Page 7 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

Well,”

Mercy said lightly as she rose to her feet, abandoning her needlework. “I believe I shall retire for the evening.”

Her voice had quavered just a little, a muted thrum of some nebulous emotion running through it like a current, and Thomas felt a frown pull at his brows. “It’s hardly gone half past eight,”

he said. “You are aware that we keep town hours, are you not?”

“Of course,”

she said, affecting a breezy tone as her fingers smoothed nervously at her navy skirts. “But the travel, you know—and so much shopping—”

A feigned yawn, and over-exaggerated roll of her shoulders. “Really, I am beyond exhausted.”

She wasn’t. He’d have laid money upon it, though he had not the faintest idea why she would have lied. “It’s best to continue as you mean to go on,”

he said. “We’ll be out quite late for many evening engagements—”

“Thomas,”

Mother hissed, and Mercy’s shoulders stiffened.

What had he said? Even Marina and Juliet had turned frosty gazes upon him, as if he had given some mortal offense. Clearly, they all considered themselves privy to something he’d missed. “Go, then,”

he said. “Good evening, Miss Fletcher.”

Mercy fled. There was simply no other word for it. Her chin dipped down as if in shame, and her fingers caught up handfuls of her skirts, and she fled through the door, her retreating footsteps gaining speed as she careened down the corridor toward the stairs.

A queer silence descended over the drawing room, as if her sudden absence had sucked all of the air, all of the sound from the room. Distantly, there was the echoing slam of a door on another floor. “What the devil’s gotten into her?”

Thomas muttered, slouching in his chair. And then, with a faint scoff, “And she’s left her damned sketchbook again.”

“Language,”

Mother chided, and she slid her hand toward the little book, lifting it from its position upon the couch. “Marina, will you—”

“Yes, of course.”

Marina scrambled to her feet, reaching her hands out for the book.

“I’ll go, too,”

Juliet said, and she linked arms with Marina, casting one last censorious look at Thomas as they quit the room together.

Thomas drained the last of his brandy with a scowl. Sisters. Utterly incomprehensible for a dozen reasons, not the least of which was that they happened to be women. “It cannot require two people deliver one book.”

“It doesn’t,”

Mother said, with a sigh. “But perhaps two friends can give comfort better than one.”

Comfort? “Have you all developed some heretofore unknown predilection for speaking in riddles?”

He pushed himself out of his chair and headed for the sideboard to pour himself a fresh glass of brandy, since it appeared he would be needing it. “You really ought to choose something,”

he said, with a nod toward the stack of letters Mother had discarded. “Juliet will be just devastated if she must wait much longer to make her come-out.”

“Juliet will be even more devastated still,”

Mother said, “if she must make her come-out without one of her dearest friends at her side.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea of what you mean to imply,”

he said, sloshing a healthy measure of liquor into his glass.

“Mercy wasn’t invited, Thomas.”

Not invited? “What the devil do you mean, she wasn’t invited?”

“Exactly that,”

Mother said, a suspiciously moist gleam in her eyes as she lifted the stack of papers and gave them a vicious shake. “Not to any of them. A dozen invitations here, and Mercy has been left off of every one. And I told her—I told her she had naught to worry for. That of course she would be invited. But it seems she knew better than I all along.”

Briefly, he thought of Mercy’s skeptical expression at dinner evening last, how she had managed little more than a bland smile at Mother’s insistence, how very quiet she had been until the conclusion of dinner. She hadn’t believed those assurances, he realized in retrospect.

But perhaps she had hoped, at least until a few moments ago. Reckless and impulsive Mercy might be, but stupid she was not. She was clever enough to have deduced—quite correctly, it seemed—what Mother’s refusal of those invitations which had arrived had signified.

It hadn’t been weariness which had caused her to absent herself so abruptly, as he had suspected. It had been humiliation. Thomas tossed back a swallow of brandy, and the burn of the liquor down his throat justified the wince he gave.

Mother gave a long sigh, liberally inflected with regret. “Do you know,”

she said, “I’m afraid I chided Mercy a few too many times today, for a somewhat gloomy attitude whilst we were engaged with the modiste. Of course, Marina and Juliet were having great fun, but Mercy…I don’t believe Mercy was enjoying herself much at all. And now I can only think that she must have known. All that time, she must somehow have known.”

She’d had a dressing room full of lavish gowns already, for which she had evinced little care. Thomas doubted that he would have put it down to anything other than a surly attitude, either. Besides, he’d never known her to wear much beyond serviceable dresses suitable for tromping about the countryside. There was little call for such extravagant gowns where she spent the majority of her days; perhaps she had simply never accustomed herself to the tedium of standing perfectly still upon a dais while a seamstress pinned up her hem. Enduring tedium had never been one of Mercy’s strong suits.

