Page 21 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

Is that him?”

Thomas inquired beneath his breath as he joined Mercy at the front of their theatre box between acts, with the tiniest gesture of his head toward the gentleman across the theatre at whom Marina had spent most of the evening peering at through her opera glasses. “Marina’s bookseller?”

Mercy gave a little start, her eyes darting toward Marina, who was chatting with Juliet near the rear of the box, awaiting visitors. “Yes,”

she said, almost guiltily. “That’s him. How did you learn of it?”

“Mother told me,”

Thomas said, and rested his arms upon the railing. “You knew, then?”

“I suspected,”

Mercy said, with a tiny shrug. “We’ve encountered him a bit too often for it to have been by chance alone.”

“And you said nothing.”

“If it hadn’t been meant to be a secret, Marina would have told me herself,”

Mercy said softly. “And it was not my secret to tell. There was never any manner of indiscretion which I could deduce. It was harmless—”

“Harmless.”

Thomas scoffed the word, the tiniest hint of a sneer curling his lip. “He’s a damned bookseller.”

Mercy winced, sidling away a pace as if the words had been delivered alongside a blow. “And I am a merchant’s daughter,”

she said, striving to keep the hurt from her voice.

Thomas made a rough sound beneath his breath, and his fingers twitched as if he had had to resist the impulse to reach for her, to soothe the hurt he had inflicted, however unintentionally. “That’s not what I meant,”

he said. “You must know that’s not what I meant.”

“Must I?”

Thomas bent his head, flexed his fingers within his gloves. Ran them through the perfectly-combed strands of his hair, ruining the understated elegance of it. “She is accustomed to a certain standard of living,”

he said. “One she could hardly expect a bookseller to provide.”

“He’s not only a bookseller,”

Mercy said. “He’s a publisher. He’s got half a dozen bookstores scattered across London, and he prints and sells his own copies of the titles whose rights he has acquired. Probably he is quite wealthy.”

“It’s not his ability to support her which is in question,”

Thomas said. “She’ll have a dowry for that, one which I expect to keep her in comfort for the rest of her days. It’s the sort of life she will have outside of financial considerations.”

His hand landed once more upon the railing, gloved fingers tenting over it as if he would drive his blunt nails into the wood. “She’ll sacrifice,”

he said. “Her social position. The standing within society to which she has been entitled since birth. I don’t think she understands quite what it will mean.”

“Oh. I see.”

A woman’s reputation, her social value, was ever so much more fragile than a man’s. Any number of things might damage it, from a minor slip to a major fall. Even things for which she was by no means responsible might affect her perceived suitability for marriage or for inclusion within those most exclusive events whose invitations were sparingly distributed.

Would Marina consider it a sacrifice? In all her Seasons out, she’d not found a gentleman yet whom she had cared to encourage. But she had lit up from within every time she’d encountered her bookseller, glowing with pleasure, with happiness.

Thomas sucked in a breath, turning his head to squint through his spectacles, searching for the man situated across the theatre from them. “I don’t want to break her heart,”

he said. “But it is my duty to guard them, to guide them where appropriate.”

Yes. As any good brother would. To protect them from the evils of the world, from society’s censure and judgment. To shepherd them toward suitable matches and to nudge them away from those which might cause injury. As the daughter of a tradesman herself, Mercy knew she was something short of suitable by virtue of her common birth alone. A man might lower himself to marry beneath him—to a point. But past it, and it would not be only his judgment called into question.

Guilty by association. Mercy would doom them all, eventually, see them made as much outcasts as ever she had been. And all of that brotherly concern would be for naught.

She ventured, “I could speak with her, if you like.”

Perhaps she owed him that much. To lead by the example she intended to set herself.

His hand upon the railing slid nearer to hers, their fingers nearly touching. As close to a touch as they might risk in a venue such as this, surrounded by family and onlookers. “No,”

he said. “It is my responsibility. And—I shall trust your judgment in this for now, I think. Harmless, until proven otherwise.”

A half-smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “God knows what I’m meant to say to her, besides.”

he sighed. “I’ll have to think upon it.”

She hoped he would. For Marina’s sake, and his own.

