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. Itisspring—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 thatbest 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 hershoes 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 justfour 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 thenIcrawled 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 wasnotkind about it.”
