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Christopher Thomas Hughes, Earl St John, was a man of science. He was a physician, to be precise, with a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh. That was all very acceptable, for gentleman physicians were considered respectable in their own right. If only the man had been satisfied to remain in his proper place and not gone out of his way to climb down the social ladder to become a sawbones, dressing festering wounds, setting bones, bleeding people and, when all else failed, chopping off their limbs. For St John was trained not only in theoretical medicine but also in its rougher, less respectable cousin: practical surgery. And this, precisely, was the root of all his problems. A gentleman, a peer, no less, who had learned a trade, who worked for a fee, who carried a surgeon’s case and whose hands, though scrubbed clean for the drawing room, had recently wielded a scalpel in the theatre, was simply unheard of. He had, in the plainest sense, blood on his hands.

It made him a persona non grata. He was violating the code of a gentleman. It was, polite society had decided, simply not done.

He must be mad, they insisted. Mad to volunteer to join Wellington’s army to chop off injured soldiers’ limbs in the thick of battle. Mad to tend to hundreds, nay, thousands of wounded men, only to have them die under his hands from camp fever and dysentery. Mad to risk his life and to prefer this filthy, entirely ungentlemanly trade over idling away his time in one of the elegant, genteel clubs in London, reading newspapers about the wars from a safe distance in a comfortable armchair, as a proper aristocrat was expected to do.

St John, to no one’s surprise, was no proper aristocrat.

As a former military surgeon who had spent six years abroad, he felt more at home with soldiers camping on the Andalusian plains than in London drawing rooms. He was entirely out of touch with polite society, possessing no manners, no breeding, and worst of all, no sense of fashion whatsoever. He wore a suit that was decades out of fashion, and his hair. Goodness, his hair! It defied description. He tied his long, raven tresses carelessly back into an impatient queue, though it frequently came loose and hung about his face as if he did not know what to do with it. He rarely shaved, and even more rarely had his clothes pressed. What soldier, pray, had time to press his shirts when French cuirassiers were charging?

After he’d returned from the wars, disillusioned, lost, and bleeding more on the inside than the outside, for he’d fortunately survived the wars without as much as a scratch, he’d immediately found employment in Bethlehem Hospital in London.

The horror! What peer would ever willingly seek employment and work for his living? And at Bedlam, of all places.

Thus it came about that his reputation received the final death knell. And St John helped it cheerfully along through his highly idiosyncratic behaviour.

After several years of working at Bedlam, he grimly concluded he was as incapable of saving lives there as he had been at war. Both had proven to be exercises in futility; the one a fight against an ineffective system, the other a fight against fate. It was then he’d remembered that he had a ward, his young niece, waiting for him at a girls’ school in Bath. What was it called again? Ah yes. Miss Hilversham’s Seminary for Young Ladies. He’d promised his sister that he would take care of little Phoebe.

And so, after he’d left Bedlam, he’d decided to settle in his old family hall again. That was an irony in and of itself, for he’d happily avoided the place for over a decade. He’d rather go to war than settle in his old family home. But there was Phoebe. The only family he had left. And he’d promised to care for her. He concluded it might be as good a time as any to have little Phoebe come with him to keep him company. Maybe home was what his restless spirit needed. Maybe facing the past and healing the ghosts was what needed to be done. Maybe gathering his only living relative around him was the right thing to do.

So here he was, in Bath.

At this girls’ school, facing two females.

One was clearly terrified of him, for reasons which he had only himself to blame, and the other—ahh.

The other threw him completely out of countenance, as nothing ever had in his entire pathetic, useless life.

But when his glance had first fallen on that petite dark-haired girl who stuck her nose proudly into the air, introducing herself with a haughtiness that knew no equal that she was Miss Hilversham, he knew with a sinking foreboding that his life was about to change forever.

* * *

St John, as was already stated, was a man of science who did not believe in unscientific things like sentiment or, heaven forbid, irrational things like love at first sight. He’d always waved it away when one of his comrades would waffle about how hopelessly they’d fallen in love with some beautiful Spanish girl they’d encountered during their campaign.

It was entirely impossible, he’d argue. How could one possibly fall in love with a stranger?

There was no such thing as love at first sight, he’d always claimed; it was merely the folly of dreamers and romantics. An infatuation, a hallucination. A disorder of the nerves. At best, a base biological reaction of the body, like lust. Nothing more.

But as he’d knelt, there, in front of the sooty fireplace, sticking his head in it to check for the jackdaws he’d seen nesting in the chimney when he approached the school, barking upwards to frighten them away, and tilted his head aside to see the lovely vision which had appeared in the doorway, he knew he’d been wrong. Oh, so terribly, terribly wrong.

His heart lurched and squeezed, and a rushing filled his veins and sizzled and burned its way to his heart. He felt alive as never before.

And then he knew, with a dull realisation, that this must be it.

Right at first sight, too.

Like a right old dolt.

He was utterly entranced.

And because that was a bag of moonshine and utterly impossible, he immediately suppressed the emotion. Because what could not be, simply could not be.

Earlier, that other anaemic-looking female had opened the door and stiffly led him to the parlour as if she were doing him some sort of favour by allowing him into the hallowed halls of the school. She’d been clearly terrified of him, and surely, she’d heard of all the rumours that were circulating about his person. Not the most flattering of stories, for sure, even if some of them were true. He sighed. But he never paid heed to gossip, and he naively assumed others didn’t, either, which was why it always came as somewhat of a surprise to him that they’d already well made up their mind about him and his personality long before they’d even met him.

That was what one got when one had worked as a physician at Bedlam. Outsiders tended to mix up who was the doctor and who the patient, frequently swapping the two either through ignorance or sheer malice. He could not muster up enough curiosity to uncover the reason behind people’s penchant for malicious gossip, and he’d always shrugged it off as being inconsequential. After what he’d experienced during the wars, after he’d witnessed the entire range of malevolence of human nature and what it was capable of, gossip was a vice not even worth giving a second thought. And he cared very little for what his fellow man or woman tended to think of him. Let them gossip about him, by all means. He cared nothing for it.

But this time, he’d been irritated by the woman’s behaviour from the very first.

It hadn’t helped that a bee had stung her right at the collar, but the woman had been so transfixed by him she hadn’t even noticed. What kind of woman was she that she would not notice a sting? How utterly disconnected from her body must she be? Was she capable of feeling any sort of sensation at all? These were the thoughts that went through his mind, followed by a more scientific curiosity, his perpetual affliction. How did the bee end up in a closed parlour, anyhow? There wasn’t a window open anywhere. Unless the creature had come into the parlour with him. In which case he was responsible for her getting stung. Since she’d seemed so oblivious to it, and the sting was swelling and turning a nasty red, he’d grabbed her by the shoulders, pinned her still, scraped the sting away with the nail of his thumb, then bent his head to suck the poison out.