Page 24 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

Mercy crammed a few dresses into a valise without care for the delicate fabrics she rumpled in the process. A trunk she could not have managed, not the way she intended to escape the house, but a valise would do well enough. In went a few sets of underthings, a nightgown, stockings—less than she would have liked to take, but more than she strictly required. She tossed in her sketchbook and turned for a last look at the room, struggling to slow the frantic pace of her brain enough to pick out anything she had missed.

Her room looked like a storm had swept through it, and she felt a brief flicker of pity for the servants who would no doubt be tasked with returning it to its former state. But her gaze fell upon one of the many notes she had written to herself and pinned up in various places, and for a moment her heart gave a vicious squeeze in her chest. There would be no one to understand her queer habits as Thomas did, no one to make such accommodations for her, or to remind her as he did of the things she had forgotten. Carefully she collected the notes, tapping them into a neat stack. If she could have nothing else, at least she would have this. The tiny bit of order he had wrested from the chaos—for her.

The only thing left was her reticule, and she shoved the stack of notes within it. A sob tore at her throat, and she pressed her hand over her mouth to stifle it. What was she going to tell Papa? She couldn’t stay in London, couldn’t return home to the countryside.

She couldn’t risk seeing Thomas again, and there was nowhere to hide from him. Soon enough he would satisfy that condition he had put upon himself and recover his family fortune, and he would propose. And she—she was so damned weak. Weak enough to accept. Weak enough to ruin all of them.

For his own good, then. For all of them. She shoved her wrist through the drawstring of the reticule and latched the valise. She only hoped it would survive the impact.

As she hefted it from where she had placed it upon her bed, she heard a sudden clamor begin downstairs; no doubt the baroness and the girls arriving home from the ball. Hurry, she told herself. She could use the commotion as cover, hiding the inevitable sounds of her escape within it.

She slid open the window as footsteps thundered upon the stairs, echoing throughout the house. The girls’ merry chatter grew louder, laughter ringing through the corridors, and Mercy—Mercy lifted her valise in her arms, positioned it carefully, and tipped it out the window.

It dropped like a stone, landing in a bush below. The crack of branches and the rustle of leaves cut through the night. The valise popped open, scattering clothing across the bushes, the grass. But the laughter hadn’t yet abated. There was no sudden, suspicious silence. There was just the footsteps receding down the hall and the opening of doors, and Mercy breathed a sigh of abject relief.

She left the house through the window for the last time, sliding over the sill and feeling for the wood of the trellis that ran alongside her window. She would have to be careful. She knew now that it was less stable than she had thought, and there was that bit that had cracked straight off the last time she had gone down.

One cautious step at a time she descended, moving slowly, shaking off the ivy that wanted to cling to her fingers. It seemed an hour before she touched the ground at last, and the spiky branches of the bushes tugged at the silk of her skirts. She wrenched them free, heard the fragile material rend with the violent motion.

In a frenzy she collected the garments that had fallen from the valise, stuffing them back within with just as little care as that with which she had first packed them. The latches had popped open in the fall, but were still in sound, working condition.

This was it. As she collected the handle of the valise, she looked up at the house one last time, setting her shoulders in resolve. The end.

One of them had to be sensible. This time, that burden fell upon her shoulders.

∞∞∞

Thomas polished off the last bit of egg upon his plate, pinching the bridge of his nose as he stared down at the assortment of documents arrayed out upon the desk before him. He had, after a fashion, assembled them into some version of order. Account balances, investments, and signed affidavits from various institutions.

Mercy had, with her clever mind and the instincts of a born woman of business, been more helpful than she could possibly have known. It had not occurred to him, in his single-minded determination to hunt down Fordham, that he might build himself a clearer picture of the crime with proper documentation. He’d simply assumed, naturally, that Fordham had falsified every document possible in the service of concealing what he’d done.

But he hadn’t. The picture had not become clear until he’d taken Mercy’s suggestion of approaching those institutions for what information they might provide, but now that he had it all—dates, accounts, statements from those businesses and banking institutions involved—it had begun to form at last.

Roughly four months ago had been the beginning of the end. His accounts had been flush, then, investments properly managed. And then, in what had begun as a slow trickle, there had been both withdrawals and deposits—a succession of them, in increasing amounts, from one account to another. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, he thought. Money moved round and round again, no doubt in the hopes that it would go unnoticed so long as the balances appeared to be as they ought.

