Thomas’ head jerked up. “You do?”
“Of course. There have been times it would have been terribly difficult to miss.”
“But you never said anything.”
“What should I have said?” And there, that was genuine confusion on her face as she tipped her head to the right ininquiry. “I imagine it troubled you enough without my having made note of it to you. What purpose would be served in calling attention to it, except perhaps to make you feel embarrassed of it?”
Father had thought nothing of making him feel embarrassed and ashamed. He had used that shame as a motivational tool, striving to drive the stammer out of him with the heavy-handed use of it. And here was Mercy—a woman he’d never been particularly kind to—who, as it turned out, had been kinder to him all his life than he had ever known. “Father was fond of mockery,” he said. And all it had done was turned him ever more quiet; sullen, even. “Even Mother, well-intentioned as she is, has long had the habit of attempting to finish my sentences for me.” Which had been frustrating in its own way.
“Probably there was no need for that. You’ve always gotten your words out eventually,” Mercy said. “There’s nothing wrong with requiring a little more time to do so.”
Quite abruptly it occurred to him that he had not, as an adult, stammered in her presence. Even at his most agitated, in his moments of highest stress and strain—most frequently caused by her. Because she had, somehow, been comfortable? Safe?
Thomas scoffed. “To hear Father speak of it, one would have thought it was a cardinal sin.” At least, he had always been made to feel that it was so. Father had never understood that all his mockery and reproach had never once aided Thomas in his attempt to speak through the tie of his tongue, the peculiar thickness of his throat. That each glare and glower had merely tightened that knot, stymied the words he had struggled to speak. “Sometimes,” he said, “it’s as if my mind moves too quickly for speech, and my tongue is two sentences behind, stuck around a word.” An occurrence that had always left him feeling slow and stupid, clumsy in his expression of thought.
“Busy brain,” Mercy said absently, and her hands drifted toher lap, smoothing at the gold silk of her skirts.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Busy brain,” she said again. “That’s what I call mine. Often, my mind leaps from one thought to the next indiscriminately. It can make it difficult to hold a conversation, you understand. It might feel as though that conversation has slowed to a crawl, and that I am suddenly fifteen minutes ahead of where I ought to be, already arrived to a place that the conversation has not yet reached.” She braced one elbow upon the arm of the couch, set her chin in her palm. “Sometimes it does, eventually,” she said. “And sometimes I’ve jumped to a place it was never going, and I’ve lost the thread of the conversation entirely. My brain is just too busy to move at the snail’s pace of most conversations, and my attention is often too fleeting a thing to remain engaged upon any one subject.”
“That sounds”—unusual—“aggravating.”
She managed a shrug, a tiny lift and fall of her shoulders that sent her sleeve slipping down her right arm. “It is frustrating, certainly,” she said. “For no one so much as me.”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t intend to be odd or difficult or—or absent-minded,” she said, casting out the final phrase as if it had been a pejorative of the worst sort. “It’s never intentional. It just happens. I have endless attention for the things that interest me—so much so that I’ve forgotten to eat and lost track of time entirely. To the point that it might feel as though hours have passed in an instant, midnight arriving when I would swear it had been noon only minutes before. Conversely, I have never been able to fix my attention to a task I find unpleasant—or sometimes even to a task I might find pleasant, could I summon the inclination to begin with it. I might read the same page of the same book ten times or more, but find my mind has wandered away each time.”
By the strained tone of her voice, Thomas surmised that ithad not been an easy admission to make. “Go on,” he said, and hoped she had interpreted it as encouraging.
She heaved a sigh, and her dark eyes shifted away from his as she tucked her chin down into her palm as if to hide her face. “I’ve missed myriad appointments, been appallingly late more often than I’d care to admit,” she said, “and lost or forgotten more things than I can count. It makes no difference how important that object might be. Have you any idea how frustrating it is to lose something you would swear had been in your hand only moments before?”
“Like the key,” he said. “The one you neglected to take the night you left the house.”
“I maintain Iwouldhave remembered that one,” she said, a pleat of pique appearing between her brows. “If you had not—”
“Let’s not,” he said, biting back a shred of a laugh, “or I’ll be obligated to take you to task for it once more.”
Wisely, Mercy snapped her mouth shut. “Like the key,” she allowed, with a little hunch of her shoulders. “Or my sketchbook. My hats, my gloves.” A pink flush drifted across her cheeks and there was a faint rustle of silk as her legs shifted minutely beneath her skirts. “My slippers,” she added.
“You left them on the stairs when we came up,” he said. “You usually do, in fact. I’ve tripped over them a half a dozen times already. Damn near broke my neck stumbling over them once, in the early hours of the morning.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Really, I nevermeanto do it. It’s just—”
“Habit, I’d guess,” he interjected. “A wholly unconscious one, most likely. I take it you do the same at home?”
“Yes,” she said on a sigh. “The servants have grown accustomed to my eccentricities over the years. Most often, by the time I discover something is missing, it’s been found and returned to my room. I’m certain I’ve annoyed our cook far toooften for something cold to eat because I’ve forgotten the time and missed a proper meal.” Mercy managed a little laugh, flat and self-derisive. “In fact, it would be fairer to say the servants have all been managing aroundme for most of my life. I can’t manage to concentrate upon things like dinner menus, or which linens need to be replaced, or even tallying the accounting books. Arithmetic bores me to tears,” she said. “I suppose you were right there. I’ve never been particularly proficient in it.”
“But youareclever,” he said. “You managed to repair that hot air balloon on your own. Your father said he didn’t think you would do it—and yet you did.”
“I wasinterested,” she stressed. “But you’re mistaken. He thought I wouldn’t because I often don’t. Our country house is often littered with unfinished projects; things I began with all good intent and then lost interest in. I suspect it’s been some years since I’ve finished so much as a needlework sampler,” she said, abashed. With a jerky motion, her hands fell into her lap, fingers fidgeting with the smooth silk of her skirts. “It’s not my competence that is at issue. It’s my attention.”
He had been so wrong. About everything. So many behaviors he had attributed to her station, or to her father’s overindulgence, or to a flagrant disregard for propriety, or to a basic lack of respect and consideration. It had never been that, any of it. It had just beenMercy, swimming upstream against a current she could not control. One that controlled her instead.
“The worst—the absoluteworst,” she said, her eyes glittering, “is enduring well-meaning suggestions such as,‘If you only tried harder, Mercy.’” Her hands flew up in a little gesture of agitation, as if she were tempted to pull out her hair with the aggravation of it. “I have,” she declared, the pitch of her voice wobbling across octaves in its strident insistence. “I have tried! Ihavetried, all my life.”
Yes; he supposed she must have done. He had done hisdamnedest to master his stammer, and still it clawed at his throat from time to time. Most often, especially in his younger days, it had mastered him, and no amount of Father’s reproach had made it cease. How condescending, he thought, to reduce such afflictions to a matter of simply trying harder. “I was not going to suggest it,” he said. “I’ve had enough of that myself.”
