Passion Favors the Bold

by Theresa Romain

  He ignored this. “If being shot wasn’t so annoying, I would brave Jenks’s wrath and visit Lowe. Waiting about for patients to come to me feels like wasting time.”

  She bit down hard on the words that wanted to spring forth. Isn’t that exactly what your hospital is intended to do? Bring the patients to you, to save the physician’s time?

  Save it for what, was the question. As Hugo had nothing to do at present but read about vegetable acids and refuse nobly to steal the wine cellar key, she guessed he felt time to be ticking away fruitlessly. Certainly he reached for his nonexistent watch often enough, as if checking on the progress of his life.

  “Whether you go to them or they come to you, you help people.” Envy flashed through her, almost battering through her polite smile. He always knew what to do. There was always something he could do to be useful.

  In short, he had a purpose. She was beginning to detest the word.

  “I do,” he granted. “But when I leave, no one else will care for these people as I have. And I don’t mean that no one will care as much, or as well. I mean that other medical men will literally offer different care.”

  “Not to imply that you are arrogant—but is that not all right?”

  “Probably it is arrogant.” He looked troubled. “But most physicians would have bled Mr. Lowe to remove the infection from his blood. That is exactly the treatment that led to my brother’s death.”

  Georgette stretched out her feet, knocking the toe of one slipper against Hugo’s boot in sympathy. “Mr. Lowe is doing well. Maybe there are times a patient needs to be bled, but in this case he was fortunate you were here.”

  He knocked her slippered foot with his larger one. “Surely there are times it is right to bleed a patient, or it wouldn’t be such a common practice. Yet I cannot think of any at the moment. If one’s body does the healing—which it does, far more than any medicine I could offer—then the blood needs to carry the healing about.”

  Georgette held up a hand. “Wait. Healing isn’t a substance. And you’re starting to plan again, aren’t you? You have that sort of distant, distracted look, and it’s not because you’ve left off your spectacles.”

  He folded his arms.

  “Aha. Yes. You are planning something.”

  He rolled his coat-clad shoulders, testing the movement of the wounded muscle. “I don’t know what causes healing. And my plan, so to speak, is small: I need to talk to the apothecary. The nearest surgeon is too far away. The apothecary will be the best source of care for these people once we’re gone.”

  He said we’re, but it wasn’t a together-sounding sort of word. It spoke of a time when they would be gone from here, and he would have his hospital to build.

  Don’t go, she wanted to beg. But such had always been his plan, organized as if there were boxes to tick. The travel, the gold, the return, the hospital. Adding in “the apothecary” was a subclause to the gold. So, she supposed, was she.

  It was more difficult to be honest about what she wanted outside of the hidden bounds of the wine cellar. Truth had seemed smaller there, easier to admit.

  She stood up, knowing manners would make him creak upright as well. “Good luck to you. I admit, I’d prefer you not to be shot again, so perhaps you could ask Jenks to have the apothecary sent here.”

  He stood to match her, face set in grave lines. “It seems silly, maybe, to care so much. But for a younger son of a duke, for whom so much of life is plotted out and inessential, any chance to”—he halted, fumbling for the right word—“to matter must be seized.”

  “Poor sons of dukes,” Georgette murmured. “They have the most difficult lot in life.”

  “It has been some days since I was provoked into cursing in your presence. Please do not goad me into ending my proper streak.”

  “What has propriety ever done for us?” She could feel the curious gaze of the footman on them, so she settled for drawing a finger along his jawline.

  He caught her hand up in his—and before releasing it, he pressed it to his lips. “I have a plan for you as well, Miss Impudence. Do not think I have forgotten that tomorrow is your birthday. You told me the date of it when we visited the beach.”

  “Oh . . .” she replied with stunning inadequacy.

  “Beg pardon, but right now I’m going to see about having the apothecary summoned,” Hugo said. “Until later?”

  “Uh—” she replied.

  “Right,” he said. “Glad we’re in agreement.”

