Page 23 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

Mercy had been quiet in the carriage. Suspiciously quiet. So quiet that Thomas had felt the weight of every unsaid word like a ball of lead within his stomach. She gazed out the window the entirety of the short journey home, her chin cradled in her hand and her eyes—distant. There were only a few inches that separated them, and yet she was miles away. Somewhere else entirely.

Had he hurt her? Frightened her? No—he’d astonished her, perhaps, but she had come so hard around him that he’d had to wrench himself free of her there at the last to protect her from an unintended pregnancy. Perhaps he had surprised her, but he’d have staked his life on no more than that.

Her hand perched lightly in his own as he helped her alight from the carriage as they arrived, and her gaze slid away from his, falling to the ground. Not fear, he thought. Not hurt or anger—but shame.

His stomach clenched in concern, in uncertainty. Had he given it to her, that shame that he had read, however briefly, in her eyes? He had not, exactly, behaved with her as a gentleman ought to have done, though it had always been with the assumption of a forthcoming marriage.

He ought to have proposed first. The world was so very puritanical in its view of women, restricting their behavior far more than men, despite the fact that he knew of few men who exhibited the same chastity they would have expected of women. He had been rather puritanical in his own opinions. He’d let his pride govern his actions. Had he sacrificed hers in the doing of it?

Before she could retract her hand from his, he closed his fingers around it. “Mercy, if I have erred—”

Her eyes snapped up to his, wide and startled, meeting his for no more than a moment before her gaze sheared toward the coachman. “Please, let’s go inside,”

she said, pitching her voice low to avoid attracting undue attention. “We must speak.”

She slipped her hand out of his, turning for the door.

Thomas flexed his hands impotently, and that sense of unease only grew as the butler admitted them, as Mercy strode across the foyer and began to ascend the stairs. One step at a time, steady and slow, but he could not help but feel as if her feet were pounding out the bass notes of a funeral dirge.

“Have I offended?”

he asked as she proceeded ahead of him, up and up again, toward the billiards room. He thought he heard her draw a ragged breath, thought he heard a faint gasp for air. “Have I erred in some manner?”

he asked again as she wrapped her fingers around the handle of the billiards room door, pushed it open, and darted within.

He followed, closed the door tight behind them, unsurprised to find her already at the sideboard. Her back was turned toward him, and she poured herself an overlarge glass of brandy with a hand that trembled. She cast the largest portion of it back in one long swallow, bracing herself for the burn, and her free hand—

Her free hand swiped across her face. The sort of gesture that was intended to wipe away tears. “You haven’t,”

she said, in a croak of a voice, thick with emotion. “Erred. Offended. You haven’t. I have.”

Christ. “Mercy,”

he said as she turned, and he took a step toward her, reached out for her.

With the thrust of one hand out before her, she warned him away. “Don’t,”

she said. “Please. I’ll never get it out if you do.”

She was trying desperately—and failing—to school her features into some manner of calm, but those tears kept sneaking up upon her, one at a time. A hiccough briefly broke her composure, and her chin quivered. “I just wanted one more night,”

she said in a broken whisper as she tossed back the last of her brandy and set the glass aside once more. “It was greedy of me. Selfish, I know. I am so very sorry, Thomas.”

One more night? “What do you mean?”

he asked. But the bottom had dropped out of his stomach, and he thought—he thought he must know already.

“I mean that tomorrow, you will resume your search for your villainous solicitor,”

she said. “And I have no doubt but that you will find him. And when you do—”

“I will ask you to marry me.”

“Do not, I beg of you. I will refuse.”

Her lips tightened, trembled. Her fingers knitted before her, knuckles white with strain. “I would ask you to spare us both that hurt. I never intended to marry you, Thomas.”

His hand groped for the arm of the nearest chair, and he sank down into it, his stomach aching as if he had been punched in the gut. His heart aching. “You’re within your rights to refuse,”

he said. “But I would like to know why.”

Because she had led him to believe otherwise, and even now she was torn, agonized. He could not believe she had been toying with him. Or if she had, she had also been toying with herself. She could not now wear that stricken expression and not care. Not love.

As he did.

He ventured, “Does this have something to do with that woman you’ve been meeting? Charity?”

She jerked as if he’d struck out at her, and what little color remained bleached from her face. “Did you—did you read my letters?”