“What can we do?”

he asked, aware that there was an odd something that tightened his chest, a strange ache just behind his breastbone. Pity? Sympathy? “There must be something—”

“Of course there is,”

Mother said, and there was an edge of steel in the sharpness of her voice. “You needn’t concern yourself, Thomas. Naturally, I shall have to write a great number of responses, but I know well enough how to wield the proper words to rectify this situation. Certainly most—if not all—invitations will be reissued as they ought to have been in the first place, likely explained away as a mistake or an oversight.”

That curious tightness in his chest eased a fraction. Just enough that his next breath came a bit smoother.

“But the worst of it,”

Mother said, “is that they weren’t either. One or two, perhaps, but a dozen? No. And I am just so sorry that Mercy has been the one to suffer for my poor judgment of character.”

Her lips compressed into a grim line, her gaze shied away from his. “She’s a clever woman, you know, Thomas,”

she said softly. “She is going to know, of course, that she was not wanted to begin with.”

∞∞∞

A suspicious thump roused Thomas from a sound slumber. It hadn’t come from the servants’ quarters on the floor above, but from somewhere on the floor below. He levered his elbows beneath him, struggling to sweep the remnants of sleep from his brain as he struggled to recall the layout of the house, what room was positioned beneath his, and for what purpose so odd a sound might have come from it.

The library, he thought. Though what anyone would be doing in the library at this time of night was well beyond him. An intruder? Unlikely; there were rooms on floors beneath with far more valuable things to steal, and even if books were valuable in their own right, their weight relative to their value would make them dubious targets at best.

Another thump. Christ. He was never going to be able to get back to sleep without seeing for himself what was going on below. Blinking into the darkness, Thomas slid out of bed and groped for his spectacles, which he had discarded upon the nearest nightstand.

They slid onto his face somewhat less comfortably than he would have preferred, but that was to be expected with a bent frame. His trousers sat, folded neatly, upon the chair placed before the hearth, and he stumbled into them clumsily, his limbs still stiff with interrupted sleep. He snatched his banyan off the back of the chair and slung it on over his shoulders, grumbling beneath his breath as he headed for the door.

Now, mostly awake, rather more dressed than he would have liked to be for the time of night, and surly to have been yanked unceremoniously from a pleasant sleep, he could admit to himself that he was as certain as it was possible for a man to be whom he would find within the library.

Mercy. It was always Mercy, like a stubborn thorn in his side. Sometimes, he thought she had some bit of the devil in her, that she derived a perverse sort of enjoyment from provoking him.

He tromped down the stairs one at a time, peering down the hall as he arrived on the floor below. Just as he’d expected, there was a glow of light beneath the closed door of the library. With a sigh of resignation as he approached, he pushed it open with one hand, and it swung in a broad arc back toward the wall. “Miss Fletcher, what the devil are you doing?”

Another thump, this time beneath the desk near the window, and the whole thing gave a vicious rattle at the strike—as if she’d struck her head against the underside when she startled at his intrusion. “Ouch. Fucking hell,”

came a distinctly feminine growl, though Mercy remained unseen, concealed beneath the desk.

Despite himself, a startled, incredulous laugh eked out of his throat. “I sincerely hope you are not using that sort of language around my sisters.”

What the hell was she doing beneath the desk?

“Don’t be absurd,”

Mercy said in a scathing, if somewhat drunken-sounding mutter. “They’ve taught me more foul language that I ever learned of my own accord.”

Now who was being absurd? “Impossible. Where would they have had occasion to learn it?”

His eyes strayed to the surface of the desk. The sketchbook open upon its surface, a half-completed pattern forming upon the page, lines smooth and steady despite the apparent inebriation of their architect. The decanter of liquor, noticeably depleted from the last time he’d seen it. The glass set beside it, with but a few drops of amber liquid coating the bottom.

Christ. A part of him wanted to be angry, to launch into yet another lecture on the impropriety of over-imbibing. The best he could manage was a vague exasperation. Probably if he had been so humiliated as she had been this evening, he’d have been tempted to find solace at the bottom of a bottle, too.

A faint tingle slid up the back of his neck, prickling the hairs there. In fact, he had done just that only too recently, the very evening prior to her ill-fated hot air balloon ride. Perhaps they had a little more in common than he had ever cared to consider.

“Naturally they learned it from you,”

came the drawl of her reply. “I’m given to understand sisters are very good at eavesdropping. Have you seen my pencil?”

Befuddled, Thomas could only inquire, “Your what?”

“My pencil. I dropped it.”

Another hard thunk, which rattled the surface of the desk and set the pages of her sketchbook to quivering. “Ouch!”

A queer, effervescent feeling bubbled up in his chest, and Thomas coughed into the cup of his hand before another unexpected laugh could escape. “You might try waiting until you’re out from beneath the desk to attempt standing,”

he suggested.

