“Still they admire her so,” Mother mused. “And there ismuch to admire in her. If only you knew how to look.”
Hell. He’d thought his father’s disapproval was a heavy enough burden to bear. But he fairly staggered beneath the weight of his mother’s disappointment. “All right,” he said. “I’ll send a servant off to find her. And when she returns…I will ask her to dance.”
∞∞∞
Thomas stormed into the library when Mercy was halfwaythrough a new pattern and a glass of brandy, looking every bit as furious as he had only days ago when he’d taken her to task in the drawing room for sneaking out of the house.
“What have I done this time?” she sighed, laying down her pencil and drawing her dressing gown tighter about her shoulders as she pushed herself up from her sprawl upon the couch nearest the hearth.
Twitchwent that tiny muscle beneath his eye. And there—the one in his cheek as well. “You cannot,” he breathed in a furious, if constrained tone, “simply leave a ball whenever you please.”
“Of course I can,” she said, quite reasonably. “In fact, I did.” It hadn’t been difficult. All it had required was getting the attention of a servant and asking them to go fetch the carriage round. “I even remembered to leave a note and have the carriage sent back.” Which had been quite good of her, in her own opinion.
“The note arrived, but the carriage hadn’t made its return when I received it. I walkedback.”
Mercy blinked in mute surprise. “Why?”
“Because you are never where you are bloody well meant to be!”
Well, that was unfair. She was precisely where she was meant to be. She hadn’t taken a single detour. What had she done, then, that was so objectionable—first to be chastised fornotbeing at home, and now to be chastisedforit? “I don’t know what you wish me to say,” she said. “I came straight home. I sent the carriage back.”
“That’s not the damned point,” he said, and a shuddering sigh drifted from his lungs as he cast himself into a chair and tipped his head back. “You were meant to be at the ball.”
“What rubbish,” she said. “I wasn’t. You know well enough that I wasn’t.”
“You were invited.”
“Only,” she said, “because your mother insisted. It is difficult to feel much welcome when one knows one was only invited out of obligation. The least we can do is be honest about it. Perhaps it stung, once, when I was younger.” When she hadn’t yet learned how very cruel his world could be. How insular; how exacting. “Now, it simply is as it is.”
“And how is that?” His gaze sharpened behind the lenses of his spectacles, suddenly intent.
Mercy pursed her lips together, wondering how she might phrase her situation delicately. Whether he even deserved her delicacy. “Let us just say that sketching at home has been a far better use of my time. I fear by the end of the ball I might have been swallowed up into the paper-hangings, never to be seen again. Certainly no one has missed me.”
“Mother did,” he said, clasping his hands before him and resting his elbows upon his knees. “Idid.”
“Did you?” Idly, Mercy adjusted the large volume of some text or other she’d laid across her lap as a makeshift desk and tested the point of her pencil against the pad of her thumb. “How long did it take you to notice I had not returned?”
Twitch, twitch. “Three dances,” he admitted. And then, “You said it stung when you were younger. What did you mean by that?”
Mercy thumbed through the stack of papers she’d scavenged from the desk, hunting for a fresh page. “They weren’t cast-offs,” she said lightly. “Those gowns I gave to your sisters. They’ve never been worn, so they’re not cast-offs.”
“What do you mean, they’ve never been worn?”
“Is there some other meaning to those words of which I am presently unaware?” There; a blank page at last. She resituated the book upon her lap, positioned her pencil upon the page, and began to sketch the outline of a tulip. This one for a springpattern, she thought. Something cheerful.
“But why were they not worn? There must have been at least fifty gowns within your dressing room.”
His quizzical expression perplexed her, given both his general and specific distaste of her. A wide, flat tulip leaf curled beneath the point of her pencil. “Sixty-two,” she said. “Not counting the four I burned. The only ones I wore.” They had gone up so quickly, those delicate silk gowns. Precious and lovely and fragile, gone in just a moment. Leaving hardly enough ash behind them to fill a thimble. But Lord, it had been cathartic to watch them go. “Had you imagined I could possibly have worn them all in the single fortnight I was in London?” she scoffed. “It will not surprise you, my lord, that you are hardly the only one of your social strata to disapprove of me. One cannot turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, after all.”
Thomas had the good grace to flush. “Hell,” he said, lifting one hand to rub at his jaw. “I suppose you must have overheard—”
“I eavesdropped,” Mercy said, with a little flick of her pencil across the page. “Unintentionally, I assure you. No one wishes to hear such things of themselves. I ought to have left sooner.” A little laugh trickled from her throat. “I wish I had.”
“You weren’t meant to hear those things,” he said, in a raspy sort of voice.
“No, I don’t suppose I was.” She turned the page, abandoning the stylized spring tulips for a pattern of eight-pointed stars connected by swirling frills, which she thought would embroider well upon netting. “A menace, you said. A lost cause.”
“I did say that,” he acknowledged. “I shouldn’t have done. Even in private.”
