Read an Excerpt
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 all-too-familiar initials RSA. Rider and Son Apothecary.
Rider and Son. The latter being the primary reason for this very worst of days.
The longer she stared at the tin, the less Lucy felt the strain of responsibility for running Peterson's Apothecary and keeping her siblings housed and fed. Beneath the initials were printed the words Rider's Lozenges. The ever-present exhaustion that had weighed her down moments ago began to dissipate at the sight of the smaller print beneath, which read "exclusive." The more she stared, the more her guilt subsided beneath a wave of anger that coursed through her blood. "Exclusive patented formula for the relief of putrid throats."
Exclusive patented formula.
The anger simmered and simmered the longer she stared until it reached a boil and turned to rage.
Grabbing her paletot from the coatrack and a random bonnet that may or may not have matched, Lucy stormed out of the shop, slamming the door behind her with a vengeance that was less impressive when she had to turn around the next second to lock it.
Exclusive patent.
The words burned in her brain, and she clenched her hands into fists.
One warm summer afternoon four months ago, Lucy had been so tired, she'd stopped to sit on a park bench and had closed her eyes. Only for a minute or two, but long enough for a young gentleman passing by to notice and be concerned enough for her safety to inquire as to her well-being.
While the brief rest had been involuntary, remaining on the bench and striking up a conversation with the handsome stranger was her choice, and a terrible one at that. Lucy had allowed Duncan Rider to walk her home, not questioning the coincidence that the son of her father's rival had been the one to find her vulnerable and offer his protection was down to her own stupidity.
Now, as Lucy barreled down the rotting walkways of Calthorpe Street, she barely registered the admiring glances from the gentlemen walking in the opposite direction or the sudden appearance of the wan November sun as it poked through the gray clouds of autumn.
Instead, her head was filled with memories so excruciating they jabbed at her chest like heated needles, rousing feelings of shame alongside her resentment.
Such as the next time she'd seen Duncan, when he appeared during a busy day at the apothecary with a pretty nosegay of violets. He'd smelled like barley water and soap, a combination so simple and appealing it had scrambled her brains and left her giddy as a goose.
Or the memory of how their kisses had unfolded in the back rooms of the apothecary, turning from delightfully sweet to something much more carnal. How kisses had proceeded to touches, and from there even more, and how she'd believed it a harbinger of what would come once they married.
A shout ripped Lucy's attention back to the present, and she jerked back from the road, missing the broad side of a carriage by inches. The driver called out curses at her over his shoulder, but they bounced off her and scattered across the muddied street as Lucy turned the corner onto Gray's Inn Road.
Halfway through a row of weathered stone buildings, almost invisible unless one knew what to look for, a discreet brass plaque to the left of a blackened oak door read:
Tierney & Co., Bookkeeping Services
Lucy took a deep breath, pulling the dirty brown beginnings of a London fog into her lungs and expelling it along with the remorse and shame that accompanied her memory of Duncan holding her handwritten formula for a new kind of throat lozenge she'd worked two years to perfect.
"I'll just test it out for you, shall I?" he'd said, eyes roaming the page. Duncan and his father had long searched for a throat lozenge remedy that tasted as good as it worked. Might Duncan be tempted to impress his father with her lozenge? His lips curled up on one side as he read, and Lucy recalled the slight shadow of foreboding moving across the candlelight in the back storeroom where they carried out their affair.
"I don't know," she'd hedged.
Too late. He'd folded the formula and distracted her with kisses.
"I've more space and materials at my disposal. I know you think this is ready to sell, but isn't it better that we take the time to make sure?"
It might have been exhaustion that weakened Lucy just enough that she took advantage of an offer to help shoulder some of her burdens. However, the decision to let Duncan Rider walk out of Peterson's Apothecary with a formula that was worth a fortune was due not to her sleepless nights, but to a weakness in her character that allowed her to believe a man when he told her he loved her.
Now, four months later, somehow Duncan had again betrayed her.
Having already lost the lozenge formula to Duncan's avaricious grasp, Lucy had been horrified to find a second formula missing. She'd come up with a salve for treating babies' croup, a remedy even more profitable than the lozenges. What parent wouldn't pay through the nose to calm a croupy baby?
Lucy was certain that Duncan must have found out about her work and stolen both the formula and ingredient list for the salve.
This time, Lucy would not dissolve into tears and swear never to love again. This time, she was going eviscerate her rival and get her formula back.
Then she would swear never to love again.
“And that is why I would like you to kill him. Or, perhaps not so drastic. Maybe torture him first. At the very least, leave him in great discomfort. I have plenty of ideas how you might do this and am happy to present them in writing along with anatomically correct diagrams.”
Jonathan Thorne blinked at the incongruity of the bloodthirsty demand and the composed nature of the woman who issued it.
He almost blinked again at the sight of her face when she leaned forward and into the light but stopped himself at the last second.
None of that now.
Never again.
He'd been in the back room when he heard her come in off the street, asking for Henry Winthram, the tenor of her husky voice sounding sadly familiar.
The sound of a woman almost drained of hope.
"Miss Peterson, I appreciate your, erm, enthusiasm?" Winthram said now.
Henry Winthram was the newest and youngest agent at Tierney's and, with his raw talents, he'd also brought along a decade's worth of experience handling a mind-boggling array of poisons, explosives, insecticides, and scientists.
