Passion Favors the Bold

by Theresa Romain

  Abduction. God. This was his thanks for rescuing her from a crowd that, if they recognized her as a gently bred young woman rather than a scrubby youth, would have turned on her in every way imaginable.

  “If you accompany me to Strawfield,” Georgette added, “I shall behave properly.”

  Feigning docility, she lowered her eyes. Light eyes, like the pale of a summer sky. Pale hair and skin, too. Seeing her among the mazelike shelves of Frost’s Bookshop, Hugo had always thought she looked as though she were half faded into the pages of a story.

  A fanciful observation. Most uncharacteristic of him. Especially since, as his visits to the bookshop stacked in number, he saw how hard and how prosaically she worked. Because Hugo had befriended her brother during their medical studies in Edinburgh, Georgette seemed not to regard the duke’s son with the formality she would a stranger. In his presence, she carried garments for the laundress, scooped up her cousin’s wayward toddlers, marked accounts, stacked books—and so on, in ceaseless motion.

  “Do you want to search for your brother, Miss Frost? Or for the stolen coins?”

  She considered. “First the second thing. Then the first thing second.”

  “I should have guessed,” he murmured. “Do explain to me. My family already disapproves, and my would-be patrons have already declined. How would notoriety for finding stolen sovereigns increase my credibility in medical circles? And better still, how would it translate into financial support for my hospital?”

  “Finding the sovereigns would make you tonnish. Then everything you said and did would be acceptable to people of influence.” She spoke matter-of-factly, as though this were obvious.

  And maybe it should have been. These people of influence—of which his father was one, and of whom his family was constantly aware—were unimpressed by the carefully constructed appeals to logic on which Hugo prided himself. By accounts of the increased productivity of fields when tenants were fit and healthy. By evidence of the opposite, too: tales of infection, of suppuration, of dirty wards, of lives that should have been saved.

  Accompany me to Strawfield: the words painted a lovely picture such as he had not seen for years. A wide sky, absent the caustic smell of chloride of lime and the heavy odor of ill bodies, often beyond help. People who listened to him simply because they thought him worth listening to. Not because they had to, because his father was a duke. Not dismissing him, either, as a younger son with wild ideas that trespassed against the upper class’s notions of suitability.

  When influenza broke out among the dukedom’s tenants, Hugo’s own father, the Duke of Willingham, had called Hugo mad to quarantine ill tenants away from their healthy relatives. Everyone knew that influenza came from an imbalance of humors, said his father, so what use would a quarantine be? But when the spread of illness was halted and the outbreak ended almost as soon as it began, the duke granted that perhaps Hugo had been right.

  Not right enough to support his other medical ideas, though. Not right enough to grant that Hugo’s chosen field was a worthwhile way to spend one’s life.

  They hadn’t spoken in quite some time. It was better that way.

  “Think of all the people you could help with your hospital,” Georgette coaxed.

  Hugo folded his arms. “You are thinking of one. You.”

  She beamed. “You only fold your arms when you’re about to change your mind.”

  “I do not.” He unfolded his arms, but they snapped back into a cradle about his midsection. “How did you—why . . .”

  “I learned such signals working in the family bookshop. When to push someone harder. When a bit more persuasion would help me to make the sale.”

  She had sorted him out, that was true enough—though he wasn’t prepared to tell her he’d give in. Despite himself, his mouth curved up at one corner. “All that fluffy blond hair covers a diabolical mind.”

  Her brows knit. “What is diabolical about both of us getting what we want?”

  To this, he had no answer: only a question. In this agreement, would he be the devil, or poor Faust, who sold his soul?

  Chapter Two

  “You’ll have to stay in here,” Hugo decided.

  Georgette Frost was improper from head to toe, from tumbled-down wavy hair to falling-apart shoes. There was no place for her in Somerset House.

  Through the carriage window, he eyed the familiar, immense structure. The headquarters of the Royal Society was a great pale pile of columns and arches, of story upon story that gobbled a great stretch of the Strand as if space was no matter and money no object.

