Page 5 of Peril in Piccadilly (Pippa Darling Mysteries #7)

Chapter Five

By the time Christopher made it upstairs—he had to wait for the lift to come back down after I had used it—I was standing in the kitchenette watching the kettle boil while I muttered darkly under my breath. Christopher placing an envelope with my name on it on the counter in front of me didn’t improve my mood.

I slanted him a fulminating stare. “Where did you get this?”

“Evans gave it to me on my way in,” Christopher said as he began to unbutton his jacket. “I imagine you went by him too fast. Or perhaps he was afraid you would take his head clean off if he attempted to interfere with you.”

Perhaps he had done. It was a not invalid concern. I had been angry enough to commit violence five minutes ago, and I wasn’t much better now. I eyed the envelope with my name written across it in Wolfgang’s snarly Kurrentschrift with a furrowed brow. “He didn’t waste any time, did he?”

It was a mostly rhetorical comment—it wasn’t even seven in the morning yet, so clearly he hadn’t done—but Christopher shook his head. “He sent the messenger as soon as it was light outside, I imagine.”

I flicked him a glance. “What do you suppose he wants?”

“Open it and see,” Christopher said, shrugging out of the jacket and draping it over the back of a chair before reaching up to dig around in the cabinet for cups and saucers. “Although five quid says it’s an invitation to supper so he can make another attempt to talk you into marrying him.”

I could always use five pounds, so I unstuck the envelope flap and pulled out the short note with the Savoy Hotel insignia in the corner. “You owe me five quid,” I said a few seconds later.

He stopped what he was doing, which was placing the saucers on the counter and the cups on top of them, to look at me. “Truly?”

“He invited me to tea, not supper.”

Christopher rolled his eyes and turned back to the task. “A technicality.”

“A technicality still counts. You said supper, not tea.”

He huffed and turned his attention to the cabinet. “Orange Pekoe all right?”

“I would rather have English Breakfast,” I said, “but I suppose Orange Pekoe will have to do, if that’s all we have.”

“We’ll pick up some English Breakfast the next time we do the marketing.” He put the tin on the counter and popped the lid off. And flicked me a look. “I notice you don’t deny that he will give talking you into marriage another go.”

I made a face. “Most likely, yes. Although I don’t know, Christopher. He’s never been pushy about it. When he proposed at Marsden Manor and I didn’t immediately say yes, he wasn’t difficult about it. He isn’t trying to force me into accepting him.”

“He’d better not,” Christopher said, in a tone that hinted of danger should anyone try. He’s approximately as dangerous as a kitten in a snit, so I paid it no attention beyond an eyeroll and a, “Yes, yes.”

“Shall you go?”

“Tonight, do you mean? I suppose so. We’re not doing anything else, so why wouldn’t I? It’s one more meal your father doesn’t have to pay for, isn’t it?”

“My father can afford to feed you,” Christopher said, with the magnificent disregard of someone who has never had to worry about where his next meal will be coming from. “Aren’t you afraid that he’ll make another attempt on your life?”

“Are you still on about that?” I shook my head. “He hasn’t made the first attempt on my life, Christopher.”

“You don’t find it suspicious that you tell him you don’t want to go to Germany with him, and five minutes later, you plunge headfirst down a staircase?”

“No,” I said firmly. “It sounds coincidental, I’ll give you that. But why on earth would he want me dead? If he wants a wife who’ll go to Germany with him, and I don’t want to do it, he can just find someone else.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t want anyone else.”

“That’s fine, then. But killing me won’t get him what he wants, either. I’ll be dead, but he’ll still need a wife. And if that’s the case, he might as well just find one without killing me first.”

“Perhaps he was trying to scare you,” Christopher said, “so you’ll accept the protection of his name.”

“The what, now?” I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense, Christopher. First of all, me falling down the stairs has got nothing to do with me needing the protection of anyone’s name, but if I did do, I’ve got the protection of yours. Being attached to the Astleys, and by extension to the Sutherlands, goes a lot further than being the fiancée of the Graf von und zu Natterdorff. At least for as long as I’m here in England.”

Christopher didn’t quibble with that, most likely because he recognized that I was right. “Perhaps he was trying to give the impression that you were in danger, then,” he said instead, “so he could swoop in and save you. And then you might go to Germany with him out of gratitude, or to get away from whoever is after you.”

It made more sense than the ‘protection of his name’ thing. But nonetheless?—

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “No one is after me. It was an accident. Nothing more.”

