Page 19 of Peril in Piccadilly (Pippa Darling Mysteries #7)

Chapter Nineteen

The first time I woke up, it was only for a second, just long enough to blink my eyes open and recognize that I was alive and lying on a flat surface. My head was pounding, or perhaps the walls were, although it seemed more likely to be my head. I closed my eyes again and went back to sleep.

The next time I woke up was better, but still much the same. I had no idea how long it had been, but I was lying down in a room I didn’t recognize, but which was most likely the same place I had been the last time I woke up. It was a small room, a tight rectangle with a low ceiling and no defining characteristics. And it was dark, so it was hard to make out any details beyond the basics. The walls were still pounding, and my head spun. I felt as if I were floating, as if the room was rocking back and forth. I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

The third time I woke up was better. It was still dark, so I couldn’t make out much I hadn’t seen the first two times I had opened my eyes, but my head was filled with less cotton and I thought I was better able to think clearly.

Lifting my head made me feel dizzy, so I stayed flat on my back and took stock. Nothing hurt, other than my head, and even that didn’t feel like an injury but more like I had drunk too much and was recovering. A slow probing over my temples and the back of my head found no injuries.

I was still dressed, including shoes, so that was a positive thing. No one had thought to cover me with a blanket, and that was perhaps less positive, although it didn’t seem to have hurt me appreciably.

The surface I was lying on was somewhat squishy, so I decided that it was more likely to be a (low quality) mattress than the floor. I fumbled around and found the edge of the mattress, so yes, I was lying on a small cot somewhere in a room I didn’t recognize.

A prison cell? It was certainly small and bare enough for that, but I couldn’t recall doing anything that would have gotten me arrested. The last thing I remembered was dinner at the Savoy, and talking to Wolfgang about his grandfather.

Had something happened to me on my way home? Had I been kidnapped in the same way that Christopher had been?

Was Christopher here?

I rolled over on my side and peered down at the floor. The movement made a wave of nausea rise through my esophagus, and I swallowed it back, determinedly, and flopped onto my back again. The floor had been empty, and so was the rest of the room. I was alone, although that didn’t mean that there couldn’t be another room just like this one nearby, that had Christopher in it.

It was around this time that I realized that the knocking in the walls was real and not a product of my headache. The entire room vibrated, and there were banging sounds from outside the room, and the smell of… my nostrils flared. Was that petrol?

It was, wasn’t it? The air stank of petrol and the floor was moving. It wasn’t simply that I was dizzy and discombobulated from whatever had happened to me. The room vibrated and the floor moved.

It took much longer than it should have done to put those two things together—or three things: add the smell of petrol to the other two—and come up with an answer.

A boat. I was on a boat. On the water.

I had been here before, I realized, or at least somewhere very like it. Twelve years ago, my mother had put me on a boat bound for Southampton, and had telegrammed her sister in England to meet me there. It was a long time ago, and I had been small and distraught about leaving my mother and the only home I had ever known, so I didn’t remember much about the trip. No details, just disjointed impressions. But I did remember the feeling of claustrophobia, and of being somewhere I didn’t want to be. And the rocking, the constant rocking of the floor.

If I left the cabin and went above deck, would I see land, or only open water?

Could I even leave the cabin if I wanted to?

I sat up carefully—my head swam, but it helped to know that the unsteadiness was the water, not me—and got my feet under me. I wobbled a bit when I stood, and my head did a slow roll. The nausea reasserted itself, and I had to close my eyes and wait it out, but I stayed upright.

The door was four steps away. I made it there and leaned on the wall for several moments before I could fumble for the lock.

By now, things had started to come back to me, or if nothing else, I was beginning to reason a few things out.

I was still wearing my salmon frock, so I had been abducted before I could make it home from supper. I remembered going to the Savoy, and sitting across from Wolfgang at table. I also remembered, quite distinctly, Crispin telling me, not once but several times, that he and Tom would be on hand, in separate motorcars, to follow Wolfgang home.

I must have been taken by someone else, then. Perhaps Wolfgang had put me into a Hackney for the trip home, and then he had gone off to his… rooms in Shoreditch, wasn’t it? I had a vague memory of him admitting to that. Unless I had imagined it, of course. My head was still fuzzy.

