by Martha Keyes
It was Viola who primarily carried the conversation, a fact which made Mercy grateful, for after her confrontation with Solomon, she was drained of energy and motivation.
One thing was certain: Solomon was still angry with her; he still thought ill of her.
And she couldn’t blame him. She could rationalize away all the things that had led her to walk away from their betrothal, but what remained after all that was still a weakness of character that brought a blush of shame to Mercy’s cheeks, even two years later.
It was Solomon who took it upon himself to bring Mr. Coburn down to the drawing room after he had lingered over his port for a few minutes.
Mr. Coburn smiled from ear to ear as he entered the room, leaning slightly on Solomon. “Forget my arm—I seem to have forgotten how to use my legs!”
He was installed in the softest seat in the room—a large, wingback chair with deep blue, velvet fabric—while Deborah seated herself on the floor in front of him, looking up at him now and again with such love and admiration that Mercy had to look away.
She was happy for her cousin and the love she had found. But she envied it. She envied it so much that it ached to witness it, particularly when she and Solomon were so at odds.
She found his eyes were on her, but he looked away when their gazes met.
“I think I shall be mended well enough to travel tomorrow,” said Mr. Coburn, “provided the doctor agrees, which, I admit, I have my doubts about. He seems to be a foreboding man, but perhaps experience has taught him the wisdom of such an approach.” He gazed down at his arm, wrapped in a linen sling. “In any event, you would all be horrified to see the rainbow of colors the bruising on my arm has created.”
“I could make up a poultice for your arm if you wish?” Viola said. “There is a particular combination that is known to fend off any threatening fever, besides drawing the healing powers of the body toward the swelling and bruising.”
Mr. Coburn, who had been absent for all of the discussions of Viola’s views on magic and the supernatural, took her suggestion as a great kindness and asked if perhaps she would be willing to make the poultice before they retired to bed.
She nodded quickly, visibly pleased that he had taken her up on her offer.
“For I don’t wish to be hampered with this injury longer than is absolutely necessary.”
“No, indeed.” Deborah smiled up at him. “But we shan’t let it interfere with our plans.”
Mr. Coburn smiled at her, but it had an apprehensive quality to it.
“I must say,” Deborah continued with a furrowed brow, “that it was terribly unkind of the hateful soul who wrote that note, betraying us and our elopement. Whoever it was, they shall not have their way, for I mean to marry you, Frederick Coburn! Nothing shall stop me.” She rested her head on his knee and closed her eyes with a contented sigh.
Her head came back up, a pout to her lips. “Though I cannot for the life of me understand who might have written it. The only person who was aware of our intent was my maid—for I simply could not make all the preparations without taking her into my confidence—but I refuse to believe she would serve me so.”
Mercy caught eyes with Mr. Coburn, as he tugged at his already loose cravat.
Deborah seemed to notice the brief exchange and looked back and forth between them. “What? What is it?”
This was not Mercy’s battle, she reminded herself. Mr. Coburn would have to decide whether to confess to Deborah or to continue deceiving her.
“My darling,” he said, his brows drawn together as he shifted slightly in his seat.
She turned so she could look at him, waiting expectantly.
“It was me,” he said.
There was a pause.
“I wrote the note.”
Deborah blinked uncomprehendingly and drew back. “What?” She laughed nervously and slapped at his knee. “You are funning!”
He shook his head gravely. “You know I had grave doubts about the wisdom of eloping, my love. I had such apprehension about the matter that—”
She pushed herself from the ground, looking at him as though he were a sudden stranger. “You wrote the note that brought everyone upon us? That has kept us from eloping?”
He stood, approaching her with an outstretched hand, but she backed away, and her disbelief began to give way to anger.
She looked to Mercy. “Did you know about this?”
Mercy nodded once. “Only since earlier today.”
Deborah stared at her, aghast. “How did I ever come to believe I could trust you?”
