Page 32 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match
The maid bobbed a curtsey. “My pleasure, miss,” she said. “Someone will be up to inform you when your bath is ready.” And then she slipped out the door to allow Mercy to enjoy her breakfast in peace.
She would never miss a meal or forget an engagement again, she realized as she bit into a piece of toast. Well, she almost certainly would—it was just that it would not matter as once it had. So long as someone had been entrusted with the task of reminding her. It had never occurred to her before, since she had spent the majority of her time out in the countryside where her appointments had been relatively few and far between. Even if her inattention to such things, and her resulting lateness, had been a matter of some private shame, it had largely been her burden to bear.
And yet Thomas had, with relatively little effort, relieved her of that burden. With just a few delicate instructions to the staff, he had erased a problem that Mercy had never managed to solve on her own.
Breakfast, still warm, delivered to her whether she had remembered it or not. A staff that knew the schedule she could not keep in her own head, ready to remind her in plenty of time to prepare herself. In the silence of the library, she laid her fork across her plate and instead gingerly closed her sketchbook. Thenew one, which she had found waiting here for her one morning a few days ago. Her fingers traced the pattern on its cloth cover; the very same pattern that graced one of Thomas’ waistcoats. She had wondered from where it had come, naturally, but now…now she thought she must know.
A gift she had never expected, least of all from him. And now—how much simpler her life had been made, with just a bit of trust extended to exactly the right person.
∞∞∞
Despite the promise he had made to Mercy, Thomas found himself loath to part with her sketchbook when Mr. Sumner next came to call upon him. It had been tucked into the drawer within his nightstand—along with her gloves—since she had given it into his keeping, and he’d developed something of a habit of thumbing through it before bed, examining the patterns sketched therein as if he might find something of Mercy left within them. Her state of mind, he thought. Happiness in the spiral of a curl; fretfulness in a sharp, dark line across the page.
Guile, perhaps, in the underside of a stylized leaf. Cunning in the cleverly-rendered fronds of a fern, or craftiness in the points of a star, which he imagined had been designed to be embroidered atop the machine-made netting that her father’s factories also produced.
He gave a sigh as he handed the sketchbook over to Mr. Sumner. Louder than he ought to have done, he supposed, given the pensive look the man offered him.
“My lord, is aught amiss?” Sumner inquired.
There were a great number of things amiss, really, any one ofwhich Thomas might have expounded upon at length. But he had neither the time nor the inclination to do so at present, and he suspected Mr. Sumner did not, either. “No,” he said. “Nothing with which you need concern yourself.”
Presently, the concern belonged only to Thomas. For the third time since they had arrived in London, he’d found Mercy’s shoes left upon the landing when he’d come down the stairs early in the morning. The first time he’d found them there, he’d thought little of it. The second, he’d been baffled. But the third had been revelatory.
It had taken a few points of data for him to reach the correct conclusion, but it had not escaped his notice that those occasions in which he had discovered her shoes discarded upon the landing—where they had most certainlynotbeen when the household had retired for the evening—had each been preceded by the arrival of yet another letter from C. Nightingale. Mercy had been sneaking out of the house to meet him.
He simply did not know what he was meant todoabout it. Plainly his displeasure at her first escape had not made its intended impression. And if he were being honest with himself, he had to admit that his first reaction to the truth of it had not been anger so much as relief that at least she had been stealthy enough to avoid anyone’s notice—his included. That if she had been leaving her shoes on the landing upon her return, it could only mean that she had not climbed down the blasted trellis to make her escape.
But the thought of her wandering London alone and unescorted at such an hour caused a nasty little flare of fear somewhere behind his breastbone, made his heart squeeze behind the cage of his ribs.
Mr. Sumner hesitated, no doubt unnerved by Thomas’ persistent silence. “There is nothing more I can do for you, my lord?”
“Not unless you’ve brought along my villainous former solicitor in your pocket,” Thomas said with another sigh, painfully aware that he could not even ask after C. Nightingale, whom he was increasingly confident was not, in fact, Fletcher’s mill manager, as Mercy had claimed—for if he had been, then certainly Mercy would have delivered her sketchbook to the man herself at any one of those illicit meetings.
Who was he, then? A lover? It seemed unlikely. When would she have had the time, the occasion, to acquire one? The letters had been arriving practically since they’d made London; hardly enough time for Mercy to have found herself a suitor.
A friend? But she’d laid claim to none of those, either. And what sort offrienddid a woman creep from her home in the dead of night to meet, besides?
“The investigator,” Mr. Sumner blurted out. “Has his information proved unsatisfactory in any regard? Shall I—”
“No, Mr. Sumner,” Thomas said, and rubbed at his jaw, allowing that perhaps his pensive mood had proved a bit too unsettling for a man accustomed to solving problems. “He’s been perfectly satisfactory. I’ve no complaints with the quality of the information which has been provided to me. It is only that Fordham has gone to ground at present, and I must wait for him to show himself once more. Rest assured that I asked you here today only to request that you pass along Miss Fletcher’s sketchbook—not to complain of your assistance.”
Mr. Sumner visibly relaxed, and Thomas envied the man his relief. He had the sinking suspicion it would be some time before his own troubles eased.
Mercy had lied to him, and he—he could not even find it within himself to blame her for it. Rigid, Mother had called him, and unbending. Too much like his father. What could Mercy possibly have donebutlie, when there was nothing she could have said that would have swayed him?
Thus far she had been careful, mostly discreet but for the shoes she’d left upon the landing. The only thing he could do to protect her was to ensure that her secret little outings remained exactly that. And to trust in her to take care of herself.
∞∞∞
Thomas folded his arms across his chest and glared through the sea of dancers, searching for the vivid yellow of Mercy’s gown through the throng. Somehow, he’d expected the pattern which had heretofore been established to continue on as it had, certain that when he arrived to tonight’s ball—late, owing to his other obligations—Mercy would already be champing at the bit to leave.
Instead, he’d found her engaged in a dance. And in the brief glimpses he caught of her as the dance stretched on, she seemed to be enjoying herself. For some damned reason, the flash of her smile—open, genuine, and directed right at the fellow who whirled her about the floor—provoked something akin to annoyance within him.
“Who the devil is dancing with Miss Fletcher?” he grumbled to Marina, who had found herself between partners, and shared the space against the wall with him while Mother was off hunting for the refreshment table.
“Mr. Earnshaw,” she said, fluttering her fingers at Juliet as she flew by on the ballroom floor. “He seems a pleasant enough gentleman. As I understand it he is seldom in town for the Season. His father was the youngest son of an earl. Barrington, I believe,” she added, as if he might have memorizedDebrett’s Peeragewell enough for that to provide much clarity.
“And his mother?”
