Page 2 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match
In all the years of their acquaintance, he could count on one hand the number of occasions on which more than five minutes had elapsed before he’d been nigh overcome with the urge totoss her into the nearest lake. It was a bloody miracle he’d not snapped before now.
“So help me,” Thomas said in a grim monotone as he climbed unsteadily to his feet, “if that balloon should cross the boundary of my property again, I will damned wellshoot it downirrespective of whether or not you happen to be in it.”
“It won’t,” Mercy said blithely, as if he’d not said anything much worth noting. “Though, of course, it would be prudent of you not to go about sleeping in fields—”
“They’re mydamned fields, and I’ll sleep in them if I please!” Thomas threw up his hands, though even that motion made his head ache and his gut churn. “Get that damned thing offmy property! At once!”
“Yes, yes,” Mercy muttered beneath her breath, plainly distracted, her attention diverted by the balloon still rolling off into the distance. “As soon as I—where are you going?”
“To have a word with your father!” Thomas snapped as he stalked off in the direction of the Fletcher house. Again. For all the good it had ever done.
Because Mercy Fletcher was about as controllable as the wind on which she’d sailed in.
∞∞∞
In retrospect, Thomas conceded he likely ought to have at least made his way home for a bath and a change of clothing before he’d stormed into the Fletcher house to demand a meeting with Mr. Augustus Fletcher. At some point during the night before—though he was not quite certain when—he’d lost his hat. His coat had become unforgivably wrinkled. He reeked of cheap spiritsand cheaper ale. And one of the buttons of his waistcoat now had a number of silky strands of dark hair coiled round it, no doubt those he’d accidentally wrenched free of Mercy’s head when he’d shoved her off of him.
The damned footman kept making some sort of subtle motion with his fingers as they both waited outside Mr. Fletcher’s study door for admittance, running his fingers across the bridge of his nose as if to suggest that Thomas ought to reposition his spectacles. Not that it would do him any good, with how badly the earpiece had been bent.
At long last, there was a clearing of a throat beyond the closed door of Fletcher’s office, followed by a surly, “Come in.”
The footman sprang into action, leaping for the door before Thomas could reach it.
Behind the massive desk situated before a window, Mr. Fletcher pressed his fingertips to his greying temples, rubbing as if he’d found himself in the grips of a terrible migraine. “What’s Mercy done now?” he inquired, his voice threaded through with exhaustion.
Thomas paused, halfway to the desk. “I beg your pardon?”
“Twice a month at least, like bloody clockwork, you storm into my study to complain of my daughter,” Mr. Fletcher said, leaning back in his chair. “So what is it this time? Has she set something afire? Caused a disturbance in the village? Gone riding without the company of a groom?”
It hadn’t been the lack of a groom’s company that had precipitated that particular complaint, per se, though it had, of course, been a contributing factor. It had been that she’d done it in her nightgown in the dead of night, straight past his bedroom window, her dark hair streaming loose like Lady Goddamned Godiva.
Even if she hadn’t, precisely, been naked, the thin linen of her nightgown had left little to the imagination.
“She’s trespassed upon my land again,” Thomas said flatly.
“I see.” By the nonchalant tone of voice Mr. Fletcher employed, Thomas was given to understand that he hardly thought this worth complaining of, especially when one considered that Thomas’ mother and sisters invited Mercy over with distressing frequency.
“In a goddamned hot air balloon,” Thomas added in a seething growl.
For a moment there was only a stunned silence between them as Mr. Fletcher’s bushy brows crept steadily toward his hairline. The old man had finally been rendered speechless by his daughter’s reckless pursuits, or so it seemed.
“How in hell did she acquire one?” Thomas asked, with an aggravated gesticulation of his hands, rather as if he were emulating a deranged conductor of an unseen orchestra. But then this particular melody was hardly new to him. Mercy was always into some nonsense or other, and he—like clockwork, as charged—was obliged to come sing the same shrill tune to her father as he had a thousand times before, to little effect.
Mr. Fletcher heaved a sigh, his shoulders slumping as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Never got a clear answer on that,” he said, his voice hinting at an exhaustion Thomas could only guess at, given that despite her predilection for making Thomas the unwilling victim of her myriad trespasses, at the very least he did not have tolivewith the damnable woman. “Suppose she must’ve gotten it when last I went away on business.” Another sigh, this one low and beleaguered. “It was in a dreadful state. Never thought she’d be able to repair it.”
Yes, well, he ought to have learned by now that Mercy had ten times the amount of raw determination than she had good common sense. “Shedidrepair it,” Thomas said. “And sailed it onto my property. And crash-landed it in one of my fields, directly atop me.”
Mr. Fletcher’s bush brows scrunched together in a frown of confusion. “What were you doing in the field?”
“That’s hardly what is at issue here!” The peculiar stridence of Thomas’ voice was enough to lift Mr. Fletcher’s brows yet further, until they threatened to collide with his hairline entirely.
“I ask,” Mr. Fletcher said, pitching his voice lower, no doubt to avoid his own voice carrying through the door to the footman stationed outside, “because I’ve heard some troubling rumors of late.”
Thomas felt his shoulders slump, the fine hairs prickling at the back of his neck. No—not yet. It was not so dire as all that just yet. Quarter day had barely passed. It wasn’t uncommon, precisely, for wages to be paid a bit late, due to the negligence or else the general apathy of one’s employer. It was just thathehad never made a particular habit of such a thing.
Then again, he’d never before been in dire financial straits. “I’m not certain what you mean to imply,” he said, striving to keep the caustic tone from his inflection, even as his mind worked to sort out from whence those benighted rumors might have originated. As with most country estates, the vast majority of his servants were from the local village. But then again, so too would Mr. Fletcher’s be. Blast it, just how damned many of them might come from the same family? Perhaps a housemaid might share the fact that she had not yet been paid this quarter’s wages over the dinner table, and then that word might well spread from one household to another with appalling ease.
“I mean to say,” Mr. Fletcher said carefully, “that the rumor is that you’ve not presently got the blunt even to pay your staff. And if you haven’t got that, then…” He let his voice taper off in solemn suggestion.
