Page 9 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

In hindsight, as Mercy gazed up at her bedchamber window upon her return, she understood that she had made several small but crucial mistakes.

The first had been being caught upon the stairway, naturally. She had never cultivated the particular skill of sneaking, but then she had never really had to. Papa had never begrudged her the occasional midnight walk—or ride, if she had been so inclined. There wasn’t much mischief into which one might become embroiled in the countryside, other than misjudging the boundaries of Papa’s property and accidentally trespassing onto the neighboring Armitage estate.

The second had been in her failure to lock her bedchamber door. Certainly, if she had done so, she would not now find herself in her present predicament. Which was the complete inability to crawl back through her window the same way she had left it. She had, in fact, made it all the way up the trellis—which had creaked something dreadful, given that she heartily suspected it had in no way been fashioned to support the weight of an adult woman—only to find it closed and firmly latched against her. And as there were still several hours left until dawn, she very much doubted that it had been the work of a maid.

The third mistake was in the fact that she had left her house key sitting upon her nightstand. She hadn’t meant to do it, of course. She’d set it out quite deliberately, with the intention to place it within her reticule. Only she had never done so—and since she had not left through the front door, she hadn’t placed herself in the position to check for it until she’d returned home to find herself locked out entirely.

No conveniently open window. No key. And unless Mercy’s eyes deceived her, between the heavy curtains of the drawing room there came tiny flashes of dim light, as of a lamp set upon a table. As of someone lying in wait to ambush her upon her return.

Thomas. It had to be.

A sigh lodged itself in her throat, and she swallowed it back as she trudged up the steps leading to the front door, lifted her hand, and knocked upon it. Just three raps, quiet enough that only someone listening for them would have heard.

There was the click of the lock, and the door flew open with such swiftness that she could only assume he’d been waiting by the window to spot her as she came up the steps. And then he was there, glowering in that severe fashion to which she had long become inured.

A long, hard swallow rolled down his throat and disappeared beneath his cravat, which was no longer quite so pristine and elegantly tied as it had been some hours ago. A muscle jumped in his cheek, and he spoke through what she imagined were tightly-clenched teeth. “Get. Inside. Now.”

The sigh she had swallowed down worked its way free as she slid past him and into the foyer, the hem of her cloak whisking across the polished floor. The snap of the door closing behind her sent a frisson of alarm jolting up her spine. “Well,”

she said crisply as she turned for the stairs. “I’ll just be on my way up to bed—”

There was a muted thump, and the frog closure of her cloak pulled tight against her throat. Mercy halted, turned to see Thomas standing just behind her, one foot planted solidly in the fabric of her cloak, pinning her in place. “I don’t think you will,”

he said, and his voice was nearly—but not quite—pleasant. “I think you had every opportunity to do just that some hours ago, when I stopped you on the stairs.”

Through sheer dint of will, Mercy resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Now, Thomas—eep.”

Her heels skidded upon the floor as he released the hem of her cloak, only to seize her by the arm and propel her bodily across the floor toward the drawing room.

“What in God’s name were you thinking?”

he hissed as he shut the door behind them.

Mercy felt her brows lift in surprise. “I was thinking that I had some business to which to attend,” she said.

“No lady has business to which to attend at such an hour of the night. And I distinctly recall instructing you to return to your room.”

“You did,”

she said, linking her hands before her. “And I did.”

“But you did not then stay there.”

“No.”

A bark of incredulous laughter, harsh and biting, eked from his throat. He hooked a finger to tug at his cravat, as if it had begun to strangle him. “I believe I explained to you, quite clearly, that it is not done for a woman to leave the house alone at such an hour. Which part of my explanation did you fail to comprehend?”

“None of it,”

she said, with a blasé shrug of her shoulders. “I simply disagreed.”

“You disagreed.”

The scathing tone with which he had issued his response might have blistered a lesser woman’s ears. “Was I unclear?”

“The rules which govern proper behavior are not something with which one is permitted to disagree. They are what they are.”

There was a tiny twitch of a muscle beneath his eye. At this rate, come sunrise he might well be twitching every muscle in his whole body.

“That’s as may be,”

she said, “but seeing as they are often ridiculous rules, I have elected to ignore them.”

