Page 12 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

Sleep had not come easily to Mercy, which was not in itself an unusual phenomenon. She had lain awake far longer than had been reasonable, her mind replaying fragments of last evening’s conversation, striving to determine, in retrospect, whether she had made a mistake in confessing her difficulties to Thomas. Attempting, in her mind’s eye, to recreate and read his facial expressions in the service of divining his thoughts, his true feelings.

There might have been an hour or two in which she had dozed off, in the darkest hours of the night, though still she had awoken again before the sun had bothered to makes its presence known outside the house. It had seemed only prudent to occupy her brain with some useful bit of work instead of agonizing over what had already happened, and so she had shrugged into her dressing gown and slipped off to the library to sketch while the rest of the household slept.

In the intense focus of her art, she had not realized how far the morning had advanced until she could no longer ignore the slant of the sun through the window directly into her eyes. Her stomach cramped with hunger as she managed to pull her attention away from the pages at last, and she squinted toward the clock upon the mantel.

“Blast,”

she muttered beneath her breath. Somehow it had gone past ten already. If she were lucky, breakfast might have been held over for her—but she’d certainly have to wash up and dress before she went down to it. Her hands had gone a bit grey from the graphite in her pencil. But the quarter of an hour that making herself presentable would no doubt require would almost certainly see her miss breakfast altogether.

She sighed as her stomach gave another gurgle of protest. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time she’d been reduced to bread and cheese after missing a meal. It would definitely not be the last.

The library door opened before Mercy could rise to leave, and a maid bustled in with a tray carefully balanced upon one hand as she let herself into the room. The scent of poached eggs, buttery toast, and freshly-steeped tea drifted through the air.

Her stomach made an embarrassingly loud sound, which clawed greedily through the otherwise silent library. “Is that…breakfast?”

she asked, her brows pinching in confusion.

“Yes, miss,”

the maid said. “Shall I put it upon the desk for you?”

“Please.”

But why had it arrived? “And thank you,”

she added. “How did you know? I forgot the time entirely. I was certain breakfast would have passed already.”

“Oh, it has, miss,”

the maid said cheerfully. “But his lordship took all of us aside this morning and said that if you hadn’t come down for breakfast before ten, we were to take a tray to you, wherever you happened to be. And as you’re usually in the library, it didn’t take long at all to find you.”

“His lordship?”

Mercy blinked, perplexed. “His lordship told you to do so?”

“Yes, miss. He said it was proper important for you to have a good meal in the morning, even if you don’t come down for one yourself. If you don’t want it, though, miss—”

“No!”

The stridence in her voice gave both of them pause, but at least it had distracted from another terrible sound of protest from her empty belly. “That is, I do want it, thank you. I was just…surprised.”

That Thomas had thought to arrange for it, whether or not she had bothered to come down for it. Whether or not she had remembered to come down for it, more like.

And that was why, she realized. Because she’d confessed to exactly this—to losing track of time and missing meals and more. Only he had taken pains to ensure that she did not miss them, even if she hadn’t come down for them.

Perhaps it had not been a mistake to confide in him after all, she thought as she took a seat at the desk and lifted her silverware to slice off a bite of egg.

“I’ll come collect the tray later, miss,”

the maid said. “Have you given any thought to what you’ll wear to the garden party today?”

“The garden party?”

Mercy echoed blankly, her fork frozen over the plate. Oh, no—the garden party. The baroness had mentioned it at last evening’s ball, but Mercy had been woolgathering in her boredom, half-listening at best. She’d forgotten it entirely since, hadn’t even the faintest idea of when it was meant to begin. So many events to which the baroness had received invitations had been evening ones; she’d given no thought at all to any that might occupy the daylight hours. “Blast,”

she said, shoveling another forkful of eggs into her mouth in her haste to finish her breakfast. Perhaps she was already late, or at the very least dreadfully behind schedule. “I haven’t, but I’ll just—”

“It’s not until afternoon, miss,”

the maid interjected. “You’ve plenty of time for breakfast. If an hour is enough time to prepare yourself, someone will draw you a bath in advance and find you when it’s time. Whenever it’s time,”

she stressed. “The staff has got your social schedule.”

