Page 26 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

Soon enough Thomas would have to begin preparing himself for an evening of haunting Fordham’s tavern in Cheapside. He had, an hour or so ago, delivered his mother and sisters to their afternoon garden party. He’d put in only a brief appearance there himself in order to help them sell the fiction that Mercy was again under the weather, lest anyone begin to wonder at her absence and his own—but a half an hour on the outside in attendance, and then he had returned home once more.

Fordham was meant to be back any day now. Thomas had never imagined himself in the singular role of thief-taker, but he fancied he had grown rather proficient these last weeks in the subtle art of subterfuge. If he could not apprehend Fordham himself, then at the very least he would be able to manage following the man back to his lodgings and sending a proper authority round to nab him within.

Blast it, he wanted this whole damned debacle over and done with. It was the last of the loose ends he’d left to tie up, the one that would right the ship he had endeavored all these years to steer straight. And yet—

He’d have preferred Mercy’s company for the occasion. No one in their right mind would ever think it the sort of outing a woman ought to be on, but Mercy would have loved to join him. He had wondered, once, what sort of man he was becoming. The answer had become clear: who he was meant to be. The man he had always stifled, stuffed so full of lectures on propriety and what was and was not done. He had buried who he truly was beneath so many layers of starch and pompous arrogance that he had never seen himself clearly. But Mercy had. Perhaps she always had.

And he thought—he thought it likely that he would never hear his father’s voice in his head again. He would never hear his own, echoing those same ruthless words that had marked so much of his life.

There was the temptation to add in a quick detour to Charity’s home, which itself was only a short walk to the tavern. But it was still broad daylight, and there was no way of knowing whether or not Fordham might pose any sort of real, physical threat. He bit off a sigh. No—Mercy relied upon his good judgment, and he had to exercise it here. She was safe and sound with her sister, and the very minute he’d apprehended Fordham, he’d go for her.

A scratch at the door of the study caught his attention, and a footman cracked the door to announce, “Mr. Sumner for you, my lord.”

Damn. Another unnecessary delay. “Mr. Sumner,”

he said as the man entered the room. “I was just on my way out. Can this possibly wait?”

“It could, my lord,”

Mr. Sumner said, adjusting the thick folio wedged beneath his arm. “But I think you would rather it did not.”

With one hand, he gestured toward the opened door, a sort of vague beckoning motion.

And slowly, with a shuffle like that of a chastened child, in walked Fordham.

Thomas vaulted up from his chair so swiftly his knees cracked the underside of the desk before he was able to straighten them properly. “Y—y—y—”

His tongue tied itself even as his hands curled upon the edge of the desk, his blunt nails carving divots into the precious, lovingly varnished mahogany. God, he wished Mercy were here at this moment, to place her hand upon his arm and anchor him. To sooth the clatter of disordered thoughts clamoring to escape, tumbling over one another. At length his throat relaxed and his tongue loosened enough to say in a seething hiss, “You have some damned nerve to come before me.”

“My lord, please,”

Mr. Sumner interjected, “I would beseech you to exercise restraint.”

Fordham had cowered away from what he had interpreted as an imminent attack, throwing his hands up to guard his face despite the fact that even Thomas’ pure and perfect rage could not have carried him across the room so quickly.

“Explain,”

Thomas said, his voice a guttural snarl to Mr. Sumner. “Explain to me right this moment why you have brought this—this thief here before me instead of dragging him before a magistrate?”

Mr. Sumner blinked, his unflappable demeanor still unshaken in the face of Thomas’ rancor. “Naturally, my lord, due to your insistence that this matter be handled with all possible delicacy, I thought it ill-advised to involve the authorities without your explicit consent. As Mr. Fordham approached me, I surmised that there was no particular need to apprehend a man who had, as you can plainly see, voluntarily surrendered himself.”

“What the hell do you mean, he voluntarily surrendered?”

Thomas inquired.

“Just exactly that,”

Mr. Sumner said. “Mr. Fordham arrived at my office several hours ago. Under the circumstances, he suspected—correctly, I expect—that he would not be well-received had he approached you on his own.”

He’d have been lucky to keep all of his teeth firmly attached to his jaw, Thomas allowed to himself.

“Instead, he approached me to aid him. As a sort of intermediary, you understand. It is not unknown where you are presently residing, nor to whom this residence belongs. Mr. Fordham deduced that I, as Mr. Fletcher’s solicitor, might be able to offer him assistance.”

Sumner gestured at the chair arranged before the desk. “Might I sit, my lord?”

“If you must.”

Thomas braced his palms upon the surface of the desk, resisting the impulse to vault over it and go for Fordham’s throat. “Fordham can bloody well stand.”

Which was well enough, he supposed, since Fordham—a mousy, nondescript man of some middling years—seemed not eager to put himself within throttling distance of Thomas besides.

