Page 4 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

Dressing for dinner was going to prove difficult, Mercy mused as she walked the deserted corridor. Her dressing room was full of the gowns she’d left behind after her first disastrous Season, all lovingly tended to and just as beautiful as when they had first been created. Several years out of fashion, but lovely nonetheless.

But they didn’t fit. She had been just eighteen when last she’d worn any of them, and while the once fashionably high waists of the gowns had accommodated her hips just fine, she’d grown too much in the bust to comfortably fit into them any longer. They could, however, be refashioned to fit Juliet, who was slender as a reed, and Marina, who was several inches smaller—but it was a certainty that Mercy would not be wearing them.

Worse still, she’d lost her shoes at some point in the afternoon. And her gloves. And her sketchbook. Well, not lost, precisely. She knew they were somewhere in the house. It was just that she couldn’t recall exactly where she had left them.

It wasn’t the first time she’d had to retrace her steps in the search for something she’d mislaid. Possibly it wasn’t even the thousandth.

Papa had always lovingly called her absent-minded, and the servants at home had acquired the habit of diligently collecting and returning to her anything she had happened to leave lying about, but despite her best efforts, she had never managed to quell the embarrassing pattern of misplacing things. Sometimes it felt as if they had vanished almost by magic, disappearing from her hands only to resurface elsewhere. She’d lost her house key no less than half a dozen times, left her reticule in dresser drawers or on a library shelf, or, on one particularly odd occasion, in the ice house.

Their house in the country would have been littered with her half-finished projects and discarded accessories if there were not a dozen servants about to collect them. But it had been almost a decade since she had last been in London, and the servants here had not had to wrest order out of her chaos in quite some time.

So the search for her shoes had fallen upon her own shoulders. She had had them when they had arrived, of course, but then Marina and Juliet had joined her in her bedchamber to rifle through the dressing room and exclaim over the gowns that had been left to molder in the darkened room.

She had had them when the girls had selected a few of those same gowns—most of which Mercy had never had occasion to wear—to see if the sumptuous garments could be refashioned into something less dated. She had had them, she thought, when she had taken a leisurely tour of the house to reacquaint herself with its winding corridors.

Had she had them in the library? She’d taken a glass of brandy there, while she had sketched in the afternoon sunlight until twilight had begun to purple the sky. At the very least, she had removed her gloves somewhere around then, since the graphite of her pencil lead tended to leave dark stains upon them. And if she had left the gloves there, then there was every chance the rest of her things could be found there as well.

Or so she hoped.

Her stockinged feet slid between carpet runners along the wood floor as she headed toward the library, and Mercy counted herself lucky she’d not crossed paths with anyone. Most especially Thomas, who would no doubt have had words for her general state of dishabille.

The door was closed. Had she closed it behind her when she had left? Ruefully, she had to admit to herself that it didn’t seem likely.

Muted voices rose to meet her ears as she approached. The baroness, her voice just the tiniest bit shrill, tinged with annoyance. “Honestly, Thomas, must you be so ill-tempered? Mercy is a lovely woman, truly. If you could be bothered to spend just a little time in her company—”

“The woman is a goddamned menace, Mother.”

This, followed with a throaty, scathing sound.

Mercy jerked back a step, her heel sliding upon the polished floor. A menace. A menace? That seemed a trifle over-exaggerated. She had known that Thomas had never been particularly fond of her—his propensity to scowl whenever in her presence had been proof positive of that. But a menace?

“Thomas.”

This from the baroness, in a sour hiss. “That was both unkind and uncalled for.”

“I nearly broke my neck simply walking into this room, Mother. The fool woman left her shoes in the damned doorway.”

There was the faint pop of a stopper being pulled from a decanter, then the slosh of liquid dashed into a glass. “She’s driven me to drink, and I’ve been in her company only a handful of hours.”

It shouldn’t have hurt, really. There had been worse said of her. Likely there would be worse said of her to come. She had long become accustomed to not being liked, had given up that futile hope for it years and years ago, when she had failed to make so much as a single friend in London.

But it did hurt. Just a little. Perhaps they had never been friends, but their families had been. At least as much as a family of his station could be said to be friends with one of hers. Marina and Juliet had always been welcome in her home. They’d often invited her to theirs. There had been teas and dinners and even the occasional country dance or dinner party, even if Thomas had rarely attended.

The baroness heaved a sigh, so longsuffering and beleaguered that Mercy had the sense that this was not a new argument, merely a continuation of one which had been brought up time and time again for years. “Thomas, it was at your insistence that Mercy has joined us for the Season.”

“I know,”

Thomas said, and gave a groan so heavy in seemed to resonate even in the hall. “I know. I felt obligated to Mr. Fletcher—in the spirit of neighborly good will, you understand. He wants her married.”

