Chapter Two
Sherry! Sherry, you get back here this instant!”
The masculine shout had originated from somewhere downstairs, Grace thought. It was not a particularly unusual occurrence; little Sherborne had been making a right nuisance of himself since he’d arrived—with his parents and older sister—from the countryside the week before.
Grace cleared her throat, striving to keep herself as still as possible to avoid disturbing the various lengths of fabric that her sister had draped over her. “Mercy?”
“Hm?” Mercy muttered as she plucked a pencil from where it had been tucked behind her ear and scribbled something down in the notebook held in her hands.
It had never ceased to amaze Grace how thoroughly Mercy could blot out even the loudest and most obvious of distractions. “Sherry’s into some mischief. Oughtn’t you do something about that?
“It’ll sort itself out. Probably.” Another furious scribble.
Grace choked on a laugh. “He’s your son!”
“When I’m working, he is Thomas’ son, and Thomas is perfectly capable—”
The door of the salon slammed open, and Grace heard the patter of small feet from somewhere behind her.
There was a high-pitched giggle as Sherry scampered past, a few biscuits clutched in his small hands.
He dove behind the cover of a couch only moments before Thomas burst through the door himself, careening into view, his chest still heaving with the effort it had required to keep up with his young son.
“Did Sherry come through here?” he asked.
Grace and Mercy exchanged a speaking glance. “We don’t inform on family,” they said in unison.
Thomas threw up his hands in exasperation. “He nicked three sugar biscuits straight off of the dowager duchess’ tea tray!”
Grace and Mercy snickered. The couch giggled.
Thomas heaved a sigh, raked one hand through his hair. “I told him one biscuit only,” he said, leveling a stern glare at the couch, which had the audacity to giggle again.
“Oh, come now,” Mercy said, snapping her notebook closed. “He’s just a little excitable. It’s so very rare that the whole family is together.” She inclined her head toward the couch. “It’ll work itself out. I promise.”
Thomas’ stern demeanor crumpled. “All right,” he said with a sigh as he bent to sweep a kiss across her cheek. “May it be on your head, then.” He adjusted his spectacles on his nose and said loudly, as he turned to go, “I’m going back downstairs.”
The door had hardly closed behind before Sherry sidled out from behind the couch. “Is it safe?”
“Mm. Debatable.” Mercy held out one hand expectantly. “I expect a biscuit, for not snitching to Papa.”
“Aw, Mama.” Sherry’s shoulders slumped. He pulled a face as he crept forward, his hands curled protectively around his stolen biscuits. As if it physically pained him to do so, at last he released the tight clasp of his fingers and allowed Mercy to select a biscuit.
“And Auntie Grace, too,” Mercy said.
Sherry rocked back upon his heels, shaken to his core. “But then I’ll have only one!” he protested.
“As you were meant to have in the first place.” Mercy tweaked his nose affectionately. “Be glad I haven’t asked you to share the last with Flora.”
Grace plucked a biscuit out of Sherry’s hands, careful not to let the fabric draped over her arms fall. “Thank you, sweetheart.”
His bounty now substantially reduced, Sherry let his shoulders fall to a dejected slump. “I have got to find a better hiding place,” he said as he trudged toward the door.
He’d have more than a little trouble with that. Even the Duke of Warrington’s massive house could hardly contain all of the family presently within it.
“Good luck, darling,” Mercy called after him, and promptly dived straight back into her notebook as if the interruption had never occurred at all, absently biting into her biscuit as she browsed her notes.
“What have you learned?” Grace asked as she tried to nudge a swath of fabric down her arm.
“That blue is not your color,” Mercy said. “Odd, that. Blue is everyone’s color. But it’s certainly not yours.” She tapped the point of the pencil to her lips. “I don’t like you in stripes, either. Perhaps I’ll come up with a new pattern for you. It is spring—how do you feel about daisies?”
“Ambivalent. May I let down my arms?”
“Oh—oh, yes, terribly sorry.” Mercy stuffed the remainder of the biscuit in her mouth, tucked the notebook beneath her arm, and began to collect the bits of fabric she’d draped over Grace.
