Page 10 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

I don’t belong here, Mercy thought as she stood beside the baroness, watching couples swirl by on the ballroom floor in dizzying blurs of color.

No one had asked her to dance. She hadn’t wanted anyone to do so, really, but still it had felt a little too pointed that no one had bothered. Even those gentlemen who had come over to claim a dance with Juliet or Marina had hardly given her more than a quick nod of acknowledgement—only when prompted by the baroness, of course.

No one had bothered even to make idle small talk. Not even so much as a Lovely weather we’re having. No one had even asked to be introduced.

It hadn’t hurt, really. She’d expected as much. She had tried to warn the baroness, after all. But it was embarrassing. Or at least it was meant to be. For her. Perhaps even for the baroness, since the poor woman had been the one to sponsor her, to insist upon her presence.

Even now, she thought, more than halfway through the evening, the baroness wanted to believe the tide would turn. But then, she was an innately kind woman, always wanting to believe the best of everyone.

So when she leaned in close to Mercy’s ear to whisper, “Your time will come, dear. You truly do look lovely this evening,”

Mercy managed to summon forth a smile and attempted to look like she believed it herself.

Lovely might’ve been a bit of an overstatement. She looked presentable at least, in the right sort of gown, with the proper gloves and jewelry, and her hair done up just perfectly. But it was all just glossy fabric and gilt laid upon the wrong form.

She did not belong. As much as the baroness might see her through kind eyes, through a lens of affection that naturally softened the worst of Mercy’s rough edges, so too did the rest of the company present see her through lenses of their own.

Upstart. Common. Vulgar.

One cannot turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

A trickle of sweat slipped down the back of her neck, sliding beneath the neckline of her gown, between her shoulder blades, and down her spine. Perhaps the rest of the company present was accustomed to the sweltering heat of ballrooms overstuffed with people, but she was not. The unholy combination of the heat and the stagnant air oversaturated with at least a score of different perfumes was slowly driving her toward madness.

The baroness made a muted sound of joy, clasping her hands before her. “Oh, look,”

she said. “Thomas has elected to join us after all!”

Oh, Lord. She could see him now, wending his way through the crowded ballroom. She hadn’t expected him—none of them had, since he’d claimed some urgent business that required his personal attention. But it seemed that his business had concluded with enough time to spare to change into a set of handsome evening clothes, all fine black wool and a perfectly elegant knot in the fabric of his cravat.

Spectacles just the tiniest bit askew upon his face. Not so much that anyone else would notice, she thought, as if he had put some manner of effort into bending the frames as closely as possible back toward their original state. But the evidence remained, if one cared to search for it, in the tiniest downward slope of the right lens, the smallest lift of the left.

Mercy snatched a glass of champagne straight from the silver tray of a passing servant as Thomas approached, lifting it to her lips to drain perhaps half the glass in advance of his company.

“Marina?”

Thomas inquired as he settled into the space beside his mother, his eyes scanning the ballroom floor.

“Dancing with Mr. DeWitt,”

the baroness said.

“And Juliet?”

“Lord Gifford.”

“He’s years too old for her,”

Thomas said, his brows drawing down sharply. “For God’s sake, he must be at least thirty.”

“It’s a dance, not an engagement, Thomas,”

the baroness said. “Everyone knows Gifford is not seeking a wife this Season, besides. You’ve nothing to worry for on that score.”

Thomas made a harsh sound beneath his breath. “DeWitt fancies himself a bit of a rake,”

he said. “He’s not likely to settle down this Season, either.”

“Only a dance, Thomas,”

the baroness repeated, and this time there was the glint of steel beneath the lightness of her voice. “Not every dance must be a prelude to courtship. Marina knows that.”

“At the very least, she could endeavor to dance with gentlemen who might be amenable to it,”

Thomas said testily.

Mercy snorted above the rim of her glass. “How would you propose she do that?”

she inquired. Pitching her voice to a simpering inflection, she posited: “I do beg your pardon, sir, but I must first inquire after your interest in matrimony before I consent to a dance.”

With a surly mutter beneath his breath, Thomas at last conceded, “I suppose not.”

As if he had just occurred to him that Mercy was also present this evening, he turned his gaze on her at last. “Miss Fletcher, what has become of your dance card?”

Startled, Mercy glanced down at the little paper card dangling from the ribbon at her wrist. Oh—she’d ruined it somehow. Unconsciously, in the boredom that had hung over her these last hours as she had languished by the edge of the dance floor, waiting alongside the baroness and the chaperones for a dance which would never come, she’d fiddled with it a little too much. Warped and mangled, it hung for dear life from the fraying bit of ribbon affixed to her wrist.

