Page 5 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

Mercy poked at the filet of sole upon her plate with the tines of her fork, her appetite vanishing as the dinner conversation had turned from idle chatter to speculation upon the Season. It couldn’t be helped, of course—it was to be Juliet’s very first, and she could hardly blame the girl for her excitement.

She had once been every bit as enthusiastic, until that enthusiasm had been crushed out of her.

“Thomas, do you think we shall have callers tomorrow?”

Juliet inquired, squirming in her seat like an overexcited puppy.

“Doubtful,”

Thomas returned between bites of fish smothered in a creamy pepper sauce. “We’ve only just arrived. In a few days, perhaps, once it is known we’re in town.”

The baroness waved away her dish, laying her fork down. “It’s known,” she said.

“How could it be?”

“Thomas,”

the baroness said patiently, “we are newly arrived to town, and already a bit late for the start of the Season, mind you. Add to that the fact that we are staying in a home not our own, and with dear Mercy added to our number—of course I had to write to inform our friends of our current circumstances.”

Thomas’ brows arched above the frames of his spectacles. “So soon?”

“Naturally,”

the baroness replied. “Else how would anyone know where or when to call upon us? Half a dozen letters at most, but unless I miss my guess—which I think we both know I never do—then our arrival to town will be known by morning at the very latest.”

She accepted a fresh glass of wine from a servant waiting in the wings, and added, “We don’t want to miss out on the best invitations simply because no one knows we are in town.”

Juliet made a giddy little sound, her blond curls bobbing. “Shall we attend a ball this very week, do you think, Mama?”

“I have no doubt but that we shall receive invitations,”

the baroness said. “Whether or not we shall accept them is in question. Of course, Mercy will require a new wardrobe in advance of our attendance—”

“I’ve instructed my solicitor to arrange an appointment with a modiste,”

Thomas said. “I believe it’s scheduled for tomorrow.”

“Oh, but a good gown takes so much time to produce,”

Marina said. “Why, our wardrobes alone required weeks, Thomas, if you’ll recall.”

Had Thomas flinched? Odd, that. Mercy cleared her throat. “There is no need to arrange your social schedules to accommodate me,”

she said. “I’m perfectly content to remain at home.”

At least until they had gone out for an evening’s engagement. It would be ever so much more convenient to slip out of the house unnoticed when there was no one at home to notice.

“Don’t be absurd,”

Thomas said, his voice dropping to a faintly surly tenor. “A suitable wardrobe is a necessity, and we’ll visit multiple shops to acquire quickly one for you if we must. You’ll need some things immediately, of a certainty, but I suppose the bulk of it could be produced over the course of the Season, delivered as they are completed. Money buys such convenience, after all.”

Money bought a great deal of things, but respectability was not one of them. One had to be born into that, or else well-connected enough to borrow against someone else’s. Papa had had the money to purchase entrée into certain homes before. Not the finest, perhaps, but those which had deemed him a useful acquaintance for one reason or another.

But there wasn’t enough money in the world to purchase social acceptance. Even if a few families had admitted them, it hadn’t meant the other guests had done anything other than to tolerate their presence.

Vulgar. Common. Upstart.

These words and more had been whispered in her hearing behind fluttering fans or clenched teeth. People staring at her as if she were an oddity, a curiosity. Pulling their skirts away as she passed by, as if she might contaminate them—when the vast majority of them wore fabrics which had been produced by one of her father’s mills, cloth woven with patterns of Mercy’s own devising.

How was it possible to covet the creations and spurn the creator? It had struck her as bizarre, even hypocritical. The strange dichotomy of valuing wealth, but only when one’s own hands were not sullied in the process of its accumulation, had perplexed her. It hadn’t been until much later that she had understood that it had never been about her, really. It had been about Papa’s affluence. That he had been so gauche, so audacious as to earn his riches instead of having been born to them.

“Mercy?”

The faint stridence to Marina’s voice suggested that this had not been the first attempt to reclaim her attention—only the first to elicit the desired response.

Mercy blinked, jarred from the depths of her thoughts, unnervingly aware of the eyes now upon her, ostensibly awaiting a response to some query that had been posed. “My apologies,”

she said, feeling the burn of embarrassment heating her cheeks. “I suppose I was woolgathering.”