∞∞∞

Shortly after eleven, after the girls had gone upstairs to ready themselves for bed, and Mother had gone off to the library in search of a novel to read, Mercy came silently down the stairs, garbed in one of those dull gowns she had favored in the countryside. A subdued brown, it made her look more like a shop girl than the heiress to a vast fortune. She paused there upon the last set of stairs, sketchbook held in one hand, expression wavering as she caught sight of him.

Probably, Thomas thought, she was wondering if he had reconsidered. If she might even now expect to be turned away from the door and sent back upstairs. It wasn’t that the thought didn’t tempt him. It was that it would not hold her. Mercy could not be kept at his pleasure; she would only stay at her own.

He had the distinct feeling that their marriage would involve a great deal of negotiation and compromise, and the thought was oddly…pleasant. He would not be the sort of husband his father had been; a commanding, authoritative one, accustomed to and expecting of proper deference and obeisance. Mercy would expect to be a partner, not a servant. She would never agree to marry him otherwise.

He said, “The carriage is waiting outside. The coachman knows your destination. He’ll wait for you.”

“Thank you,”

she said, and her voice was saturated with relief. “I know you don’t approve—”

“I don’t.”

His lips twitched at the disgruntlement that slid, however briefly, across her face. “I will worry for you every hour you are gone. And I will be in that chair”—he jammed his finger toward the open door of the drawing room, to the chair just visible from within—“until you return. Have you got everything?”

“Yes,”

she said as she proceeded down the last of the steps. “I think so.”

“Key?”

Though she wouldn’t need it, best to be safe nonetheless.

“In my reticule.”

She stepped onto the floor of the foyer, and he was pleased to see her shoes peeking out from beneath the hem of her gown.

“Reticule?”

he inquired, since she had forgotten it last time.

She lifted her right arm, and the little bag—the one his sisters had made for her out of the fabric from one of her old gowns—dangled from her wrist.

“Coin?”

A twist of her wrist, and he heard the distinctive clink of coins within. Good. She had prepared as well as was possible, forgotten nothing of which he was aware.

“I really do have to be going,”

she said impatiently.

“I know.”

He turned toward the coat rack near the door, snatched a spencer from it. “It’s gone a bit chilly,”

he said, “and will be worse still when you return. Do me this one courtesy and wear a spencer.”

With a longsuffering sigh, as if she thought his manner unnecessarily protective, she braced her sketchbook behind the newel post upon the stairs, pulled the small reticule from her wrist to shove it into the pocket of her dress, and held out her arms. He helped her shrug into the garment one arm at a time, and fastened the buttons that ran down the front. “A bit too fine,”

she said. “It may make me stand out more than I’d like.”

“It’ll be dark enough that it won’t likely matter.”

Too dark to take much note of the embellishments, the subtle embroidery, the fine stitching. And still there was so much of her plain dress visible beneath. Probably, even if someone did happen to look closely, they would only assume she had gotten her hands on a fine lady’s cast-offs.

“Are you now satisfied?”

she inquired archly, tugging at the cuffs of her spencer.

“Not until you are home again safely. And if the coachman has not delivered you back to me by—”

“Two at the latest,”

she interjected in a rush.

“—Then I will come in search of you.”

Shoving one hand into his pocket, he withdrew his pocket watch, which he tucked into the cup of her palm. “Keep it on you,”

he said. “I know how you tend to lose track of time.”

“Thank you,”

she said, curling her fingers around it. “I will keep it safe. And—thank you.”

And with a quick kiss that landed somewhere betwixt his cheek and his chin, she was off, disappearing silently out the door and into the night. A few moments later, there was the rattle of carriage wheels in the otherwise empty street outside, heading off in the direction of her destination.

She was as safe as he could make her, Thomas attempted to reassure himself. Taken directly to her destination under the watchful eye of the coachman. With her key, a bit of coin, and the spencer he’d shoved her into. Safe.

As he turned to make for the drawing room to begin what would undoubtedly be an interminable vigil, there was the soft thud of some object dropping onto the carpet running beside the stairs. Mercy’s sketchbook, he realized. She’d stashed it behind the newel post as he’d helped her to put on her spencer and had not reclaimed it before she’d gone.

He ought to have known better than to distract her on her way out the door. Ah, well, too late now. As he bent to retrieve it, a page fluttered free, drifted down onto the carpet below. Thomas pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose, bent again to retrieve the fallen page.

