“Oh, aye,” said Georgette. “You know it’s not the best unless most people can’t afford it.”
“Well . . . yes,” said Banks. “Lord Hugo did state he wished to establish a private hospital.”
Damn. “That’s not what I meant by private,” said Hugo. “I called it private because the funding would be drawn from—”
“You don’t know it’s a good hospital,” pressed Bone-box, “unless it’s too good for the likes of me.”
Banks folded his hands atop his desk, looking like a judge rendering a verdict. “Yes, that’s so. Do recall, Lord Hugo, that private hospitals aplenty already exist. Not only for the physically ill, but for lunatics. And the ill who can’t afford private treatment may enter workhouses and poorhouses and prisons.”
“Ooh, that’s like choosing between three heavens,” scoffed Georgette, causing the baronet to scowl.
Hugo hadn’t considered the stubbornness of those at the edges of high society. But then again, they hadn’t considered his stubbornness. “No one ever regained his health in a workhouse or a poorhouse or a prison. The hospital I propose will provide better care than any other available. The comforts of home, but with more constant medical attention.”
Banks looked prepared to argue—but before he could speak, Georgette hopped up to sit on the edge of his desk. “This be bigger than my whole house. Though it’s not so much a house as it be a room. Well, it’s a room if a bit of tin across a hole makes a roof.”
“Do get off my desk. Get off at once.” Banks pressed himself back in his great chair. “You live in a hole?”
“No!” Georgette sounded offended. “There’s a hole in the roof.” She slid from the desk and began to prowl about the room, touching everything she could. “All these books would make a fine glimmer in that empty grate. D’you ever pitch one in to watch it blaze up?”
With a pained look, the elderly man said, “Lord Hugo, does the boy carry lice?”
“Coo, who doesn’t?” said Georgette as she pulled a leather-bound volume from a shelf, then stuffed it back askew. “You probably have lice under that wig of yours.”
“It’s not a wig!” Banks barked.
“Then why does it look like that?”
Banks was red, practically choking. “It—I—It is not!—I—”
Hugo was not going to smile. He really was not. “Dreadful boy,” he said. “Apologize to the baronet, then leave the room at once.”
Brilliant woman. Absolutely brilliant. She had distracted Sir Joseph before he could decline further discussion. Then she made herself so obnoxious that Hugo and the baronet could unite against her.
Once Georgette had obeyed Hugo and left the chamber with seeming bad grace, he faced the baronet across the desk in taut silence.
“I beg your pardon,” he said to the older man. “What an abominable youth. Some people have no idea how to behave in good company.”
Sir Joseph grunted his agreement, slightly mollified.
“But,” Hugo added, “they still deserve medical care. As do sons of dukes, and baronets with gout, and—”
“I take your meaning.” The baronet lifted a quelling hand. “But I cannot agree to invest the resources of the Royal Society in an untried scheme. Now . . .” His dark eyes glittered. “If someone of influence supported the plan—someone such as your father, for example—then it would have the social cachet needed to draw financial backing.”
If I had my father’s support, I wouldn’t need financial backing. “Thank you for your time.” Hugo reached for the plans, beginning to roll them again. “Unfortunately, the Duke of Willingham and I do not speak. It will not be possible to gain his support.”
The baronet put a broad, gnarled hand on the papers, halting Hugo. “It’s a good plan, Lord Hugo. But at this time, it’s not practical.”
And what had practical ever done for Hugo? Practical would have bound him to London, never to visit his cottage in Edinburgh or study medicine there.
Practical had been his behavior when Matthew grew ill, when conventional treatments dictated by an absent physician failed.
He pressed a hand to the pocket of his waistcoat, feeling the familiar weight of his watch. “I understand, Sir Joseph.”
“But if you get the duke’s investment . . .”
“Right. I take your meaning. If it comes to pass”—if the sun falls and the mountains crumble—“be assured that I will notify you.” He finished gathering his plans, then returned them to their case. Bowing a farewell, he exited the office.
