“I miscalculated,” Mercy ground out between clenched teeth. “It will not happen again.” Her first ill-fated ride had been a valuable lesson.
Thomas threw up his hands with a scowl, and the candlelight glinted off the lenses of his spectacles with a dramatic, vaguely menacing flare. “I ought to have taken a hatchet to that balloon when I had the chance,” he said viciously. “Someonehas got to save you from yourself. I suppose—for the remainder of the Season—that unhappy task falls to me.”
The air fairly crackled with tension, a fierce battle of wills raging silently in the stillness of the drawing room. Mercy curled her hand around her sketchbook, drew in a deep breath, and prepared to unleash a resounding rejoinder that would put Thomas in his proper place.
Marina, ever the peacekeeper, leapt to head off another round of squabbling, pasting on a brilliant smile and addressing her mother perhaps a touch too brightly. “Mama, have you got many invitations?”
The baroness startled at the address, the last letter quivering in the clutch of her fingers. “Well,” she hedged, laying down the final letter upon the rest of the stack. “A few,” she admitted in a low voice, her lips pursing. “None we’ll accept, however.”
“But there were so many letters,” Juliet said, in a faintly pleading tone, her face falling in disappointment. “Surely a ball, or a garden party…”
The baroness shifted uncomfortably, and for perhaps half a second her gaze fell upon Mercy before it shied away almost guiltily. “None we’ll accept,” she repeated, her voice soft but firm.
Mercy’s residual anger left her in a rush reminiscent of how swiftly her hot air balloon had begun to deflate as she understood the significance of the words, why the baroness had failed to meet her eyes.
Perhaps the whole of the stack of letters had been nothingbutinvitations. But Mercy had not merited inclusion in any of them.
Chapter Seven
Well,” Mercy said lightly as she rose to her feet, abandoning her needlework. “I believe I shall retire for the evening.”
Her voice had quavered just a little, a muted thrum of some nebulous emotion running through it like a current, and Thomas felt a frown pull at his brows. “It’s hardly gone half past eight,” he said. “You are aware that we keep town hours, are you not?”
“Of course,” she said, affecting a breezy tone as her fingers smoothed nervously at her navy skirts. “But the travel, you know—and so much shopping—” A feigned yawn, and over-exaggerated roll of her shoulders. “Really, I am beyond exhausted.”
She wasn’t. He’d have laid money upon it, though he had not the faintest idea why she would have lied. “It’s best to continue as you mean to go on,” he said. “We’ll be out quite late for many evening engagements—”
“Thomas,” Mother hissed, and Mercy’s shoulders stiffened.
What had he said? Even Marina and Juliet had turned frosty gazes upon him, as if he had given some mortal offense. Clearly, they all considered themselves privy to something he’d missed. “Go, then,” he said. “Good evening, Miss Fletcher.”
Mercy fled. There was simply no other word for it. Her chin dipped down as if in shame, and her fingers caught up handfulsof her skirts, and she fled through the door, her retreating footsteps gaining speed as she careened down the corridor toward the stairs.
A queer silence descended over the drawing room, as if her sudden absence had sucked all of the air, all of the sound from the room. Distantly, there was the echoing slam of a door on another floor. “What the devil’s gotten into her?” Thomas muttered, slouching in his chair. And then, with a faint scoff, “And she’s left her damned sketchbook again.”
“Language,” Mother chided, and she slid her hand toward the little book, lifting it from its position upon the couch. “Marina, will you—”
“Yes, of course.” Marina scrambled to her feet, reaching her hands out for the book.
“I’ll go, too,” Juliet said, and she linked arms with Marina, casting one last censorious look at Thomas as they quit the room together.
Thomas drained the last of his brandy with a scowl.Sisters. Utterly incomprehensible for a dozen reasons, not the least of which was that they happened to be women. “It cannot require two people deliver one book.”
“It doesn’t,” Mother said, with a sigh. “But perhaps two friends can give comfort better than one.”
Comfort? “Have you all developed some heretofore unknown predilection for speaking in riddles?” He pushed himself out of his chair and headed for the sideboard to pour himself a fresh glass of brandy, since it appeared he would be needing it. “You really ought to choose something,” he said, with a nod toward the stack of letters Mother had discarded. “Juliet will be just devastated if she must wait much longer to make her come-out.”
“Juliet will be even more devastated still,” Mother said, “if she must make her come-out without one of her dearest friends at her side.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea of what you mean to imply,” he said, sloshing a healthy measure of liquor into his glass.
“Mercy wasn’t invited, Thomas.”
Not invited? “What the devil do you mean, she wasn’t invited?”
“Exactly that,” Mother said, a suspiciously moist gleam in her eyes as she lifted the stack of papers and gave them a vicious shake. “Not to any of them. A dozen invitations here, and Mercy has been left off of every one. And I told her—Itoldher she had naught to worry for. That of course she would be invited. But it seems she knew better than I all along.”
Briefly, he thought of Mercy’s skeptical expression at dinner evening last, how she had managed little more than a bland smile at Mother’s insistence, how very quiet she had been until the conclusion of dinner. She hadn’t believed those assurances, he realized in retrospect.
