Page 2 of Evil at the Essex House (Pippa Darling Mysteries #5)

Chapter Two

As I had told the Graf von und zu Natterdorff, Christopher and I shared a service flat in the Essex House Mansions. When we entered the lobby, Evans the commissionaire was waiting.

“Miss Darling.” He inclined his head. “Mr. Astley.”

“Evans.” He looked expectant, and I tilted my head. “Is something going on? Did someone stop by? No…” My eyes narrowed, “—don’t tell me. Is Lord St George upstairs, waiting? Did he talk you into letting him into our flat while we were out?”

“No, Miss Darling,” Evans said, while Christopher chuckled. “This arrived for you, Mr. Astley.”

He handed Christopher a note. The latter took one look at the handwriting and turned pink.

I hid a smile and turned my attention back to the doorman. “So no one is upstairs, Evans?”

“No, Miss Darling.”

Next to me, Christopher opened the note. It hadn’t been tucked inside an envelope, merely folded and sealed, and as he unfolded the paper, I slanted my eyes that way.

It wasn’t a long note, just a line and a half of script I couldn’t make out, but with a rather informal signature that I could: Tom .

“If you have to leave…” I told Christopher, who gave me a distracted look before dropping his eyes to the note and skimming it again.

Behind us, the door to the street opened, letting in the sounds of early evening in London before the door shut again. “Pardon me, Miss. Here you are, guv’nor.”

A slim figure in a natty gray suit, a lad no more than fifteen, slipped past me to hand Evans another missive. “Telegram for Miss Florence Skl…” He peered down at it. “Shhh…”

“Schlomsky,” I said. “Miss Florence Schlomsky.”

He glanced at me. “Right you are, Miss Schlomsky.”

“No, I’m not Miss Schlomsky. The telegram is for Miss Schlomsky.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yes, Miss. See you later, guv.”

He slid past in the opposite direction and was gone. The door shut behind him while Evans stared at the telegram. Christopher was still peering down at his own note, too, seemingly deep in thought.

I turned back to Evans. “Would you like for me to take that upstairs to Miss Schlomsky? I’m going that way anyway.”

Evans hesitated before handing it over. “If you wouldn’t mind, Miss Darling. That way Miss Schlomsky won’t have to wait for it. I’m not supposed to leave the lobby in the middle of a shift.”

No, of course he wasn’t. I took the thin envelope between two fingers and flicked my cousin a glance. “Coming, Christopher?”

“As a matter of fact, Pippa—” He shot me a look back, distracted. “I think I’d better respond to this as soon as possible.”

I tilted my head. “And you don’t want to come upstairs where we have pens and paper and penny stamps?”

He shook his head. “I’m just going to run down to the public call box for a minute.”

I tilted my head the other way. “Everything’s all right, isn’t it?”

He smiled. “Of course, Pippa. Just a quick ring for Crispin.”

“St George? What does Tom want with him?”

And why hadn’t he just contacted Crispin himself, instead of involving Christopher? Tom knew where to find St George.

After a second I added, suspiciously, “He’s not coming up to Town, is he? Remember what happened the last time one of us went somewhere with him.”

(In a word, murder. Or in a few more: driving around London with a dead body in the back of the motorcar, and almost getting caught in a police raid, before leaving said body under a tree in Hyde Park. It’s a long story.)

His lips twitched. “That was your fault, Pippa. You were the one who convinced him to put on a gown and crash a drag ball. None of that was his fault. Or mine, either.”

I rolled my eyes. “He’s the one who wanted to go out and celebrate his birthday. And we wouldn’t have been there in the first place if not for you.”

Although seeing the most eligible bachelor in England, heir to the Sutherland dukedom, in a beaded evening gown and makeup had almost been worth what came later.

Almost.

“At any rate,” Christopher said, “I’m going to run down the street to the call box. I’ll be up in five or ten minutes.”

I nodded. “Give him my?—”

He smirked, and I made a face. “Regards, Christopher. Give him my regards. I have no love to spare where St George is concerned, and you know it. Stop trying to pretend something is going on when you know there isn’t.”

“Yes, Pippa.” But he was still smirking when he turned for the door.

“You’d better not, Christopher,” I told his back threateningly. “If I find out that you’ve been telling St George that I’m sending him love, I’ll make sure you regret it.”

“Yes, Pippa.” He ducked through the door and out. I huffed and turned back to Evans.

“I’ll take the telegram up to Miss Schlomsky, Evans. Any message?”

Evans shook his head. “No, Miss Darling. You were here when it was delivered. You know as much as I do.”

Of course. “I’ll see you later, then, Evans.”

I headed for the lift.