Marina managed a smile, as if in an effort to sooth Mercy’s mortification. “I was only wondering,”

she said, “whom we might expect to call upon you?”

“Call upon me?”

Somehow, she had lost the threads of the conversation completely.

“It has been quite some time since you’ve last been in town, has it not?”

Marina inquired, with a guileless tilt of her head. “I daresay you’ll have dozens of old acquaintances to renew.”

Oh. Mercy supposed she couldn’t blame Marina for the misunderstanding. She’d been just fifteen when Mercy had had her Season years ago—little more than a child, with a child’s understand of such things. Marina had been born to this world, after all, and had spent a good portion of each year in town, making friends with the daughters of the aristocracy, preparing to take her place within it.

She had no idea what it was like to be an outsider to it. Nobody snubbed the daughter of a baron. Nobody had ever suggested she did not belong within polite society. And Mercy had never told her of her own experiences, for fear of tainting that romanticized version of it that Marina had always held so dear. A kindness, she had thought, not to burden the girl with experiences she would likely never know herself.

“No. There’s no one,”

Mercy heard herself say, though the light, nonchalant tone she had intended to employ had fallen somewhat flat. “I’m afraid I wasn’t in London long enough to make many friends, and it has been so long besides. I doubt much of anyone remembers me.”

Now that was likely not strictly true, but those that did would most certainly not recall her fondly. “That is to say, I don’t expect to have callers,”

she said between sips of wine to soothe her parched throat. “Or invitations.”

“Of course you shall have invitations,”

Juliet said, with a tiny furrow of her brow. “We’ll be just swimming in them. We were last Season, though I wasn’t yet out in society to attend any events myself.”

Yes; Mercy expected the Armitage family would receive a great deal of invitations. It was just that she didn’t expect to be included.

The baroness slid a sympathetic look across the table. “Not to worry,”

she said, in that fond, maternal tone that Mercy had always found comforting. “I’ve let it be known that I am sponsoring you for the Season. It would be the height of discourtesy to exclude you.”

Mercy managed a bland smile and a noncommittal response, and let the baroness believe she had been convinced. But her stomach pitched and rolled like the bowl of blancmange which had been set before her to mark the conclusion of the meal, unable to shake the suspicion that the baroness was soon to discover just how discourteous her social set could truly be to those they considered lesser than themselves.

∞∞∞

“Damned woman cannot help herself but to be entirely exasperating,”

Thomas muttered to himself as he prowled the halls of the grand house. Exasperating when she was present—and exasperating even when she was not.

Which she ought to have been. Or rather, she ought not to be any longer, because she was meant to be out with Mother, Marina, and Juliet at the modiste. Only she had failed to arrive to breakfast, and thereafter failed to make her way downstairs in a timely manner as the time of her scheduled appointment approached.

With two other girls bristling over with enthusiasm to shepherd into the waiting carriage, Mother had not had the time to hunt down her missing charge, and so that duty had fallen upon Thomas’ shoulders. Blast it, how was it possible that he had lost the wretched woman in less than twenty-four hours?

His boots pounded upon the stairs as he dashed up them, producing hollow-sounding thumps that echoed with the force of his discontent. Her room was on the fourth floor at the very end of the hall overlooking the garden; a fact which he had only filed away because it was directly above Mr. Fletcher’s study, which had made attempting to sort through his correspondence the afternoon prior a difficult endeavor over the excitable shrieks and giddy stamps of feet above his head. Choosing dresses from amongst whatever Mercy had had in her dressing room, he supposed, as Mother had said.

He’d have to talk to her about that, as well. When he found the blasted woman.

He struck his fist against the solid mahogany of her door, which could not possibly have gone unnoticed. “Miss Fletcher,”

he shouted through it, uncertain if the silence from within was due to its vacancy or the thickness of the door. Hell. There wasn’t time to wait.

The door opened silently, the hinges well-oiled. A single walking boot lay perhaps three inches from the door, turned over upon its side. A silk stocking dripped down the back of a wingback chair set before the hearth. Drawers in various states of closure poked from a massive dresser. Across the room, a massive four-poster bed sat against the wall, curtains haphazardly cast back, blue velvet counterpane spilling over the side of the mattress in a lazy fall toward the rich rug spread across the floor. The room looked as if it had been upended, shaken, and set back in its place none too gently.

And it was empty. Of course.