Mr. Coburn put a hand on Deborah’s arm. “Do not blame your cousin, Deb. It is not her fault. I begged her not to—”
Deborah pulled her arm away, distancing herself once again from Mr. Coburn. “You would defend her? After you took her into your confidence and kept the truth from me? The humiliating truth that you resorted to asking for rescue rather than marry me?”
“Deb, no! I—”
She silenced him with a hand. “Is it because of my fortune? Because Mercy has told you that I will lose my dowry if we marry without my father’s consent?”
Mr. Coburn reared back, his pleading eyes and submissive stance giving way to offense. “Of course not!”
Mercy set down her cup of tea, suddenly aware of how tightly she was gripping it.
Solomon stood silently by one of the windows, while Viola looked back and forth between Deborah and Mr. Coburn, her brows as high as they could possibly go.
Deborah straightened, her cheeks flaming with heat and her eyes overbright. “Perhaps you are right, Frederick. Perhaps this was a mistake. Perhaps I should marry Mr. Kennett after all, as it seems that we are making all our decisions based on money.”
Mercy stiffened, and she noticed Solomon’s head come up out of the corner of her eye. Deborah could not be serious. She wouldn’t do such a thing.
Would she? She could be very stubborn indeed.
She certainly loved Mr. Coburn. But like anyone, she could be pushed past a point from which there was no returning.
Mercy knew that point too well, for it was precisely where she had sent Solomon two years ago.
Deborah stared at Mr. Coburn for a moment longer, her arms down at her sides, her nostrils flaring, before she turned on her heel and left the room.
Chapter Thirteen
Mercy was divided in her loyalties.
Mr. Coburn was beside himself—anxious and unsure how to bridge the chasm that had suddenly appeared between him and Deborah. It was Mercy whose advice he sought, for she was the one who knew Deborah best.
She felt for him. His decision to write the note had certainly not been wise, but she could sympathize with it, all the same. He must have been torn indeed between his steadfast desire to do right and the fear of losing the woman he loved if she sensed him to be wavering.
But for Mercy to play advocate or even listening ear to Mr. Coburn would only deepen the divide between him and his beloved Deborah.
For her part, Deborah took pains to pay as little heed to Mr. Coburn as the barest civility would permit. It was painful to witness. She addressed herself frequently to Solomon, and Mercy tried her hardest to persuade herself that the reason this bothered her so terribly was not due to any possessiveness she might feel toward Solomon, but rather because she found it childish and maddening of her cousin to make such a pointed effort at punishing Mr. Coburn.
The alliance between Deborah and Solomon, though, was tenuous at best, and seemingly one-sided. Solomon hadn’t the personality to respond with flirting to Deborah’s veiled flattery.
Mr. Coburn had not descended for breakfast, and if Mercy had not witnessed Deborah’s eyes glancing more than once at the empty chair at the table or whenever the door opened, she might have believed that Deborah had not even noticed his absence.
Solomon rose from the breakfast table before the women had finished eating, pleading the excuse that he needed to search out his aunt, who had not been se
en since the tarot reader had come the day prior.
The door shut behind Solomon, and Mercy put down her spoon.
“Deborah,” she said.
“If you mean to lecture me, you may save your breath.” Deborah buttered the roll with so much force that it broke apart in her hands. She dropped both crumbling halves onto her plate and reached determinedly for the preserves. “I am not at all in the mood to have a peal rung over me.”
Viola sent a sympathetic glance at Mercy, stirring her tea slowly.
“I hope that I never lecture you, Deb”—Mercy’s mouth drew into a line as Deborah emitted a scoffing noise, but she pressed on, determined not to be provoked. “I only wished to suggest something.” She looked at Deborah, whose determined silence she decided to take as permission to continue. “You know that I am not in support of an elopement between you and Mr. Coburn, but I am in support of a match between the two of you. I am, Deborah. I see how much you love each other, and I think he would do everything in his power to make you happy.” She inclined her head. “His decision to write the note was certainly foolish, and I believe that he regrets it sincerely. But can you see it as the act of a man so violently in love with you that he wished to spare you from the pain he understood would result from such a course?”