Miss Florence Schlomsky has been a neighbor of Christopher’s and mine in the Essex House Mansions since we moved in early in the year. At that point, I believe she had been in London just a few months herself. We never have gotten on well, as she’s everything I particularly abhor in a woman. Or practically everything, anyway. Since meeting Flossie, I have met a few other specimens that have actually been worse, but she’s still not one of my favorite persons.

She’s American, for one thing. And while being an American doesn’t necessarily indicate that someone is vulgar, Flossie is definitely vulgar. She’s brash, and loud, and approximately as delicate as sandpaper. She also has the personality of a steam roller, and she doesn’t slow down for anyone or anything. She latched onto Christopher as soon as she realized that he was the grandson of a duke, and I had to spend time making certain that she wasn’t terrorizing him. And then, a few months later, she made Crispin’s acquaintance, and while she—thankfully—turned her attentions to him instead of Christopher, that didn’t endear her to me any further.

She is also a gold-digger.

Or perhaps that’s not fair. Flossie has plenty of gold of her own. Her father is a big deal in America, somewhere she calls Toledo. Florence is the Toledo dime store heiress. So while she’s definitely mercenary, she’s not actually looking to marry for money. She is looking to trade her father’s money for a British title instead, or so it seems. She might have settled for Christopher, had he been interested. He is the grandson of the Duke of Sutherland—or was at the time—and he’s both young and handsome, something which isn’t necessarily true of all the unmarried gentlemen in England.

But then, of course, she met Crispin, and decided she’d rather have him instead.

And Crispin, being Crispin, was disinclined to discourage her. So the last time he’d been to the flat—on the aforementioned occasion when we’d gotten involved in the murder—I had had to take him away from her. In this very lift, in fact. She had had him backed into the corner by the button panel, and was busy assaulting his mouth (and possibly other parts of his person) when the lift arrived on our floor. I had had to physically remove him from her, and I doubt he had ever been able to remove her lipstick from his collar.

All of which is to say that Florence Schlomsky and I will never be bosom buddies. She is, however, a neighbor, and a very friendly sort, and I don’t think she actually minds that I do my best to remove both Christopher and Crispin from her clutches when she gets her hands on either one of them. When she pulled the door to her flat open, she gave me a big smile. “Hullo, Pippa!”

“Hello, Florence,” I said.

Christopher’s nickname for Flossie is ‘the American manhunter with the teeth,’ and it’s not inaccurate. We’ve all got teeth, of course, but Florence has more than the usual number, all very white and straight. And she’s not a bad-looking girl, for all that she is, again, a bit vulgar. She has bouncy, brown curls, and pink apple cheeks, and she loves anything that flutters, or sparkles, or shines. Tonight’s evening dress was a delicate shell pink, with a scalloped hem and sparkling beads in a fish-scale pattern all over the skirt. It must have cost a fortune, and I’ll admit to giving it an admiring glance or two before I told myself firmly that it was all the wrong color for me—shell pink makes me look washed out—and stuck my hand out.

“Telegram for you. I was in the lobby, so I told Evans I would take it up.”

I had glanced at the front of it in the lift. It was there in my hand, and there’s nothing else to look at in the lift, so I didn’t feel bad about it. I’m sure Evans had glanced at it, too, before he handed it over to me.

Not that there was anything to see. Just a perfectly plain envelope of the same sort that Christopher and I had received a month ago, announcing his brother Francis’s engagement to my friend Constance Peckham.

In this case, it was Florence’s name and direction behind the crinkly plastic on the front, and the usual post office logo in the corner. There was no reason at all that she would turn pale, although she did.

So had Christopher and I, when our telegram arrived. We’d all gotten so used to bad news during the war, and I guess we hadn’t quite recovered yet.

“Go on,” I told her bracingly. “I’m sure it’s not as bad as you fear. And even if it is, it’s better to get it over with quickly.”

She gave me a look before she ripped open the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of paper. I tried to read upside down, but I’d gotten no further than SURPRISE! before she made an inarticulate sound. Her hand convulsed on the paper and when I looked up, shocked, her healthy, pink cheeks had turned a pasty white.

I put a hand under her arm for support and felt her tremble.

“Florence?” I tried gently. “Is everything all right?”

It clearly wasn’t, and I craned my neck in an effort to get another look at the telegram, but she had crumpled it in her fist and it was unreadable. For a moment she looked at me as if she had never seen me before, before she seemed to pull in a very deliberate breath and straighten up. “Yes, of course, Pippa. Thank you.”

The accompanying smile was so forced it looked more like a grimace.

“Is there anything I can do?” I dropped my hand since support seemed unwanted. She had taken a step back from me. “Would you like to talk about?—?”

“No.” She shook her head. “No, thank you. This is something I—” Her voice broke and she cleared her throat, “—this is something I have to deal with on my own. Thank you, Pippa.”

She stepped back, and a second later, the door shut in my face. I stared at it for a moment, annoyed, before I harrumphed and headed down the hallway towards the door to my own flat.