Gambling. It had to be. Fordham earned a tidy income as a solicitor, but not nearly enough to play as fast and deep as the withdrawals would imply. It seemed that upon a few occasions he had won enough to replenish what he had lost. But that had lasted no more than a few days at a time, and then the withdrawals had begun all over again. The pattern within the documents, the timeline that had been revealed with them, suggested an increasing sense of urgency.

Fordham couldn’t possibly have hoped to conceal this in perpetuity, had to have known that eventually his scheme would be uncovered. And yet, by the account of the tavern owner when last he’d been seen, his mood has been positively celebratory. Jovial, even, if he had spent an exorbitant sum in purchasing a round of drinks for the tavern entire.

He ought to have been quiet, withdrawn, concerned. Perhaps even in the bouts of a depression. He ought to have been striving to avoid notice, not courting it by purchasing a round for the tavern entire. He ought to have been plotting his escape, knowing that there was no way out of his present circumstances except to flee the country. And yet he had remained in England, to all accounts showing no signs of intending to leave.

It didn’t make any damned sense.

He sighed as a scratch on the door pulled him from his thoughts, lifting his head from where it had rested within his hands. “Enter,”

he called.

A maid swept in, a breakfast tray balanced in her hands.

“Thank you,”

Thomas said, gesturing to his own empty plate, “but I’ve already eaten.”

“It’s for Miss Fletcher, my lord,”

she said, with a lopsided curtsey that made the tea cup upon the tray slide precariously to the right. “It’s gone ten already. I was meant to take it to her.”

Ah, yes. He had given that instruction. And it had, to his knowledge, worked out well enough. Of course, he tended to rise early and Mercy tended to rise late, owing to the occasional difficulty in falling asleep, so they had rarely shared the breakfast table at the same time. But it was gratifying to know that she hadn’t missed meals. But why had the maid brought her breakfast here?

“She’s not here,”

he said. “Perhaps the library?”

The maid shook her head. “It’s just that—well, she’s not anywhere, my lord.”

A queer sense of unease settled over his shoulders, drawing them down into a slouch. “What do you mean, she’s not anywhere?”

he asked. “She has got to be somewhere.”

“No, my lord,”

the maid said. “Leastwise, not anywhere in the house. We’ve searched and searched.”

Oh, God. “Her bed chamber,”

he said. “Was there anything…unusual about it?”

“Well, it was a right mess, my lord, but that’s not so very unusual. Miss Fletcher isn’t the tidiest of women. But there has been some improvement recently, I suppose. Or at least there had been—”

“The window,”

Thomas gritted out between clenched teeth. “Tell me about the window. Was it latched?”

“No, my lord. In fact, it was open.”

Her brow pleated into a frown of confusion. “But that’s not so unusual. Been rather warm of late, hasn’t it?”

It was unusual when the woman at issue had developed the alarming habit of climbing trellises. Christ. He’d known—known—she would do something rash. Had felt it in his soul, like an inescapable truth. Mercy, being Mercy, would follow her heart and not her head, and damn the consequences. Foolishly, he’d thought that promise he’d extracted from her would rein in her impulses, at least long enough to cobble together a chance of convincing her to marry him.

Apparently, it had gone out the window along with her.

“I beg your pardon, my lord,”

the maid said, in an odd, garbled rush, as if she thought he might find himself suddenly tempted to shoot the messenger. Probably he’d been glowering and hadn’t realized it. “We’ll look again, just to be certain.”

“No,”

he said. “Thank you, but no. I know exactly where Miss Fletcher is.”

There was only one place she could be. In a city where she had no other friends and few acquaintances, there was only one possible place that Mercy, a woman on her own, could be.

With her sister. In Cheapside.

∞∞∞

Mercy glanced up from the window as Charity emerged from the bedroom at last, garbed in a lovely red velvet dressing gown. “Goodness,”

Charity said, muffling a yawn behind her fingers and scraping the disheveled mass of her hair over her shoulder, “I could hear you pacing all evening. Didn’t you sleep?”