Christopher looked mutinous. “It won’t seem ridiculous when you’re rolling around on the floor of the Savoy with your heels touching the back of your head.”

I stared at him. “What on earth has gotten into you, Christopher? You like Wolfgang! Or at least I thought you did.”

“That was before he tried to take you away,” Christopher said mulishly.

I blinked at him for several seconds before I found my voice again. “I didn’t realize you felt that way.”

His eyes flashed. “Of course I feel that way! You’re my best friend, and he wants to marry you and take you to Germany with him!”

“Yes,” I said, “but you never said anything.”

He threw his hands up. “What was I going to say? ‘No, don’t marry this man you seem to like, whose proposal you accepted, because I don’t want to lose my best friend?’ What kind of friend would I be if I did that?”

“Someone who cares that I stay,” I said. “And I didn’t, you know.”

“Didn’t what?”

“I didn’t accept his proposal.” I thought back to that moment in the Marsden Manor foyer, and added, “What I actually said, was, ‘Thank you, but…’ But then someone squealed, and everyone started cheering, and at that point I couldn’t really say no. But I never actually said yes, either.”

“Laetitia,” Christopher said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Laetitia was the one who squealed. Crispin squeezed her hand hard enough for that stupidly ostentatious Sutherland diamond ring to make a bruise.”

“Good grief,” I said, “why?”

Christopher rolled his eyes, hard enough that they seemed to be in danger of vanishing into the back of his skull. “I’m just going to say it, Pippa. I promised I wouldn’t, so I haven’t, but this is getting painful.”

“What is getting painful?” Other than Laetitia’s bruised finger, although there had been no bruise on it this morning, and also no Sutherland engagement ring, so that point was now moot, in more ways than one.

His eyes narrowed. “Your obliviousness, you daft cow.”

I sniffed, offended, and he added, “He fancies you. Has done for years.”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again when nothing came out.

“He took one look at you on the train platform in Salisbury when we came home from Eton that last time,” Christopher continued when I didn’t speak. “You were all grown up, in heels and bobbed hair and lipstick, and he made a sound like a dying duck. When I looked at him, he told me he’d kill me if I said anything at all about it, so I didn’t.”

I shook my head, finally finding my voice. “That’s mad, Christopher. He might have been surprised that I wasn’t the same snotty-nosed girl in pigtails that I’d been the last time he saw me—” Over Christmas holidays, that would have been, almost six years ago now, “—but he certainly wasn’t struck by…” I wrinkled my nose, “—by fancy.”

“Shows what you know,” Christopher said. “This level of thickheadedness isn’t an attractive trait, Pippa. Everyone else knows. How could you not have noticed?”

How could I not have…?

“Because there wasn’t anything to notice!”

My voice was shrill, and I made a concerted effort to calm down and sound less like something only dogs could hear. “Have you lost your mind, Christopher?”

“No,” Christopher said.

“You must have done! This is your cousin you are talking about, correct? Just to clarify? Not some other chap you may have been sharing your train compartment with on the last ride home from school?”

He gave me a look, one that said clearly that I was pushing him too far, and I raised my hands in pacification. “You can’t blame me for wanting to be certain, Christopher. Not when you’re standing there telling me that the then-Honorable Crispin Astley, current Viscount St George, future Duke of Sutherland—that’s him, correct? Same chap?—that he… that he… fancies me!”

My voice rose incredulously on the last part, and Christopher winced but persisted. “Not just fancies you, Pippa. But yes, the same chap. The one who’s in love with you.”

The ground did a little shimmy, and I did my best to ignore the unsteadiness under my feet. But truly… love, and not just fancy? “How can that be, pray tell, with the way he has always spoken to me?”

“Ugh,” Christopher said with feeling. He reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose as if I were giving him a headache. “I really don’t want to do this, you know. Not only did I promise him I wouldn’t do—and no, that time on the train wasn’t the only time it came up; we’ve actually discussed it more than once, so I’m not simply imagining things?—”

Well, that took care of that objection, and before I could voice it, too.

“If he’s in love with me,” I said, and my face twisted involuntarily as the words came out, “why would he propose to Laetitia?”

Christopher stared at me. “Because you told him to, didn’t you? Slapped him down and told him he might as well marry Laetitia because he didn’t deserve any better. What did you think he would do?”

“Not that,” I muttered. I had thought he had a better sense of self-preservation that that, frankly. I mean, we both knew he was in love with someone else, didn’t we?

