Page 11 of Peril in Piccadilly (Pippa Darling Mysteries #7)

Chapter Eleven

“You look well,” I told Violet Cummings the next afternoon.

We had slept in, in deference to our aches and pains and the interrupted slumber from the night before, and then we had spent the time over elevenses wondering how to spend the rest of the day. It was Christopher who had suggested a visit to Lady Violet. Not only had she, or her family home, been burgled by who we assumed to be the same person as had made off with the Sutherland diamonds, but the last time I had seen her, at Marsden Manor in Dorset in September, I had been absolutely certain that she was as good as dead. It couldn’t hurt to stop by and congratulate her on coming through the ordeal alive, and while we were at it, make a few discreet inquiries into the burglary.

And if we had to throw Lady Laetitia’s business under the bus to do it, well, I wasn’t going to worry about that.

“Thank you.” She smiled graciously, although I got the impression that she didn’t one hundred percent believe me.

Nor should she. She did, in fact, look all right, but ‘well’ might be overstating the fact. I knew that it had taken several weeks before she had been able to get out of bed at all, weeks during which everyone who knew her had believed that she would never wake up again, and if by some miracle she did, she wouldn’t be the girl she had been.

She had been as slim as a snake even before the incident. Now she was downright bony, her eyes were enormous over too-prominent cheekbones, and her skin had an unhealthy pallor. She hadn’t taken the time to take care of her hair during the time she’d been bedbound, because there was a quarter inch of visible roots at the bottom of her pale blond hair. But she was dressed in a pretty afternoon frock, with her face on, and sitting upright at a table in the parlor, receiving guests, and that couldn’t be overstated.

“I’m sure someone has told you what happened in the aftermath…?” I added.

She had missed Cecily’s funeral, of course, as well as Dominic Rivers’s ditto.

She nodded. “The girl’s in prison. Geoffrey is waiting for the next Assizes.”

Precisely. “And you? How do you feel?”

“Better,” Violet said decisively. “Still weak and I tire easily, but better every day.”

“That’s wonderful.” I glanced at Christopher across the table. He glanced back at me, deadpan. I guessed it was up to me to carry on.

I turned back to Violet. “I don’t know whether you’ve heard from Lady Laetitia lately…?”

“She stopped by,” Violet said, and put a red-painted nail to her red-painted lips as she looked up at the ceiling, “perhaps a week ago?”

“Then you haven’t heard the news.”

“What news?” She smiled, just a bit wickedly, and her tired eyes sparkled. “Don’t tell me. She’s decided to throw Crispin over and take vows?”

I snorted. “Hardly.” The day Laetitia Marsden entered a convent was the day pigs flew over Nottingham. “No, they’re still together. Dining at the Criterion Restaurant just the other night.”

“Then I’m afraid I simply can’t imagine.” She raised her teacup, pinky extended delicately.

“The Sutherland diamonds are gone,” I said. “A burglary early yesterday morning.”

Her eyes widened and the tea must have gone down the wrong way, because she choked and began coughing. After a moment of watching, Christopher got up and thumped her on the back. Carefully, of course, since she appeared as if a gentle breeze could knock her down. When she had stopped gasping, he conjured a handkerchief from his pocket and held it out to her so she could mop at her streaming eyes.

“Thank you.”

She dabbed them dry. Christopher stuffed the pocket square back into his trousers, but we both knew it was a lost cause; the mascara would have transferred to the silk square, and we would have to throw it away once we left Cummings House. There’s simply no way to get petroleum jelly and coal dust out of raw silk.

Christopher took his seat again and picked up his teacup, and I turned back to Violet. “She told me that you too had had a burglary.”

Violet nodded. She was still dabbing at her pale cheeks, but with her fingertips now. “A few weeks ago. I was alone in the house. Mother and Father had gone out.”

“There were servants, surely.”

“Of course.” The look she gave me said, as clearly as words, that I ought to know that the servants don’t count.

It’s the way she has always looked at me, so I moved past it. “Did you see the burglar?”