No matter. She’d not been using it anyway. Mercy gave a one-shouldered shrug, downing the rest of her champagne. “It’s nothing,”

she said, and redirected her gaze to the dance floor, striving to spot Marina or Juliet through the throng. “As there are no names upon it—nor do I expect there to be—it hardly matters whether or not it remains serviceable.”

Even in the dull roar of sound that permeated the ballroom, the silence that hung over the three of them was a palpable thing. Like a thick layer of fog, heavy enough to blunt the worst of the chatter about them.

“No names?”

Thomas echoed at last, incredulous.

“Thomas,”

the baroness said, her voice chiding. Offended, perhaps, on Mercy’s behalf, by her son’s poor manners.

“Not a one.”

It wouldn’t have bothered her, except that it had clearly bothered the baroness. “I’m sorry,”

she said, faltering over the words. “I did try to warn you.”

The baroness sighed, “Oh, Mercy, my dear girl.”

And really, it was the faint pity in the woman’s voice that hurt the most.

“I think I’ll go to the retiring room,”

Mercy said. “If you don’t mind.”

“Yes, of course,”

the baroness said sympathetically. “Do hurry back.”

Mercy gave a brief nod as she turned to go, though she didn’t intend to return in anything even vaguely approximating a hurry. After all, she knew well enough that she would not be missed.

∞∞∞

No names, Thomas mused to himself over his second glass of champagne. How was that possible? Even he had to admit that Mercy had turned up perfectly attired, and despite the wretched mangle she’d made of her dance card, she appeared to be comporting herself well enough.

She’d cleaned up better than he’d expected, given the right state she was generally in, and to which he was most accustomed. Wild hair tamed to perfect sleekness. A ball gown of the latest mode, in a deep blue that flattered her complexion, fashioned of elegant silk brocade—which he assumed must be from one of her father’s most current patterns. Evening gloves which did not bear even the faintest stain.

It was true that she was somewhat older than the average woman out on the marriage mart, but her father had a damned fortune to his name, and Mercy was his only child. She would, eventually, inherit every bit of his business and that fortune. Not to mention the obscene dowry which he would settle upon her in the meantime. He’d not managed, yet, to let slip that information to the public, but still—

Not one name?

As he considered seeking out a third glass, it occurred to him that three dances had come and gone and still Mercy had not returned to the ballroom. It might well have meant nothing, or so he attempted to tell himself. Perhaps there had been some mishap with her gown, or her slipper ribbons, or perchance her hairpins were in want of some adjustment or other. It was quite a common occurrence, really, for a woman who had not been engaged for a dance to make her way to the retiring room during that set to refresh herself as needed. To his understanding, there were often servants placed within to assist, should a lady require a quick stitch with a needle and thread, or some other such aid.

But three dances could hardly be ignored. And this was Mercy—he simply could not put it past her to have gone wandering, which would be bad enough on its own, but in a crush like this one, where anyone might stumble upon her? Where she might trespass where she ought not, and cause a scandal in the process?

Not one damned name, despite the fact that she had turned up quite elegant and pretty. Not quite so pretty as she was with her hair windswept and wild, and her cheeks flushed with the exertion of tromping across the countryside. But pretty all the same, in an odd, vaguely unsettling sort of way. As if a part of her had been laid bare which had never been meant for the public; a secret which had until now belonged only to him.

Briefly, Thomas caught sight of Marina upon the ballroom floor in one of her new gowns. It had a lovely net overlay, sparkling with tiny stars of gold embroidery, but beneath it was a smooth, rich lilac silk—one of Fletcher’s, no doubt. Somewhere upon the floor, though out of sight at present, Juliet had a beautiful new gown of her own. It did not escape him, in this uncomfortable moment of reflection, that those gowns had been purchased with funds not his own. That Fletcher’s money had paid for them and more besides, while Fletcher’s daughter had languished at the edge of the ballroom all evening amongst the dowagers and the chaperones.

Christ. He should have asked her to dance.

“Yes, you ought to have done.”

Mother’s voice; a bit snippy for his taste.

“What?”

Had he spoke aloud?

“You said you should have asked her to dance,”

Mother said, with the very same recriminatory tone she’d often used in his childhood, whenever his actions had merited being called out onto the carpet. “I assume you meant Mercy. I agree; you ought to have done.”

He supposed the infliction of guilt was a weapon every mother must learn how to wield like a knight with a sword. “Can she dance, then?”

he inquired, sulkily.

“Thomas!”

Mother chided. “Of course she can dance. The dancing master I hired for the girls taught Mercy before them. It was on her father’s recommendation that I engaged the man.”

