyone had disturbed it while he was out, Thorne entered by the back door. He fell into a protective crouch at the sound of bone crunching bone before the noise made sense to him. The slow grind of a pestle.

It had to be three o’clock, and Miss Peterson—Lucy—was still at work.

“I’m hoping that is you, Mr. Thorne, and not anyone else, for I have no more formulas to steal and no money for a common thief,” she called.

He stood in the doorway and sniffed.

“Fenugreek. It’s for new mothers,” she said, pausing in her work. “It makes a lovely tea.”

The chill that he’d managed to outwalk crept back into his bones. The gloom of the darkened room covered them both, but Thorne felt at peace knowing his daughter was warm and safe in the rooms above.

When would Lucy reach her bed? After what Duncan Rider had done to her, would she ever have another untroubled night of sleep?

Her loneliness was a palpable thing, draped round her like a shawl, weighted with the responsibilities she carried, the disappointments she’d endured. As he watched her practiced movements, some of his resentment at her beauty melted away. What use was holding her facial symmetry against her? It hadn’t made her life any easier.

Not so far gone as to pity her, certainly Thorne felt some sympathy as he bid her good night.