“Well,” she said briskly. “No new blue gowns, then. But purple looks quite nice on you, and so does pink. Green would go well with your eyes.”
Good. They were her best feature, and perhaps the one that best marked her physically as a member of her rather strange little family.
Out of all four sisters, Grace was by far the youngest. Mercy was the nearest to her in age, at thirteen years her senior.
And though Mercy, Felicity, and Charity shared a number of features between them, only Grace shared Felicity’s green eyes.
Amongst her rather tall, svelte, dark-haired sisters, she had often felt like the changeling child—blond, petite, and a fair bit more voluptuous.
As Mercy folded up the last of the fabric, Grace collapsed onto the couch and bit into her own biscuit. “I really do not require any more gowns,” she said. “And I am beginning to feel a bit like a dressmaker’s dummy.”
“Pish. I haven’t brought a single pin anywhere near you,” Mercy said.
“But really, dear, I do thank you for your assistance. I can see the patterns I want to create in my head, but it’s a bit trickier to see how the fabric falls on a human form.
And you really do have a perfect figure for it. Perhaps just a few new gowns.”
Now that high waists—which had suited her only when she had been young and half-starved—had fallen out of fashion, yes.
But for a few years there, it had been a struggle to stuff her bosom into the thin bodices, and then there had been the trouble of the straight lines of the skirts catching up around her hips, which were too wide to easily accommodate such a thing.
“I have got more gowns than I could possibly wear already.”
“Last year’s gowns,” Mercy objected. “This could be the year you find a husband. Do you want to be wearing a dated gown when it happens?”
“I could have had a husband last year, if I had wanted one. And the year before that.” She’d been out for five years, now. “I’ve had offers,” she said. “Just…none that I cared to accept.”
“Oh?” Mercy tucked her pencil and notebook away at last as she dropped down onto the couch beside Grace, toeing off her shoes as she did. “Do tell. I spend so much of my time in the countryside that I inevitably miss the best gossip.”
“Nothing salacious, I’m afraid,” Grace said as she braced her elbow upon the arm of the couch and rested her cheek in her hand.
“Mr. Stewart was more attached to the idea of having a duke for a brother-in-law than he was in having me for a wife. And Lord Latimer…” Grace gave a rueful smile.
“He suggested a long engagement so that I might have the time to adopt a slimming regimen.”
Mercy jerked in shock, her cheeks flushing with fury. “He didn’t!”
“He did.” Grace let the words settle between them for just a moment.
“Naturally, I told him I intended to lose approximately twelve stone immediately—by eschewing any and all further acquaintance with him.” She heaved a sigh.
“I think he must not quite have understood me. Even though I had refused him, he still called upon Anthony to make his intentions known.” Her brother-in-law, the husband of her eldest sister, Charity.
“Oh, no,” Mercy said, slumping in her seat.
“I believe he was cordially invited to…how did Anthony phrase it?” She tapped the pad of her index finger to her lips. “Ah, yes, I recall it now: Fuck off.”
Mercy smothered a little sound of amusement with the tips of her fingers. “Good for you,” she said. “And good on Anthony, for putting him in his place.”
“Oh, I agree.” One didn’t have to be slender to be beautiful.
No one would have described her as delicate, or dainty, or willowy—but she liked the way she looked and felt comfortable in her own body.
And she didn’t intend to sacrifice any of life’s simple pleasures just to fit someone else’s idea of who she ought to be and how she ought to look.
Perhaps she hadn’t found a husband just yet.
But then, none of her sisters had married before seven and twenty, and at just four and twenty herself, Grace had years left to ponder her choices.
Which was not to say that they would ever goad her into making one—but spending so much of her time surrounded by such blissfully happy marriages did make a woman wonder, on occasion, if she would ever be so lucky herself.
Mercy curled her legs beneath her, tucking herself against the arm of the couch. “I was thinking green for the ball tomorrow evening,” she said. “You’ve that lovely pale seafoam gown, and I am just dying to see how it’s come out.”