“Well, how was I to know?”

“I’ll grant you, you were still away at university when Mercy had her Season,”

Mother said. “But you would have known, Thomas, had you bothered to attend any of the Fletchers’ dinner parties, or our dances. Mercy is a fine dancer.”

She heaved a sigh, and cast him a pointed look. “It is a pity that no one’s asked her.”

Most especially, he assumed she meant to imply, her son, whom she had expected to have better manners than that. “Why do you suppose that is?”

he asked. “Did she cause a scandal during her Season?”

“None that ever reached my ears,”

Mother said. “But then, she was in town for all of a fortnight before she quit the Season and returned to the countryside. I asked, of course, once we returned ourselves. She said the city did not agree with her.”

Mother sipped her champagne slowly, pensively. “I wish I had thought to sponsor her then,”

she said, and Thomas thought he detected a thrum of something like maudlin sentimentality in the low tones of her voice. “But the girls were not yet out, you know, and your father…”

Would never have approved. Had never approved; neither of Mercy nor her father. Thomas had been on the receiving end of his father’s long-winded diatribes about their neighbors for as long as he could remember. For the first time, he began to wonder if the opinions he had formed of her had ever been his own—or if he had allowed, for nigh on twenty years now, his father to make them for him. “She wasn’t your responsibility,”

Thomas said. But now she was his.

“It is not responsibility; it is affection. I know you have never been particularly fond of Mercy, but she has been so good for the girls. There’s four years between her and Marina,”

Mother said, “and eight for Juliet. It is such a difference, Thomas, in childhood. They followed her about like baby chicks, and she let them. She never had to, you know. But she did.”

Mother gave a soft sigh, as if reflecting upon a sweet memory. “Such a kind little girl. Lonely, I think, since she lost her mother so young and without siblings of her own.”

Thomas had some significant trouble reconciling his mother’s image of Mercy with the child who had pushed him straight into a pond at their first meeting.

“Still they admire her so,”

Mother mused. “And there is much to admire in her. If only you knew how to look.”

Hell. He’d thought his father’s disapproval was a heavy enough burden to bear. But he fairly staggered beneath the weight of his mother’s disappointment. “All right,”

he said. “I’ll send a servant off to find her. And when she returns…I will ask her to dance.”

∞∞∞

Thomas stormed into the library when Mercy was halfway through a new pattern and a glass of brandy, looking every bit as furious as he had only days ago when he’d taken her to task in the drawing room for sneaking out of the house.

“What have I done this time?”

she sighed, laying down her pencil and drawing her dressing gown tighter about her shoulders as she pushed herself up from her sprawl upon the couch nearest the hearth.

Twitch went that tiny muscle beneath his eye. And there—the one in his cheek as well. “You cannot,”

he breathed in a furious, if constrained tone, “simply leave a ball whenever you please.”

“Of course I can,”

she said, quite reasonably. “In fact, I did.”

It hadn’t been difficult. All it had required was getting the attention of a servant and asking them to go fetch the carriage round. “I even remembered to leave a note and have the carriage sent back.”

Which had been quite good of her, in her own opinion.

“The note arrived, but the carriage hadn’t made its return when I received it. I walked back.”

Mercy blinked in mute surprise. “Why?”

“Because you are never where you are bloody well meant to be!”

Well, that was unfair. She was precisely where she was meant to be. She hadn’t taken a single detour. What had she done, then, that was so objectionable—first to be chastised for not being at home, and now to be chastised for it? “I don’t know what you wish me to say,”

she said. “I came straight home. I sent the carriage back.”

“That’s not the damned point,”

he said, and a shuddering sigh drifted from his lungs as he cast himself into a chair and tipped his head back. “You were meant to be at the ball.”

“What rubbish,”

she said. “I wasn’t. You know well enough that I wasn’t.”

“You were invited.”

“Only,”

she said, “because your mother insisted. It is difficult to feel much welcome when one knows one was only invited out of obligation. The least we can do is be honest about it. Perhaps it stung, once, when I was younger.”

When she hadn’t yet learned how very cruel his world could be. How insular; how exacting. “Now, it simply is as it is.”

“And how is that?”

His gaze sharpened behind the lenses of his spectacles, suddenly intent.

Mercy pursed her lips together, wondering how she might phrase her situation delicately. Whether he even deserved her delicacy. “Let us just say that sketching at home has been a far better use of my time. I fear by the end of the ball I might have been swallowed up into the paper-hangings, never to be seen again. Certainly no one has missed me.”

“Mother did,”

he said, clasping his hands before him and resting his elbows upon his knees. “I did.”