“Just one,”

he said. “The night I sent you off to Cheapside myself. You’d left your sketchbook behind, and the letter fell out. I didn’t mean to do it—”

But that was hardly an excuse.

“You never told me.”

“It wasn’t my business,”

he said. “I made you a promise not to pry into your affairs. That I would let you tell me in your own time.”

And apparently that time had now arrived. “Mercy, you don’t know what sort of danger that woman presents to you,”

he said. “She could ruin you simply through association. You cannot—”

“She’s my sister!”

Mercy interjected in a raw little voice, wringing her hands in distress. “Charity is my sister.”

∞∞∞

She had stunned him. Utterly and completely. It was there in the shocked fall of his jaw, in the widening of his eyes behind the lenses of his spectacles, in the harsh breath he sucked in at the revelation.

“But you don’t have a sister,”

he said inanely. And then, still in that dazed tone of voice, “I cannot believe your father has an illegitimate child.”

“Not my father,”

Mercy said, turning her gaze to the floor. “My mother. Charity is my half-sister, through our mother.”

“But your mother’s dead. You’d lost her even before you and your father came to the countryside.”

A swift shake of her head. “We did lose her,”

she said. “But not to death. She left the both of us. She simply…left.”

Her shoulders moved in an awkward shrug.

Thomas swiped one hand down his jaw. “How?”

he asked. “Why?”

“I don’t know,”

Mercy said. “I was just a child. I only known that she came to the nursery one morning to tell me she was leaving. Of course, I asked her when she would return. She just—she smiled at me, patted my head, and told me she never would. And then she left, as if I was of no more concern to her than which gown to choose or which hat to wear. She left without even a backward glance.”

Her throat was growing tighter with every word. “It was…easier, I suppose,”

she said, “for Papa to let himself be assumed a widower. It’s acceptable to not wish to speak of the presumed deceased, for the grief of it. We chose our words carefully. Lost,”

she said. “Never passed.”

“You didn’t come to London,”

he said, “to deliver fabric patterns or to acquire silk for your hot air balloon as you told your father, did you?”

“No,”

she said, with a jerky little shake of her head. She might just as easily have done those from the countryside. “No, I lied about my intentions. To everyone. I came because I had found Charity at last,”

she said. “I had seen her, just once, during my last Season. Just through the window of a passing carriage, and I thought—I thought she was Mother, at first. She’s the very image of her. She was too young to be, of course, but still I thought she must know something of Mother, to resemble her so closely.”

She braced herself against the side of the billiard table, unbearably weary already. “It took me years to uncover her identity,”

she said. “I had little information with which to find her, and I am not particularly skilled with sketching the likenesses of people. But eventually I found a forgotten miniature of Mother buried in Papa’s things, and I sent it off to a Runner, and within weeks he had identified Charity. I wrote her a letter some months ago, and we’ve been corresponding ever since. I wanted to meet her, to know her. She is my family.”

And she had had so little one it all these years. Just Papa and herself.

“And did you learn anything from her about your shared mother?”

“That she, too, had been abandoned.”

She swallowed hard. “There’s more,”

she said. “Mother married Charity’s father, and produced two daughters with him.”

“Another sister?”

“Felicity. I haven’t—I haven’t met her just yet.”

But she would. Eventually. At least, she intended to do so.

“It seems your mother had a proper theme going,”

Thomas said wryly. “Virtue names, all.”

Mercy winced. “Perhaps she named us for those qualities she lacked,”

she said, and took a deep breath. “They’re my elder half-sisters, Thomas. Charity by six years, and Felicity by three.”

She saw the moment the implication struck him. “Your mother was widowed?”

he inquired almost hopefully.

“No,”

she said, though the word scraped the inside of her throat as it emerged. “No, she wasn’t. In fact, her former husband is still living, and there was neither a divorce nor an annulment between them. It’s impossible to say even whether Charity and Felicity are legitimate with any particular certainty. And there could well be more of us, her bastard children. Mother had a habit of abandoning her families, it seems, when they had ceased to entertain.”

She would never forget the blithe, careless manner with which her mother had exited her life, never to return. She would never forget Papa’s anguish, or her own. The feeling that half of herself had gone missing. “I will have to tell Papa as well,”

she said. “I fear it will break his heart all over again, to learn the truth of it all. But I have got sisters, and I will not abandon them.”

Not as Mother had.