Married? That had to be a lie. Papa had never cared that she hadn’t married. It had been just the two of them for years and years, ever since Mother—

“But who would bother to take her?”

Thomas asked on a scoff. “One cannot turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. The man would have to be mad. Or desperate.”

Just words. Just words. They had only the power she gave to them. But Mercy winced all the same as her fingernails carved crescents into the soft skin of her palms. It wouldn’t have hurt quite so badly if she hadn’t discarded her gloves. Which were, most likely, still in the library. With Thomas and his mother.

“Or,”

the baroness suggested mildly, “possessed of enough sense to recognize a kind, loyal, intelligent woman when he meets her.”

“Mother, the woman causes chaos wherever she goes,”

Thomas said. “It’ll be a damned miracle if I can make it through the Season without strangling her. As it is, I’ll be devoting a not-insignificant portion of my time to finding a husband for a lost cause.”

Really, he’d said nothing she did not already know. So why, then, was her heart lashing against the cage of her ribs? Why had she already taken several large steps backward, as if to distance herself from a blow? Thomas had never liked her. She had known that for years.

But she had never thought he’d loathed her quite so severely.

Her stomach twisted itself into a knot. Without another thought, she turned and fled, her stockinged feet soundless as she skidded down the hall. Away from those terrible words, which had somehow hurt every bit as much as slings and arrows. Away from the echoes of the cruel words that had sent her fleeing from London so many years ago. Just—away.

∞∞∞

The last of the liquor slid down Thomas’ throat with a searing burn, and he set his glass aside at last only to catch sight of a pair of gloves haphazardly draped across a chair. Christ. The damned woman would be naked by nightfall at the rate at which she was shedding her clothing.

“Oh, Thomas,”

Mother sighed. “You have so much of your father in you. Sometimes, I wish you had just a little more of me.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Those damned gloves draped carelessly over the arm of the chair taunted him. Like a glaring symbol of every way in which Mercy Fletcher had failed to conform to societal expectations. He could count off her sins upon the fingers of those gloves, one after another, and still require a roomful of them to spare.

“You are so rigid, Thomas, so unbending.”

Mother wilted into the chair opposite the begloved one, and when her gaze followed his toward the offending accessories, the very corner of her lips quirked up in the hint of a smile. As if such uncouth behavior was something to be fond of. “You expect perfection from others,”

she said, folding her hands in her lap, “the way your father expected it of you. I wonder, Thomas, who you might have been had he ever allowed you to be less than perfect. If you were not always just a little jealous of Mercy, for being less than perfect and loved anyway.”

“What rubbish,”

he said with a scowl, though his eyes lingered still upon the gloves. “I know well enough that I’m not perfect.”

He’d let a villain make off with the family fortune, after all. For all his attentiveness to their financial wellbeing, still he had trusted too much, erred grievously in his assessment of another man’s character.

“No,”

Mother said. “But I have always felt that you punish yourself for it. I suppose I should be grateful that you have allowed myself and the girls a certain amount of grace. Could you not extend just a little of that grace to Mercy?”

What purpose would be served in indulging the little hellion? Rules were rules, and Mercy Fletcher had never met a rule she hadn’t delighted in breaking. He could not believe she was ignorant of them, which could only mean that each departure from the straight and narrow path she ought to have walked had been a deliberate flouting of convention.

Those damned gloves. With a coarse sound, he snatched them from the arm of the chair and shoved them into the depths of his pocket. “She’s not a child to be coddled,”

he snapped. “She’s at least eight and twenty—”

“Seven and twenty, Thomas, as of January. Perhaps, if you had elected to attend her birthday supper, you might have known it.”

The faint narrowing of Mother’s eyes suggested he ought to have known it anyway. “You have been nursing this grudge of yours for nearly twenty years. You decided you hated her within moments of meeting her, and you’ve not swayed an inch from it in all the years since.”

Thomas threw up his hands in aggravation. “She pushed me into a damned pond!”

“She was a child, Thomas, just as you were—and to my recollection, you did not comport yourself particularly well, either.”

Mother brushed at the fall of her skirts, smoothing the lavender fabric of the wrinkles traveling so long in a carriage had pressed into it. “Mercy, at least, had the excuse of having no mother living to teach her social graces. What was yours?”

Only that his father had been a cold, arrogant man who had loathed the very idea of their common—if wealthy—neighbors from the start. A prejudice which he had impressed upon his son. “She’s not a child any longer,”

he said. And yet she was permitted to behave like one. To leave her belongings strewn about the house. To fail to conform to social conventions. To have her trespasses dismissed as mere foibles to be chortled over. “She’s not a child, for all that she behaves like one. She ought to have grown up long ago.”

As he had.