She raised her hands in what she hoped he would interpret as a conciliatory gesture. “Thomas, I can see that you are angry—”

“Angry! Mercy, you climbed a bloody trellis down the wall from your window on the fourth floor!”

“Oh, well,”

Mercy said dismissively, with an unconcerned roll of her wrist. “It’s hardly the first time.”

“That does not comfort me.”

“And I would have made it back safely to my bedchamber,”

she said pointedly, with a haughty lift of her chin, “if you had not latched my window against me!”

“You climbed back up?”

It was not quite a roar, but something even more feral which resounded around the room, curled into corners, and vibrated with its intensity.

“And back down again.”

Mercy canted her head in confusion. “How had you expected me to return if not through the window from which I left?”

she asked.

“Foolishly,”

he said, in what was very nearly a snarl, “I had expected you might behave like someone of reasonable sense and sound mind, and to use the damned door.”

“I might have done, if I hadn’t forgotten my key. Had you not stopped me on the stairs to begin with, I’d have noticed it missing from my reticule straight off when I tried to lock the front door behind me as I left.”

That muscle in his cheek persisted in its twitching; a strange, regular rhythm. “Really, Thomas, I wouldn’t have had to leave through the window if you had not been so—so pigheaded about it.”

The firelight glinted off the lenses of his spectacles, lending his eyes an unholy gleam in the dim interior of the drawing room. His fingers flexed, knuckles popping with the odd, sharp motions. Rather like he was imagining strangling someone.

Her, most likely.

Instead he thrust them into his hair, ruffling the once perfectly-order strands, and made a garbled sound of aggravation deep in his throat, which Mercy thought was a bit overly dramatic, since she had made it back home safe and sound.

“I have been sitting in that chair,”

he said, his voice pitched to a guttural growl, jabbing a vicious finger in the direction of the object as if it had personally offended him, “for three fucking hours. While you have been gallivanting about—where, exactly?”

Mercy swallowed hard. “Cheapside.”

“Cheapside!”

“Thomas, do keep your voice down. We have got neighbors.”

A hoarse rumble of a laugh seared the air between them. “What the hell were you doing in Cheapside? How did you even get there?”

Mercy folded her arms over her chest. “Naturally, I took a hack. I wasn’t foolish enough to walk all that way on my own at midnight.”

“But you were foolish enough to leave the house unaccompanied at such an hour,”

he said scathingly. “What were you doing in Cheapside, of all places?”

“That is quite a personal question, don’t you think?”

“No, I do not think.”

He gave a wild little gesticulation of his hands, wagged a finger in her face like a stern, disapproving father. “You looked me in the eyes and said you would return to your room—”

Oh, now, really. “I never did! What you assumed is your own responsibility. I simply did not see the point in arguing the matter any further when it was always my intention to go. I took a calculated risk—”

“Maths were never your strong suit, then, I take it.”

Oooh! Mercy flattened her lips into a grim line, valiantly biting back an excoriating reply. “You can issue whichever orders please you, Thomas, but I am not your sister, nor am I a child. I am seven and twenty, well past the age of majority, and I will do as I please!”

“And your father entrusted your care and wellbeing to me,”

he said fiercely. “It is a thankless task, but by God, I will do it.”

Another yank of his cravat, another wild gesture of his hands—quite unlike any sort of behavior she had ever seen from him.

It was interesting, in an academic sort of way. He continued speaking in harsh, insistent tones, lecturing as he frequently did whenever she had offended his delicate sensibilities. She studied him as he paced the room with tight, furious steps, like she might have a creature of the wild. That implacable veneer of civility which he wore like armor had chipped straight through this time, as with a sword driven into the belly of a beast. He had become, probably in tiny chips and chinks over these last three hours, something a bit less civilized than a man. Something indefinably more feral, less genteel.

He’d uttered an unforgivably filthy word in her presence. Probably, she thought, he hadn’t even been truly aware of it. And he did not look at all inclined to apologize for it—which she would not have expected, but she rather thought the usual Thomas, the frightfully civil Thomas, would.

He turned, stopped directly before her, glared down at her through the shine of his lenses. “Have you been listening to a word I’ve said?”

he demanded.