Georgette had been leaning against the wall, scuffing her broken shoe against the floor. She darted up to Hugo as soon as he emerged from the room, then drew up short. “You look like you want to scowl.”
“I don’t want to scowl.”
“Frown, then.”
“Maybe.” He told her what had passed since she was evicted from the room. “You were right, Bone-box. You did help. Without your dreadful behavior, the meeting would have been terminated more quickly. Instead, now there’s a slim chance of success.” Very slim. Too slim for his liking.
The plans he carried were light, too fragile to bear the many hopes Hugo laid upon them.
For he wasn’t hoping only on his own behalf. For the past fourteen years, he had been hoping—and acting, and learning, and working—for two.
“What do we do now?” Georgette asked. “Guv.”
Hugo smiled thinly. “Let me consider.”
They retraced their path through the building. By the time they emerged into daylight, leaving the sweeping Palladian structure behind, logic and forethought had led Hugo to one inevitable conclusion.
“We’ll have to give the appointment at the Royal College of Physicians a miss,” he told Georgette. “There’s somewhere else we need to go, and it’ll be even more of a knife-edge of negotiation than this meeting was.”
Sometimes he hated logic and forethought.
Georgette looked pleased at the use of the word we, and she climbed into the waiting crested carriage with a leap. “Bone-box is ready for the task, whatever it might be.”
“Yes, well, that’s going to be a problem.” As he followed her into the carriage, soot made him blink. For a moment, it seemed the sun had fallen. “We’re going to pay a call on the Duke of Willingham.”
Chapter Three
Thus it was time for Bone-box, the irreverent youth, to be transformed back into the proper Miss Frost. The coachman retrieved Georgette’s trunk, from which she removed her favorite gown and the other necessaries.
Then she looked around with some doubt. A private room failed to spring into existence on the Strand. “Where can I change my clothing?”
Hugo hefted the trunk and helped the coachman stow it again. “In the carriage. Where else? We can spare five minutes.”
“Five minutes?”
“Too long?” His dark brows knit. “That’s fine. The sooner we reach Willingham House, the better for all of us.”
Honestly. “Obviously you have never tried to put on women’s clothing without the help of a maid.” She shoved the bundle into the carriage and climbed in after it.
“In this, you are correct.” Hugo held the edge of the door, preparing to shut her in.
“All right, all right. I’ll change as quickly as I can. In the carriage.” In front of Somerset House! And the carriage had only the sheerest of window shades; she might as well sell tickets to passersby. “Could you—stand in front of the carriage window?”
He raised his brows. “To what do I owe the honor, Bone-box?”
Her cheeks went instantly red. “I don’t mean that I want you to look into the carriage. I mean . . . blocking the window is—is what I mean.”
He was kind enough to ignore her stammering. “Miss Frost, you may trust me to be a gentleman.” And he closed the door.
She crouched on the floor of the carriage, all elbows and knees struggling to free herself from breeches and tight jacket. Through the thin shade, she could see the ou
tline of his head and shoulders. It was the back of his head—so yes, he was turned away.
Well. She had trusted him to be a gentleman. But what good was a gentleman? Rapunzel would never have escaped the tower if the prince had been a gentleman, listening respectfully to her singing from a distance—then walking away without a word since he had not been formally introduced to the lady.
Georgette had avoided the scholarly tomes that so captivated her parents, feasting instead on fantastical stories. Stories in which a castle was always around the next corner, and a peddler was as likely to be a prince as a pauper. Stories in which animals could speak; in which a lonely, impoverished young woman always made her fortune and found someone to love her.
They were only stories, she knew. But the fanciful promises of stories were better than having nothing to dream about at all.