The flat that Christopher and I share is a two-bed, single-bath with a foyer, a sitting room, a dining room, and a kitchenette. The sitting room is directly behind the foyer when you walk in, with the dining room and kitchen to the right and a hallway with two bedrooms and the washroom to the left. Mine is the first bedroom. I went into it and removed my cloche hat and matching jacket, and unbuckled my shoes in favor of quilted slippers. After a quick fluff of my hair in the vanity mirror—brown and bobbed, not as curly as Flossie’s, but not sleek, either—I headed back into the main part of the flat, only to intercept Christopher coming in. His telephone call to Wiltshire really hadn’t taken more than the few minutes he had promised.

I looked from the note still crumpled in his hand—shades of Florence Schlomsky—to his face. “Is everything all right?”

He nodded. “Yes, Pippa. Everything is perfectly fine.”

“What did Tom want? The note was from him, right?”

“To cancel an appointment,” Christopher said and crossed the foyer towards the hallway to his room.

I trailed after him. “Tom and Crispin had an appointment? Anything I should know about?”

He smirked at me over his shoulder. “No, Pippa. Tom and I had an appointment, and Tom had to cancel.”

“What does that have to do with St George?”

“Nothing whatsoever,” Christopher said. “They were two totally separate issues.”

I narrowed my eyes. “So why did you ring him up? Or was ringing up Crispin just an excuse, and what you really wanted, was to contact Tom? If so, you could have just been honest about it, Christopher. Nobody cares.” I certainly didn’t.

Christopher chuckled. At least I chose to interpret it as a chuckle and not a snigger at my expense. “No, Pippa. Tom’s flat isn’t on the telephone. You know that. I rang up Sutherland Hall and spoke to Crispin.”

I trailed after him down the hallway. “Is St George in trouble with Scotland Yard?” Had Tom’s note contained some sort of warning?

Christopher shook his head. “Not at all.” He gave me another look just as he reached the door to his room. “Now go away, Pippa. I’m going to take my clothes off.”

The door shut in my face and I growled and went for the knob. “You know, Christopher…”

He sighed. “Just wait until I come back out, Pippa.”

“I’ve seen you in your unmentionables before,” I told him.

“That doesn’t mean you’ll get to see me in them now. Go pour us a couple of drinks. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“And you’ll tell me what happened?”

“Nothing happened!” He took a breath and added, “Yes, Pippa. I’ll tell you what happened. Even if it was nothing. A Gin Rickey, please.”

“Fine.” I shut his door with a little more force than necessary and took myself to the sitting room, where I got busy at the bar cart. By the time Christopher came back into the sitting room in his stocking feet and sans jacket, I had a cocktail waiting for him on the table, and was sipping one of my own. “Tell me everything.”

“You’re like a dog with a bone, Pippa.” He sank down on the Chesterfield and folded one elegant leg over the other as he lifted the glass to his mouth. After taking a sip, he added, “And not one of those cute lapdogs, either. A bulldog or something like that. All possessive and growly.”

“I’m not possessive,” I said. In a tone that might have led someone to call it a growl.

Christopher sniggered. It was definitively a snigger this time. “Of course, Pippa.”

“I’m not! I’m just curious. First Tom sends you a note—and don’t bother denying it, I saw the signature—and then you rush out to ring up Crispin. You can’t blame me for being worried.”

“I don’t blame you,” Christopher said, “but there’s nothing to worry about. I swear. They’re not related. Tom’s note wasn’t about business. He canceled an appointment we had made for tomorrow. He had to go away. And it was my idea to call Crispin. I thought he would like to know about the Graf von Natterdorff.”

“The…?” My eyes bugged out. “Why on earth would you tell him about that, Christopher? You know he can’t be trusted with that sort of information.”

St George would cling to it like a bad odor, and rib me about it every chance he got.

“I thought he’d like to know,” Christopher said.

Fine. I rolled my eyes. What was done was done, and it probably wouldn’t matter, anyway. I might never hear from Wolfgang Albrecht von und zu Natterdorff ever again. “How is he, then?”

Christopher shrugged. “He’s bored. Stuck in Wiltshire with nothing to do and no one to talk to. I offered to visit, but he declined. Said his father would never allow it.”

“Why on earth not?” It’s not like Christopher’s a bad influence. He was hardly likely to turn Crispin queer simply by spending time with him—St George had absolutely no proclivities in that direction, so it would take a lot more than simply Christopher’s presence to accomplish it—and while he does have a tendency to want to seduce anything that moves (anything female, that is) he wouldn’t try to seduce me if I came along (which I certainly would). And since neither Christopher nor I have any particular inclinations towards dope or excessive drinking, or gambling or any of the other vices Crispin had a tendency to fall victim to, it seems as if Christopher and I are among the safest visitors Uncle Harold could introduce to the Hall to keep his son company.