Mercy wilted with relief, managing to swallow down a mouthful of dry toast crumbs with a long swallow of tea. “An hour is perfect,”

she said. And then paused, considered. “His lordship’s instructions?”

“Yes, miss,”

the maid said. “I’m given to understand that he’s asked her ladyship to keep the staff informed as to which events she plans to attend. Shall I have a selection of gowns brought out for you?”

What did one wear to a garden party? Mercy had never been invited to one. “I think I’ll ask the girls their opinion,”

she said. “But thank you, nonetheless.”

The maid bobbed a curtsey. “My pleasure, miss,”

she said. “Someone will be up to inform you when your bath is ready.”

And then she slipped out the door to allow Mercy to enjoy her breakfast in peace.

She would never miss a meal or forget an engagement again, she realized as she bit into a piece of toast. Well, she almost certainly would—it was just that it would not matter as once it had. So long as someone had been entrusted with the task of reminding her. It had never occurred to her before, since she had spent the majority of her time out in the countryside where her appointments had been relatively few and far between. Even if her inattention to such things, and her resulting lateness, had been a matter of some private shame, it had largely been her burden to bear.

And yet Thomas had, with relatively little effort, relieved her of that burden. With just a few delicate instructions to the staff, he had erased a problem that Mercy had never managed to solve on her own.

Breakfast, still warm, delivered to her whether she had remembered it or not. A staff that knew the schedule she could not keep in her own head, ready to remind her in plenty of time to prepare herself. In the silence of the library, she laid her fork across her plate and instead gingerly closed her sketchbook. The new one, which she had found waiting here for her one morning a few days ago. Her fingers traced the pattern on its cloth cover; the very same pattern that graced one of Thomas’ waistcoats. She had wondered from where it had come, naturally, but now…now she thought she must know.

A gift she had never expected, least of all from him. And now—how much simpler her life had been made, with just a bit of trust extended to exactly the right person.

∞∞∞

Despite the promise he had made to Mercy, Thomas found himself loath to part with her sketchbook when Mr. Sumner next came to call upon him. It had been tucked into the drawer within his nightstand—along with her gloves—since she had given it into his keeping, and he’d developed something of a habit of thumbing through it before bed, examining the patterns sketched therein as if he might find something of Mercy left within them. Her state of mind, he thought. Happiness in the spiral of a curl; fretfulness in a sharp, dark line across the page.

Guile, perhaps, in the underside of a stylized leaf. Cunning in the cleverly-rendered fronds of a fern, or craftiness in the points of a star, which he imagined had been designed to be embroidered atop the machine-made netting that her father’s factories also produced.

He gave a sigh as he handed the sketchbook over to Mr. Sumner. Louder than he ought to have done, he supposed, given the pensive look the man offered him.

“My lord, is aught amiss?”

Sumner inquired.

There were a great number of things amiss, really, any one of which Thomas might have expounded upon at length. But he had neither the time nor the inclination to do so at present, and he suspected Mr. Sumner did not, either. “No,”

he said. “Nothing with which you need concern yourself.”

Presently, the concern belonged only to Thomas. For the third time since they had arrived in London, he’d found Mercy’s shoes left upon the landing when he’d come down the stairs early in the morning. The first time he’d found them there, he’d thought little of it. The second, he’d been baffled. But the third had been revelatory.

It had taken a few points of data for him to reach the correct conclusion, but it had not escaped his notice that those occasions in which he had discovered her shoes discarded upon the landing—where they had most certainly not been when the household had retired for the evening—had each been preceded by the arrival of yet another letter from C. Nightingale. Mercy had been sneaking out of the house to meet him.

He simply did not know what he was meant to do about it. Plainly his displeasure at her first escape had not made its intended impression. And if he were being honest with himself, he had to admit that his first reaction to the truth of it had not been anger so much as relief that at least she had been stealthy enough to avoid anyone’s notice—his included. That if she had been leaving her shoes on the landing upon her return, it could only mean that she had not climbed down the blasted trellis to make her escape.