  When he left the room, she sank into the embrace of the wing chair. Let the servants look and wonder; they couldn’t see through her proper facade to the turbulence of her dreams.

  So easily, Hugo’s plans set her to dreaming: not of a treasure in gold, but of kisses. Of looks that made her tremble and flush; of nearness that made her ache with want. She could almost forget that she and Hugo were in Northumberland only because of rumor and stolen treasure, not because their lives were truly connected.

  But if they were . . . it would be like home.

  She’d dreamed of a cottage once, all hers, planted about with flowers and herbs and vegetables. Something that would allow her to be fine on her own, not reliant on help that might never come.

  Now her dream was changing, the little stone cottage stretching to three stories and some sixty rooms. The soft Kentish landscape wiped into starkness and space and rain-soaked fields, with a castle in the dim distance to keep guard over the border with Scotland.

  And she wasn’t alone in this dream, for Hugo was with her. He wanted to be with her, just as . . . as she wanted to be with him.

  She must have dozed, for a hammering at the door of Raeburn Hall jolted her upright. Heavy lids blinking, she looked about. The cold grate—the slant of the afternoon light—oh, right. She was in the parlor. About an hour must have passed. Surely that wasn’t enough time for the apothecary to arrive? Would an apothecary knock with such urgency?

  She stretched, rolled her shoulders, and shook off the clinging threads of drowsiness. Then she strode to the entrance hall to see what the fuss was about.

  Already, a crowd had gathered there. Everyone from Hawes, who managed to look not at all curious, to Linton, who managed nothing of the sort. Oddly, there was no one present whom Georgette did not recognize from the household.

  And then she saw Jenks, leaning against the door. Folding a paper and stuffing it into his coat pocket. Looking inscrutable as ever, but with a flick of urgency to his movements.

  “What is it?” Georgette was the first to ask the question everyone wanted answered. “Another express?”

  Jenks blinked, as if only now noticing the number of people about. “My apologies for the disruption. Yes, another express.”

  “Are you going to tell us what is in it, Mr. Jenks, or should I pick your pocket later?” Georgette asked.

  “I wouldn’t recommend you do that, Mrs. Crowe,” said the Runner. “I suppose I can tell you all. The news will be in papers soon enough. This express comes from my colleague in the village of Strawfield, in Derbyshire. Three of the six stolen trunks of gold have been recovered, and one of the four thieves arrested.”

  “Bless my soul!” Sir Frederic had emerged from his study, blinking owlishly at the hubbub. “Half the gold, one of the thieves. That is progress, is it not? That is true progress.”

  “The thieves,” Jenks added with asperity, “call themselves ‘the John Smiths.’ The man arrested swears he cannot identify any of the others.”

  “One thief caught, though,” Sir Frederic said heartily. “That is good! Surely the most important thing is recovering the gold. Let the other criminals go where they will. If they haven’t the gold, what harm have they done?”

  “A great deal, sir,” said the Runner. “The so-called John Smith who was arrested has killed a woman in Strawfield. Four guards at the Royal Mint, too, were killed. And the unfortunate whose body was found burned near Doncaster is likely another victim of the thieves.”

  The
hubbub turned to a hush. Even Sir Frederic’s bluff cheer vanished.

  “People get so excited about the gold,” said Jenks, “that they forget about the blood spilled. But I have not, and I won’t.”

  Six lives for six trunks of gold—good Lord. It was not a worthy trade. There were other human losses that might be related, too. Like Lowe’s injured foot. Keeling’s harassment and rape of Linton, for which he recompensed her with a bit of shining metal.

  “Now that the Derbyshire investigation is concluded, should we expect the nation’s treasure hunters to move north, Mr. Jenks?” This was the contribution of Hawes, whose question was posed in a silky accent without a trace of anxiety. “Shall I prepare more rooms, Sir Frederic?”

  “No need for that, surely.” Jenks was the first to answer. “If anyone comes hunting for treasure here, he’ll be disappointed.”

