The Love Remedy (The Damsels of Discovery, Band 1) - Softcover

Buch 1 von 2: The Damsels of Discovery

Everett, Elizabeth

 
9780593550465: The Love Remedy (The Damsels of Discovery, Band 1)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593550463 ISBN 13: 9780593550465
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

“Beautiful and important.”—New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn

When a Victorian apothecary hires a stoic private investigator to protect her business, they learn there’s only one way to treat true love—with a happily ever after.

When Lucinda Peterson’s recently perfected formula for a salve to treat croup goes missing, she’s certain it’s only the latest in a line of misfortunes at the hands of a rival apothecary. Outraged and fearing financial ruin, Lucy turns to private investigator Jonathan Thorne for help. She just didn’t expect her champion to be so . . . grumpy?

A single father and an agent at Tierney & Co., Thorne accepts missions for a wide variety of employers—from the British government to wronged wives. None have intrigued him so much as the spirited Miss Peterson. As the two work side by side to unmask her scientific saboteur, Lucy slips ever so sweetly under Thorne’s battered armor, tempting him to abandon old promises.

With no shortage of suspects—from a hostile political group to an erstwhile suitor—Thorne’s investigation becomes a threat to all that Lucy holds dear. As the truth unravels around them the cure to their problems is clear: they must face the future together.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

USA Today bestselling author Elizabeth Everett lives in upstate New York with her family. She likes going for long walks or (very) short runs to nearby sites that figure prominently in the history of civil rights and women's suffrage. Her writing is inspired by her admiration for rule breakers and her belief in the power of love to change the world.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

London, 1843

"'Ow much for pulling a toof?"

Any other day, Lucinda Peterson's answer would have been however much the man standing before her could afford.

Since its founding, Peterson's Apothecary held a reputation for charging fair prices for real cures. If a customer had no money, Lucy and her siblings would often accept goods or services in trade.

Today, however, was not any other day.

Today was officially the worst day of Lucy's life.

Yes, there had been other worst days, but that was before today. Today was absolutely the worst.

"Half shilling," Lucy said, steel in her voice as she crossed her arms, exuding determination. She would hold strong, today. She would think of the money the shop desperately needed and the bills piling up and the fact that she truly, really, absolutely needed new undergarments.

"'Alf shilling?" the man wailed. "'Ow'm I supposed to buy food for me we'uns?"

With a dramatic sigh, he slumped against the large wooden counter that ran the length of the apothecary. The counter, a mammoth construction made of imported walnut, was the dividing line between Lucy's two worlds.

Until she was seven, Lucy existed with everyone else on the public side. Over there, the shop was crowded with customers who spoke in myriad accents and dialects as they waited in line for a consultation held in hushed voices at the end of the counter. Not all patients were concerned with privacy, however, and lively discussions went on between folks in line on the severity of their symptoms, the veracity of the diagnosis, and the general merits of cures suggested.

Laughter, tears, and the occasional spontaneous bout of poetry happened on the public side of the counter. Seven-year-old Lucy would sweep the floor and dust the shelves as the voices flowed over and around her, waiting for the day when she could cross the dividing line and begin her apprenticeship on the other side.

All four walls of the apothecary were lined with the tools of her trade. Some shelves held rows of glass jars containing medicinal roots such as ginger and turmeric. Other shelves held tin canisters full of ground powders, tiny tin scoops tied to the handles with coarse black yarn. A series of drawers covered the back half of the shop, each of them labeled in a painstaking round running hand by Lucy's grandfather. There hadn't been any dried crocodile dung in stock for eighty years or so, but the label remained, a source of amusement and conjecture for those waiting in line.

The shop had stood since the beginning of the last century, and even on this, her absolute worst day, Lucy gave in. She wasn't going to be the Peterson that broke tradition and turned a patient away.

Even though today was Lucy's worst day ever, that didn't mean it should be terrible for everyone.

"For anyone else a tooth is thruppence," Lucy said as she pulled on her brown linen treatment coat. "So I'm not accused of taking food from the mouths of your we'uns." She paused to pull a jar of eucalyptus oil out from a drawer and set it on the counter. "I suppose I can charge you tuppence and throw in a boiled sweet for each of them."

