Page 22 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match
“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, Iwilldo 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 frightfullycivilThomas, 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 hellcanI 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 wellstaythere 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 fabricof 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 uponhim, 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.