Shadows passed before the window; Hugo was lifting his arm to shade his eyes, maybe. As Georgette scrabbled into her stockings and gown, she was slightly disappointed that he didn’t even try to peek. Which meant, perhaps, that he regarded her as a horrid rapscallion like Bone-box in truth. Or as no more than a duty he hoped to discharge quickly.
She had few enough people who were glad to be around her. Since she had left the family bookshop—could that have been only earlier today?—maybe she could count on none at all.
But that was to be expected. It was greedy for a faded-looking girl with scarcely a coin to her name to hope for others to notice her at all.
So. That was why she had to make her own fortune, like the heroines of her favorite stories. She’d learned from childhood, she couldn’t rely on others to see to her interests. Especially not her parents, living with their noses in books, learning fact after fact instead of noticing when their own daughter was hungry or hadn’t a candle to call her own.
Quickly as she could, she rolled up the boys’ clothing and pinned up her hair in a simple knot. She knocked at the carriage door, and Hugo opened it at once, looking up at her with reproach. “That was far longer than five minutes.”
“It was such a delight changing my garments in this enclosed space that I decided to prolong the experience.”
“Have you finished?”
“As well as I can without the help of a maid.” For her boys’ garb, she had bound her chest tightly. She had left the binding on in place of her stays, which fastened up the back and would require a servant to lace them.
The bodice of her gown also buttoned up the back, and there was no help for it. She couldn’t call on a duke with the top half of her gown drooping. “I need you to do up these buttons. I can’t reach them.”
Her own face grew hot. Again. Hugo only looked amused. “Now I am become a lady’s maid. This day has taken any number of unexpected turns, hasn’t it?”
“If you were truly a lady’s maid, I’d have you do something with my hair. I’ve never met a duke, and . . .” Her hands flailed, the universal gesture for I would like to look more elegant, but this is the best I can do without a glass or the help of another pair of hands.
If that wasn’t a universal gesture, it should be.
“It’ll be fine.” Hugo halted on the carriage step. “You’ll be with my mother. If she doesn’t like you, it won’t be because of your hair.”
“Is that meant to be comforting?”
“Not particularly. Why? Are you comforted?”
“No.” If she hadn’t needed him to do up her buttons, she would have been sorely tempted to sock him. “And why are we going to your parents’ town house? I told you I didn’t want to stay as your mother’s guest.”
“We’re not going for that reason. I hope to avoid a likely fruitless search for stolen coins, and to make a request that is slightly less likely to be fruitless.” He paused. “That’s what I have to do, that is. You can . . . I don’t know. Drink tea, or whatever it is ladies do in their free hours.”
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t have free hours at the bookshop.” He meant well, so she managed a smile. Though she’d never thought of her birth as low—her parents were educated, and at some point a generation or two ago, the family had owned land—she felt the gulf between her station and Lord Hugo’s keenly at the moment. Nothing could have knit a man of such rarefied status in friendship with her brother Benedict except, of course, for books and study.
He made a sound under his breath that might have been a curse. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Here, turn about and I’ll fasten you up.”
He hoisted himself into the carriage and sat on the squabs beside her. Hitching up one leg, he turned toward her on the cushioned seat. With hands that were tentative, even gentle, he caught her shoulders and turned her away from him. “Buttons, buttons,” he said. “How impractical.”
“No one in the history of England ever said women’s fashions were practical.” Sharply, she folded her legs to the side, presenting him with more of her back. “Don’t think I didn’t notice, by the bye, that you said you wanted to avoid the search for coins. I didn’t agree to that.”
“I know. And I don’t expect that of you. Whether or not my request is granted, I’ll see you safely to your brother. You two can hunt together, if you choose.”
Georgette had been preparing for a splendid, indignant rant. But... “Oh.” Now that the need for it was stripped away, a lump caught in her throat.
At her back, light movements marked Hugo’s progress with the buttons, tiny circles of horn that marched from her nape to the high waist of the gown. The bodice grew more and more snug with each one fastened, making her short of breath in a way she could not remember ever being before in this gown.