I was absolutely certain about what Crispin had told me, however. He and Tom would be outside the Savoy to follow Wolfgang to where he was going. One or both of them must have followed him home, then, and meanwhile, the Hackney driver had taken me… where? To the Royal Albert Docks? To Southampton?

Had I walked onto the boat under my own steam?

I couldn’t remember doing that. I couldn’t remember anything after talking to Wolfgang at table in the Savoy Restaurant. I had felt dizzy, hadn’t I? And he had told me that he would take care of me?

I had a mental glimpse of a cup of tea—and of a man’s hand knocking it over. And then déjà vu to another cup of tea, and… the same thing happening?

But no, I’d been drinking coffee last night, surely? The tea incident had taken place a long time ago, at least the first time. Crispin and I had reached for a cup of tea at the same time, one that Aunt Charlotte had poured for me. It had been just after I’d been shot, hadn’t it? Late April at Sutherland Hall. He had been trying to help me, because the wound in my arm made it hard for me to reach for things.

Or perhaps he hadn’t been helping. Perhaps he had knocked the cup over on purpose. He’s not usually clumsy, so perhaps there had been something in it that he hadn’t wanted me to drink. If Aunt Charlotte hadn’t been above trying to shoot me, she wouldn’t have hesitated to poison me, either. So I might owe him thanks for saving my life on that occasion. If I ever got out of here, I’d be sure to tell him so.

But that was a long time ago. More recently, Wolfgang had knocked a cup of tea practically into my lap. Not tonight, though. Tonight, we’d been drinking coffee.

No, that tea incident had been a few days ago. And like Crispin, Wolfgang wasn’t usually clumsy.

It had been just after that, hadn’t it, that the ma?tre d’ had delivered the note for Wolfgang? Perhaps Wolfgang had put something in my tea, and the ma?tre d’ had seen it, and then Wolfgang had aborted the mission once he knew that his action had been noticed?

And then he had tried again tonight, when another ma?tre d’ was on duty, a less observant one, and he had succeeded in getting me here?

I could have spent a long time pondering the past, but I thought the best thing I could do for myself was to try to find a way out of my predicament. Before we arrived in Germany (or perhaps somewhere else; perhaps we were not on our way back to the Weimar Republic) and certainly before Wolfgang could arrive at my door to—just as a possibility—force me into a wedding ceremony by sea captain, or alternatively, if I refused, toss me overboard.

I doubted I could make it to land if he did do. I can swim—now—but I’m not strong enough to want to brave the North Sea, especially at night. I still have something of an aversion to water after that incident in the Neckar when I was small, as well.

Or the plan might be something entirely different. I could be reading the whole thing wrong. Perhaps he didn’t want to marry me or kill me at all. Perhaps he wanted something else. But it didn’t matter. The whole plan would be moot if I could just remove myself from the equation. So I grabbed the doorknob in my hand and twisted it.

I had been afraid that I had been locked in here. Such was not the case. The door opened easily from the inside, and I put my head out into a narrow hallway lined by half a dozen other doors.

It was possible—not likely, perhaps, but possible—that Christopher was behind one of them. The temptation to start opening doors in the hope that I might find him was almost overwhelming. A bit of sympathetic company in this situation would have been very nice. I didn’t do it, however, for two reasons. Firstly, because I had decided that getting myself away would be the better part of valor, and secondly, because I was afraid that I would open a door and come face to face with Wolfgang.

Or if not Wolfgang, then whoever had brought me here. But it was most likely Wolfgang.

It was instinct to begin to take my shoes off before I set off, the better to move soundlessly, but a mere half second of thought told me that there was no point in trying to be quiet. The boat was already making so much noise that no one would hear anything I did. Nonetheless, I shut the door carefully behind me and headed down the hall towards the steep and narrow staircase I could see at the end of it. I walked quickly and with my heart in my throat, but I didn’t run. At the bottom of the stairs, I started up, holding on to the railing the whole way.

There was another corridor and another staircase after that, less narrow and less steep. So far I hadn’t seen a soul, and when I came out at the top of the second staircase, it was obvious why. The entire panoply of the sky arched above me, thousands of stars on a velvet background, with a waxing gibbous moon that would be full in a few more days. It was the middle of the night, and all I could see around me was water.

It was also freezing cold, and I wrapped my arms around myself to stop shivering. My wrap was below deck somewhere, no doubt—perhaps Wolfgang had it, along with my handbag, unless, of course, I was on this boat by myself, while Wolfgang was still on English soil.