No. Not a page at all. A letter.

He hadn’t meant to pry, really, but there was so little printed upon the page that his eyes had already scanned the scant few words contained therein before he was aware of having done so.

The Black Swan, the letter read, followed by today’s date. No time, but then Mercy could not possibly have slipped away during the day for a meeting at a tavern, and she had had so many evening events of late that attempting to pin a proper time down would likely have proved impossible.

So she had not lied, then, about her destination, and that—that was good. He hadn’t expected she had, truly, but the confirmation eased his mind a little more. It was a relief only to know that she had not chafed at the bargain he’d offered her, given a false location at which to arrive only to slip off somewhere else once the coachman had delivered her there.

It was only the name scrawled in an elegant hand at the bottom of the letter that gave him pause. Charity. He’d expected a man’s name. But no—the other side of the paper revealed the sender to be as he’d thought. C. Nightingale. No return address.

It should have comforted him, that she had been meeting with a woman. It did not. Instead his mind drew back to some nights ago, when he had taken Mercy along with him to Cheapside. The way she had frozen where she had stood, staring at the woman who had alighted from the carriage just across the street from them.

He’d thought it had been the gown which had captured her attention. But no, it had been the woman herself. Charity. He’d known her largely from reputation, from the rumors bandied about regarding her in gentlemen’s clubs and card rooms and other such places frequented exclusively by men. He’d even seen her once or twice, on the arm of whichever gentleman happened to have most recently secured the pleasure of her company, no doubt for some astronomical sum. He’d never known her surname, but then he’d never had to. Her given name had been identifying enough, had become something of a crude jest amongst those in the know.

Charity does not come cheaply.

What manner of business could Mercy have with a woman like that? How had she even learned of her existence? Those letters had been coming practically since they’d arrived in London, and Mercy had certainly not gone unsupervised long enough to have met her on the street, to have formed an acquaintance during the—what, twenty-four hours before that first letter had arrived?

Christ, he had to—he had to—

Let it go. He couldn’t ask; he’d promised not to pry. And she had promised to tell him herself, eventually. He shouldn’t even have read the letter, which had not been meant for his eyes. He’d simply have to trust that Mercy would honor that promise she had made to him.

With some effort, Thomas folded the letter up once more and tucked it back into the sketchbook from whence it had fallen, and replaced the sketchbook upon the banister where Mercy had left it, balanced more carefully this time behind the newel post.

Let it go, he thought, and retreated to the drawing room to take the seat he’d intended. An hour passed in silent contemplation, with only the flickering fire in the hearth and the steady tick of the clock upon the mantel for company. Soon, he thought, there would be no secrets left between them. And when in the future Mercy wished to take herself out of doors at an inappropriate hour—say, for a moonlit ride across the rolling hills of the countryside—well, then, he’d accompany her. There was always a compromise to be found, somewhere between his caution and her courage.

Half an hour later, shortly after the clock had struck one, there was the sound of a carriage rolling to a stop outside the house. With one hand, Thomas peeled back the heavy drape of the curtain and peered out the window into the night. And there she was, climbing once more out of the carriage, safe and well.

Thomas was out of his chair before she’d even made it to the steps. He caught her unawares with the opening of the door, and she paused, one hand still fisted within the depths of the reticule that dangled from her wrist, ostensibly in search of the key buried within.

And there, in full view of God and anyone who might’ve chanced to pass at such an hour, on the steps of her father’s stately home in Mayfair, Thomas dragged her into his arms and kissed her.

Nothing—nothing—mattered but this. That she was here and home and safe once more.

“Thomas,”

she murmured beneath the frantic press of her lips, her voice slightly muffled. There was the slight bitterness of ale on her tongue, but beneath it was just sweet Mercy. “Whatever has gotten into you?”

She had. She had gotten into him one moment at a time, one smile, one touch, one kiss, invading his blood, his thoughts, his soul. She had slipped into him like a thief, stealing his heart one piece at a time until she had owned every last bit of it.

“You’re safe?”

he asked. “You’re well?”

“Yes. Of course. I told you I would be.”

But she sighed and tucked her head against his shoulder. “It’s late,”

she said, and she let fall the reticule to stroke her fingers down his chest. “Shall we go to bed?”