“When I desire your advice, I will request it.”

The grumbly-surly reply preceded a catch of her breath and a strange fumbling sound. Her right hand appeared first, gripping the edge of the desk, and then at last she hoisted herself up from the floor and collapsed back into the chair, pencil clutched in her left hand.

She’d left off the dressing gown this time, and the rumpled linen of her nightdress had, in her efforts to retrieve the pencil that had fallen beneath the desk, coasted somewhat sideways, the sleeve near to falling off her left shoulder. She puffed her frizzy hair away from her eyes, kept her head bent, and wielded her pencil like a dagger as she surveyed the half-completed pattern with a detached gaze. “Leave me be, Thomas. I have patterns to finish.”

His brows inched higher. “At half past three in the morning?”

“No time like the present. Often I find myself unable to sleep at regular hours. I am choosing to use my time productively instead.”

When he did not then absent himself from her presence, she gave a muted sigh of resignation and sank unsteadily into her chair once more. “By all means, then,”

she said in tones rife with encroaching exhaustion. “Get on with it. A lecture, perhaps, on the impropriety of a lady drinking spirits, or being out of bed at such an hour, or—or wandering the house in such a state of undress. You need not hold your tongue on my account. Say what you will. You always do.”

If he were honest with himself, he could hardly recall a time he had not had something recriminatory to say of her or to her. She was not wrong in her assessment, and for the first time he was forced to admit that he had been rigid and unbending and—perhaps a bit more of a starchy, high-strung arse than he would have liked to acknowledge even to himself.

A man in the image of his father. The sort of man whom people tended to tiptoe around as if they were walking upon eggshells, leery of taking any action which might provoke disapproval. The sort of man who was close to no one, who could find fault in anything. The sort of man who could turn his son into a stammering, anxious mess with only a look, whose censure was legendary, and who had not been particularly missed by his family after his death.

Was that truly the sort of man he wanted to be, so cold and unforgiving that Mercy truly could not consider a possibility that existed in which he did not intend to take her to task for some infraction or other? Would he wish for Marina or Juliet to marry a man in Father’s image? In the one he had cultivated for himself?

Hell, no.

“In fact, I have got something to say,”

he said, and he caught the arm of a wingback chair, dragged it across the floor toward the desk, and cast himself into it. “Pour me a glass.”

∞∞∞

“You bear a remarkable resemblance to a badger.”

Mercy blinked, nonplussed, and paused in the act of replacing the stopper back into the neck of the decanter. “That’s quite a rude thing to say to a woman who has kindly poured you a drink.”

The temptation hovered to cast it into his face, but she doubted she could aim well enough at this point. Things had gone a bit soft and wibbly, and she was certain if she had so much as another drop of brandy herself, there would quite suddenly be two Thomases to contend with, when one was quite enough to manage already.

“Well, it’s what I wanted to say. And it is true, besides. You’ve smeared graphite all over your face.”

He took the glass from her hand, took a small sip. A cautious one, she thought.

“What?”

She lifted her hands and stared down at the right one, which had somehow ended up covered in a thick sheen of pencil lead. “Why did you not tell me?”

“Because it was amusing.”

He gave a careless shrug, but there lingered the tiniest hint of satisfaction in the very corner of his mouth. “You said you often find yourself unable to sleep. Is this a frequent occurrence, then?”

he asked, with a vague gesture of his hand, which she guessed was meant to encapsulate the whole of the situation—the room, the liquor. Her.

“I do not frequently drink to excess,”

she sniffed, uncertain whether or not she was meant to be offended. “But I am frequently awake at odd hours.”

“Hmm.”

His glass dangled from his fingertips, and that was curiosity etched into the lines of his face rather than judgment. “Why?”

Why? “How the devil should I know? Have you not ever found yourself unable to sleep?”

“Yes, of course. But I would not describe it as a frequent occurrence. It’s curious that you would.”

“Well, I don’t know why.”

The query itself seemed to scratch at something in her brain, prodding uncomfortably close to a tender area. A sense of abnormality that had been with her all her life. “I have always been this way. I did not choose it,”

she said, defensively. Crawling out of her bed even as a child to walk deserted corridors when her brain had just felt too busy for sleep to settle in. Sometimes nodding off around dawn, if she were lucky to snatch at perhaps a few hours of sleep before she was woken for breakfast.

“I didn’t intend to imply that you had.”

Another small sip from his glass, as if the brandy had been little more than a ritual in which to participate. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, his dark eyes were a little too sharp, a little too keen.

Mercy rubbed at her tired eyes, remembering too late the graphite smearing her face. “Get on with it,”

she said. “The lecture.”

“I don’t want to lecture you.”