“That’s done, then,” he said. When she touched the back of the bodice at her nape, feeling for the top button, her fingers brushed against his. Her breath pulled in short and sharp, as though she’d been startled.
Maybe she had been startled, at that.
When she faced forward again, Hugo at once flung himself across the carriage to the other seat.
“How dramatic,” Georgette said. “Are you all right?”
“Quite all right.” But his dark blue gaze traced her in ways unfamiliar and unfathomable, as if she were a room in his hospital plans that he could not remember having designed, and for which he could not imagine the purpose.
Georgette forgot this oddness when the carriage pulled up before Willingham House. For that matter, she almost forgot her own name.
A duke and duchess who bore a grudge against one of their sons would, in a proper tale, inhabit an isolated stone castle where the weather always stormed. But a mansion in London was even more impressive, and when a butler opened the door to Hugo and herself, she gawked at the broad, elegant stone building as she had at Somerset House.
“This is beautiful,” she whispered to Hugo once a butler admitted them to the entry hall. “I was certain it’d be dour and dark. One of those melancholy Gothic piles of chipped stone and portraits with long noses.”
He smirked. “That’s all on the second story.”
He opened the door to the drawing room, which looked exactly like society papers had led Georgette to expect. The ceilings were high, the windows tall and sparkling, the plasterwork intricate and snowy. Everything was spacious and clean, with no musty stacks of books and not a speck of dust anywhere. Certainly no laundry to be folded or packages to be stowed.
No, instead there was a small flock of richly dressed women sitting on velvet-covered chairs. As one, they turned to look at the intruders. Some froze with teacups raised halfway to their lips. The effect was one of genteel shock.
Amidst the elegant splendor, one woman spoke. “Lord Hugo. What a delightful surprise.”
“Mother.” He bowed.
So this was a duchess. Tall and well-dressed, gray-haired and brittle, with careful posture and an expression of determined calm.
“It has been too long since your last visit, Hugo.” The duchess shifted her posture in a graceful flutter: of hands, of shawls, of the faded curls
that hung in careful arrangements about her ears. “Are you here to apologize to your father?” Her Grace set down a teacup, and that was fluttery too, the china cup rattling against its frail saucer. “With your coat in that state?”
“It’s not his fault, Your Grace,” Georgette said, remembering to curtsy as she spoke. “A horrid street urchin threw cheap liquor on him when he was trying to help. The boy was in trouble, you see.”
Hugo slanted a sharp look at her. “I’m pleased to hear you say so, Miss Frost. That is exactly how I viewed the incident as well.”
The duchess regarded them each in turn, then asked, “Who is your companion, Hugo? I was not expecting callers at this hour.”
It was impossible to ignore the presence of five other women in the room. Not expecting callers, it was clear, meant not expecting someone like this. Georgette’s favorite gown of pale yellow appeared plain and cheap next to the rich silk hangings on the walls, the cut velvet of the upholstery on which was seated the duchess. Again, she experienced that jarring sense of being pulled into a world she did not understand.
But Hugo introduced Georgette politely around the room, and she gave a creditable curtsy to each of the noblewomen. “It is my pleasure to meet you, Your Grace,” she told the duchess. “Your son is helping me locate my brother.”
“Is he indeed, Miss Frost?” the duchess said, as a servant brought in yet another tea tray molded of enough silver to entice the beleaguered Royal Mint. “I have been curious about Lord Hugo’s acquaintances from his medical years. Your brother is fortunate in his friendships.”
“A medical acquaintance? How intriguing.” A woman with lovely blond curls and a sweet, fatigued smile selected a tiny cake from the tray of delicacies. “Miss Frost, I have never encountered a medical woman. Is your gown a sort of... of academic costume?”
Hugo flipped her a wave. “Oh, hullo, Tess. Heard you and Loftus were expecting again. Congratulations.”
Passion Favors the Bold Page 3
