Page 6 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match
“It is my hope”—hisferventhope—“that our social schedules in London will simply be too full to allow Miss Fletcher to come to much mischief.”
Marina tittered behind her fingers. “I imagine that Mercy can find mischief anywhere,” she said, though the words sounded inordinately fond.
“Well, we shall all have to see that she does not,” Thomas said. “We owe it to Mr. Fletcher to see that his daughter comes to no harm.” Through her own reckless actions or otherwise. “He wants his daughter to find a husband.”
“A husband? ForMercy?” Marina blinked. “She doesn’t want a husband. She’s told me so at least a dozen times.”
Well, she was getting one, or so her father had determined, even if Mercy had never seemed particularly in want of one. Probably, Thomas thought, rather uncharitably, she would exasperate the poor man into an early grave. There was a part of him that was tempted to believe that any man foolish enough to take Mercy to wife deserved his fate.
Still, given the tight rein they would all have upon her, it was unlikely that the man would understand the magnitude of his undertaking until it was too late.
Thomas stifled a sigh. Poor bastard—whosoever he might be.
Chapter Three
The carriage rattled down the cobblestone road, and as the right front wheel hit a rut, all the occupants were jostled unceremoniously to one side, a crush which yanked Mercy straight from what had been a perfectly lovely daydream. Mercy stifled a sigh, but could not manage to stifle her wince as the sharp point of an elbow was introduced—violently—to her side. “Juliet, dear, your elbow is jabbing me in the ribs.”
“Oh, I’m so terribly sorry.” There was a minute shifting, though the pressure was mostly unrelieved.
The sigh drifted free of Mercy’s lungs anyway. The carriage had not seemed quite so close at the start of their journey. Probably, if it had been only a short jaunt, it would have been bearable. But they’d been traveling for some time, and with five occupants to the carriage, any ride longer than an hour was bound to become uncomfortable.
It hadn’t helped that Thomas’ legs were altogether too long, and he was prone to stretching them out as if to relieve the stiffness from his muscles, taking up even more of the space that rightfully belonged to her. It also hadn’t helped that he’d developed an obnoxious habit of looking down his long nose at her, his gaze piercing and faintly judgmental through the lenses of his spectacles.
They sat upon the bridge of his nose unevenly, and that—thatgave Mercy just the tiniest, pettiest bit of satisfaction. A small imperfection in his otherwise perfectly polished exterior, which she suspected must aggrieve him greatly, since she had not known him to show himself publicly with so much as a single dark hair out of place, or even the slightest smudge or faintest wrinkle marring his appearance.
She was half-convinced that no blemish would have dared inflict itself upon him. Perhaps if a wrinkle had had the poor taste to settle into the folds of his coat, he would have only to produce the merest fraction of the glower he habitually saved for herfor it to pull itself free at once.
That glower he leveled at her now, his dark eyes narrowing behind his spectacles as if to hone it to a razor’s edge. “What could you possibly find amusing?”
Mercy felt her brows lift in surprise. “I beg your pardon?”
“You laughed.”
“I didn’t.”
“Er—you did, dear,” the baroness said, her voice inflected with a faint confusion.
“Oh.” Had she really, then? Well, then, it was Thomas’ fault, for stirring such fanciful notions. Perhaps if he did not so often behave in a manner which suggested he had got a rather large stick lodged firmly up his backside—
“You’ve just done it again!” Thomas’ cheeks hollowed with offended dignity, and a muscle twitched beneath his eye. “What, pray tell, do you find so amusing about me that you must laugh when you look upon me?”
Mercy pinched her lips together against the words which wanted to spill out. “Nothing in particular,” she said, pitching her voice to a haughty tone. “I was merely…thinking.”
“Of what.” It was a flat, terse demand—an order, given by a man who expected unquestioning obedience.
Mercy had never been much accustomed to obeying, and hadlittle enough interest in beginning now. “Nothing in particular,” she said, and schooled her face into strict serenity whilst Thomas only grew more agitated.
Marina coughed into her fist, straining her voice to project levity. “We’ve made it all this way without succumbing to bickering,” she said. “Surely we can hold out an additional—Mercy, what do you think? Ten minutes? Twenty?”
Momentarily diverted, Mercy glanced out the window to get her bearings, watching the streets of London flow past. “Five,” she said. “On the outside. Our townhouse is just on the next street.”
Juliet blew out a breath in relief. “At last, I shall be able to breathe once again.”
Mercy supposed she was correct, though the efficacy of breathing in the thick of the coal smoke that tended to clog the city was debatable. “We’re nearly there,” she said soothingly, patting Juliet’s hand. The carriage was already slowing, rounding a corner. “There will be room to spare within our townhouse, I promise you. It’s large enough that it’s unlikely we’ll encounter one another except at supper, perhaps, during those evenings you have no engagements.”
The baroness canted her head to the right, bracing herself as the carriage slowed further. “You speak as though you hadn’t planned to attend those engagements,” she said, a note of befuddlement swimming within her voice.
“I hadn’t,” Mercy said. “Really, I’ve just come up to London for some personal errands. Some new silk from Papa’s mill and such things. I’d have come on my own, but Papa insisted—”