“Do you mean to tell me,” I said for clarification, “that all those times when I told him he ought to man up and tell the girl he was in love with that he fancied her…”

Christopher nodded. “You were talking about yourself.”

“And when we discussed it with your mother and father before going to Dorset for the engagement party last month, and I suggested that we find her and put her wise…”

“Still talking about yourself.”

“And Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert knew it?”

“Of course they knew it,” Christopher said. “Everyone knows it, Pippa. Mum and Dad, Constance and Francis, Laetitia…”

That explained the animosity, at any rate. I had wondered about that.

“Uncle Harold?” I asked. “Aunt Charlotte?”

Christopher nodded. “Them, too. Grandfather, before he died. All the servants. Tom, of course. It’s not a secret.”

“So when we listened to Uncle Harold rant at Crispin that weekend in April…”

“Grimsby had just informed Grandfather of Crispin’s many failings,” Christopher said, “and Grandfather called both Uncle Harold and Crispin on the carpet. Crispin didn’t want to listen, it seemed, and his father followed him to his rooms to, I assume, try to talk some sense into him.”

And we had heard them screaming at one another when we came out of Christopher’s room to go outside for a walk.

“Uncle Harold called me a common chippy,” I said, thinking back, “and a foreigner to boot.”

Funny how I had never connected those words to myself. I had racked my brain trying to think of other women of Crispin’s acquaintance who might fit the criteria, and had mostly come up empty, at least after Johanna de Vos bit the dust. It had never once occurred to me that I fit the parameters myself.

Christopher nodded. “He also said that Crispin should marry someone else and keep you as a mistress. As I recall, Crispin didn’t like that much.”

No, he hadn’t. “So when Aunt Charlotte put me as far into the west wing at Sutherland Hall as she put you into the east wing…”

“It wasn’t me she was trying to keep you away from,” Christopher said.

“Would that be why she hid the pages from Grimsby’s notebook in my room, too, do you suppose? So I could see all of St George’s misdeeds in black and white, and I would detest him all the more?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Christopher said. “You’ve never pretended to like Crispin, but I suppose she thought it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that you continued to despise him.”

No doubt. I shivered, and then folded my arms across my chest to hide how the thought made me cold all the way down to the marrow. Never mind the fact that she had tried to kill me; what parent does something like that to her only child?

Then again, we were talking about the upper crust, weren’t we, with their titles and estates hanging in the balance, and it wasn’t as if Uncle Harold and Aunt Charlotte had been a love match, was it? I supposed they both felt that if they could deal with each other for the sake of the reputation and fortune of the Sutherlands, then so could Crispin.

And at least he was allowed to keep me as a mistress on the side, the lucky boy.

“Do you think he would have done it?” I asked.

Christopher squinted at me. The water had finished boiling now, and he was dealing with the strainer and tea leaves. “Done what?”

I made a face. Now that I had to deliberately articulate what had fallen out of my mouth more or less without input from my brain, I wished I had kept my mouth shut. “Married Laetitia and tried to keep me as a mistress.”

Christopher turned to me. His eyebrows rose. “Are you mad?” he wanted to know.

I opened my mouth and then closed it again when he continued. “Entirely aside from the fact that he’s in love with you, and that he wouldn’t insult you that way, or for that matter use you that way?—”

He had better not.

“—is there anything about your relationship with Crispin that would indicate that you would allow him to survive after coming to you with such a suggestion?”

I had to admit that there wasn’t. “I would eviscerate him. After I finished laughing myself sick.”

Christopher nodded. “And I’m sure he knows that. Besides, he isn’t that sort of a person.”

I opened my mouth, and he waved me to silence. “Don’t, Pippa. You know he wouldn’t marry Laetitia and then carry on with you behind her back.”

“Tell that to all the girls he’s bedded in the past couple of years,” I said.

“But he wasn’t married to any of them. Nor in love with any of them, either.”

“But according to you he was in love with me. And it certainly didn’t stop him from spreading his favors to all and sundry.”

“Because he couldn’t have you,” Christopher said, heading out of the kitchenette with both the cups of tea and a toss of his head indicating that I should follow. “You’d never agree, and Uncle Harold would never allow it, anyway.”

I trailed after him, out of the kitchen and into the sitting room. “I don’t know if I can trust this, Christopher. Are you certain you haven’t lost your mind and he’s simply pulling your leg?”

Christopher snorted as he placed the cups and saucers on the table and dropped down on one end of the Chesterfield. “Mine and everyone else’s, I suppose?”