I seemed to be on the deck of what was more a freighter and less a passenger conveyance. There were no deckchairs in sight, nor anything else you would expect to find on a passenger liner. The bridge was up ahead—I could see the lights and hear a faint murmur of voices from the seamen who were awake at this time of night. They didn’t sound like they were speaking English—the words were more guttural, the consonants less refined—and after a few seconds of pricking my ears I could confirm that yes, they were speaking German. My own was no longer fluent enough to make out what they were saying, but I recognized the cadence and enough of the more basic words to verify it.

That seemed to take care of any question of what I was doing here, then. No one beside Wolfgang would surely think to carry me onboard a German freighter as a mode of abduction.

I had, it seemed, no good options. I could go back to my cabin and wait for Wolfgang to put whatever plan he had concocted into action, which might involve killing me or might only involve forcing me into marriage. I was honestly not keen on either of those choices, especially after this.

I could jump into the water and most likely drown, if I didn’t die of hypothermia first.

I could approach the bridge and explain the situation, but there were no guarantees that the crew wasn’t in cahoots with Wolfgang, or if not that, that they had at least been paid enough to look the other way. They’d more than likely give me back to him if I approached them. Or at least there was enough of a chance of it that I didn’t want to take the risk.

I could try to hide. Leave the cabin empty and find somewhere else to stow away. Perhaps Wolfgang would believe that I had jumped overboard, and wouldn’t look for me. Perhaps I could stay out of sight for long enough that the boat would reach shore somewhere. And once we got to where we were going—whether that was Bremerhaven or Kiel or somewhere further afield; hopefully this wasn’t a cross-Atlantic voyage—I could attempt to make my way back home from there.

In fact, it might be better if we were going to America. The language would be easier there. I hadn’t spoken German in more than a decade. And seeing as I was a German citizen, if I ended up in Germany, the authorities might even refuse to send me back to England.

If I made it to America, I could contact the Schlomskys for help. They owed me that, after I had figured out what happened to their daughter. And surely it couldn’t actually be as far between New York and Toledo as I had been led to believe?

It was at this point that I heard the scuff of a shoe behind me, and then two hands grabbed my upper arms while a male voice said, “Got you!” in my ear.

I shrieked, of course, as if I had been stabbed. The voice—or more accurately, the man it belonged to—muttered something (likely a curse) and moved one hand up to slap over my mouth. He was wearing gloves, or I would have bit him.

His other arm went across my chest so he could haul me backwards and then shake me. “Quiet!”

There wasn’t anything else I could do, of course. Or rather, I did my best to scream, but the hand across my mouth stopped anything but muffled outrage from escaping.

“Should have let him do it himself,” the voice muttered, and my blood chilled as I realized that Wolfgang might have accomplices onboard. Not just sailors he had paid to look the other way, but actual accomplices. Perhaps he wasn’t even here. Perhaps he had loaded me into a motorcar outside the Savoy, and someone else had taken me to the boat, while Wolfgang himself led Tom and Crispin on a merry chase all over London. They may not even have noticed that I was missing yet.

Perhaps this had nothing to do with marriage at all. Perhaps Wolfgang was part of a white slavery ring, and he had abducted both Christopher and myself and was shipping us off to darkest Arabia for some sultan’s harem.

I renewed my efforts to get free, to the obvious irritation of the man holding me. He gave me a shake, the way a terrier might shake a rat it had caught. “Stop it! We’re the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and we’re here to rescue you. You’re going home.”

I was?

“Here. You take her.” He shoved me at someone else, whose scent and tweed coat was familiar.

“It’s all right, Pippa,” Tom’s voice said. “Come with me. We’ll get you off the boat.”

That was the point when my knees buckled, of course, and he had to put an arm around my waist to keep me standing. There was no going anywhere, not while I was like this. And he must have realized it, because he stayed where he was while I buried my face in his tweed coat and hung on, shaking.

“Christopher?” I managed after a few seconds, my teeth chattering.

His head came up alertly. “Is he here?”

“I haven’t seen him. I thought maybe you?—”

But he shook his head. “I’m afraid not. We’ll find him. I need you to pull yourself together and walk with me, all right? There’s a lifeboat off the side of the ship.”