Satisfied with the bargain, the man climbed into her treatment chair in the back room, holding on to the padded armrests and squeezing his eyes shut in anticipation. Lucy spilled a few drops of the oil on a handkerchief and tied it over her nose.

While the scent of eucalyptus was strong enough to bring tears to her eyes, the smell from the man's rotted tooth was even stronger. She numbed his gums with oil of clove as she examined the rotting tooth and explained to him what she was going to do.

His discomfort was so great, the man waved away her warnings, and so, with a practiced grip, Lucy used her pincers to pull out the offending tooth.

Both wept, him from the pain, she from the stench, as Lucy explained how to best keep the rest of his teeth from suffering the same fate.

"You're an angel, miss," the man exclaimed. At least, Lucy hoped he said angel. His cheek was beginning to swell.

She sent him off with the promised sweets as well as a tin of tooth powder and, seeing there were no customers in the shop, she locked the front door and closed the green curtains over the street-facing windows to indicate the shop was closed.

Lucy's younger sister, Juliet, was out seeing those patients who were not well enough to visit the shop, and her brother, David, could be anywhere in the capital city. Some days he was up with the sun, dusting the shelves and charming the clientele into doubling or even tripling their purchases. Other days, he was nowhere to be found. Days like today.

Worst days.

Lucy sighed a long-drawn-out sigh that she was embarrassed to hear exuded a low note of self-pity along with despair. Exhaustion weighed down her legs and pulled at her elbows while she cleaned the treatment chair and wrote the details of the man's procedure in her record book. She'd not slept well last night. Nor the night before. In fact, Lucy hadn't had an uninterrupted night's sleep for nine years.

Standing with a quill in her hand, she gazed at the etching hanging on the far wall of the back room, sandwiched between a tall, thin chest of drawers and a coatrack covered in bonnets and caps left behind by forgetful patients. Made in exchange for a treatment long forgotten, the artist had captured her mother and father posed side by side in a rare moment of rest.

Constantly moving, and yet always with time for a smile for whoever was in pain or in need of a sympathetic ear, her mother had been a woman of great faith in God and even greater faith in her husband.

"We work all day so we can make merry afterward," her father would tell Lucy when she complained about the long hours. Indeed, evenings in the Peterson household were redolent with the sound of music and comradery, her father loving nothing more than an impromptu concert with his children, no matter their mistakes on the instruments he'd chosen for them.

The etching was an amateurish work, yet it managed to convey the genuine delight on her father's face when he found himself in company of his wife.

It had been nine years since her parents died of cholera, a loathsome disease most likely brought home by British soldiers serving with the East India Company. When the first few patients came to the apothecary with symptoms, the Petersons had sent their children to stay with a cousin in the countryside to wait out the disease. Lucy and Juliet had protested, both having trained for such scenarios, but their father held firm.

Her parents' deaths had come as less of a shock to Lucy than her father's will. Everything was left to her; the apothecary and the building in which it stood, as well as the proprietary formulas of her father and her grandfather's tonics and salves.

She had been eighteen years old.

"What were you thinking back then, Da?" she asked the etching now, the smell of vinegar and eucalyptus stinging the back of her throat. "Why would you put this on my shoulders?"

Her father stared out from the picture with his round cheeks and patchy whiskers, eyes crinkled in such a way that Lucy fancied he heard her laments and would give her words of advice if he could speak.

What would they be?

A yawn so large it cracked her jaw made Lucy break off her musings and remove her apron.

Exhaustion had played a huge role in her string of bad decisions the past four months. Ultimately, however, the fault lay with her. Lucy's guilt had been squeezing the breath from her lungs for weeks.

On the counter, slightly dented from having been crushed in her fist, then thrown to the ground and stepped on, then heaved against the wall, sat a grimy little tin. Affixed to the top was a label with the...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593550463
ISBN 13 
9780593550465
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
BERKLEY
https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY

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