Page 8 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

I’m not going to ask,”

Thomas said as he walked into the drawing room late in the afternoon, picking a delicate path around the fabric had been strewn about across nearly every available surface, including the floor. “I’m certain I don’t want to know.”

Marina lifted a pair of silver scissors in her hand and snipped the blades in the air. “We are repurposing some of Mercy’s old things,” she said.

“I did say I wasn’t going to ask.”

For Christ’s sake, the room looked like a modiste’s shop had exploded within it. Loose lace dripped from the tables, scraps of fabric draped across every chair and couch to the point that they all looked as if they had been reupholstered by a decorator who had gone mad, and—were those Mercy’s shoes wedged beneath a stack of gowns? “Where has Miss Fletcher gone, then?”

“Out to the garden,”

Juliet said. “She lost patience for ripping seams about four gowns ago.”

Yet again, Mercy was walking about absent appropriate footwear. “And she does not mind you ruining her old gowns?”

“Why, no,”

Juliet said. “It was her suggestion. The gowns are years out of style, Thomas—but the fabric is still quite valuable. These patterns are just impossible to find these days in such perfect condition.”

And yet Mercy had sacrificed them to the girls so easily. Probably because her last Season had not been a pleasant one for her, given the cold reception she had gotten from the Ton, the certainty she had had that she would not be welcomed into their hallowed halls. Perhaps the gowns had meant little more to her than bad memories best forgotten.

Thomas cleared his throat, uncomfortably aware of the strange tightness within it. “Are they really so valuable, then?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,”

Marina enthused, and she abandoned her scissors to sort through a bundle of fabrics—snipped skirts, he assumed—which she had laid aside. “These ones, here, especially. Ladies went mad for them, Thomas. They sold out just everywhere. I was furious with you for nearly a month because your tailor had one of these patterns made into a waistcoat, and I couldn’t manage to get a gown out of it. There just wasn’t any left to be had.”

“Really?”

He’d had no idea. But then, he’d never paid much attention to his clothing. His tailor had always made excellent decisions on his behalf.

“I suppose Mercy must’ve gotten first pick of them,”

Marina said. “The fashion went out of style, but the fabric hasn’t. It’s become something of a status symbol, I suppose. Even if they can’t be seen in such dated old gowns, many ladies don’t wish to part with the fabric itself. They want people to remember that they were lucky enough to own it from the first. I’ve seen it turned into all manner of accessories—decoration for coats and waistcoats, children’s clothing, skirts and hats and even hair ribbons trimmed with lace.”

She spread her fingers over the top of the fabric, the colors still clear and bold from years spent tucked away out of the sun. “We were thinking of making some accessories for Mercy,”

she said. “In return for her generosity. She should have something to show for these gowns, don’t you think?”

Hell. He’d known—in the general sense of an older brother of younger sisters—that the girls had always been friendly with Mercy. Childhood friends, quite literally; the sort of friendship he had once assumed would fizzle out as they had aged, due to their differing stations. He’d always had the misguided idea that their friendship had forged of necessity, since the Fletchers had been their nearest neighbors in the countryside. And maybe that had been the case, when they’d been children.

But it wasn’t now. Mercy had become family to them. Thick as thieves, the three of them. And she had been good to them. For them, even. Perhaps she had been a better sister—if not by blood—to the girls than he had ever been a brother.

And he’d never known it. Because he had never bothered to see it for himself. Always he’d had something better to do, some bit of business to manage, or otherwise a general disinterest in dinner parties and country dances and the activities of giddy young girls.

Of course he had always loved his sisters. But Mercy, he thought, knew them. In a way he did not, and never had. And they knew her, far better than he ever had but for the assumptions he had made of her.

“Yes,”

he said, and he found that he actually meant the word. “Yes, she should have something to show for them.”

Because, he thought, that was what sisters were meant to do for one another. Turn something wretched into something lovely.

∞∞∞

“I’m seven and twenty years old,”

Mercy said to herself beneath her breath as she dressed in an old gown; a nondescript brown one which was not handsome but was at least serviceable and clean. “I am permitted to leave the house on my own if I please.”

It was true. She was well beyond the age of majority. So far beyond it, in fact, that she could only imagine what people would say of her this Season. At least at her last she had had the luxury of being young, just eighteen, a perfectly appropriate age for a woman to be on the marriage mart. Seven and twenty was practically ancient by comparison.

There was a difference, she knew, between the permissible and the appropriate. A woman of good reputation did not leave her home unaccompanied at such an hour. In fact, a woman of good reputation left her home at such an hour only if she were engaged for a particular event—which she was not this evening.

But she would be, and the thought sank into her stomach like a ball of lead. She would be. Because the baroness had received a handful of amended invitations just this afternoon, and she had found her social schedule decidedly fuller than she would have preferred. Than she had even expected.

Apparently, Papa had been quite correct—the baroness wielded no small amount of social influence. Enough of it to make Mercy’s presence alongside the Armitage family a small price to pay for their continued good will.

Unfortunately, the prospect of a long Season just stuffed to the gills with social events would make Mercy’s own plans a bit more difficult to accommodate. Tonight would be the last night for a week or better that Mercy expected to have a free evening. It had to be tonight.

Still, her nerves had frayed just a little at the edges at the thought. She knew her way around the city—in theory, if not so much in practice. She had a handful of coin in her reticule. She could hire out a hack if necessary. Between her unremarkable appearance, the cloak she had dawned, and the fact that she hadn’t really been much in London in nearly a decade, she was highly unlikely to be recognized.