  “Because there’s nothing here! I have been telling you so.” Sir Frederic clucked, his round face the picture of wounded pride. “Well, you are to be leaving soon, then. Yes?”

  “I didn’t say any of that, Sir Frederic.” Jenks’s impassive stare met the baronet’s, then held it until Sir Frederic blinked, shuffling his feet. “And no, I’m not leaving yet.”

  In his tone was a mild chastisement to their host, but Georgette felt it directed toward herself as well. She and Hugo had met no one else looking here for the stolen sovereigns. This meant that she alone, of all the gold-mad seekers in England, had pursued the stolen sovereigns so relentlessly north. She alone had stalked this Bow Street Runner, using his intelligence to sneak her way along the correct path.

  She was ashamed. She had thought only of the glitter of the coins, of what they could do to change her life. She had forgotten all those people whose lives had already been changed, and those whose lives had been ended.

  “I will help you, Mr. Jenks,” she said. “However I can.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Why were these men so stubborn? Jenks, as Hugo once had, refused her help. “Keep yourself safe,” he said. “That will be help enough. And don’t do anything foolish that will force me to shoot you or Mr. Crowe.”

  Hugo, like Jenks, was busy for the rest of the afternoon. While Jenks did God knew what in response to the news contained in the express, Hugo did, in fact, meet with the apothecary. The two men parted happy on both sides—one having learned more about rural medicine, the other having got to pick the brain of a physician who also happened to be a duke’s son.

  In short, everything seemed to be in process without her. Which meant that Georgette awoke the morning of her twenty-first birthday with nothing to do but formulate a scheme.

  She had forgone so many pleasures for years, working in the bookshop for her parents. Working for Cousin Mary and her husband. Doing whatever was needed. Love had been confined to the occasional kiss with an almost-stranger at the servants’ entrance to the building. It had taken place in seconds, only to be soon regretted.

  At least, that was how life had been before she clambered reluctantly into Lord Hugo Starling’s carriage. Now she knew what love was, and a moment was no longer enough—even as she feared it. So easily, she could let her hungry heart love him. But she must not, for to love someone was to need him, and she had no illusions that he needed anything of her. Every touch, every kiss between them, she had begun.

  She would begin something new, now. Something for them both, but also just for her, to hold to in the moments after their journey was ended. Once the gold was found or lost forever. There would still be a reward.

  It was her birthday, and she wasn’t going to forgo any pleasures today.

  Hugo collared her in the corridor as she exited the breakfast parlor. “Good morning, Madam Birthday. You look lovely.”

  She curtsied. She had contrived an out-of-the-ordinary gown today, and she liked feeling the skirts swirl about her legs. To a white muslin dress, sweetly embroidered and beaded at the bodice, she and Linton had stitched an overskirt of sheer golden silk. The fabric had begun life as a shawl, but it was far more useful for making one pretty than keeping one warm. “Thank you for the kind wishes, Lord Non-Birthday. Fine feathers make fine birds—but if you want to tell me the bird is fine too, I won’t mind.”

  “The bird makes the feathers fine.” He took his spectacles from his waistcoat pocket, then put them back.

  “Are you fidgeting?”

  “Not at all.” He hesitated. “Maybe. I told you yesterday I had a plan in mind. But I do not know whether you will like it.”

  “I don’t either. I haven’t enough evidence to go on until you tell me what it is.”

  He smiled faintly. “I have had an influence on your vocabulary, I see. I do not know whether that is a good thing.”

  She leaned against the brightly papered wall of the corridor, tucking her hands neatly behind her back. “Of course it’s a good thing. I’m teasing you, and you could use teasing. What is the gift?”

  “It’s . . . no, it’s no good. I’ll take you to the apothecary in Bamburgh, and you can pick out sweets or powders or whatever you like.”

  His level of hesitation was intriguing. “Every time you demur, I become more certain I am going to like the gift. As long as it’s not a bullet through your other trapezius, which Jenks would contribute if we left the house.”