“What rubbish,”

she said with an inelegant snort. “Of course you do. You always lecture.”

“I—”

Thomas hesitated, a wrinkle of a frown appearing between the arches of his brows. “I suppose I do, don’t I?”

he mused, almost to himself. “Well. I don’t mean to do it this evening. May I see your sketchbook?”

“For what reason?”

Mercy inquired, laying her hands over it protectively.

“Curiosity,”

he said. “I thumbed through it once before—”

Her fingers curled tighter around it at the reminder. “Which was not very good of you to do.”

Thomas had the good grace to affect an abashed expression, pitching his shoulders in a shrug. “No, I suppose not,”

he allowed. “Even so, I was impressed. Your sketches were precise, exact. I could see where the pattern was meant to be repeated, how the lines would join from one block print to the next. How did you learn to do it by hand, with only a pencil?”

“I don’t know. Practice, I suppose.”

Years of it. Her first patterns had been inspired, but inelegant. They had required the talents of others to adjust them to suit the printing blocks and rollers used in Papa’s factories. Now, she could simply see the repeats in her head, create a pattern with seamless lines with only the stroke of her pencil across the page.

“I once visited a fabric mill in which I briefly considered investing,”

he said. “Not your father’s; he’s never been much in need of investment. But the patterns on offer were clumsily rendered, poorly aligned. It had the regrettable tendency to make the prints look cheap, which is why I declined to invest. It’s clear enough that yours are done with far more care.”

That had sounded remarkably like praise, and for a moment Mercy almost wondered if her brandy-clouded brain had invented it. But since he had expressed some manner of interest… “Incidentally,”

she said, contriving to keep her voice light and steady, passably nonchalant, “I shall have to meet with the mill manager to pass along my latest patterns.”

Thomas’ dark brows drew down, interest replaced with severity. The imperious lord of the manor once again. “Out of the question.”

“It wasn’t a question to begin with. I was merely being courteous enough to inform you of my intentions.”

“I am informing you that it is not done. No respectable unmarried lady would do such a thing.”

“I should think it has been made rather clear this evening that I am not respectable, by the standards of your social set.”

Her fingers itched to reach for the brandy decanter—or perhaps Thomas’ throat.

For a moment Thomas said nothing, though she could hear already in her head the suspicious cadence of the question he would no doubt pose next: What did you do to give that impression? Because it would have to be her fault, to his mind.

But the question never came. Instead he said, “I take it your last Season was not a particularly pleasant one.”

“Not particularly,”

she said, somewhat surprised that he had avoided reaching for the low-hanging fruit of a judgmental quip. She had, after all, practically placed it within his reach herself. “I don’t care to discuss it.”

Another sip of his brandy, and he swirled the remaining liquor in his glass, peering down at it as if he might divine the solution to a problem from the bottom of it. “It is a fact—albeit I understand an unpleasant one—that certain things are simply not done by ladies. I am not telling you that you cannot meet with your father’s manager to be difficult or contrary, but because it would be injurious to your reputation to do so.”

Frustration snarled Mercy’s breath in her lungs. “They are expected,”

she said. “Papa would have delivered them, had he come to town. But as he has not—”

“I am telling you that you cannot deliver them in person,”

Thomas said. “Not that they will not be delivered.”

He held out his hand expectantly. “I have recently been in contact with your father’s solicitor. I’ll see them passed along at the next opportunity.”

“Mr. Sumner?”

she asked. “You’ve been in contact with Mr. Sumner?”

“Yes. He came round only an hour or so after we arrived in London, and assured me he would make himself available if there were anything required of him. Can he be trusted to deliver your patterns?”

“Of course.”

Mercy blew out a breath of relief. She uncurled her fingers from the protective cage they had formed over her sketchbook, peeling it off the desk, hesitating for a moment before she handed it over. “You will truly…see that it gets to Mr. Sumner?”

“I’m not entirely unreasonable,”

he said, and he set his unfinished glass aside to receive the sketchbook she set into his hands. “I understand the import of your work to your father’s business. I’ll see that it gets where it must.”

His thumb edged beneath the cover, and his eyes lifted to hers. “May I?”

He had already, she supposed. “If you like,” she said.

One by one, he flipped pages, studying the patterns drawn upon them. “You have a good eye for design,”

he said. “I suppose you must know that, given how well your patterns sell. The lines are very clean.”

“Papa’s machinery is the best there is to be had,”

she said. “Some of those—the more elaborate ones—will be woven into silk brocade. But the simpler ones will print well upon cotton.”

Crisp, clean lines, with quality dyes that would not bleed so severely as they might otherwise.

“They truly are well done,”

he mused, almost absently, as he flipped pages. “You have a gift, here.”

And again, Mercy found herself at a loss for words. Probably, she thought, it was the most civil conversation they’d ever had.