But the thought of her wandering London alone and unescorted at such an hour caused a nasty little flare of fear somewhere behind his breastbone, made his heart squeeze behind the cage of his ribs.

Mr. Sumner hesitated, no doubt unnerved by Thomas’ persistent silence. “There is nothing more I can do for you, my lord?”

“Not unless you’ve brought along my villainous former solicitor in your pocket,”

Thomas said with another sigh, painfully aware that he could not even ask after C. Nightingale, whom he was increasingly confident was not, in fact, Fletcher’s mill manager, as Mercy had claimed—for if he had been, then certainly Mercy would have delivered her sketchbook to the man herself at any one of those illicit meetings.

Who was he, then? A lover? It seemed unlikely. When would she have had the time, the occasion, to acquire one? The letters had been arriving practically since they’d made London; hardly enough time for Mercy to have found herself a suitor.

A friend? But she’d laid claim to none of those, either. And what sort of friend did a woman creep from her home in the dead of night to meet, besides?

“The investigator,”

Mr. Sumner blurted out. “Has his information proved unsatisfactory in any regard? Shall I—”

“No, Mr. Sumner,”

Thomas said, and rubbed at his jaw, allowing that perhaps his pensive mood had proved a bit too unsettling for a man accustomed to solving problems. “He’s been perfectly satisfactory. I’ve no complaints with the quality of the information which has been provided to me. It is only that Fordham has gone to ground at present, and I must wait for him to show himself once more. Rest assured that I asked you here today only to request that you pass along Miss Fletcher’s sketchbook—not to complain of your assistance.”

Mr. Sumner visibly relaxed, and Thomas envied the man his relief. He had the sinking suspicion it would be some time before his own troubles eased.

Mercy had lied to him, and he—he could not even find it within himself to blame her for it. Rigid, Mother had called him, and unbending. Too much like his father. What could Mercy possibly have done but lie, when there was nothing she could have said that would have swayed him?

Thus far she had been careful, mostly discreet but for the shoes she’d left upon the landing. The only thing he could do to protect her was to ensure that her secret little outings remained exactly that. And to trust in her to take care of herself.

∞∞∞

Thomas folded his arms across his chest and glared through the sea of dancers, searching for the vivid yellow of Mercy’s gown through the throng. Somehow, he’d expected the pattern which had heretofore been established to continue on as it had, certain that when he arrived to tonight’s ball—late, owing to his other obligations—Mercy would already be champing at the bit to leave.

Instead, he’d found her engaged in a dance. And in the brief glimpses he caught of her as the dance stretched on, she seemed to be enjoying herself. For some damned reason, the flash of her smile—open, genuine, and directed right at the fellow who whirled her about the floor—provoked something akin to annoyance within him.

“Who the devil is dancing with Miss Fletcher?”

he grumbled to Marina, who had found herself between partners, and shared the space against the wall with him while Mother was off hunting for the refreshment table.

“Mr. Earnshaw,”

she said, fluttering her fingers at Juliet as she flew by on the ballroom floor. “He seems a pleasant enough gentleman. As I understand it he is seldom in town for the Season. His father was the youngest son of an earl. Barrington, I believe,”

she added, as if he might have memorized Debrett’s Peerage well enough for that to provide much clarity.

“And his mother?”

“I’m not certain. American, I suppose, given that Mr. Earnshaw seems to have spent a good deal of time there,”

Marina said. “I can only assume that his connections to the aristocracy through his father are sufficient to see him in invitations. He and Mercy talked a great deal at the garden party last week. Mostly business, I think. The vast majority of it was well beyond my grasp.”

And yet Mercy had not mentioned any Mr. Earnshaw to him. Thomas adjusted his crooked spectacles upon the bridge of his nose and squinted through the lenses at the man. A businessman, then. Connected to the aristocracy, even if he did not expect to inherit a title himself. Mercy whirled by once again, and for a fleeting instant Thomas caught another glimpse of the smile upon her face, a laugh caught in the dimple of her cheek.

“He is a fine dancer,”

Marina said. “And they look well together, do they not?”