Deborah said nothing, but she sat still, looking at Mercy with a hard stare.
“He was wrong not to speak to you directly, yes,” continued Mercy, “but does it not matter that it was all motivated by his love for you?”
Viola smiled wistfully with a small sigh. “‘To say the truth, reason and love / Keep little company together nowadays.’”
For once, Mercy appreciated Viola’s timing, for Deborah seemed to be struck somewhat by the quote.
“Do not push him away, Deborah,” Mercy pleaded. “He only wishes to do right—to do whatever will bring you the most happiness, and he loves you so very much.”
Deborah applied herself again to the less mutilated half of the roll in front of her, but not so quickly that Mercy missed the tearful sheen covering her eyes.
“I am not so certain he does,” said Deborah. “Perhaps I was being ridiculous and naïve to believe in marrying for love. Perhaps my father is right after all.”
Mercy tensed, never anticipating that to hear Deborah soften toward her father could cause Mercy herself such pain.
How would she stand it if, after everything that had happened, Deborah decided to marry Solomon? Mercy had been taking great pains to heal the divide between her cousin and uncle, yet a resigned match between Deborah and Solomon had not been her end goal. She was confident that Deborah and Uncle Richard could make their peace—and Deborah could still have her beloved Mr. Coburn.
But more than ever, Mercy wished to heal another divide: the one between her and Solomon. That was a divide, though, that she doubted could be bridged; and Mercy had no one but herself to blame.
“You mustn’t give up on love, Deborah,” Viola said. “It is a gift. ‘For though 'tis got by chance,'tis kept by art.’”
Mercy felt the catch in her own throat and looked down on the pretense of rubbing a smudge from the tablecloth.
“It is Frederick, not I, who has profaned our love,” said Deborah mulishly.
Deborah’s sour humor weighed down the group considerably, peppered as her conversation was with jabs at her lover. She alternated between ire and a melancholic wistfulness, during which episodes she would recount a memory of the time when Mr. Coburn’s love had been more sure.
She seemed, too, to hold Mercy as the person responsible, in some part, for the supposed decline of her lover’s affections, though it was unclear whether she viewed Mercy as a rival or merely a foe.
For what seemed like the hundredth time, Mercy tried to point out the ridiculousness of such a belief, and she found the task wearing on her severely while laboring under the weight of her own heavy heart.
She sat before a blank piece of foolscap, waiting to compose some communication in response to Uncle Richard’s letter, but she was at a loss for words.
There was no mistaking how enraged Uncle Richard was. It was obvious from the pooling ink and unusually rough angles to his writing that he had struggled to control his ire as he wrote. No doubt some of it stemmed from his worry over his wife’s condition. She was still laid up in bed, from what he had said, and she had not yet been told of Deborah’s antics. Mercy felt for Edith back at Westwood, alone as she was in the tense household. But Edith was entirely capable of handling the situation, and it was better than the alternative: Mercy could only imagine how her sarcastic and skeptical quips about love and marriage would have added complication to things at Chesterley House.
Mercy could also feel her uncle’s desperation to keep Deborah from continuing to Scotland. He wished for a report on Deborah’s intentions. It seemed he had his doubts about whether she could be persuaded against the elopement, and her response, if not satisfactory, might well provoke him into making the journey to Chesterley House to carry her home by force.
Mercy shut her eyes, trying to focus on her response, even as Deborah directed her somewhat sulky monologue to Miss Pawnce and Solomon.
“…For he is far more susceptible to flattery than I had ever supposed.” Deborah shot a tight-lipped glance at Mercy.
Mercy clenched her teeth, then whipped around. “For heaven’s sake, Deborah! Spare us any more of your theatrics. Mr. Coburn is more than willing and anxious for you to be reconciled to one another so that you may decide together how to make the best case for your attachment to your father.”