Mr. Sumner’s folio landed with a thwack upon the surface of the desk, and he began to rifle through the papers therein, arranging them into some manner of order. Piles and piles of them, set out at perfect angles. “If you’ll allow me one moment, my lord, to prepare myself,”

he muttered.

“It seems to me you’ve had more than a few already. Hours, you said.”

“Well, yes,”

Sumner hedged. “There was quite a lot to manage. It is always best, I have found, to present a solution rather than a problem. I daresay it is one of the reasons Mr. Fletcher has kept me in his employ for so many years. Ah—there.”

Like a consummate perfectionist, he twitched the edges of the last stack of documents so that it was evenly spaced alongside the others. “This is your solution, my lord. Your fortune restored.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Thomas asked. “How much of it?”

“All of it, I should say,”

Mr. Sumner said. “And some extra besides, owing to the investments and annuities in your name which were dissolved, which ought to have accrued”—he paused to glance over his shoulder at Fordham—“three months of interest?”

“Four,”

Fordham said in a tight, shrill voice. “Four months.”

“Four months,”

Sumner amended. “Naturally, when Mr. Fordham arrived at my office, I demanded an explanation of him. I am given to understand that like many gentlemen, Mr. Fordham found himself the victim of certain vices—”

“Gambling,”

Thomas snarled, and Fordham gave a jerky nod. So he’d assessed it correctly, once he’d assembled a proper timeline of events, collected every bit of information he could get his hands on at the various institutions at which he ought to have had accounts.

“Never found the appeal in it m’self,”

Sumner said. “But it’s a tale as old as time. A gentleman finds himself established within a gaming establishment, wagers a little more than he ought, then significantly more—”

“Then he embezzles from his employer,”

Thomas suggested icily. “His employer’s mother. His employer’s sisters. Forcing said employer to rely upon the largesse—such as it is—of a neighbor even to have the hope of managing the journey to London for the Season.”

“I tried to pay it back,”

Fordham said, and his teeth clattered with nerves. “I tried—a bit here and there, whenever I eked out a win. I thought so long as the balances were correct when I sent the quarterly accounting, you’d never know the difference.”

And he wouldn’t have done. Everything had looked well enough—until it hadn’t. “I certainly learned it eventually,”

he said. “Just in time for my staff to begin deserting their posts due to lack of wages. In time to discover the debts that I had accrued in outfitting my sisters for the Season had not been paid. Had I discovered it any later, there might have been irreparable damage done to my reputation and my family’s well-being.”

His fingers tented upon the desk, knuckles going white. His gaze fell upon the documents arrayed before him. “I assume,”

he said, his voice tense and clipped, “once you had gotten in too deep to recover yourself, you helped yourself to the rest of my funds. Hit a lucky streak, did you?”

“No, my lord. I—I did take the rest. Only to cover my losses. And then—and then I lost more, besides.”

The shame in the man’s voice gave Thomas pause. His brows arched in surprise. “Mr. Sumner has claimed that what you have stolen has been restored to me.”

“Not merely a claim, my lord,”

Mr. Sumner said, and there was a vaguely offended inflection to his voice, as if his pride had been pricked by the suggestion that he might, somehow, have provided inaccurate information. “I have seen to it all myself, alongside Mr. Fordham, whose assistance was invaluable.”

“Invaluable?”

Thomas echoed. “How so?”

“In fact,”

Sumner said, “Mr. Fordham has kept meticulous records for himself. It was only because of them that your funds have been restored to you so quickly. It might have days, weeks even, of putting it all straight again otherwise. Instead, only hours.”

“How is it, then, that my funds—lost to some squalid gaming hell, no doubt—have been restored to me?”

Thomas asked.

Bravely, considering the circumstances, Fordham took a few careful steps forward, firming his shoulders, his fingers flexing at his sides. “You might recall, my lord, some years ago I advised you upon a certain investment. A proposition for a gold mine in Wales.”

“One in which I declined to invest,”

Thomas said. He had been new to the title then, and not particularly eager to make free with the family funds. He had thought the scheme too risky, too complex, its originators acting upon little more than a hunch. Like as not he’d have lost his money entirely. Even if it had succeeded, he’d thought it just as possible that that investment would show no returns for years.

“I did invest,”

Mr. Fordham said. “I could not convince you of it, so I invested my own funds. A bit more than I could afford to spare, in all honesty. And then I heard nothing of it for nearly two years. Not a word. I assumed, as you likely would have done, that it had failed and my investment had been lost. Until just over a month ago, when I received a missive from the fellows with whom I had invested, requesting a meeting.”

“Your gold mine paid off?”

Thomas squinted at the paperwork before him once again.