  Lord Hugo Starling did not make mistakes. He acted with calm and logic, following analysis and forethought. But if he did make mistakes, bringing Georgette Frost with him to Somerset House would have been one of them.

  It was the only way he could attend his planned meeting with the Royal Society’s president, though. So. Analysis. Forethought.

  When he reached for the carriage door, Georgette spoke up. “Wait. I have an idea.”

  Hugo halted, half arisen from the squabs, hand outstretched. “You strike fear into my heart.”

  “I should come in with you. I can be a good distraction from your . . .” She motioned at his upper body.

  “From my stinking, stained, formerly fashionable coat that I owe to my last attempt to intervene on your behalf?” Reluctantly, he settled back onto the squabs. “Any more of your help, Miss Frost, and I’ll find myself in Bedlam.”

  She looked amused. “First, that was your help, not mine. And I didn’t ask for it or want it. When I help you—well, your coat won’t miraculously come clean, but I think your meeting will go far more smoothly.”

  “Is there to be a second point?”

  “Yes. Second, you may call me Georgette. You’ve bought enough books and seen me carry enough laundry that we ought to be more informal.”

  “And I’ve seen you in breeches with your hair down.”

  “Oh, right. You’d better not call me Georgette at the moment.” Starting at the ends, she began twisting her hair into a tight coil. “While I’m dressed as a boy, you ought to call me . . . Bone-box.”

  She looked as if she were enjoying herself. “I’m not calling you Bone-box,” he said.

  “’Course not. I don’t know you, guv. How could you know my name?”

  “Guv?” Hugo regretted not opening the carriage door and flinging himself through it when he had the chance.

  “I can’t call you ‘my lord,’ because we’ve only just met. How could I know how blue-blooded you are?”

  “Your feigned uncertainty is not my greatest reservation about this suggestion of yours.”

  “This is going to be effective. Trust me.” Georgette finished twisting up her hair, then yanked her cap over the mass. “What would make more sense than for you to bring in the sort of urchin who would be helped by the new sort of hospital you have planned?”

  “Many things. Many things in the world would make more sense than that.” The air was humid and close, the open window providing no breeze.

  “You still regret your coat, don’t you? You mustn’t worry about it. If men always went home when they smelled of liquor, all society balls would end before ten o’clock.”

  She had a point there.

  Even so: “Why are you so suspiciously helpful all of a sudden?”

  “Because you’re so delightful and handsome that I can’t stay away from you for so much as a minute?” Before he had time to take this in, she continued, “Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s because I am sorry your coat was ruined. And because I believe you need all the help you can get, determined as you are to berate a man who has already told you no three times.”

  “The first reason was much better,” Hugo grumbled. “And it was only twice, not three times. Though both rejections were from Latham at the Royal College of Physicians. This is my first approach to Banks.”

  “Is it? Then you’re assured of success with me at your side.”

 
Damn the woman; he was about to fold his arms again. He clenched his fists, forcing his elbows to remain straight. “What sort of plan do you have in mind?”

  “Don’t trouble yourself, Hugo. You’ll come out smelling like roses.” She sniffed, wrinkling her nose at the sour odor of his rotgut-stained coat. “Figuratively.” And then she grinned.

  It was the grin that won him over, as though they were coconspirators. Hugo couldn’t recall the last time someone other than a shopkeeper had offered to help him. Not since his brother Matthew’s death fourteen years before had someone taken his part.

  “All right,” he said. “I believe you’re sincere. You may come to the meeting with me, but only because you begged.”

  It wasn’t a mistake to say yes. It was reasonable. She said she would help. The unexpected ringing in his ears of you’re so delightful and handsome—spoken in jest—was decidedly not reasonable. But that did not matter; it didn’t influence his decision.

  From beneath the squabs, he fetched his hospital plans, rolled up in a long leather case. Then at last, he opened the door. His coachman had descended, waiting for the carriage’s occupants to emerge, and the man let the steps down at once. Hugo clambered out, then extended a hand to help Georgette.