  He leaned against the wall beside her, nudging her hip with his. “Well. I thought I would give you a day. The whole day, in which I’d do as you wished.”

  “Like a servant?” She wrinkled her nose. “But servants are paid to take orders.”

  “Not like that, no. Like . . . a friend. Or something. Because I know you like to be with people who care about you.”

  The “or something” was intriguing as well. And the rest of the offer was too sweet, shaking her as if she’d breakfasted on chocolate and wine rather than toast and tea.

  “Who would not wish to be with people who care about one?” She spoke lightly to cover the embarrassing depth of emotion evoked by his simple words.

  It was a normal wish, surely. For Georgette it had always been her fondest one. Doubtless there were people for whom love was a bedrock, hardly noticed in its steady permanence. But when one grew up with parents as busy as they were distant, love was a shifting sand. What allowed a structure to be built one day might be the same thing that toppled it the next. She was never certain of anything, except that she must work as hard as ever she could. To become indispensable in small ways, which were better than no ways at all.

  What could she work at now, though? The offer of a day of Hugo’s time left her uncertain of how best to use it.

  He would do as she wished, he said. “But,” she realized, “you cannot give me the whole day. You are promised to see patients in the parlor beginning at one o’clock.”

  He let his head fall against the wall with a thud. “You are right. How could I forget?”

  “How could you have arranged two things for the same time? Tut, tut. Your admirable plans have outgrown themselves.”

  “What about tomorrow instead? If that would do, I could—”

  “Stop.” She placed her fingertips on his lips, gently. “It is a wonderful gift, and I want it today. We shall just have to make excellent use of the morning.”

  “Do you have something in mind?”

  “In fact, I do.” She traced the shape of his lips with careful fingertips. “If you will truly do as I wish, then I want you to love me.”

  * * *

  Yes, Hugo thought at once. And then: What had he got himself into?

  Catching her fingers up in his own, he pulled them from his lips. “What do you mean by love?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked troubled. “What does it mean to you?”

  Why could she not ask him about vegetable acids, or about the composition of the bullet that had pierced his shoulder the previous week? Something easy to answer. Something definite.

  “It means . . .” He twined his fingers with hers. “Oh, a milli
on little things. And before you ask, no, that is not a precise number. That’s only an estimate.”

  She swung his hand with hers, bumping it lightly against the rail of the wall. “Hmm. Give me a few examples from that million.”

  He pondered this. In his early life, love had been inextricable from the double soul he shared with his twin. So long and so well had they known each other, it was as if they shared a life, and whatever happened to one was known and felt by the other.

  But Matthew was gone. Had been gone for a long time, and so was that idea of love. Love now was smaller, more everyday. It had to be, or the pierce of it, the loss of it, could not be borne.

  “Love is . . . laughter after a joke that isn’t all that funny,” he said. “Asking how a day was, and listening earnestly to the answer. Splitting the last tart instead of eating it all oneself.”

  Somehow he was managing full sentences, when she had asked him to love her, and her hair smelled sweetly of some sort of flowery soap. He could remember what it had looked like unpinned, down about her shoulders. Though she’d been wearing scrubby boys’ clothing at the time, she had been beautiful. She could not help it. She was joy, and intrigue, and mystery. She was brave in ways he had never thought of being brave.

  “It is,” he added, “putting down a book for one’s companion when one only wants to read.”

  “That is love indeed.” She sounded grave.

  “You are teasing me? After I thought up such excellent examples?”

  “Not at all. I like them very much. I have seen more of such examples shown to others than I have known myself; that is all.”

  He wanted to punch the whole indifferent world. Instead, he said, “Well, what can I do for you? Shall I pick up a book and put it down when you speak? Shall we find a single tart to split? But since it is your birthday, I will likely give you the whole thing.”

  “No, that’s not what I want.” She dragged in a deep breath, then blurted, “I want you to make love to me.”

  Yes, he thought again—then sense collared him. “What? I—no, I can’t do that.”