Yes, they did, damn it all. Thomas wasn’t certain why it irritated him so to see it, what, precisely had evoked that restless sensation just beneath his breastbone. But something was there, clawing to get out. “Well enough,”

he said tersely. And then, “I shall have to tell Mother not to let her go off with just anyone.”

“What!”

Marina gave a choked little laugh. “Thomas, it is only a dance. They rubbed along well enough at the garden party.”

Which he had not attended, and no one had thought to inform him that Mercy had gained an admirer. “We don’t know his intentions,”

he said. If Mr. Fletcher disapproved of a mere baron, probably an untitled businessman would also fail to meet his exacting standards, no matter his connections to an earldom. “She is her father’s only child. Of course we must be on guard for fortune hunters and the like.”

“Thomas, if I did not know better, I would say you sounded very nearly jealous,”

Marina chided, with a slow, rueful shake of her head.

The accusation slid down his spine along with a frisson of shock. Jealous. Of course he was not jealous. He was just…protective, as was only right, given the nature of his obligation to her father. Concerned, as anyone would rightly be at the sudden interest of an unknown quantity, a man whose background and intentions he had not thoroughly vetted.

He opened his mouth to refute the charge, and: “Th—th—that—”

Ah, hell. His cravat had grown too tight around his throat, his tongue entirely too thick in his mouth. Clumsy and tangled, as if it sought to prevent him from speaking an untruth.

Was he jealous? It was true enough he’d expected to find her waiting against the wall, where she always had been. Had been counting upon a short stay, a dance, and then—

Billiards, he’d assumed. Perhaps brandy. It had been a damned miserable day thus far, and he’d been looking forward to it. Only now—now some other gentleman had commanded Mercy’s attention. And here he was, relegated to a position against the wall, waiting upon her to be done with her dance. To stop smiling at the damned man as if he had hung the moon in the sky only for her, when she had never—

When she had never looked at him quite like that.

Would she have, had he not set them at odds at every possible opportunity, until just recently? Would she ever?

“I am not jealous,”

he managed to say through gritted teeth, though Marina had long since ceased to pay him any attention. Which was a damned good thing, as the words had rung false even to his own ears. Good God. He had been engaged to find Mercy an aristocratic husband, and her father had already made it clear that a baron would never do.

He had expected to find the task onerous, burdensome. He had not expected to find it disagreeable in this particular sense. But just now, as the dance at last came to its conclusion and Mr. Earnshaw—whatever manner of man he was—held out his arm to Mercy to conduct her back, Thomas was forced to consider that this was not likely the last he would see of the man.

And there was a part of him, somewhere deep down—the part of him that had been oddly touched that Mercy had always known of his stammer and had never once cast it up before him; the part of him that enjoyed her proficiency at billiards; the part of him that had begun to find the accessories and objects she tended to leave strewn indiscriminately about the house more endearing than exasperating—that desperately wished it was.

∞∞∞

“Don’t look now,”

Mr. Earnshaw whispered to Mercy as he conducted her back toward the place that the baroness had carved out for them against a wall, “but I believe your guardian is scowling at me.”

“He’s not my guardian,”

Mercy corrected blithely. “His mother is sponsoring me for the Season. And if he’s scowling at anyone, it is most assuredly at me.”

“Far be it from me to argue with a lady,”

Mr. Earnshaw said, a touch of cheek in his voice, “but I swear it to you. It’s me he’s scowling at. Is he of a disagreeable disposition?”

“Generally? Yes.”

Mercy smothered a laugh beneath her fingers at the slight apprehension that drifted over Mr. Earnshaw’s face. “Don’t concern yourself. I don’t believe he can help it, and he’s far too well-mannered to make anything that might even remotely constitute a scene.”

“Nevertheless, I think I shall take my leave swiftly, if you don’t mind.”

At last they arrived near enough that he could not be accused of having abandoned her halfway, and Mercy let her hand fall from the crook of his elbow. “It was a pleasure, Miss Fletcher,”

he said, as he took her hand and bowed over it. “I do hope you’ll save a dance for me, should we meet again at another ball.”

“I would be delighted. And I shall write to my father with all haste,”

Mercy said, charmed. He had been a more amiable companion in a dance partner than she’d expected to find, but then she’d enjoyed his company at last week’s garden party as well.