“No,”

Mercy said. Thanks to her busy brain, which had spent the night leaping from potential disaster to potential disaster, she’d not slept a wink. It hadn’t helped that Charity’s flat, which was situated above what was now a milliner’s shop, had but one bed chamber, and so Mercy had had to pass an interminable night upon a small couch with legs so spindly that she had been certain they would collapse beneath her at any moment. “I’m so sorry,”

she said. “Probably I should not have prevailed upon you—”

“You should not have done,”

Charity said flatly. “Why do you think I have always insisted we meet elsewhere? You know you cannot be seen to associate with me. If you hadn’t arrived at such a dreadful hour, I would have turned you away for your own good.”

For your own good. Mercy bristled at the phrasing, its general condescension. As if she were somehow incapable of making her own decisions! And then, abruptly, a tiny spear of shame pierced that bubble of righteous anger. She had thought the very same, hadn’t she? She had fled in the night, without so much as a word, for Thomas’ own good. For the sake of his family and their reputations.

“I don’t want to lose you,”

she said softly. “Not now that I’ve found you.”

But did the world exist in which she could have both?

With a sigh, Charity wilted onto the couch which, remarkably, didn’t issue even so much as a creak with the advent of her weight upon it. “I made my choices long ago,”

she said. “And I do not regret them. I would do it all over again if I had the option. I have had years and years to accept that some doors would remain forever closed to me.”

With one hand she poured tea from the pot that Mercy had made hours ago, and then winced as she brought the cup to her lips and learned firsthand how cold and bitter it had grown. “There are some things, some choices, which one can never take back. And you, Mercy—you have so many more choices than ever I did. You really ought to think of your future.”

That was just the problem. Her busy brain had constructed an elaborate web of futures. And not only her own. There were so many futures to consider, and she had handled them with careless hands already. It felt as though each passing moment brought with it a new succession of cracks, hairline fractures running across them. Shattering felt an inevitability.

“I have thought a great deal about my future,”

Mercy said, and that was true. It was just that she had never anticipated the potential for a different future opening up before her. She had given up on the childhood dream of being a wife and a mother years ago, closed the door upon it when it had become clear to her that it would not happen

She had simply never planned for the possibility of Thomas wedging his boot in that door to shove it back open.

“I had thought a great deal about my future,”

Mercy amended. “I had no plans to marry. I certainly never expected to—to—”

“Fall in love?”

Charity supplied with a shrug. “By the grace of God, I had any proclivity toward romance snuffed out of me years and years ago. And yet…”

“And yet?”

“It seems to me a rare thing, love,”

Charity said. “My most recent benefactor fell victim to it himself, in fact. And with his own wife, if you can imagine! I don’t know that I’d care to become irreparably besotted myself, since love does tend to make an idiot of one, but I think I’d rather enjoy a bit of honest adoration. Do tell me. What is it like?”

Mercy scrubbed one hand over her eyes, which had grown remarkably damp. “It truly is like falling,”

she said in a ragged murmur. “Falling from such a great height, and knowing your body will be dashed to pieces when you land.”

“That sounds dreadful,”

Charity said in dulcet tones rife with disappointment, curling one hand beneath her chin.

Mercy shook her head. “It’s magnificent. Exhilarating and terrifying and nerve-wracking, and just—just glorious.”

She had soared the skies in a hot air balloon and still not touched the heights she had reached with Thomas. From so little as a dance, a game of billiards, a naughty whisper in her ear. Each moment inexpressibly precious, etched into her heart forever. “You never do reach the ground,”

she said. “You crash into his arms instead, and it is—the most perfect place to be. The most perfect feeling in the world.”

“And this man…this baron who gives you this feeling. He’s offered for you?”

“Not yet,”

Mercy said. “Not yet. But he said he would.”

“And he knows,”

Charity said, with an inquisitive cant of her head. “Everything?”

“Everything,”

Mercy said, with an awkward shrug of her shoulders. “I had led him to believe I intended to marry him.”

He would never have taken her to bed otherwise. “I owed him a proper explanation for why he could not marry me.”

“Then it would seem to me as though he has come to his own conclusions,”

Charity said. “He has made his choice, with the full breadth of information available, and it is you. So now you will have to make yours. Will you be an idiot in love, or a lonely fool?”

Mercy sucked in a harsh breath. I want you to let me be there to catch you if you fall, Thomas had once told her, and she—she had warded off those outstretched arms and dived straight for the rocks that would dash her to pieces at the bottom instead. She had aimed for those damned rocks, when all along—

All along she should have aimed for Thomas and trusted in him to catch her.