Page 71 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match
“It’s just that—I have just realized—” Mercy paused to draw a steadying breath. “We sound like Marina and Juliet,” she said at last. “When they’re in the midst of a sisterly squabble.” By the uncomprehending look Charity slanted her direction, sheguessed that this was in no way remarkable or at all uncommon. But then, Charity had always had a sister.
And Mercy had, too. But she had never known it.
“Do they squabble often, then?” Charity asked.
“Mm, no,” Mercy said. “At least rarely in my hearing. Usually they are the best of friends. But when they do fight, oh, it isbrutal.” She settled her hands in her lap. “Do you think we’ll squabble like that?” Like sisters, she meant to imply, and by Charity’s indulgent glance, she thought she had been understood.
“If you call me a shrew with any degree of regularity,” Charity said, and aimed a whack at Mercy’s head with her newspaper, “it’s practically a certainty. Now calm yourself andbe good. You must stay until your baron comes to fetch you.”
Mercy startled. “He’s coming to fetch me?”
“He said he would,” Charity drawled. “I’ve no particular reason to doubt him. And he was really rather polite in his letter, much more so than I had expected.”
“Did he say when?”
“No,” Charity said. “He only asked that I extend to you my hospitality until he comes to collect you. He mentioned, too, that you’ve a remarkable tendency to act without thinking. Given the argument we’ve just had, I’m inclined to believe him.” She gave a blasé shrug. “So I’ve hidden your shoes.”
Mercy glanced down at her feet, which peeped out from beneath the hem of her dress. Bare, but for her stockings. Damn. “It’s just that I have alreadyacted without thinking,” she said. “Or—without thinking clearly. I shouldn’t have left.”
“I would tell you that I hate to say I told you so, but that would be a lie. I really,trulylove it.”
Mercy cast Charity a glare—in the spirit of good-natured, sisterly spite—and said, “It’s just that you were right.”
“I am, generally. You should contrive simply to agree withme at all times. But in this circumstance, I shall allow you to expound upon exactly how I was right.”
“Magnanimous of you,” Mercy said, and there wasn’t even any heat to the words. “I decided I would rather be an idiot in love.” Her own epiphany, and it had come quietly, with the singular realization that she simply could not do without him. That perhaps she would complicate his life, complicate the lives of everyone close to her. But it wasn’t for her to decide what he ought to be willing to bear. It was only for her to trust him to know his own heart.
Thomas knew all there was to know, every detail of her life. Every scandal and secret, every queer habit and idiosyncrasy. And he wanted her anyway.
“I have to tell him,” she said in a frog’s croak of a voice. “I have to tell him I love him. I never have, you know.” Once, she had thought it a kindness. That when they inevitably parted, he would be the better for it. But there was no kindness in withholding love, no mercy in the unjust separation of two kindred souls.
“And you will,” Charity said. “When he comes to fetch you, and not before. You have made your bed in your madcap dash for freedom, and now you must lie in it and wait for him to come retrieve you.”
“Ugh.” Mercy cast her head back against the back of the couch with an enervated sigh. “I swear I wish he did not know me half so well.”
“I think it’s lovely,” Charity confided. “I have been hard for too many years to ever make myself vulnerable,” she added, “but sometimes I think…it must be wonderful to be known. Truly known by another.”
“It is,” Mercy said. “Except when it’s dreadful. Now, for instance.”
Charity chuckled over the pages of her newspaper. “You haveonly yourself to blame, dearest.”
“But it is ever so much more satisfying to blame someone else,” Mercy declared, folding her legs beneath her as she settled in for a long wait upon the couch.
A fierce pounding upon the door filled the room, floating up from the stairs which led to the door upon the street below, and Mercy startled at the sound. “Already?” she asked. “But it’s—it’s still daylight.”
Charity cast down her paper and unfolded herself from the couch. “Stay,” she said, gesturing to Mercy with one hand as she headed for the window that overlooked the street below. Peeling back a corner of the sheer curtain, she peered out. “Mercy,” she said, “your baron is not…a greying gentleman of some advancing years, is he?”
“Thomas? No,” she said, and her brow furrowed at the question. “He’s just thirty, and his hair is quite dark.” Against Charity’s order, she popped up, striding across the floor. “Do you not recognize your caller?”
“Not in the least,” Charity said. And then, as Mercy approached, “Dearest, don’t. You shouldn’t be spotted here, even from the window.”
But Mercy had wedged herself there already, peeking through the lifted curtain to gaze out onto the street, at the gentleman standing there, his fist raised to pound upon the door again. Her breath sailed from her lungs as if someone had planted a fist into them. “Oh, Lord,” she said in a squeak. “That certainly isn’t Thomas. That’s my father.”
Chapter Twenty Six
Soon enough Thomas would have to begin preparing himself for an evening of haunting Fordham’s tavern in Cheapside. He had, an hour or so ago, delivered his mother and sisters to their afternoon garden party. He’d put in only a brief appearance there himself in order to help them sell the fiction that Mercy was again under the weather, lest anyone begin to wonder at her absence and his own—but a half an hour on the outside in attendance, and then he had returned home once more.
Fordham was meant to be back any day now. Thomas had never imagined himself in the singular role of thief-taker, but he fancied he had grown rather proficient these last weeks in the subtle art of subterfuge. If he could not apprehend Fordham himself, then at the very least he would be able to manage following the man back to his lodgings and sending a proper authority round to nab him within.