He nudged me into moving, and then shuffled with me across the deck before he stopped at the edge of the boat where a ladder led downward. I peered over the edge. There was icy black water below, as well as a smaller boat tied up to the bigger freighter, bobbing along.

And there was a dark figure on the deck of the smaller boat, and a familiar pale face smirking up at me. “There you are, Darling.”

“St George,” I said, and I’ll admit that I was happy to see him, if only because he was here to rescue me. Certainly not because I had been concerned that I would never see him, or anyone else in the family, ever again.

“Would you like for me to climb up and fetch you? You can hang around my neck like a monkey on the way down.”

“Thank you, but no.” If this was what it took to get me onto the ladder and down to the lifeboat, I would take it. “You’d probably drop me. Just step aside.”

Tom assisted me onto the ladder and made sure I had a solid grip on the top rung before he let go. “It’s not that far,” he informed me. “Just move slowly and carefully.”

“Yes,” Crispin agreed from below, cheerfully, “no need to rush. The view is lovely from down here.”

That probably implied that he was taking the opportunity to peer up my skirt. Or perhaps not, perhaps he was just watching my derriere coming down. Either way, it gave me incentive to keep going. By the time I was almost at the bottom, he grabbed me around the waist and swung me the rest of the way down, and then he wrapped both arms around me, a bit too tightly, and buried his nose in my hair.

I was too shocked to say anything, to be honest. It was something Christopher would have done, and for a moment it was comforting to lean into the embrace and imagine that it was he who was holding me instead of Crispin. But of course it wasn’t. Tweed is tweed, but Crispin smells differently than Christopher does, and aside from that, he was also engaged to be married and too much closeness in this situation would be a very bad thing.

I freed myself and took a step back. “Thank you, St George.”

“Don’t mention it,” Crispin said and had to clear his throat. It must have helped him get his usual acerbic self back in line, because the next thing out of his mouth was, “Bloody hell, Darling, could you be any less careful?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

I wrapped my arms around myself, because I was standing in a boat on the open water in a short-sleeved silk crepe gown with short sleeves in October, and he made an exasperated noise before shrugging out of his tweed coat and wrapping it around me. “Come sit down.”

He pulled me over to a bench against the small wheelhouse midships of the lifeboat, and pulled me down next to him. And proceeded to wrap his arm around me in an effort to share some of his own body heat.

“Thank you,” I muttered. Thanking Crispin for anything goes against the grain, but under the circumstances he deserved it, and I’ll do what I have to do when there’s no other choice.

“As I said, don’t mention it. How could you have been so careless?”

As to allow myself to be doped, I supposed.

“You were the ones who were supposed to keep an eye on me,” I said indignantly, instead of admitting that I had allowed Wolfgang to dope me and kidnap me without any suspicions as to his motivations whatsoever. “Why didn’t you rescue me?”

“What do you call this, Darling?”

He gestured to himself, and the lifeboat, and Tom, somewhere on the freighter, looking for Christopher and Wolfgang.

Since he had a point, I told him, “I didn’t think he would do something like this. All my focus was on keeping him busy until after supper, when the two of you were supposed to go after him.”

“As we did,” Crispin said, “when he hauled your lifeless body out of the Savoy and loaded you into a Hackney.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t fall on him right then and there.”

“I wanted to,” Crispin said. “Tom held me back. He thought Wolfie might be taking you to where Christopher is.”

Trust Tom to prioritize finding Christopher over rescuing me. And trust Crispin, I suppose, to go along with it. He might love me, but he loved Christopher, too.

Not that I wouldn’t have done the same, of course.

“It’s possible that he’s in one of the other cabins,” I said. “I didn’t open any of the other doors, just in case I found Wolfgang instead. I didn’t want him to realize that I was awake.”

“If Kit’s there, Tom will find him,” Crispin said. After a moment, he added, “I’ll be surprised, though. I’m fairly certain that this was a Gretna Green situation, and the thing with Kit is something else.”

Yes, I was fairly certain of the same thing. Wolfgang had no reason to want to take Christopher to Germany with him. I wasn’t even sure what his reason was for wanting to take me. It wasn’t for love of me. No one who loves someone else would dope their cup of coffee and load them onto a freighter bound for foreign parts without their consent.

No, whatever this was, the reasons for it were a lot colder and more calculating than love.

“I ought to let Tom tell you,” Crispin said when I expressed as much, “but I’m not certain I quite understand it either.”