She had made that decision years ago, when she had begun her search. To see it through, to find what she had lost. And she had found so much more than she had expected. But she had found the inevitability of scandal, too. When it had been only her own reputation at risk—which had been of little consequence to her—she had not counted the loss so great.

But now it was Thomas. It was Juliet and Marina and the baroness. They would sacrifice to associate with her, should any of this become public knowledge. Twice already Thomas had warned her away from Charity; he could not deny the truth of it. And she could not ask them to weather the scandal with her.

“I am so very sorry,”

she whispered. “I didn’t expect any of this. Us, I mean to say. Whatever we have been to one another. It was so selfish of me to entertain it, but I just—I wanted you.”

Shamed, she dropped her gaze. “I wanted you,”

she repeated. “For however long I could have you. But I always knew I would have to tell you why—why we cannot marry.”

And now he knew it, as well.

∞∞∞

Mercy had curled in on herself, her hands busking her arms as if the room had grown too cold for comfort, but Thomas knew the posture for what it was. Defensive, protective. Arms crossed over her heart as if a single harsh word from him might wound it. As if it had already begun to bleed.

A secret sister. Two sisters—possibly more. Christ, he had been so damned blind. Mercy had practically confessed once before, that night they’d seen Charity on the street. She is someone’s daughter, Mercy had said. Someone’s sister.

That Charity had been someone’s daughter was simply a matter of fact. Everyone had parents. Not so with sisters. Mercy couldn’t have possibly surmised that much of a stranger on the street without due reason.

He was meant to say something, he knew. Probably she expected some manner of recrimination, accusation. She had deceived him. A lie of omission at the very least. But they had known one another—truly known one another—for so short a time. He could not hold her responsible for withholding honesty she had not owed him.

And yet she had revealed it to him at last, that closely-guarded secret. He was meant to say something to it, to acknowledge it. At the very least to confirm that he had both heard and understood its implications.

He said, “Pour me a drink, would you?”

Mercy startled, her mouth dropping open. “I beg your pardon?”

Thomas inclined his head toward the sideboard. “A drink. If you would be so kind.”

She had had the benefit of a large glass of liquor, and he had had to take in all that she had to say sober as a judge, and while he did not begrudge her the liquid fortitude she had taken, if ever there had been a time to drink, it was here and now.

Like a sleepwalker in the grips of some remembered, repetitive action she turned for the sideboard, selected a glass, and poured from a crystal decanter. But her breath hitched halfway through the action, and her hand trembled as she struggled to replace the stopper. “Naturally, you will want to leave Papa’s house,”

she said as she brought the glass to him. “Though I would advise waiting until morning. There will be less gossip that way. If you have not enough funds to secure other lodgings, I will—”

“I have the funds,”

he said as he took the glass from her hand. “Your father was really quite generous.”

But then he could afford to be, even if Thomas had always intended to repay him.

“I just wanted to be perfectly clear,”

she said, and her hands fisted in the silk skirt of her ball gown. Fretfully, she began to pace. “You need feel no responsibility for me. I am quite capable of looking after myself. And it would be best”—another hitch of her breath, ending on a distressed gasp—“it would be best if you were to distance yourself from me as soon as possible.”

She swallowed hard, and her voice warbled across an octave. “All of you.”

He took a bracing drink and let the brandy burn down his throat. “No,” he said.

“No?”

Mercy paused in her pacing so abruptly she looked like nothing so much as a marionette jerked to a halt by an unseen puppeteer. “No? Thomas, have you not heard a word I have said?”

“Oh, I heard them. Every last one of them.”

And they had lifted a film from his eyes. He doubted it had been her intent, but she had accomplished it all the same. The world had become simultaneously extremely complicated and very simple indeed. It was true enough that he could hardly imagine a less ideal set of circumstances.

It was also true that when she had finished speaking, when she had concluded that pretty little speech that she had imagined would spell out in perfect, fatalistic terms the end of their relationship, the killing of any possibility of a future between them, he hadn’t cared.

There was nothing more important to him than Mercy. Not social standing, not money, not respect, not reputation. Nothing. He would have sacrificed the whole of it, without even the tiniest hesitation, to keep her. Without her, he’d be half a man at best. Probably less. He needed her in a way he would never be able to fully articulate, in a way that went deeper than simple words could ever hope to convey. That was the simple bit—acceptance of that fact.