“Did you?”

Idly, Mercy adjusted the large volume of some text or other she’d laid across her lap as a makeshift desk and tested the point of her pencil against the pad of her thumb. “How long did it take you to notice I had not returned?”

Twitch, twitch. “Three dances,”

he admitted. And then, “You said it stung when you were younger. What did you mean by that?”

Mercy thumbed through the stack of papers she’d scavenged from the desk, hunting for a fresh page. “They weren’t cast-offs,”

she said lightly. “Those gowns I gave to your sisters. They’ve never been worn, so they’re not cast-offs.”

“What do you mean, they’ve never been worn?”

“Is there some other meaning to those words of which I am presently unaware?”

There; a blank page at last. She resituated the book upon her lap, positioned her pencil upon the page, and began to sketch the outline of a tulip. This one for a spring pattern, she thought. Something cheerful.

“But why were they not worn? There must have been at least fifty gowns within your dressing room.”

His quizzical expression perplexed her, given both his general and specific distaste of her. A wide, flat tulip leaf curled beneath the point of her pencil. “Sixty-two,”

she said. “Not counting the four I burned. The only ones I wore.”

They had gone up so quickly, those delicate silk gowns. Precious and lovely and fragile, gone in just a moment. Leaving hardly enough ash behind them to fill a thimble. But Lord, it had been cathartic to watch them go. “Had you imagined I could possibly have worn them all in the single fortnight I was in London?”

she scoffed. “It will not surprise you, my lord, that you are hardly the only one of your social strata to disapprove of me. One cannot turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, after all.”

Thomas had the good grace to flush. “Hell,”

he said, lifting one hand to rub at his jaw. “I suppose you must have overheard—”

“I eavesdropped,”

Mercy said, with a little flick of her pencil across the page. “Unintentionally, I assure you. No one wishes to hear such things of themselves. I ought to have left sooner.”

A little laugh trickled from her throat. “I wish I had.”

“You weren’t meant to hear those things,”

he said, in a raspy sort of voice.

“No, I don’t suppose I was.”

She turned the page, abandoning the stylized spring tulips for a pattern of eight-pointed stars connected by swirling frills, which she thought would embroider well upon netting. “A menace, you said. A lost cause.”

“I did say that,”

he acknowledged. “I shouldn’t have done. Even in private.”

“It wasn’t kind of you,”

she said, and laid down her pencil to retrieve her abandoned glass of brandy. It slid down her throat smoother than it had in the beginning, a pleasant burn to the bottom of her stomach. “I did try to tell your mother,”

she said. “What was going to happen. To save us all the embarrassment of it. Just because my feelings aren’t hurt doesn’t mean my pride isn’t a bit battered.”

“Because nobody asked you to dance?”

“Because nobody ever has, and nobody was ever going to,”

she said patiently. “It’s happened before, you know. My first Season. I was a bit slow then, I suppose. Four balls I attended, the hosts of which Papa managed to bribe or bully in order to secure an invitation for me.”

The brandy was gone, and the decanter was so far. Instead she held the glass in her hand and traced the rim. “Four balls to realize how unwanted I was within those hallowed halls. I was not asked to dance. No one even requested to be introduced to me.”

“I’m sorry,”

he said, and to her annoyance, he actually seemed to mean it. “That must have been dreadful.”

Mercy managed a shrug. “Only a few young ladies and gentlemen were overtly cruel about it,”

she said. “But still, it was plain enough to see that I did not belong there amongst them. Papa had purchased a place for me at those events. Probably he could have purchased me a husband, too, had I wished it. But even he hasn’t got the blunt to purchase favor or respect.”

“If Mother had known—”

“Oh, I didn’t tell her,”

Mercy said. “I was just eighteen, you know, and still quite sensitive about it. Who wants to confess such a failure, when there is nothing to be done of it? To relive something so humiliating?”

“But surely Marina, at least.”

Mercy sighed and brushed back a lock of hair that had come loose from her pins. “No,”

she said. “She had such romantic dreams of her own first Season. It would have been cruel to tell her what a wreck I’d made of mine, to steal those dreams away from her. Besides, there was simply no point in putting such a thought in her head, when it was never going to happen to her. All of you have places within society already. You have had all your lives, simply by virtue of the station to which you were born. I’m the problem. The interloper in their midst. The menace.”

Thomas winced. His arms straightened as he pushed himself out of the chair and strode toward the table upon which the decanter of brandy had been set. He seized a glass, plunking it down to pour himself a healthy measure of liquor.

“Another for me as well,”

Mercy said, holding out her own glass. “If you don’t mind.”