She shook her head. “I was asleep. I didn’t know that anything had happened until the next morning, when Father found the safe in the library empty.”

“He got into your safe?”

She nodded. “Didn’t he rob the Marsdens’ safe?”

“I don’t imagine there was anything in the Marsden safe that was worth taking,” I said. “The Marsdens don’t spend much time in London, do they?”

She didn’t respond, and I added, “Laetitia was only up for the weekend. And the maid had gone to bed, so the jewelry was on the dressing table.”

“How careless of dear Laetitia.” Violet sniggered. “She’s been after the Sutherland diamonds ever since Crispin came down from Cambridge two years ago. It seems like poetic justice that she’d get her hands on them and a month later, leave them on the dressing table to be stolen.”

Perhaps it did. Unfortunately, the loss of the ring did nothing to actually release him from the engagement, more was the pity.

I didn’t say so, of course—I had said so before, ad nauseam , and saying it again would not make any difference—but Violet must have read my mind, or at least my expression, because she added, perhaps in an effort to be sympathetic, “It could be worse, you know.”

“Could it?”

“She loves him. At least she has that going for her.”

I supposed she did, now that I thought about it. I had always discouraged Crispin from proposing to Laetitia because he didn’t love her, and I still stood by that, even if I had had to reconsider my stance on him throwing caution to the wind and proposing to the girl he really loved. If that girl was me, as Christopher assured me she was, I could only be glad that Crispin hadn’t gone down on one knee and declared his love, because I wouldn’t have responded well.

But now that Violet had pointed it out (and I had had a moment to consider), I supposed she was actually right and it could have been worse. He could have ended up engaged to someone he didn’t love, who also didn’t love him.

“His father might have set him up with someone like me,” Violet said, as if she had, indeed, read my mind and not just my expression. “I wouldn’t have put it past Duke Harold.”

She looked from Christopher to me and back. “Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy Crispin’s company. But I don’t love him, and I don’t want to marry him. We wouldn’t get on well together in the long term.”

“He can be a bit of a pill,” I agreed, blandly, while Christopher ventured, “But if his father and yours had insisted?—”

Violet confirmed, “I would have considered it. So just be grateful that it didn’t happen that way.”

Indeed.

“But you don’t know anything about the burglary?” I pressed. “No idea who the burglar was, for instance?”

She shook her head. “How would I possibly know that? I don’t associate with the types of people who break the law.”

“Dominic Rivers broke the law,” I pointed out, and I was absolutely certain that she had associated with him.

Her eyes turned cold and flinty. “Dom is dead. He certainly didn’t take my mother’s emerald and sapphire brooch.”

I hadn’t suggested that he had done. But before I could say so, Christopher asked, “Your mother lost an emerald and sapphire brooch?”

He gave me a significant look, as if this ought to mean something to me.

Violet nodded. “Emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds in the shape of a peacock. Lovely piece, if a bit old-fashioned.”

“Valuable, I suppose?” She didn’t answer—I’m sure the answer was self-evident—and Christopher added, “How many emeralds? And sapphires and diamonds?”

“Oh, God.” Violet flapped a hand. “Who knows? Ten? Fifteen?”

“You wouldn’t recognize them if you saw them again?”

She stared at him as if suspecting he had lost his mind, and Christopher clarified, “Not the brooch. I’m certain you would recognize that. But the individual stones.”

Violet shook her head. “One diamond is very much like another, isn’t it? Just like one emerald is like another, and one sapphire?—”

“Yes, of course.” But he did give me another significant glance, even if he didn’t ask any more questions.

“Coincidence,” I told him thirty minutes later, as we made our way along Curzon Street towards Hyde Park Corner and the nearest tube stop.

“Mmm,” Christopher responded. The murmur had a distinct disbelieving quality to it, something not easy to do with a single letter.

“There’s no evidence whatsoever that Wolfgang has anything to do with the jewelry thefts.”

He flicked me a look. “You thought of it, too.”

I opened my mouth to argue that I hadn’t. Before I could do, he went on, “You must have, because I haven’t mentioned his name. All I did was look at you.”