“Then why don’t you tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you what Wolfgang told me, and perhaps we can figure it out from there.”

“Certainly,” Crispin said. “The chap from the Natterdorff constabulary—the one Tom spoke to yesterday morning—rang back during the time you and I were at the flat. Tom told me about it while you were inside the Savoy with Wolfie.”

“And what did the constable know?” Whatever it was, it must be good, because Crispin had Schadenfreude written all over his face.

He smirked. “Quite a lot, as it happens. Wolfie left the castle three months ago, after a heated argument with the old man. No one’s seen him since. Six weeks ago, the old man changed his will?—”

Oh, dear. “Did he cut Wolfgang out?”

Crispin nodded. “And it seems he also cut off the money at the same time. That would explain the Savoy Hotel situation, wouldn’t it?”

It certainly would. The cash flow had stopped abruptly, and Wolfgang had had to move elsewhere, to conserve what money he had left.

“He told me that he’s been living in rooms in Shoreditch,” I said. “I don’t know whether it’s true or not.”

“I don’t know that I care,” Crispin answered, “other than that of course it’s wonderful, imagining him living in squalor in rented rooms in Shoreditch. But he couldn’t keep Kit there, so I don’t know if it matters.”

No, of course he couldn’t keep Christopher there. Too many people around for that. That was why the Schlomsky parents had been made to pay for the flat in the Essex House Mansions as well as for the ‘country cottage’ in Thornton Heath. A nice flat for ‘Flossie’ to occupy, and a secure place to keep the real Flossie while her kidnappers bled her parents dry.

That same thought as last time buzzed through my head again, and this time I took it out and looked at it. But before I could say anything, Crispin had continued. “Apparently, the old man is on his deathbed. Any chance to get him to change that will back is dwindling by the minute. I suppose that’s why Wolfie decided to head home.”

I made a noncommittal little noise, and he added, “I can’t imagine why he’d want to take you with him, though.”

His tone indicated that nobody with any sense would want me around given the choice.

“It’s one thing if he needed a wife to get back into his grandfather’s good graces,” Crispin continued peevishly. “Perhaps the old man likes women, or he thinks Wolfie ought to give up philandering and start producing heirs. Perhaps he has a habit of tomcatting around?—”

“You would know all about that,” I said sweetly, and he shot me a look.

“I’m engaged, remember? If anyone’s settling down and producing heirs, I am.”

I made a face, and he added, “But why on earth would he want you badly enough to dope you and carry you onto a boat to smuggle you out of the country and back into Germany with no one the wiser? No offense, Darling, but you’re not exactly the type to drive men mad.”

“And here I always thought I drove you mad,” I said. “I can explain that, actually?—”

Or at least I thought I could, if my suppositions were correct. He didn’t let me do so, however.

“It’d be one thing a hundred years ago. A forced marriage might stick then. But you’d either marry him willingly or not at all, and if he forced you, you’d leave him and then divorce him. Thank God that’s an option now.”

I nodded. Yes, indeed. If the worst had come to the worst, and the captain of the freighter had agreed to facilitate a ceremony once we were in international water, at least I wouldn’t have had to stay married afterwards.

“So” Crispin said, “I don’t see the sense in forcing you. Unless he thought you’d be so enamored with his castle that you’d accept him after all? Although if he thinks a castle will sway you, he doesn’t know you very well.”

No, he didn’t.

“I’m fairly certain I know why he did it, St George.”

He gave me a dubious look. “You do?”

“I might. The old man changed his will, did you say? Who is the new heir?”

“A cousin,” Crispin said. “Born on the wrong side of the blanket, or some such thing.” He wrinkled his nose. “Common as dirt, most likely. The child of some disgraced younger son from a generation or two ago, who?—”

“Yes,” I interrupted, “thank you.”

He looked at me. And then—I always knew he was quick—his eyes widened. “No.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You…” He seemed to have lost his breath, and it took a moment for him to regain it. “ You are the new Gr?fin von und zu Natterdorff?”

“It appears I am. Wolfgang told me that my father was his father’s younger brother, disinherited for reading Marx and wanting to work with his hands.”

“Dear Lord,” Crispin said faintly. He buried his face in his hands and hunched over, moaning. I patted him on the back while I wondered, half-heartedly, whether the shaking under my palm was from tears or laughter, and whether, ultimately, it mattered.