But still as she crept down the stairs came the vague sense that she was doing something wrong. The Armitages would not approve. Neither would Papa, she knew, no matter how doting he tended to be. He might let her have her way in all manner of things, but this—this she had not even considered sharing with him.

It might well break his heart.

The creak of a board upon the staircase drew a wince from her, unnaturally loud in the silence of midnight. The hair at the nape of her neck lifted as she heard the thud of shoes within Papa’s study, and with a dawning sense of horror she watched the shadows shift in the faint light which crept beneath the door.

Too late to flee; the door had opened, smoothly, silently. Thomas poked his head out of the room, adjusting his crooked spectacles upon his face as he peered out into the hall. His eyes narrowed minutely as his gaze landed upon her—fully dressed to go out, at an hour such as this.

“No,”

he said, his jaw firming. “Whatever you are meant to be doing, just—no.”

“I beg your pardon,”

Mercy said, lifting her chin in challenge. “I am of age to do as I please.” So there.

The door closed behind him as he stepped fully out into the hallway. “This isn’t the goddamned countryside,”

he returned in a fierce whisper. “The streets are filled with thieves and footpads after dark, and ladies do not leave their homes at such an hour unaccompanied. It simply is not done.”

His eyes narrowed behind the lenses of his spectacles as he looked her over once more, his brows descending as he noted her plain dress, her unremarkable cloak. “Just where is it that you are intending to go?”

For a moment, Mercy gawped like a fish. “For—for a walk.”

A snort. “You’re lying, and you’re not even particularly good at it.”

That was hardly fair; she hadn’t had to do terribly much lying in her life. Nor had she expected to meet him in the halls. How could she have had a ready excuse available to give to him? “You cannot stop me from walking out the door,” she said.

“I beg to differ,”

he said, folding his arms over his chest. “I’ve got at least five stone on you. I could heft you straight over my shoulder and lock you within your room if it pleased me to do so. Speaking of your room, I would suggest you return to it at once of your own accord.”

Mercy pursed her lips against the rash desire to argue, which she knew from experience would avail her nothing. There was simply neither point nor sense in doing so, when Thomas had plainly made up his mind.

But he had not credited her with half so much cleverness or ingenuity as she deserved, and in his arrogance he would no doubt think his point had been made and she had meekly accepted his judgment. So she would let him think what he would and do as she pleased regardless. “Good night, then, my lord,”

she said, and turned upon her heel to ascend the stairs, feeling the burn of his gaze straight at her back as she went up, up, up—

And out the window instead.

∞∞∞

Mercy hadn’t precisely slammed her door, but she had certainly closed it with enough force for the sound to echo down the staircase. It had seemed almost recriminatory, that sound, and damned if it hadn’t brought with it the faintest stirrings of guilt.

Between the two of them, Thomas was in the right, and he damned well knew it. Any number of terrible things could happen to a woman walking the streets of London alone after dark. It hadn’t been cruelty or stubbornness that had compelled him to put his foot down.

It had just been simple, honest concern.

Naturally, Mercy—who had become accustomed to a good deal more freedom in the countryside than even his sisters had been allowed—would take issue with it. But she hadn’t the experience with the city that he had.

His eyes drifted to the corner of the desk, where a pair of gloves had rested for the past few days. Mercy’s gloves; the ones he’d found discarded in the library that first afternoon. He’d meant to return them to her before now. He simply hadn’t gotten round to it yet.

Hell. Might as well do it now, while he knew she was still awake. And then perhaps he could apologize for being so overbearing and attempt to impress upon her once more the risks she courted with such reckless actions. In the countryside, the worst she could expect to encounter was an adder, if she were particularly unwary where she set her feet.

In London, if she happened to traverse the wrong street, she might well lose her life.

Thomas scooped up the gloves and tucked them into his pocket on his way out of the office. He’d been in a foul mood even before he’d caught her attempting to sneak out of the house, and perhaps he’d snapped at her a bit too severely, forced her onto the defensive when he might have attempted a civil conversation.

She hadn’t truly deserved it, he reasoned as he proceeded up the stairs. She simply did not know any better—or at least she had never had to know any better. They lived beneath different sets of rules, she and his sisters. And Mercy had not, in the entire time he had known her, had a mother to guide her the way the girls had. She and her father had lost her even before they had moved to their countryside estate.

Thomas paused there before her door, his hand lifted to knock. Be kind, Mother had said to him, only too recently. And he hadn’t been, he realized—not ever, really. Perhaps he did have too much of his father in him. Perhaps he had become too much like his father. The very thought nearly provoked a shudder.

He wrapped his other hand around the gloves within his pocket and withdrew them, the fabric soft and cool in the clutch of his fingers. Just like Mercy, they were imperfect. A tiny splotch of ink upon the left thumb. The grey of graphite upon the side of the right one. A fraying thread poking through a seam that had begun to come loose. Almost charming, in a peculiar sort of way. He had the strangest sense that, were a great number of items laid out before him, he would be able to simply know, instinctively, which of them belonged to Mercy.

He rapped the door with his knuckles and pitched his voice low. “Mercy?”

There came no response. Odd, since it had not been quite five minutes since he’d sent her back upstairs again. She had to be awake. And yet there was nothing from behind the door—none of the sounds he ought to have expected of a woman preparing herself for bed from full dress. No crackle of the hearth, no movement whatsoever; not even a snore.

It was just…quiet.

Too quiet.

The hairs upon his arms and the nape of his neck lifted with a queer sensation; rather like someone had walked across his grave. He eased the door open and peered within.

The window was open. And Mercy was gone.