Page 31 of Mischief at Marsden Manor

“Well enough,” Constance said from behind me. “Nothing happened to me like what happened to you. I was worried that Francis was going to wake up screaming—he does that sometimes, when something happens that reminds him of the War?—”

Like coming face to face with Wolfgang, I assumed. “But he didn’t?”

Constance shook her head. “Or if he did, I didn’t hear him. Christopher must have taken care of it if anything happened.”

“You can call him Kit, you know. He’ll be your cousin before too much longer.”

“You don’t,” Constance said, as we emerged into the upstairs hallway.

I stopped to wait for her so we could walk side by side towards Cecily Fletcher’s door. “I do sometimes. But when I first met him, on the docks at Southampton when I was eleven, he introduced himself as Christopher. I don’t think he minds when people call him Kit?—”

Tom Gardiner did, in addition to Francis and Crispin and of course his parents.

“—but I got in the habit of calling him Christopher because that’s what he told me to call him, and I suppose I never got out of it.”

Constance nodded and flicked a glance at my door. “How did you enjoy Wisteria?”

“It was lovely,” I said, although between getting in late last night and having to drag myself downstairs after an uneasy night this morning, I hadn’t paid it too much attention. “The bed was comfortable.”

“Which is Miss Fletcher’s room?”

I pointed. The little plaque, that I hadn’t noticed in the middle of the night, said Honeysuckle.

“Pale pink, yellow and green,” Constance said.

“Quite so. I didn’t get a chance to see the décor in the middle of the night. She ran out of the room and left the lights off. And I was more concerned with getting her back into bed safely than with what the walls looked like.”

Constance nodded. “I suppose we knock?”

“It seems indicated.” I applied my knuckles to the wood and waited. When nothing happened, I did it again.

“She might have come down before Francis, Christopher and I,” Constance suggested, looking around. “We hadn’t been in the breakfast room very long when you arrived.”

“Bilge and his wife were there. And you said you’d seen Wolfgang and Laetitia. Who else did you see?”

Constance surveyed the hallway as she thought about it. “Lord St George, as I mentioned. He came down with Laetitia. Or I suppose more accurately, she brought him down with her.”

I nodded.

“The three of them left together when we came in. Lord St George?—”

“Crispin,” I said. “He’s practically your cousin. There’s no need to stand on ceremony.”

“He looked like he wanted to stay with us, and let his fiancée leave with your friend, but she brought him to heel.”

I made a face. “I wish you wouldn’t say it like that.”

“That’s how it was,” Constance said, and I gave her a look.

“You were a lot meeker at Godolphin.”

“I was a lot more cowed as a child,” Constance said, and continued, “Geoffrey came down, in full hunting kit. So did the other two gentlemen.”

“Dominic Rivers and the Honorable Reggie?”

She nodded. I tried to picture Dom Rivers in houndstooth and Tattersall, and failed. He looked so extremely cosmopolitan that it was difficult to imagine him in anything other than evening kit, or at most, a nice afternoon suit. But tweed and plus-fours, no.

“The girls arrived eventually, too,” Constance added. “Lady Violet and Olivia Barnsley.”