Page 67 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match
She left the house through the window for the last time, sliding over the sill and feeling for the wood of the trellis that ran alongside her window. She would have to be careful. She knew now that it was less stable than she had thought, and there was that bit that had cracked straight off the last time she had gonedown.
One cautious step at a time she descended, moving slowly, shaking off the ivy that wanted to cling to her fingers. It seemed an hour before she touched the ground at last, and the spiky branches of the bushes tugged at the silk of her skirts. She wrenched them free, heard the fragile material rend with the violent motion.
In a frenzy she collected the garments that had fallen from the valise, stuffing them back within with just as little care as that with which she had first packed them. The latches had popped open in the fall, but were still in sound, working condition.
This was it. As she collected the handle of the valise, she looked up at the house one last time, setting her shoulders in resolve.The end.
One of them had to be sensible. This time, that burden fell upon her shoulders.
∞∞∞
Thomas polished off the last bit of egg upon his plate, pinching the bridge of his nose as he stared down at the assortment of documents arrayed out upon the desk before him. He had, after a fashion, assembled them into some version of order. Account balances, investments, and signed affidavits from various institutions.
Mercy had, with her clever mind and the instincts of a born woman of business, been more helpful than she could possibly have known. It had not occurred to him, in his single-minded determination to hunt down Fordham, that he might buildhimself a clearer picture of the crime with proper documentation. He’d simply assumed, naturally, that Fordham had falsified every document possible in the service of concealing what he’d done.
But he hadn’t. The picture had not become clear until he’d taken Mercy’s suggestion of approaching those institutions for what information they might provide, but now that he had it all—dates, accounts, statements from those businesses and banking institutions involved—it had begun to form at last.
Roughly four months ago had been the beginning of the end. His accounts had been flush, then, investments properly managed. And then, in what had begun as a slow trickle, there had been both withdrawals and deposits—a succession of them, in increasing amounts, from one account to another. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, he thought. Money moved round and round again, no doubt in the hopes that it would go unnoticed so long as the balances appeared to be as they ought.
Gambling. It had to be. Fordham earned a tidy income as a solicitor, but not nearly enough to play as fast and deep as the withdrawals would imply. It seemed that upon a few occasions he had won enough to replenish what he had lost. But that had lasted no more than a few days at a time, and then the withdrawals had begun all over again. The pattern within the documents, the timeline that had been revealed with them, suggested an increasing sense of urgency.
Fordham couldn’t possibly have hoped to conceal this in perpetuity, had to have known that eventually his scheme would be uncovered. And yet, by the account of the tavern owner when last he’d been seen, his mood has been positively celebratory. Jovial, even, if he had spent an exorbitant sum in purchasing a round of drinks for the tavern entire.
He ought to have been quiet, withdrawn, concerned. Perhaps even in the bouts of a depression. He ought to have been strivingto avoid notice, not courting it by purchasing a round for the tavern entire. Heoughtto have been plotting his escape, knowing that there was no way out of his present circumstances except to flee the country. And yet he had remained in England, to all accounts showing no signs of intending to leave.
It didn’t make any damned sense.
He sighed as a scratch on the door pulled him from his thoughts, lifting his head from where it had rested within his hands. “Enter,” he called.
A maid swept in, a breakfast tray balanced in her hands.
“Thank you,” Thomas said, gesturing to his own empty plate, “but I’ve already eaten.”
“It’s for Miss Fletcher, my lord,” she said, with a lopsided curtsey that made the tea cup upon the tray slide precariously to the right. “It’s gone ten already. I was meant to take it to her.”
Ah, yes. He had given that instruction. And it had, to his knowledge, worked out well enough. Of course, he tended to rise early and Mercy tended to rise late, owing to the occasional difficulty in falling asleep, so they had rarely shared the breakfast table at the same time. But it was gratifying to know that she hadn’t missed meals. But why had the maid brought her breakfast here?
“She’s not here,” he said. “Perhaps the library?”
The maid shook her head. “It’s just that—well, she’s not anywhere, my lord.”
A queer sense of unease settled over his shoulders, drawing them down into a slouch. “What do you mean, she’s notanywhere?” he asked. “She has got to be somewhere.”
“No, my lord,” the maid said. “Leastwise, not anywhere in the house. We’ve searched and searched.”
Oh, God. “Her bed chamber,” he said. “Was there anything…unusual about it?”
“Well, it was a right mess, my lord, but that’s not so veryunusual. Miss Fletcher isn’t the tidiest of women. But there has been some improvement recently, I suppose. Or at least therehadbeen—”
“The window,” Thomas gritted out between clenched teeth. “Tell me about the window. Was it latched?”
“No, my lord. In fact, it was open.” Her brow pleated into a frown of confusion. “But that’s not so unusual. Been rather warm of late, hasn’t it?”
It was unusual when the woman at issue had developed the alarming habit of climbing trellises. Christ. He’d known—known—she would do something rash. Had felt it in his soul, like an inescapable truth. Mercy, being Mercy, would follow her heart and not her head, and damn the consequences. Foolishly, he’d thought that promise he’d extracted from her would rein in her impulses, at least long enough to cobble together a chance of convincing her to marry him.
Apparently, it had gone out the window along with her.
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” the maid said, in an odd, garbled rush, as if she thought he might find himself suddenly tempted to shoot the messenger. Probably he’d been glowering and hadn’t realized it. “We’ll look again, just to be certain.”