Perhaps her prior misadventure with spirits had made him somewhat leery, for Thomas squinted at her in rank suspicion behind the lenses of his spectacles. “How many will this make for you?” he asked.

“Only two,”

she said. “But it will help me sleep easier tonight.”

“Hell,”

he said, and strode across the room. The decanter clinked against her glass as he poured, though she could not tell whether it had been her fault or his. “Might as well. Been a wretched night all around.”

“Say rather boring,”

she said. “You’ll understand if I do not wish to attend future balls.”

“There’s the damned problem,”

Thomas said as he reclaimed his seat once more. “You’ll have to. Mother insisted on as much to several of her friends. She’s disappointed enough in them for leaving you off to begin with. She’ll be devastated if it was for nothing.”

“I really would rather not,”

she said, with an aggrieved sigh, and rubbed at her temple with one hand. “It is so dreadfully boring, Thomas, to be set up against the wall for hours at a time. I can think of a dozen things I’d rather be doing, and it is embarrassing besides. I may not take it to heart as I once did, but nobody likes to be the subject of gossip.”

“I promise you, you will dance at the next ball.”

The firelight flickered off the lenses of his spectacles as he sipped his brandy. “I would have asked you,”

he said, “had you returned to the ball instead of haring off home.”

Mercy lifted her brows in surprise. “What, and run the risk that I would tread upon your toes?”

“Mother assures me you’re a fine dancer,” he said.

“Oh? Perhaps I’d do it purely for the fun of it, then.”

Again, a flash of shame crossed his features, which was curious. “Worse has been said of me, deliberately within my hearing,”

she said. “I’ll admit I did not expect it from you—”

“Christ,”

he interjected, and scrubbed his hand across his face, rubbing away the faint traces of shame that lingered upon it. “I was angry when I said those things of you. I don’t think you’re a lost cause, nor a sow’s ear.”

“But a menace?”

she prompted, with a cant of her head.

“Ah, well, you are that,”

he said, attempting a half-smile as he took a long swallow from his glass. “If you would cease going off half-cocked on some misadventure or other, perhaps I’ll revise my opinion. You have menaced me of late; surely even you can admit to it.”

Despite herself, Mercy laughed. “I suppose I can be…sometimes trying,”

she allowed.

“Stubborn,”

he said, with a pointed look over his glass. “Intractable. Prone to flights of fancy and madcap schemes.”

She muffled a chuckle beneath her fingers. “Do you know, Thomas, you really are too straight-laced sometimes. Just occasionally I wonder if you have ever had anything that might, by any definition, be considered fun in the whole of your life.”

“I don’t suppose I have. Not a lot of fun to be had in managing an estate.”

He glanced down at the drink in his hand as if it contained the answer to an unasked question. “From time to time, I enjoy billiards.”

Fascinating, to have to consider so carefully what activities one enjoyed. “Do you? I’m quite good at billiards.”

A little snort, as if this response had not surprised him. “Of course you are.”

He drained the last of his glass and rose to his feet once more. “It’s late,”

he said. “Mother and the girls will be back shortly, and you should be abed by then.”

Probably so none of them caught her staggering about the house in her cups, reeking of brandy, she mused. “All right,”

she said. “I’ll go up once I’ve finished my glass.”

“Good.”

He set his glass aside upon the table, turned toward the door—and paused. “Let’s make a deal between us,”

he said slowly, as he turned toward her once more, a curious expression chasing across his face.

“What sort of a deal?”

Mercy asked, inclining her head in interest.

“You’ll attend the next ball—at which I promise you that you will dance at least once—and after, I will let you beat me at billiards.”

Mercy scoffed. “I don’t require such a deal to beat you at billiards,”

she said, tipping her nose in the air in open superiority.

“Fine,”

Thomas said with an insouciant shrug. “I will let you try to beat me at billiards.”

With an annoyed huff, Mercy climbed to her feet, listing just a bit unsteadily. It had been easy enough to ignore the effects of the brandy whilst seated, but just now she felt them a bit more severely than she had anticipated. “I will also reserve the right to leave the ball at any point if I should become bored,”

she demanded.

“I will take you home myself,”

Thomas promised. “Understand me here—you are not to leave any event unaccompanied. Like it or not, you have a reputation to protect, and the protecting of it is presently my responsibility.”

Good enough, she supposed. “Done,”

she said, and extended her hand to him.

Like a gentleman, he took it, his fingers warm and strong as they wrapped around hers to seal the deal they had made between them. “For whatever it might be worth to you,”

he said, “I am sorry. Not because you overheard those words I said, but because I said them to begin with.”