“Miss Fletcher?”

he called again, and his foot crossed the threshold of the room with only the vague sense that he was doing something he ought not—which wouldn’t matter a whit, truly, provided she was not in the room.

Another door stood ajar within, and the light spilling in through the window illuminated a dressing room stuffed to its gills with gowns, fine fabrics glittering with silver and gold thread in the thick stream of sunlight that fell upon them.

For a moment, Thomas found himself nearly dazzled. Everyone knew Fletcher was wealthy. Some might even have said obscenely so. But this—this was so far beyond ostentatious.

Somehow he’d crossed the room and thrown open the dressing room door without having consciously done it. Small wonder Marina and Juliet had shrieked fit to wake the dead. There had to be at least fifty gowns crammed into the room—all woefully outdated, unless he missed his guess, but made of the finest cloth.

Mercy had left them behind? A bloody fortune in gowns, and she had left them all in town? He could not recall seeing her in anything but day dresses for years. But the gowns she had abandoned were fit for a damned princess. What woman in her right mind would have simply left them?

A muted gasp from somewhere behind him. And then Mercy’s voice, infuriated, incredulous: “What are you doing in my room?”

The back of his neck heated with mortification to have been caught snooping. Somehow, through sheer dint of will, Thomas shoved the feeling down, recalled his own outrage. “Looking for you,”

he said as he snapped the dressing room door shut. “Have you any idea of what time it is?”

he asked as he turned to face her.

Mercy stood in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest, cheeks glowing with a flush of fury. Still in her nightclothes, though at least she’d had the good sense—what little of it she seemed to possess—to have donned a dressing gown. Her bare toes curled into the plush rug that had been laid across the floor. She gave a sniff and a toss of her head that sent her untidy plait sliding over her shoulder, little flyaway strands suggesting that she hadn’t so much as run a brush through it since she’d woken. “I haven’t, really,” she said.

“It’s nearly noon,”

he ground out. “You didn’t even bother to come down to breakfast.”

“I forgot,”

she said, with a challenging lift of her chin.

“You forgot,”

he echoed, skeptical. “You forgot breakfast.”

“It is perfectly possible to forget, when one does not find oneself possessed of much of an appetite!”

Thomas threw his hands up in aggravation. “Mother and the girls are already in the carriage,”

he said. “Waiting upon you—and you haven’t even bothered to dress. I suppose you conveniently forgot you were meant to have an appointment with the modiste today as well.”

For a moment her mouth gave a queer little tremble, her chin dropping an inch or so as her shoulders pinched higher. “I’m sorry. I truly did forget,”

she said in a muted murmur, her dark eyes drifting away from his, her gaze sliding across the floor as if she could not bear to meet his. “I won’t be a moment. Please tell them I’ll be down directly.”

Something uncomfortably akin to guilt settled in his gut. “Make your apologies to them yourself,”

he said tersely. “In the future, I trust you can be relied upon to be prompt. I have neither the time nor the inclination to chase you down for every forgotten engagement.”

The color in her cheeks burned hotter still. “I will be ready,”

she said in a low grumble, “as soon as you remove yourself from my room. In the future, I would appreciate it if you did not go pawing through my things.”

Hardly pawing. The worst of which he could be accused was further opening a door which had already been opened. And perhaps invading the privacy of her room—which would not have been necessary, had she bothered to recall her appointment.

There was simply no point in arguing, when each moment he wasted was one more it would take her to ready herself. And she could not do that while he yet lingered within her room. “Make it quick,”

he said frostily, and she edged out of his way as he headed for the door, ignoring the scathing little sound she made in the back of her throat.

He’d nearly crossed the threshold when he recalled the dressing room full of gowns. “Miss Fletcher,”

he said severely, one hand wrapped around the door hand, “as generous as I am certain you meant your offer to be, I would remind you that my sisters are well provided for. They do not wear anyone’s cast-off clothing.”

As he closed the door slowly behind him, a faint disappointment curled in his chest. He’d expected more ire from her. Instead he’d received only a studiously blank look and a grim silence. That unexpected quiet, thick and unsettling, followed him as he retreated down the hall. As if, with that one glance, she had set him adrift in a formless fog of shame.

He’d said nothing particularly untoward, to his recollection. Someone had had to take her to task, to impress upon her the carelessness of her actions. So why had he been left feeling rather like he’d kicked a puppy?