But she was correct in her own way. There would be repercussions, possibly inescapable ones, and not only for the two of them. Mercy loved his sisters and his mother every bit as much as he did. Of course she would not want her own scandals to blow back upon them, to affect their chances retaining their positions within society, or of making good matches.

Although…

Mercy chewed her lower lip, wringing her hands in misery. “Have you nothing to say?”

she prompted. Still waiting for that reproach she thought it her duty to endure, he thought.

Another sip of brandy. Thomas said, “Yes. I told you some nights ago that I hadn’t the faintest idea of what I was going to say to Marina regarding her bookseller.”

“Publisher,”

Mercy corrected automatically.

“Publisher,”

Thomas repeated. “At any rate, I’ve figured it out at last. I’m going to tell her to marry him.”

Mercy’s eyes widened, brows leaping toward her hairline. “But you were so against it.”

“Yes, well, it’s occurred to me that I’ve been more than a little hypocritical just lately. I’ve held two sets of standards in my head, adhering to one while expecting another of others, and it wasn’t just wrong, it was inherently flawed.”

He had given it to her, that certainty that there could never be anything more between them, with his rigid adherence to propriety. He had given her that doubt which had so tormented her. She had carried with her twenty years of experience of him—his prejudices and his severity and his stern observance of certain social mores. And only weeks ago, the conclusion to which she had leapt would have been the correct one.

But he had changed. Mercy had changed him. Not into a different man, but into the man he had hoped to one day become. The one he never could have been without her, for he’d failed to achieve it all these years on his own. He said, “My mother told me recently that there is nothing more important than happiness, and really, she has always known best. And I realized, as you were talking, that I could only ever be happy with you. That none of the rest of it mattered. That whatever scandals with which you come equipped, I will take them—so long as I have you into the bargain. I would sacrifice everything for you and never count the loss. Marina deserves the freedom to make the same choice in the service of her future happiness.”

She closed her eyes, bowed her head. “Don’t say that,”

she said. “Please. I could very well cost you everything. You would grow to resent me.”

“No. Never.”

An odd, strangled laugh eked from her throat. Her shoulders hunched, and she scrubbed the back of her hand across her eyes. “I’ve already refused you, Thomas.”

“No, you haven’t,”

he said, quite reasonably, in his opinion. “You can’t refuse me. I haven’t asked you yet.”

“You can’t ask me,”

she said, and her voice crackled across the words. “Thomas, you know you can’t.”

“No,”

he said. “I know only that I have made you feel that way.”

His fault; his responsibility to mend it. “I won’t pretend I can solve every problem. But I am going to solve what I can, and the rest—the rest we’ll figure out together.”

And when she opened her mouth to protest once more, he interjected lightly: “Mercy, you might have said that you didn’t want to marry me. But you didn’t. Not once. That you would refuse, yes. That I wasn’t to ask, certainly. But never that you didn’t want to.”

And even with that fact flung into her face, an easy escape if she truly had wished for it, still she couldn’t force herself to say it. Her jaw worked, her mouth opened—and no words emerged.

Because she did want to marry him, he knew, and she wouldn’t utter that lie to him. And more than that, she loved him. She loved him enough to sacrifice her happiness for what she thought would be his. She loved him enough to let him go, when she thought it would be to his benefit.

Her noble sacrifice be damned; he had been caught already, and he had no intention of being tossed back.

“Suppose we continue this discussion later,”

he said. “I anticipate a very busy day tomorrow. I’d prefer to get to it well-rested.”

“There is no discussion to be had,”

she said, in tones of increasing desperation. “Thomas, I will refuse.”

“That is your right. I’m still going to ask.”

When he had managed to mitigate the worst of her fears. When she could allow herself to believe that the love they would share was something precious and profound, worth any amount of sacrifice. When he could convince her to set her hand in his and trust him to protect her against the world. When she understand that his loyalty to her eclipsed all else.

He unfurled himself from the couch, reached out to cup her cheek in his hand. Those dark eyes looked upon him with such longing and such terror—afraid to trust, afraid to hope. Afraid he hadn’t meant what he said. Perhaps even more so that he had.

She was going to do something foolhardy and reckless. He couldn’t possibly hazard a guess as to what, but he could see it there in her eyes, the desperation lingering in the coffee-dark depths of them. And he—he was just going to have to contend with whatever she chose to throw at him.

“Go to bed, Mercy,”

he sighed, bending to press a resigned kiss to the top of her head. “I’ll see you in the morning.”