If indeed he had been jealous, it had only been because she had been allowed to be so much freer than he. Than his sisters, or indeed even his mother. That the rules which had long governed their lives had never constrained her in a similar manner. That to all accounts, her father had never rebuked her for aught she did, no matter how shocking.

“It costs nothing to be kind, Thomas,”

Mother said. “Do you think I would have encouraged her friendship with Marina and Juliet if I had thought her character to be lacking? Perhaps Mercy is a bit willful—”

“Spoiled,”

Thomas cast out resentfully. “Pigheaded. Stubborn and reckless.”

“Spirited,”

Mother corrected. “Intelligent and determined. My goodness, Thomas, she spent the afternoon letting the girls choose any gowns they fancied from her dressing room, and you know her father produces the finest fabrics there are to be had. Even if he has been indulgent, it does not mean he has raised a selfish child.”

She gave an abbreviated wistful sigh. “I wish you could unbend just a little. If you could bear to spend more than a few minutes in Mercy’s company, then perhaps you would see her differently.”

“I don’t need to like her to find her a husband,”

Thomas growled.

“Perhaps not, but it couldn’t hurt. If the most flattering thing you can say of her is that she is spoiled and pigheaded, how do you imagine you will persuade any gentleman to call upon her? You must find something in her to admire, Thomas, or no one else will.”

Hell. She was right, after a fashion. And he owed it to Mr. Fletcher to do his damnedest to accomplish the goal which had been set before him. With a sigh, he sank into the chair across from Mother, upon which Mercy’s damned gloves had once rested.

A sharp pain darted up his thigh as something stabbed him, and with a fierce yelp, he shot out of the chair. A pencil fell to the chair, rolling across the upholstered surface to tuck itself up against a small book that had been wedged between the arm and the seat.

The damned woman was trying to kill him.

“Now, Thomas,”

Mother soothed, though there was a certain strained tightness in her voice that made it sound rather as if she had suppressed a chortle. “This is Mercy’s home. We are prevailing upon her father’s hospitality.”

“He is prevailing upon ours,”

Thomas gritted out between clenched teeth as he bent to retrieve the pencil and the little leather-bound book, thumbing it open to skim the pages. “The use of the house is the least he could offer when one considers—”

Mother cleared her throat in disapproval, cutting straight through his words. “I’m certain I taught you better,”

she said, “than to invade someone else’s privacy.”

“It’s a sketchbook, not a diary,”

Thomas said, though of course he couldn’t have known that when he’d opened it. “You can hardly even call it prying—unless you mean to suggest that Miss Fletcher has somehow hidden her private thoughts into pages and pages of nonsensical sketches. See?”

He held the little book aloft, spreading the pages for her perusal. “Not so much as a landscape amongst them. The wretched woman can’t even be bothered to sketch like she ought. It’s all just frills and flourishes.”

No detailed figures; no idyllic gardens or pastoral countryside scenes. Not so much as a face sketched in profile.

Mother stifled a laugh with the tips of her fingers as she rose to her feet once more, her lips twisting in the wry echo of a joke he had missed. “Oh, Thomas,”

she said, with a slow shake of her head. “They’re not nonsense at all. They’re patterns.”

“Patterns?”

he repeated inanely. “Whatever for?”

“Fabrics,”

she said, with a fond pat to his cheek. “Mr. Fletcher’s mills produce the finest silks and the most coveted prints to be had in England. And Mercy, it would seem, produces the patterns for them.”

She gave a little flutter of her fingers toward the open pages revealed within the sketchbook he yet held in his hand. “You’re wearing that one on your waistcoat.”

With a queer sense of shock, Thomas looked down at the patterned cloth of his waistcoat, comparing the intricate curls and flourishes rendered upon it to the strokes of graphite on page held down beneath his thumb.

Hell. It was the same. He’d never paid much attention to his clothing; largely it was his tailor that kept abreast of the current fashions. But it would not surprise him if the man sourced his fabrics from Mr. Fletcher’s businesses. There was a reason Fletcher was so goddamned wealthy.

Apparently, at least a part of that reason was Mercy. How long had he been wearing her patterns without knowing?

“Of course, it must be returned to Mercy immediately,”

Mother said lightly, as she turned toward the door.

“I suppose so,”

he said on a faint grumble, snapping the book closed once more and extending it to her. “Here, you may—”

“Not me, Thomas,”

Mother said with a little sniff of amusement at his presumption. “You. And for God’s sake, my dearest, pigheaded son—be kind.”

She swept out of the room, content to have gotten the last word in.

Thomas sank back into the chair with a groan, rubbing at his temple with one hand. It costs nothing to be kind, Mother had said, and he supposed she was correct. And a damn good thing it was, too, since he hadn’t so much as two pence to rub together.