Of course she was. Mercy was personally involved with her father’s silk mill and designed most of the patterns herself.
And Grace was generally happy to play dressmaker’s dummy for her, and to wear the beautiful fabrics so generously provided to her, but— “Lord Lockhart is certain to be there,” she muttered beneath her breath. “Could I not skip that one?”
“Grace, sweetheart. Have you quarreled with him again?”
Grace felt her shoulders slumping, and she slid a few inches in her seat. “If he wasn’t such a rude, hateful, mean—”
Mercy’s laugh trickled over her ears. “Tansy invaded his garden again?”
“Worse,” Grace admitted. “She found an open window and crawled through it into the stillroom.”
“And then?” Mercy prompted.
“And then—and then—and then I crawled through,” Grace confessed. “I only meant to retrieve her! But his lordship caught me at it, and—” Grace huffed, folding her arms over her chest. “I got stuck. He had to pull me out, and he was not kind about it.”
“Grace.”
“What was I meant to do? The last time he caught her in his house, he threatened to shave her!”
“I’m certain he was exaggerating,” Mercy said, with a consoling pat upon Grace’s knee. “After all, he’d have to catch her first, and Tansy’s a slippery thing. And so cunning, I’m not convinced she isn’t half-fox.”
“He’s got catmint all over his garden and proclaims himself surprised when it attracts a cat! Tansy doesn’t mean any harm by it. And really, she’s such a sweet, precious—”
“To you, darling. To you.” Mercy gave a wry grin. “She’s taken a swipe at nearly everyone else at some point or another. Sometimes more than once. Why, just two days ago, I saw her leap from the top of a wardrobe straight at one of the footmen, and I would swear she had murder in her eyes.”
Of course she had had murder in her eyes.
Tansy was a cat, and cats excelled at precisely two things: sleeping for the vast majority of the day, and a general proclivity toward criminal intent.
Tansy, like most cats, preferred to fill every last one of her waking hours with crime. Murder had always been a possibility.
Tansy had been a gift to Grace from her sister, Felicity, and her brother-in-law, Ian, upon her matriculation from Felicity’s girls’ school, and she had been Grace’s constant companion ever since.
Every bit as much a member of her family as her sisters, as her nieces and nephews.
Tansy had withstood agonizingly long carriage rides between Grace’s sisters’ homes, and waited patiently for her return home from evening events during the Season.
She slept right beside Grace each evening, her ferocious rumble of a purr a reassuring presence in the depths of the night.
If his lordship had taken a dislike to the poor dear girl, well, then, it was his own fault for being steadfastly immune to her many charms. Probably the wretched man preferred dogs.
Mercy adjusted herself on the couch, propping one arm upon the armrest. “At any rate, it’s a Toogood ball,” she said.
“All of our friends will be there, and it is Felicity and Ian’s first of the Season, you know.
” Her voice pitched to a cajoling tone. “Our first with all of us together. Just think how lovely—”
“All right,” Grace said, casting up her hands. “All right, I’ll go. But I will not be anything more than cordial to his lordship, for he doesn’t deserve even my cordiality.”
“I’d never ask it of you,” Mercy swore emphatically as she popped up from the couch, no doubt to impart the good news to the rest of the family.
“But I am so glad. It’s going to be wonderful.
” Her bare feet padded across the carpet toward the door, and she turned at the last, her dark hair flying over her shoulder. “And you will wear—”
“I’ll wear the green.”
“Brilliant.” A dimple glowed in Mercy’s cheek. “And if Lord Lockhart is rude to you, you have only to tell Anthony, and he’ll—”
“Tell him to fuck off?” Grace suggested.
“Probably he’ll be a bit more tactful than that,” Mercy said with a light laugh. “They are neighbors of a sort, after all. And really, his only crime is not caring much for Tansy.”
Which was utterly unforgiveable, in Grace’s opinion. “I’ll be cordial,” she said. “But if he should utter even one unflattering word of Tansy, I will not be held responsible for my actions.”
“Fair enough,” Mercy said, as she started for the door once more. “Just do me one small favor, and don’t get caught.”