Page 56 of Courting Trouble
“I’ll be right down.” Nora checked out the window for the guards her father had hired to stand sentinel against either gangsters or reporters. She wondered if any of them knew a wit about doctoring wounds.
They stood on the walk, looking much too brutish and conspicuous for such a quiet square.
She hurried to fetch a kit of bandages and iodine from the washroom and flew downstairs to the parlor.
Felicity swept up the vase and Mercy was sitting like a child about to be scolded, her fist curled around a handkerchief.
“I’m not cross, it’s only a vase,” Nora said with a fond smile, holding her hand out. “Where are you hurt?”
“It’s a trifle.” Mercy unclenched her hand and pulled back a handkerchief, revealing a cut on her palm that still welled with blood. “When the vase fell, I lunged for it and, clumsy dolt that I am, I fell right on top of it.”
“It’s bleedingsomuch,” Felicity said with a delicate, dyspeptic burp. “I can’t look, or I’ll be sick. Or faint.”
“It appears worse than it is.” Mercy inspected it. “So superficial, I can’t imagine it’ll even need stitches.”
“A small mercy that,” Nora murmured, dabbing a ball of cotton with the iodine and pressing it gently to the cut.
“Why?” Mercy queried. “Because the closest clinic happens to be Dr. Conleith’s surgery?” She waggled expressive brows, her wide, mischievous mouth twisting in a suggestive grin. “Istillcan’t believe he broke father’s nose.”
“I’d have given anything to have seen it,” Felicity sighed.
At that, Nora shoved a bandage into Mercy’s wounded hand, and promptly burst into tears.
Her sisters instantly bracketed her like two clucking bookends, their hands fluttering on her back and her arm like anxious butterflies unsure of where to land.
Nora wrestled with her runaway emotion, doing her best to rein it back in, but each bawl seemed more gasping than the last, until every breath dragged through hiccupping sobs.
Felicity crooned to her, rubbing little comforting circles against her spine as Mercy affixed a one-handed makeshift bandage on her own palm.
“You love Titus, don’t you?” Felicity sighed, resting her chin on Nora’s uninjured shoulder.
Nora shook her head, accepting the handkerchief Felicity handed her, and dabbing at her eyes and nose. “Don’t mark this, either of you. It’s been a trying time and I’m…it doesn’t matter.”
She took in a deep, painful breath and swallowed the ocean of tears threatening to sweep her into the tide. “What matters is that next year I’ll be married to a Duke’s son, Titus will be the toast of the elite scientific and surgical community, and you… you’ll be the belles of the season with dowries the size of which London has not yet seen, if Father is to be believed.” She smoothed the skirt of her black gown and took in several calming breaths. “There’s still hope,” she reminded herself.
Felicity pulled her hands back as if she were made of burning rubbish. “Hope for what?”
“For you both. For good marriages.”
The twins looked quizzically at her, and then each other, before they astonished her by bursting into peals of unladylike guffaws.
“What onearthmakes you think we want to be married?” Mercy ended a chortle with an accidental snort, which sent them both into another tumult of amusement.
Felicity wiped tears from the corner of her eyes. “I believe the idioms,not if the entire world depended on it, andnever in a million yearshave been batted around.”
Nora stared at them as if they were each two heads of a hydra. “But…you’re being bullied terribly. Shunned from society. Not invited to participate in the season.”
“And?” Mercy shrugged. “That leaves us time to attend lectures and meetings, and it’s ever so much easier on Felicity that she doesn’t have to talk to men. Or look at them. Let alone marry one, can you imagine?”
Felicity sobered at this a little, but seemed sincere when she said, “We’ve decided all we need is each other’s company.Nohusbands. Ever.”
Nora shook her head, unable to comprehend. “But… without husbands how will you afford to live?”
Mercy shrugged. “Well, Father’s on the hook for our upkeep indefinitely.”
Alarmed, Nora grasped her uninjured hand and forced Mercy to meet her gaze. “Father is unforgiving if you defy him like this. He’ll throw you to the wolves if you’re of no use to him; believe me when I tell you that.”
Mercy stood, pulling her hand from Nora’s frantic grasp, her eyes blazing with a sapphire zeal. “We’ll become governesses then, or seamstresses. Companions or stuffy old librarians. But I’ll see a cold day in hell before I see myself in a church as a bride.”