Solomon was looking at her with a gleam of appreciation in his eyes, as if he had been wishing for someone to say those very words to Deborah.
The door opened, and Miss Pickering entered. It was the first time she had emerged for anything but the necessities from the room she’d had converted into a writing space.
“I am at my wit’s end.” She held in her inky hands a piece of sheet-and-half foolscap, which had only two lines of writing upon it. “I thought that Quintessa had finally opened herself up to me and that surely Leonidas would follow. But alas, I had not written more than these two sentences when the heavens closed upon me yet again.” She rushed over to Viola, who was looking upon her with earnest sympathy.
“Have you any other suggestions, my dear,” Miss Pickering pleaded, kneeling before Viola, “for how to draw them out? How to elicit their trust in me? The trust to tell their story.”
Viola’s eyes narrowed in thought. “You know, Miss Pickering, you have been confined to the house ever since our arrival. Isn’t that correct?”
Miss Pickering nodded quickly, hanging on Viola’s every word. For someone who claimed to receive such joy from writing, she had yet to exhibit anything even approaching it.
Viola pursed her lips. “One must not underestimate the power of nature to revive the mind and ignite the flame of creation.” She breathed in, then sighed, “‘To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.’”
Miss Pickering’s gaze stayed trained on Viola. “Nature is imagination itself,” she said softly. She threw her arms around Viola, whose cheeks turned pink with embarrassment and pleasure.
“How much wisdom is there in youth!” Miss Pickering said. She stood and was gone from the room as quickly as she had come.
Mercy set down her quill, feeling nearly as uninspired in her missive to Uncle Richard as Miss Pickering felt in her playwriting. “Perhaps it would do all of us good to take some air. Is there perhaps a lake or some woods nearby where we could go for a walk?” She looked a question at Solomon.
“Well, yes,” he said with a slight smile. “But it would be a short walk indeed, for both are found just behind Chesterley, beyond the ruins.”
Viola’s head whipped around. “Ruins?”
Solomon smiled at her. “Yes, Miss Pawnce. Ruins. Chesterley House was a much grander estate twenty-five years ago. You have seen but a small portion of it. A fire tore thro
ugh the entire western wing, and my aunt’s parents could not afford the cost of setting it to rights afterward. It has remained thus ever since. Though, unless Aunt Priscilla”—he cleared his throat—“has made changes in the last two or three years, nature has taken over entirely.”
Viola clasped her hands together and looked to Mercy, who smiled.
“It sounds very magical, doesn’t it?” Mercy shot a quick glance at Deborah. “Would you like to join us?”
The door creaked, and all heads turned toward it.
Mr. Coburn stood in the doorway, his arm suspended in front of him in the sling. His gaze moved hesitantly toward Deborah and back to Mercy. He attempted a smile. “You weren’t all planning an expedition out of doors without telling me, were you?”
“Mr. Coburn!” Mercy rose. “Are you well enough to be out of bed and walking around unassisted?”
He let out an exasperated breath. “There comes a point, I think, when resting and remaining immobile begin to impede rather than accelerate the healing process.”
Deborah was watching Mr. Coburn and Mercy with a strange glint in her eyes, but she turned her head away when Mercy looked to her. She and Mr. Coburn could never be reconciled if they spent no time in one another’s company.
“I think a little venture outside couldn’t be so very wrong,” Mercy replied to him. “Come, let us all go together.”
They all moved toward the door, aside from Deborah, who remained in her seat, until she seemed to realize that no one was paying any heed to whether she stayed or joined.
She rose with a small huff, then passed through the door, which Solomon held open for everyone.
Mr. Coburn was stable enough in his walk, but Mercy refused to let that keep her from attempting to orchestrate a rapprochement between him and Deborah.
“Solomon.” She stopped in the corridor and turned to him. “You are the only one of us who knows the way, so unless we wish to find ourselves in the kitchens, perhaps you should lead.”