“Handsomely,”

Fordham said. “Ludicrously. I’d not have believed it myself—initially I did not, in fact.”

He swallowed hard, audibly. “I had intended to flee the country,”

he said. “I knew there was no other escape for what I had done. But when I received that letter, I thought—there might be a chance for me yet. So I stayed. I stayed, and I hid, and when they came to London to inform me of their progress, I met with them. They invited me to Wales with them to see for myself.”

“Wales,”

Thomas breathed. Northwest, the barkeep had said. With the Welsh toffs who had accompanied him. Fordham had been in Wales this last week, overseeing what had been made of his investment. The goddamned gold mine. And he’d said he’d come into money not because he’d stolen Thomas’, but because his own damned fortune had been made.

He might have fled with his fortune, might have gone anywhere in the world. But he hadn’t. He’d come straight back to London to right the wrong he’d done. And then some, if Mr. Sumner were to be believed.

“I am not asking your forgiveness,”

Mr. Fordham said, swallowing heavily. “Lord knows I do not deserve it. Those things of which I have been accused—I am guilty of them, all. I came here today only to put right what I have done wrong and to beg for your mercy.”

Mercy. Thomas smothered a strange laugh beneath his fingers, surprised at the phrasing. In a way, he thought, Fordham had given him Mercy. His legs collapsed beneath him and he sat down heavily in the leather-covered chair situated behind the desk. If not for Fordham’s perfidy and the ensuing debacle it had caused, he thought, there would have been no reason to accept the devil’s bargain Fletcher had offered. No reason for Mother to sponsor Mercy for the Season. No reason at all to have spent more than a few moments at a time in her presence.

He would have missed the love of his life by inches, because he had been too stupid and too stubborn ever to truly see her. He would never have learned what manner of man he truly was, never unbent himself enough to permit Marina’s common suitor to call upon her. By some strange twist of fate, Fordham’s deceit might well have saved them all. In a stranger way, he could almost find himself…grateful.

Mr. Sumner cleared his throat. “I would warn you, my lord, that the publicity a public trial would garner would hardly be ideal. You might be called to give evidence, testimony. In light of the fact that has been no harm—that is to say, no permanent harm,”

he amended swiftly as Thomas produced a glare, “it might be best simply to consider this matter closed.”

Sumner was right. With a sigh, Thomas scrubbed at his face. “You have got your mercy, Fordham.”

And soon enough, Thomas would have his own. “So long as you get the hell out of my sight—and contrive to stay there.”

∞∞∞

There was something very nearly farcical about the civilized routine of tea, Mercy thought, when those in attendance included both one’s father and one’s courtesan half-sister. She thought perhaps all of them had been a bit stunned at Papa’s arrival some ten minutes earlier—even Papa himself.

Hardly a word had passed between them since Charity had cracked the door to admit him. Though she had undertaken the perfunctory courtesies that would be expected of someone receiving a guest, they had seemed somewhat strained, as if performed by rote repetition rather than of conscious action. As the water had heated in the kettle upon the stove, Charity had swept about the room, lighting a succession of candles to beat back the burgeoning darkness as sunset swept away into evening.

Mercy’s head had been swirling with disjointed fragments of thoughts ever since Papa’s arrival, her busy brain cycling through them in quick succession, but eventually, as she sipped her tea in the heavy silence that had descended upon them, enough pieces clicked into place to form a cogent sentence—and an accusation. “You knew,”

she said, as she set her tea cup down upon its saucer with a clatter. “You knew!”

It was the only explanation she could find amidst the chaos of it all for how Papa had arrived here, at Charity’s door. He had known. He had to have known.

Papa winced, his face drooping into a hangdog expression. “Yes,”

he admitted softly. “I knew.”

“For how long?”

Mercy demanded, her chin lifting along with her ire. “You kept this from me. You kept my life from me! How long did you know?”

“A year,”

Papa said, directing his gaze to the toes of his boots upon the floor. “Perhaps as many as two. I swear to you, Mercy, I never meant to cause you any harm. I didn’t know—I didn’t know how I was meant to tell you. What your mother truly was. What she had made you. Made the both of us.”

A harsh retort crawled up Mercy’s throat and stuck there, lodged behind her tongue. For all the hurt that clawed at her heart, still there was the prick of her conscience. She had kept the same secret, and for the same reason. With the back of her hand she swiped at her eyes, swallowing back those recriminatory words once more.

The heat of anger fled as swiftly as it had come upon her. “I’m sorry, Papa,”

she said in a choked voice as Charity gave a few awkward pats to her back. “I didn’t know how I was meant to tell you, either.”

But she might have had a sister for longer than a few months. Might have known the family she had never known she had always had. “How did you come to be here?”

she asked. “You weren’t meant to be in London for weeks.”