“It all seems to be part and parcel of my uncle’s plan to get Crispin to do the right thing vis-à-vis Lady Laetitia,” Christopher said.

I arched my brows. “The right thing, is it?”

He made a face. “You know what I mean. The right thing according to Uncle Harold. He thinks it’s time Crispin settles down. Laetitia Marsden meets the requirements. And he did?—”

He drew quotation marks in the air with two fingers on each hand, “—ruin her earlier this year.”

I scoffed. “I hardly think that she’d agree with you that she’s ruined, Christopher. She was the one who seduced him, wasn’t she, and not the other way around.”

“So it seems,” Christopher said.

“It’s the nineteen-twenties, for goodness’s sake. We’re all very modern now.”

He didn’t respond to that, and I added, “And it’s not as if he got her with child, is it?”

“No,” Christopher agreed, “it doesn’t appear as if he did.”

No, it didn’t. “If they were together in January, she’d be as big as a Zeppelin by now.”

And she wasn’t. Or at least she hadn’t been as of a few weeks ago. Lady Laetitia had been as willowy and beautiful as always during my cousin Francis’s engagement party in July.

“That’s if he hasn’t been with her since,” Christopher said.

I stared at him for a second before I opened my mouth. “When would he have had the chance? They weren’t together during that weekend at the Dower House. We were there, and he spent every night in a room with you and Francis. And he said no to her during the weekend at Beckwith Place. She announced it right out loud, remember?”

“But Uncle Harold invited the Marsdens to stop at Sutherland Hall on their way back to Dorset,” Christopher said. “People do have relations when you and I are not around too, you know.”

“Of course they do, Christopher. But they’re not going to misbehave at the Hall with his father and her parents there, surely?”

“I didn’t get the impression that her parents or Uncle Harold would mind if they did,” Christopher said dryly. “At any rate, the solitude at the Hall is chafing at him. You know how he gets.”

I did. The Viscount St George enjoys excitement. When he’s kept from it, he wilts, the poor, delicate flower. “But nothing’s wrong?”

He shook his head. “Nothing aside from his being bored and alone. I’m more interested in Flossie Schlomsky right now. What on earth was in that telegram, Pippa?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “I tried to get a look at it, but between reading upside down and the flimsiness of the paper—” not to mention Flossie’s hand shaking, “—all I caught was the first word. Surprise . She turned as white as a sheet, though, so I don’t imagine it could have been good news.”

“It didn’t look like it,” Christopher agreed, and took another sip of his Gin Rickey. “She swept through the lobby just as I was on my way back inside. I held the door for her, and she barely took the time to say thank you—no smile, no, ‘ Hello, Mr. Astley ?—’”

He delivered the last three words in Florence’s saucy alto, “—before she was out the door and on her way up the pavement.”

“She must have run out almost as soon as she shut the door in my face,” I said.

He arched his brows. “Did she really?”

I nodded. “I didn’t say anything about it, because I could see that she was shaken, but it was quite rude. Even for her.”

There was a moment’s pause while we both sipped our drinks. Then?—

“I hope she’s all right,” Christopher said.

It was my turn to snigger. “Why, Christopher. I didn’t know you cared.”

He sent me a dark look. “I don’t, Pippa. But I don’t wish ill on anyone.”

“I do,” I said. “Quite a few people, as a matter of fact.”

“Name one.”

“Uncle Harold,” I said. Christopher arched his brows, and I continued, “I don’t like the way he treats Crispin. He’s a bully, and he needs to keep his hands to himself. I was sincerely concerned that he had given Crispin a concussion last month at Beckwith Place.”

Christopher grimaced, but didn’t protest.

“And Laetitia Marsden, as well. Flossie is an irritant, and I would hate to have to look at her across the Christmas goose for the next forty years, but there is no chance that he’ll want to marry her, and I don’t think I’ll have to worry about him being forced into it against his will, either. Lady Laetitia, on the other hand…”

Christopher nodded. “She definitely has designs on Crispin, as well as Uncle Harold’s blessing to get him to propose by any means necessary. And she would kill you as soon as look at you if you got in her way, so you’d better be careful if that’s your plan.”

I rolled my eyes. “If he’s willing to let himself be pushed into proposing to a woman he doesn’t love simply because he lacks the backbone to say no, that’s his problem. I’m just listing off people I would enjoy seeing with a painful and embarrassing rash.”

“And you would like to see Laetitia with one of those?”

“I would be delighted,” I said. “Flossie, on the other hand… Well, I don’t suppose a rash would hurt her, either. But I wouldn’t rejoice in it, I don’t think. And as for anything worse… Well, I hope you’re right, and nothing terrible is wrong.”

Christopher nodded and raised his glass. “To Flossie.”

I raised mine, too. “If you insist.”