  “I’m not a lady,” she said in a gruff semblance of a stripling’s voice, ignoring his hand and hopping down on her own. “I’m Bone-box, the horrid urchin you plucked from the gutter.”

  “The gutter, you say. Of the Strand.” Hugo squinted down the bustling length of the wide, tonnish street. “Right. Let’s be on with it, Bone-box.”

  As the coachman closed the door behind them, she fell into step at Hugo’s side. Tallish for a woman, she had a long and determined stride, and they made their swift way to the main entrance.

  Though not a member of the Royal Society, Hugo had been to Somerset House any number of times before. Besides the quarters of the scientists, it housed public offices and the Royal Academy of Arts, which, during Hugo’s youth, had inflicted upon him many a dull afternoon of regarding paintings at his mother’s side.

  The sound of their footsteps was gentle on the floor; the air seemed cooler in the great open space. The entry hall of Somerset House was designed to impress, with a painted ceiling two stories above and long arcades of windows taller than a man. Hugo led Georgette to the spiral staircase, which took them to the story on which Sir Joseph Banks kept his office. This required a complex navigation through smaller chambers and corridors that bumped this way and that. As they walked, Hugo nodded greetings to the curious faces he passed by.

  “They’re looking at you, Bone-box,” he muttered. “Give the good people a wave.”

  She ignored him. “It’s so grand in here,” she breathed. “It’s lovely and tall and airy.”

  Today Somerset House seemed to Hugo no more than a nut that needed to be cracked. But to someone who had spent her days in a bookshop where empty space meant income lost, the vertical portions of the building granted to each department must have seemed, to borrow Georgette’s understatement, acceptable.

  Outside the door to Banks’s chamber, Hugo paused. “Remember, you promised you’d be helpful. Behave yourself.”

  “I will behave like myself,” she replied. “Only better.”

  “Better? Have I come upon the Royal Reward already?”

  “Better suited for this situation, I mean.” She stuffed her hands into her pockets, adopting the slouching posture of a reluctant youth.

  He regarded her with narrowed eyes. Would her disguise fool Banks? Was this a fool’s errand entirely? A lock of her hair had loosened from its coil beneath the cap, slipping in a loop over one ear. Clean and long, it was unmistakably the hair of a lady.

  With his thumb, Hugo caught the edge and stroked the treacherous lock back under the cap. He had acted without thought—but her hair was smooth, and her skin was soft. As of their own accord, his fingertips lingered on each.

  The tender sensations took him aback, and he jerked away his hand. “Sorry,” he said. “You had—there was this—that is, I saw a hair coming loose.”

  Her hand lifted to her cheek, her expression puzzled. “Thanks. Right.”

  “In we go.” Hugo hoisted his long leather case under one arm, remembering this time to precede the supposed Bone-box through the doorway.

  “Lord Hugo! Greetings to you,” called the old man behind the huge desk.

  Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society for longer than Hugo had been alive, had created himself a scholarly nest in one of the chambers given to the use of his organization. Fireplace and desk, massive chair and pillowed lap desk, books and books, more books and yet more. The grate was unlit, the curtains opened to draw in wistful daylight.

  At the center of it all, the baronet sat in a great wheeled chair. “Gout,” he grunted, gesturing to his chair. “It’s dreadful today; couldn’t take a step. Forgive me for not rising, Lord Hugo. And whom have you brought with you?” Sir Joseph’s face was like a turtle’s, fierce and forward and with shrewd eyes. They lingered over the rumpled bits of Hugo’s appearance, the unlikely presence of Georgette at his side.

  In for a penny, in for a potential patronage. “This rapscallion darted in front of my carriage and spooked the horses. My coachman collared him.”

  “I didn’t want to steal them,” said Georgette in her gruff boy’s voice, sounding as though she had wanted nothing more in the world. Her tidy accent had slipped into the brasher cadence of the rookeries. “I weren’t going to use my knife to cut the harness.”

  “This nameless young urchin—”

  “Bone-box!”

  “—is,” Hugo hurried on, “exactly the sort of Londoner who currently receives indifferent care from indifferently trained caregivers at one of the city’s public hospitals.”