I opened my mouth to say that I wouldn’t put it past him—Crispin, that was—and Christopher shook his head. “Don’t bother, Pippa. I’m not the one who has lost my mind. You’re the one denying what everyone else can plainly see. Bloody hell, it’s not as if he’s been exactly discreet, is it? He’s called you darling for half a decade. I can’t believe you haven’t caught on.”

“Yes,” I said, “but…”

“But nothing. Everyone else can see it. Why can’t you?”

I thought about it—not that I was convinced, mind you, but if Christopher was right and Crispin did nurture fond feelings for me… why hadn’t I noticed?

“I suppose because he behaves as if he despises me,” I said, honestly. “He always has done.”

“He doesn’t,” Christopher said. He had picked up his Orange Pekoe and was sipping with every appearance of enjoyment, while I still sat with my hands in my lap while my tea turned cold on the table. “Although the fact that you so obviously despise him doesn’t make him any more likely to be vulnerable with you, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

Yes, of course. And the idea of Crispin being vulnerable made my face pucker.

After a moment’s silence, Christopher added, thoughtfully, “Although at this point I’m not certain what difference it makes, anyway. He’s marrying Laetitia, isn’t he, however he might feel about you.”

Yes, he was. “Serves him right,” I said, “if he couldn’t even be bothered to tell me.”

Christopher smirked. “I don’t imagine he had much hope that you felt the same way. Might as well save himself the embarrassment, if you were just going to laugh in his face.”

“Perhaps I wouldn’t have done,” I said, and picked up my own cup of tea at long last. “Perhaps I would have been sympathetic and understanding.”

I tried to keep a straight face, the way someone who was sympathetic and understanding would do, but I couldn’t maintain it, and Christopher grinned. “You wouldn’t have done, Pippa. You would have seen an opportunity to gloat, and you would have taken it. We both know it, and so does he.”

We did both know it, although having it pointed out didn’t make me feel very good about myself. “Are you absolutely certain about this, Christopher? You wouldn’t joke about it, would you?”

“I wouldn’t,” Christopher confirmed. “And yes, I’m absolutely certain. We talk about it occasionally. Obliquely, of course. He isn’t the type to cry over a girl…”

No, of course not.

“—but I keep him up to date on what’s going on with you. I rang up Sutherland Hall the same day we met Wolfgang, if you’ll recall.”

Yes, of course I recalled. “He showed up at the Savoy the next night to take me home,” I said. All the way from Wiltshire. Although he had intimated, on that occasion, that he was really in London to see someone else and I was just an afterthought.

But when I mentioned that, Christopher set me straight. “The only reason he motored up was because I phoned him and told him about Wolfgang. Laetitia Marsden wasn’t even in London that weekend.”

“There are other women,” I said.

He shook his head. “Not lately. After Francis’s and Constance’s engagement party, Uncle Harold made it quite clear that he expected Crispin to fall in line and propose to Laetitia.”

Of course he had done. The Earl and Countess of Marsden were Constance’s aunt and uncle, so the occasion had created a perfect meeting of the minds for the Duke of Sutherland and the Countess of Marsden to put their heads together and matchmake their children.

“I fail to see why I’d be such a terrible wife,” I said with an offended sniff.

Not to Crispin, obviously. I didn’t want to marry Crispin. I just didn’t like to be told that I wasn’t good enough for him.

Most of Crispin’s conquests had been higher-born, admittedly—Lady Laetitia Marsden, Lady Violet Cummings, the Honorable Cecily Fletcher, and the Honorable Gladys Long. Even Millicent Tremayne was the granddaughter of someone or other. On the other hand, I wasn’t as objectionable as that waitress he had dallied with back in June. I was young, healthy, and reasonably attractive. My hips weren’t any skinnier than Laetitia’s, and she was expected to produce children. I was the ward of the brother of the Duke of Sutherland, and my mother had been an Honorable. It wasn’t as if I were a street urchin.

“It’s the German thing,” Christopher said apologetically.

Yes, of course it was. Although it wasn’t as if my country of origin was my fault. I hadn’t asked my mother to marry a foreigner, nor had I asked to be born. If Francis, who had fought the Boche, could forgive me for my birth, then surely Uncle Harold, who hadn’t lifted a finger in defense of his country, should be able to do the same. Half of me was very respectably English. And if Crispin didn’t mind?—

At that point, my brain rebelled, as it was borne in upon me just how much Crispin apparently didn’t mind.

