“No,” he said. “Thank you, but no. I know exactly where Miss Fletcher is.”
There was only one place she could be. In a city where she had no other friends and few acquaintances, there was only one possible place that Mercy, a woman on her own, could be.
With her sister. In Cheapside.
∞∞∞
Mercy glanced up from the window as Charity emerged from the bedroom at last, garbed in a lovely red velvet dressing gown. “Goodness,” Charity said, muffling a yawn behind her fingers and scraping the disheveled mass of her hair over her shoulder, “I could hear you pacing all evening. Didn’t you sleep?”
“No,” Mercy said. Thanks to her busy brain, which had spent the night leaping from potential disaster to potential disaster, she’d not slept a wink. It hadn’t helped that Charity’s flat, which was situated above what was now a milliner’s shop, had but one bed chamber, and so Mercy had had to pass an interminable night upon a small couch with legs so spindly that she had been certain they would collapse beneath her at any moment. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Probably I should not have prevailed upon you—”
“You should not have done,” Charity said flatly. “Why do you think I have always insisted we meet elsewhere? You know you cannot be seen to associate with me. If you hadn’t arrived at such a dreadful hour, I would have turned you away for your own good.”
For your own good. Mercy bristled at the phrasing, its general condescension. As if she were somehow incapable of making her own decisions! And then, abruptly, a tiny spear of shame pierced that bubble of righteous anger. She had thought the very same, hadn’t she? She had fled in the night, without so much as a word, forThomas’own good. For the sake of his family and their reputations.
“I don’t want to lose you,” she said softly. “Not now that I’ve found you.” But did the world exist in which she could haveboth?
With a sigh, Charity wilted onto the couch which, remarkably, didn’t issue even so much as a creak with the advent of her weight upon it. “I made my choices long ago,” she said. “And I do not regret them. I would do it all over again if I had the option. I have had years and years to accept that some doors would remain forever closed to me.” With one hand she poured tea from the pot that Mercy had made hours ago, and then winced as she brought the cup to her lips and learned firsthand how cold and bitter it had grown. “There are some things, some choices, which one can never take back. And you, Mercy—you have so many more choices than ever I did. You really ought to think of your future.”
That was just the problem. Her busy brain had constructed an elaborate web of futures. And not only her own. There were so many futures to consider, and she had handled them with careless hands already. It felt as though each passing moment brought with it a new succession of cracks, hairline fractures running across them. Shattering felt an inevitability.
“I have thought a great deal about my future,” Mercy said, and that was true. It was just that she had never anticipated the potential for a different future opening up before her. She had given up on the childhood dream of being a wife and a mother years ago, closed the door upon it when it had become clear to her that it would not happen
She had simply never planned for the possibility of Thomas wedging his boot in that door to shove it back open.
“Ihadthought a great deal about my future,” Mercy amended. “I had no plans to marry. I certainly never expected to—to—”
“Fall in love?” Charity supplied with a shrug. “By the grace of God, I had any proclivity toward romance snuffed out of me years and years ago. And yet…”
“And yet?”
“It seems to me a rare thing, love,” Charity said. “My most recent benefactor fell victim to it himself, in fact. And with his own wife, if you can imagine! I don’t know that I’d care to become irreparably besotted myself, since love does tend to make an idiot of one, but I think I’d rather enjoy a bit of honest adoration. Do tell me. What is it like?”
Mercy scrubbed one hand over her eyes, which had grown remarkably damp. “It truly is like falling,” she said in a ragged murmur. “Falling from such a great height, and knowing your body will be dashed to pieces when you land.”
“That sounds dreadful,” Charity said in dulcet tones rife with disappointment, curling one hand beneath her chin.
Mercy shook her head. “It’s magnificent. Exhilarating and terrifying and nerve-wracking, and just—just glorious.” She had soared the skies in a hot air balloon and still not touched the heights she had reached with Thomas. From so little as a dance, a game of billiards, a naughty whisper in her ear. Each moment inexpressibly precious, etched into her heart forever. “You never do reach the ground,” she said. “You crash into his arms instead, and it is—the most perfect place to be. The most perfect feeling in the world.”
“And this man…this baron who gives you this feeling. He’s offered for you?”
“Not yet,” Mercy said. “Not yet. But he said he would.”
“And he knows,” Charity said, with an inquisitive cant of her head. “Everything?”
“Everything,” Mercy said, with an awkward shrug of her shoulders. “I had led him to believe I intended to marry him.” He would never have taken her to bed otherwise. “I owed him a proper explanation for why he could not marry me.”
“Then it would seem to me as though he has come to his own conclusions,” Charity said. “He has made his choice, with the fullbreadth of information available, and it is you. So now you will have to make yours. Will you be an idiot in love, or a lonely fool?”
Mercy sucked in a harsh breath.I want you to let me be there to catch you if you fall, Thomas had once told her, and she—she had warded off those outstretched arms and dived straight for the rocks that would dash her to pieces at the bottom instead. She had aimed for those damned rocks, when all along—
All along she should have aimed for Thomas and trusted in him to catch her.
Chapter Twenty Five
Thomas stared down at the note that had been delivered not ten minutes ago, from oneC. Nightingale. This time, addressed to him rather than to Mercy. The first missive—the first of many, he expected—from Mercy’s half-sister. And this time it had arrived with a return address. She was expecting a reply, then, this woman who would soon be his sister-in-law. Or half of one, anyway. He edged his thumb beneath the wax seal, prying it free of the paper, and unfolded the letter. Like the other he’d read, it was concise and to the point.
I have got your betrothed here with me. What am I to do with her?