  “Coo, no I don’t,” said the professed Bone-box. “I wouldn’t go to a hospital ’less I wanted to die of somethin’ worse than what I went in for.”

  She wasn’t the only one who held this opinion. The city’s public hospitals were short of staff, overcrowded, undersupplied. Too often, they were a place where the ill and weak went to become more so, not to be healed.

  “As I mentioned in my correspondence arranging this meeting,” Hugo said, “I seek patronage for a different sort of hospital. One in which the patients wouldn’t die.”

  Banks gave a bark of laughter. “You have such power?”

  “I have such skill and vision,” Hugo replied. What was the purpose of false modesty?

  Georgette made a noise he would have previously thought impossible from the throat of a respectable woman.

  Opening his leather case, Hugo extracted his precious plans and unrolled them before the baronet. Banks spread them flat, centering them before him on the large desk. “Why have you applied to me here, my lord? Why not the Royal College of Physicians?”

  Hugo chose his words carefully. “They lack the vision required for such a project.”

  “Turned you down flat, eh?” Banks looked pleased. Though not a student of medicine himself, he was known to nurture competition with the Royal College of Physicians. The stocks of medicinal plants grown by the Royal Society surpassed those of any other organization in England.

  “They tossed the rotgut on him, like,” said Georgette. “When he was there earlier. Saw it happen m’self.”

  “Now, really, er, Bone-box.” Hugo tried to sound as though he were covering for a true statement rather than a ridiculous lie. “We needn’t speak of that. Our business is with Sir Joseph.”

  The baronet looked gratified. “The Royal College allows members who aren’t proper gentlemen,” he tutted. “Surgeons in the mix; apothecaries, too. Not true men of science.” He peered more closely at the architectural drawing atop the stack of plans.

  Hugo’s opinion of surgeons and apothecaries was more favorable, but he pressed on, choosing his words carefully. “I intend that men of learning and skill will administer the proposed hospital. You see that
I have accounted for separation between patients with various illnesses, as well as rooms for surgeries, treatments, and convalescence. Complete care until the patient has recovered.”

  “Any ideas about gout?” Banks asked.

  “Drink lemon juice,” said the ruffian at Hugo’s side. “As much as ever you can get your hands on. Or if that costs more rag than you can get—”

  “Thank you, I think Sir Joseph can locate lemons if he wishes.” Hugo shot her a threatening glare. “And . . . Sir Joseph, that is not a terrible suggestion, if you wish to try it.”

  “Me mam had gout. I been stealing lemons for her since ever I could walk,” Georgette confided with alarming smoothness. “Or should I not say that? I mean, me brother was.”

  Hugo cleared his throat. “Never mind the lemons. These plans were drawn to my specification by an engineer; then I made corrections and alterations for maximum efficiency.”

  “And used a purse-full of ten-pound words,” hooted Georgette.

  Most young women would have quailed at the glare Hugo shot her. She only blinked back at him, all innocence.

  “Hmm.” Oblivious, Banks looked over the carefully measured and drawn diagrams and plans, the lists and recommendations. “Uh-hmm.” He peered through a glass, scrutinizing some details more closely. Taking pages from the top and setting them aside. Sometimes flipping one back over again for a second look.

  Hugo fought the urge to tap his foot.

  At last, the old man straightened in his chair. “These are ambitious plans.”

  “Thank you,” said Hugo.

  The baronet shook his head. “Too ambitious. I’m a naturalist by training, not a physician like you, but I speak with confidence that people want to be treated in their homes.”

  “That wastes the medical man’s time,” Hugo protested. “Think how many more people he could help with all his patients at hand.”

  “People are not bolts of cloth, to be woven into shape and sent out into the world in identical fashion.”

  “I am not saying they would receive identical treatment. They would receive excellent treatment.”

  The elderly baronet sighed. “The most excellent treatment is that denied to one’s inferiors—or so many believe. Medicine is exclusive, Lord Hugo, and I mean that literally. Certain portions of society are excluded from receiving it.”