Papa cleared his throat. “I would not have been,”

he said, “except that Lord Armitage wrote to me last week to inform me that he intended to marry you.”

His brow furrowed into a severe frown. “I came to tender my response in person. But there was nobody at home when I arrived, and I heard the servants whispering that you had not been seen since evening last.”

He shoved one hand into the pocket of his coat and withdrew a fistful of letters. Charity’s letters, the ones Mercy had scrupulously saved, collected within her drawer. “I found these in your nightstand. I recognized the name, of course. I suppose I thought—hoped—I might find you here.”

His gaze flitted to Charity, as if her appearance came as something of a shock each and every time he laid his eyes upon her. “I beg your pardon,”

he said to her. “It is only that you resemble her so closely.”

“You need not apologize,”

Charity said. “I’m well aware of it. My father also found it disquieting. Audacious, almost, as if I had somehow contrived to resemble Mother only to plague him.”

She took a sip of her tea, her eyelids lowering. “You need not mince words,”

she said. “She abandoned me, too. I am well aware of what she was.”

“Is,”

Papa corrected. “The last information I received suggested she had married again and was living happily in France.”

Mercy startled. “Does—does she have any more children?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know,”

Papa said, his mouth turned down in faint apology. “I learned only of the two girls who had come before you. I know now that I ought to have told you,”

he said. “But you are my only child. My daughter. I wanted only to protect you.”

Protect her. From the hurt of it, but also the potential scandal. He had not known, then, when last she had been in London. He hadn’t pushed her toward marriage, hadn’t made any particular effort to see her settled, much less sought to buy her a title. That course of action had not occurred to him until she had expressed an interest in returning to London. She supposed she had been safe enough in the countryside, segregated from polite society, such as it was. But probably the potential scandal had been lurking at the back of his mind for some time. Bad enough that Mother had abandoned them. But if she should ever return to England, should she bring her scandals back with her…

Guilty by association. What father wished to see his daughter brought to ruin through no fault of her own? He couldn’t possibly have hoped to protect her from the scandal of it. But he might have bought her a husband who could. “Is that why you told Thomas to find me a husband?”

she inquired.

He stifled what had promised to be a magnificent glower at her use of Thomas’ given name. “He was meant to find you a husband with a name and a title powerful enough to protect you,”

he said. “I’m not the man I once was, and I won’t be around forever. What sort of father would I be to leave you vulnerable? I cannot safeguard you from the consequences of your mother’s actions; I cannot legitimize you in the eyes of the law.”

Neither, Mercy suspected he meant to imply, could he insulate her from that judgment by association she might well receive on Charity’s account.

“I hoped to see you married,”

he continued, “for your own sake. I’d have bought you a duke if there were one to be had, if only so that you would be safe should any of this come to light. No one maligns a duchess.”

But she didn’t want a duke. “Papa, I am going to marry Thomas,”

she said. As soon as he asked her.

A deeper furrow of that craggy brow. “Sweetheart, he is only a baron, and the title isn’t particularly old or distinguished besides. I want better for you. I want—”

“It’s not your marriage,”

Mercy interjected. “It’s mine. It is what I want. And this way,”

she added, reaching across the space which separated them to take his hand in hers, “I won’t be far from you. In London, or at home in the countryside.”

Papa’s eyes glittered with a sudden sheen of tears. “I would like that,”

he admitted at last, gruffly. “I suppose if I must lose you, to do it to a man who resides within riding distance would be preferable.”

“You aren’t going to lose me,”

Mercy said. “Our family is expanding—not shrinking.”

But it had been just the two of them for so long that she thought perhaps he was struggling with the concept. That she was not leaving his family to join another. That instead their families would merge and take a new shape. A profoundly unconventional one, but one that she had gone to quite a lot of effort to form. “Charity will be part of it, Papa. And so will her sister.”

“Your sister as well,”

Charity said.

“Our sister,”

Mercy amended, and squeezed Papa’s hand. “We are all Mother’s daughters, and I know that it will be…difficult for you. But it would mean a great deal to me if you could find it in your heart to be kind. To be welcoming.”

Most especially to the woman who would not expect it. Who Mercy suspected had experienced little genuine kindness in her life. A woman who presented herself to be as cold and hard as diamond, but who had opened her heart—and her home, however briefly—to a half-sister she’d not know she’d had until just recently.

At last Papa lifted his gaze to Charity, for once not flinching from that uncanny resemblance to the woman he’d once known as his wife. And he said, “She hurt all of us, your mother and Mercy’s. We have that in common. All I need to know of you is that you are my daughter’s sister. And if she would welcome you into our family, then so will I.”

And the moment might have retained its peculiar poignancy, but for the pounding upon the door that had come not ten seconds later, followed by Thomas’ voice shouting from below, “Open the damned door! I told you I would not be seduced and discarded!”