“Thought transference,” I told him sullenly. “We’re soulmates, Christopher. Platonic soulmates. Capable of mind-reading.”

His lips quirked. “Is that what we are?”

“Something like that.” I shrugged irritably. “I’ll admit that the thought crossed my mind, and before you looked at me. But simply because a brooch made of sapphires and emeralds went missing from the Cummingses, doesn’t mean that the ring that Wolfgang offered me was made from those same sapphires and emeralds.”

“Of course not,” Christopher agreed. “But it’s significant, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know that I do,” I said. “There are plenty of sapphires and emeralds in the world. Plenty of rings, too. And besides, Wolfgang wouldn’t resort to thievery.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, why would he? He’s the Graf von Natterdorff with a Schloss in Baden-Württemberg. He has no need to steal other people’s heirlooms. I’m sure he has plenty of his own.”

“We have only his word for that,” Christopher pointed out, and when I turned to stare—or glare—at him, he added, “Be reasonable, Pippa. How do you know that he is what he says he is, other than that he says it?”

I opened my mouth, and then closed it again. I had taken for granted that he was telling the truth, because why wouldn’t I?

“He went to university,” I said eventually. “The Mensur scar, remember? Mensur dueling is something that the German students do at university. His family had enough money to get him an education.”

“That doesn’t prove that he’s the Graf von und zu Natterdorff,” Christopher answered. “He could be someone else, with enough money to go to uni. Like you and me. We don’t have titles, but we went to university. Besides, did you not tell me that your father had a Mensur scar?”

I blinked, surprised that I had never caught this anomaly on my own. “He did do.”

“And he was a craftsman, didn’t you say?”

“He was.” My father made furniture. Lovely, hand-crafted, expensive furniture.

“And if he had a Mensur scar,” Christopher continued, “then it’s not only the children of the wealthy who have them.”

Perhaps not. “Wolfgang had the money to stay at the Savoy, though.”

“But not forever,” Christopher said.

“Does anyone have enough money to stay at the Savoy forever? Does even Uncle Harold have enough money for that?”

“Of course he does,” Christopher said.

“Well, lots of people don’t.” Christopher and I certainly didn’t. For a few days, yes. For weeks at a time, no. “If Wolfgang were poor, don’t you think he would have stayed somewhere else from the start? Why waste money on the Savoy if you’re on a budget?”

“He may have had his own reasons for choosing it,” Christopher said.

“Such as?”

He gave a half-shrug. “Access to people with money? I wonder whether there were thefts at the Savoy during the time he stayed there?”

“We can ask,” I said, “although I can’t imagine that they’ll tell us.”

“The doorman told you that Natterdorff isn’t a guest anymore. He might tell you this, as well.”

I supposed he might. “Are we going to the Savoy, then?”

“No,” Christopher said. “But the next time you’re invited for tea or supper there, I plan to lurk in the lobby and follow Natterdorff home after he leaves you. And while we wait for that to happen, I shall ring up Tom and ask him whether there have been reports of thefts at the Savoy.”

“That will make for a handy excuse to contact him,” I agreed. “Home, then?”

“Home,” Christopher agreed, and took my arm for the descent into the underground.

The opportunity came sooner than either of us had anticipated. That same evening, a note arrived from Wolfgang asking me to share luncheon with him the next day. Not at the Savoy this time, but at Sweetings on Queen Victoria Street in Blackfriars.

“A bit out of the way, that,” Christopher commented as we huddled over the note. “I wonder whether he lives out that way now?”

He might well do. It was certainly away from our usual haunts, which stretched from the Savoy on the Strand west to Piccadilly and Mayfair. Venturing east towards the Tower of London was unusual, to say the least.

“There’s no lobby at Sweetings,” I pointed out, “so if you plan to lurk, you’ll have to find somewhere else to do so.”

“Across the street ought to do.” He squinted at me. “You’re going, then?”

I snorted. “Of course I’m going. It’s not every day a woman gets invited to Sweetings for luncheon.”