Mercy blinked, instantly jolted from her thoughts. “No,”

she said honestly. “Not really.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because you’ve lectured me at least a dozen times before”—an understatement, if ever there had been one—“and it’s always the same. It does grow boring, you know. Repetitive, if you will.”

His jaw dropped open, mouth working like a fish plucked from the water for a long moment. “Boring,”

he said. “Boring!”

With an incredulous laugh, he retreated back across the room and cast himself into the chair, scrubbing at his face so fiercely with his hands that he threatened to push his spectacles clear off his nose. “For God’s sake. What the hell am I to do with you? What the hell can I do with you?”

“Well, you might—”

“Rhetorical questions,”

he bit off, glaring at her through his fingers. “I was not seeking suggestions.”

At long last he seemed to comprehend the futility of it all. Slowly he sat back, closed his eyes, and uttered in a bland, weary monotone, “Go to bed, Mercy.”

“All right, then.”

She’d have gone straight up herself, had he not dragged her straight to the drawing room, though she doubted he would much appreciate the reminder.

She had almost made it over the threshold when he added, sulkily and without much hope that his demand, however justified he might have imagined it to have been, would be heeded, “And damned well stay there this time.”

∞∞∞

What the hell had Mercy been thinking? And more important still, where the hell had she gone?

Thomas paced the perimeter of Mr. Fletcher’s study, acutely aware of the lateness of the hour and how little time he had left to dedicate to his own business. He’d wasted the bulk of it already in concern over Mercy, and he was wasting it still in senseless dwelling upon her most recent misadventure.

It was just that if there had been one misadventure, there was bound to be another. And another, and yet more still—and she couldn’t even bother to pay attention to a particularly salient lecture.

She would do something equally foolhardy again. He was certain of it. How was he meant to keep a woman like her out of trouble, when she’d never met a damned brewing catastrophe she didn’t wish to dive headlong into?

Christ! He might drive himself straight to madness plotting ways to circumvent her natural talent for mischief. It was an impossibility on its face to stay even a step ahead of her, when she was so governed by her penchant toward chaos.

He’d simply have to keep as watchful an eye as was possible upon her and hope for the best, because it would be fucking futile to plan for the worst when the worst might be anything from slipping out of the house at an inappropriate hour to doing her best impersonation of Lady Godiva straight through Hyde Park during the fashionable hour. Depending upon her whims, which were mercurial on the best of days.

Thomas heaved a sigh as he straightened his shoulders and turned once more toward the desk, intent upon getting around to the correspondence he’d neglected these last hours whilst he’d been positioned near the drawing room window, awaiting the return of his errant charge.

There, perched upon the very edge of the desk, lay a pair of gloves. Mercy’s gloves; the same ones he’d meant to return to her this evening. As he had returned her shoes and her sketchbook—eventually.

But they hadn’t fit in his pocket like the gloves had.

In his panicked state after discovering her missing, he must have forgotten to leave them within her room. And yes, upon reflection he seemed to vaguely recall shoving them back within the depths of his pocket. Absently fingering the soft, worn fabric of them from time to time throughout this evening’s long vigil. Even slapping them down upon the desk in full fury when he had at last come up the stairs and to Fletcher’s office himself.

Probably she hadn’t missed them. Gloves didn’t require so much time as gowns to produce. In all likelihood she’d returned home from that shopping excursion with his mother and sister with gloves to spare. But these gloves—these were distinctly Mercy’s. Old, worn, with splotches of ink and discolored patches from dirt or grass or pencil lead. Probably the bulk of her clothing was like that.

They would be telling, as her gloves were, as her sketchbook was. They would bear the evidence of every scrape and mishap that had befallen her, into which she had become embroiled whilst wearing them. They’d tell a patchwork story, in their own way, through stains and tears and fraying threads, of where they had been and what they had seen.

He adjusted his spectacles on the bridge of his nose and realized that they also had become a part of that story. She’d left her mark upon him, too.

With a muted sound of frustration, he sank into the chair behind the desk and at last peeled the wax seal upon the most recent letter from his new solicitor. Folded within was a missive from Mr. Sumner’s man—the very best investigator available.

Fordham, the miserable thieving bastard, had been spotted at a tavern in Cheapside.

Recently.