I shook my head, as if to dislodge the thought. “You can’t be serious about this. He can’t be serious about this. It must be a joke. Otherwise, it’s… it’s madness, Christopher!”

“Believe me,” Christopher said, “I have told him so. More than once. How he imagined he was going to win you over behaving the way he does is beyond me.”

“That’s not…” I shook my head in frustration. “Never mind. Just… let us never speak of it again, please. I won’t bring it up, and you won’t either.”

“Fine by me,” Christopher said easily. “It brings me no pleasure to imagine my cousin and my other cousin going at it like rabbits.”

My face puckered. “That’s foul, Christopher. I beg you won’t put that kind of image in my head again.”

“It’s in mine,” Christopher said, “and you can’t blame me for wanting to share the misery.”

I absolutely could, and told him so. “All of this aside, I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t have tea with Wolfgang later. St George is marrying Laetitia, and wouldn’t have been allowed to marry me anyway, and that’s assuming I would have wanted to marry him…”

Christopher opened his mouth, and I waved him off. “I might as well reconsider Wolfgang’s proposal in this new light. Perhaps going off to Germany with him would be the best thing for everyone.”

It would keep me from gnashing my teeth for the next half-century while I watched Laetitia make herself at home as mistress of Sutherland Hall. And if Christopher wasn’t pulling my leg and Crispin truly did have more than familial feelings for me, getting out of his way so he could find whatever happiness he could with a woman he didn’t love, might be the kindest thing I could do for him.

“Not for me,” Christopher said.

Well, no. Of course not for him. But— “Do you foresee us staying together for the rest of our lives, Christopher?”

Didn’t he want a life and a relationship of his own at some point? With someone like—say—Tom Gardiner?

“I foresaw you doing as you promised,” Christopher said severely, “and marry me if we are both still single at thirty.”

Well, yes. I had promised that, hadn’t I? Although that had been before anyone else had wanted to marry me. Or at least before I had known about it.

“After all,” Christopher added, “it’s the only way I’m likely to get an heir, isn’t it?”

An heir? “I didn’t know you cared about having an heir.”

He huffed. “A child, then. You know Mum and Dad care about grandchildren.”

“Of course. But surely Francis and Constance have that in hand? If anyone has child-bearing hips, it’s Constance.”

“Now, now,” Christopher said, albeit not without a twitch of his lips, “don’t be unkind, Pippa.”

“I’m not being unkind. I love Constance. But you have to admit that she’s not exactly the Roaring Twenties ideal of woman.”

Quite unlike Lady Laetitia, who had the appeal of the decade down to an art.

Constance had the bobbed hair and the lipstick, of course. Everyone did these days. But she was an old-fashioned girl in that all she wanted to do, was marry Francis and settle into being a wife and mother. No cocktail parties and cigarettes for Constance.

And yes, her hips were more ample than my own, and for that matter than Laetitia’s. Everything about Constance was soft and warm. She’d be a wonderful mother when the time came.

“I suppose,” Christopher admitted, a bit reluctantly. I could tell that he still felt as if he were being disloyal to his brother’s fiancée.

“Besides, even if we were both still single at thirty, and we did marry one another, did you really want to…?”

Christopher’s face twisted. “Bloody hell, no. No offense, Pippa, but that’s vile.”

I wouldn’t go as far as to use that particular word, but then I had precious little experience with which to reason. The idea of kissing him passionately was certainly off-putting—who wants to kiss their own brother, and that’s basically what he was to me?—but surely something like that, or worse, would be required?

“Well,” I said, “then how did you think we would manage to make an heir? Through immaculate conception?”

“I rather imagined,” Christopher said, with no shame whatsoever, “that by then Crispin would have talked you around, and I’d help you bring up his children. It’s not likely that anyone would be able to tell the difference.”

It was my turn to pucker. “If anything is vile, Christopher, that is. You’d marry me while I was carrying on with your cousin—your married cousin—and between us, we’d bring up the illegitimate children? And you thought Laetitia would accept this? Let alone that I would?”

Because that would never happen. I didn’t want Crispin in the first place, but if he wanted me, he’d damn well better be willing to give up the title and fortune for me, rather than marry Laetitia and try to talk me into his bed on the side. It seemed like the least he could do.

“I’m meeting Wolfgang for tea,” I said firmly. “And you’ll do me the favor, Christopher, of not ringing up Wiltshire and dragging St George back up here for it. He has enough to deal with without that.”

“Probably won’t end up in Wiltshire anyway,” Christopher said, and he was most likely right about that.