It’s the premier oyster bar in the city, that has been around since Victoria was on the throne. Christopher and I are more likely to snack on a serving of beans on toast at home than to venture out to Sweetings on an average Monday.

As a result, I was practically giddy by the time we came up out of the underground at the corner of Cannon and Queen Victoria Streets the next afternoon. I was wearing my favorite blue and white afternoon frock, and a matching blue cloche, while Christopher had on his own cloche hat with a little clutch of violets on it, and one of my skirts and jackets.

Other than the cloche, which had caught his eye at Style & Gerrish in Salisbury in April, Kitty’s wardrobe tends to run to evening wear. When Christopher needs something for daytime, he usually raids my wardrobe.

The skirt was a bit shorter on him than on me, seeing as he’s a couple of inches taller than I am. It’s a good thing that I’m not one of those terribly daring Bright Young People who hem everything to a practically indecent length, because had I been, Christopher wouldn’t have looked decent at all. As it was, the bottom of the skirt covered his kneecaps, but just barely, and I’m certain the couple of gentlemen who gave his nicely-turned calves admiring glances on their way past, would have been appalled to realize that they were, indeed, ogling a man.

“I’ll wait here, shall I?” Christopher inquired after we had made our way across Cannon Street and halfway down Queen Victoria. The restaurant sat on the pointed corner of Queen Victoria and Queen, a half block away, across from Bow Lane and Watling Street, and the gothic St Mary Aldermary Church.

I eyed the doorway he indicated, and then looked across the street. “Are you certain you wouldn’t prefer to go inside the church for a bit? You’ll get cold, waiting out here, and I’m sure we’ll be inside a while.”

Not to mention that he had come down from Oxford with a first in history, and he rather likes old churches. St Mary Aldermary was close to a thousand years old—or at least the first St Mary Aldermary had been. This new version—not new at all—was from the mid-1600s, so quite old enough in its own right to interest my cousin.

Under normal circumstances, he would likely have taken me up on the suggestion. Under these, he scoffed. “Looking like this? No, thank you. I’m sure I would be struck dead as soon as I crossed the threshold.”

“I don’t think God cares that you’re wearing a skirt,” I said. “Weren’t skirts de rigeur in Jerusalem back in the day?”

He smirked. “I was more worried about the vicar coming after me with a hymnal than God striking me down with a bolt of lightning.”

Ah . “I suppose I can’t argue with that. But do you have to lurk in doorways?”

“I hardly think anyone’s going to look at me and think I’m for hire,” Christopher said coolly. “Unless you’re telling me I look cheap, Pippa?”

“Of course not.” There was nothing cheap about him, not the clothes he wore—mine—nor the face he had painted on himself. He looked like an elegant young lady of the upper echelon, not tawdry at all. Certainly not someone who was available for the right price.

“It’s just not common for nice women to loiter in doorways for hours at a time,” I added. “And it’s cold, and likely to get colder…”

“I doubt it’ll be hours,” Christopher said. “And if it is, I’ll manage. At least it isn’t raining today.”

No, it wasn’t. October had started off nice and warm, but then we’d had a few days of thunder and lightning about a week in, and that had brought in gray skies and lower temperatures. It was not so cold that we couldn’t be outside comfortably, at least as long as we were walking around, but I rather thought Christopher might freeze had he to stand in a doorway for an hour or more waiting for Wolfgang and I to appear again.

“Perhaps you could simply lunch at Sweetings yourself?” I suggested. “There’s nothing wrong with a young lady lunching on her own.”

“I’m sure there’s not. However, I rather think your beau will recognize your clothes, don’t you?”

I eyed him. “Perhaps he would.” He had seen them all before, as a matter of fact, so perhaps Christopher was right and it wasn’t a risk we wanted to run.

He patted my arm. “Don’t worry about me, Pippa. Just go meet Natterdorff. See if he’ll tell you where he lives now. And if he does, drop a glove on your way down the street, so I’ll know not to follow him.”

I promised I would do, and then I continued up the street towards the entrance to Sweetings. By the time I turned around, he had melted into the doorway and was nowhere to be seen.