As Mr. Earnshaw made a clean escape, Mercy saw Thomas closing in upon her—still scowling.

“It’s my dance, I believe,”

he said as he reached her side, though he hardly sounded pleased about it.

“That won’t be necessary,”

she said. “I’ve had my dance for the evening. Mr. Earnshaw sacrificed himself in your place, so you may consider yourself absolved of the obligation.”

“I’m not certain he considered it much of a sacrifice. You looked to be getting on well.”

And so they had—but the evening had been interminably boring until Mr. Earnshaw had arrived. “He was a pleasant dance partner,”

she said. “But I am ready to leave, if you would be so kind as to bring round the carriage.”

“Mercy,”

he said, pitching his voice low as he bent near her ear, and a strange little shiver slid down her spine as she realized that he had used her given name in a public place. “I am asking you to dance with me.”

“Oh,”

she said. “Not…out of obligation?”

“No.”

It was offered testily, as if he had not cared for the admission. And he held out his hand to her.

But she was going to accept nonetheless. “Why, then?”

she asked as she set her hand in his.

“Hell if I can say.”

His fingers closed around hers, and he led her back out onto the floor just as the first strains of a waltz drifted through the air. “Why are you writing to your father?”

he asked as he swept her into a turn.

So he had been eavesdropping, then. Curious. “Mr. Earnshaw does a good deal of business in America,”

she said. “He has got a mill of his own outside of Boston. We haven’t got any particular business interests in America as of yet, and while we have exported some fabrics, it is often cost-prohibitive to do so. That is, it’s far more profitable to keep the fabrics in the country, where so much of the profit isn’t eaten up by export taxes and the costs associated with shipping.”

She stifled a laugh at the flicker of confusion that flitted across Thomas’ face.

“So what is he proposing, then?” he asked.

“A partnership of sorts,”

she said. “He’d like to produce some of our best-selling patterns locally, rather than importing the fabric whole. He would purchase the right to use our patterns—say, at a set cost per bolt—and then produce the fabric himself, according to our standards.”

Another turn. Mercy had counted Mr. Earnshaw a fine dancer, but it had not occurred to her until now that Thomas was better still. Which did not precisely surprise, when she considered that she had never known him to be anything less than exemplary at any given endeavor. It was quite an annoying habit he had, really, of being so bloody perfect at everything.

But then, she had never seen him dance with anyone else. He had to be close to thirty, now, plenty old enough to have taken a wife. Plenty old enough, at least, to have danced with a fair few women.

“He is using you, then,”

Thomas said, and the space between his brows pleated into a frown. “For your business.”

“For Father’s business, at least,”

she said. “He requested I write to Father on his behalf. I was happy to oblige.”

“You should not have done. It was an utterly inappropriate thing for him to have suggested. Offensive, even, that he would seek to—”

Mercy tipped back her head and laughed, thoroughly amused by the consternation scrawled across his face, as if he had been personally offended by the thought of it. “Thomas, has it not occurred to you that I am also using him? It is the way of business. Men make such deals between them all the time. Frankly, I was flattered he thought to solicit my opinion. I would not have agreed to write to Father had I thought it a poor proposal.”

Had he flinched at the word proposal? Strange. “It is rather hypocritical of you to criticize it,”

she added.

“How so?”

“Is not a marriage also a business proposition, the majority of the time? Women wed for position and social standing; men for money and power. The whole of the Season is designed for one half of the Ton to offer up their assets to the other, trading up as far as they might. It’s every bit as cold-blooded as business, you know. But at least a business proposal is sealed with an honest contract rather than holy vows before God which neither party intends to keep.”

That frown deepened, and she thought she rather had offended him this time. “I would keep my vows,”

he said. “Were I so inclined to make them.”

He sounded so affronted that Mercy pursed her lips against another laugh. “Well, then, you’d be a rarity, I expect.”

“When did you become such a cynic?”

“Oh, years and years ago,”

she said, as the waltz came to any end at last. But the final thrumming chords of the music had not quite disguised the wistfulness she had been unable to exorcise from her voice.