Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Thompson opened the door at Marsden House, so wherever Laetitia was, she hadn’t eloped with him.
He was still quite the decorative specimen, though, and I’ll admit that my eyes lingered for a second. Until Crispin elbowed me in the ribs on his way past with a smooth, “Afternoon, Thompson.”
Thompson fell back a step. So did I, for that matter. “Your Grace.”
“You remember my cousin Christopher Astley, don’t you? And Miss Darling?”
“Of course.” Thompson nodded politely but without taking his attention off Crispin as the latter moved into the foyer. “What can I do for you, Your Grace?”
“I wanted to talk about Laetitia,” Crispin said, as Christopher passed through the door as the last one of us, and Thompson shut it behind him.
He turned back to Crispin. “I’m afraid Miss Laetitia isn’t here, Your Grace. Lady Euphemia rang up looking for her again last night, but she wasn’t here then, either.”
“I’ve heard,” Crispin told him. “We thought perhaps she had turned up since then.”
“When was the last time Lady Laetitia was here?” I asked, and Thompson turned his admittedly excellent blue eyes on me.
“At Marsden House, Miss Darling?”
I nodded, and he added, “Miss Laetitia hasn’t spent as much time in Town recently. She was here for a quick trip just after the events at Sutherland Hall—”
It was a very delicate way of referring to the week when Uncle Harold killed the footman, the local doctor, the former maid, and finally himself.
“—but she only stayed the night before going back. And before that—”
“What was she doing in London?” Crispin wanted to know.
There was a faint wrinkle between his brows.
Perhaps he hadn’t known that Laetitia had escaped to Town in the midst of the fallout from Uncle Harold’s death.
I was a bit surprised to hear it myself, as a matter of fact.
I would have expected her to be at Sutherland Hall safeguarding her future—or to put a more charitable spin on it, supporting her husband-to-be through the loss of his father—instead of gallivanting up to London for her own purposes.
Not that I had any room to talk. Christopher and I had decamped in short order, just a few days after the denouement.
Not for any lack of care, but because Laetitia, in fact, had made it clear that we were de trop.
And I’ll be the first to admit that the situation had been awkward.
Of everyone there, Christopher and I—along with Crispin, Uncle Herbert, and Aunt Roz—had been the only ones who knew exactly what was going on and why.
It had been a full-time job making certain we didn’t say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time.
But still, to hear that Laetitia had left Crispin to his own devices during that week was surprising.
However, what was even more surprising was to hear that Crispin was surprised.
He must have noticed that she’d been gone, surely—unless she had been back at Marsden Manor by then—but he didn’t seem to know what she’d been doing, either.
Thompson looked apologetic. “Miss Laetitia didn’t say, Your Grace.
She arrived in the mid-afternoon with no warning, informed us she would be going out for supper, and retired to her room.
She left in the early evening and came back just before midnight.
She woke the next morning, had breakfast, and left again. ”
“And she didn’t tell you who she was meeting.”
It was less a question than statement. Thompson shook his head anyway. “I’m afraid not, Miss Darling.”
“Do you know where she dined?”
But he didn’t know that, either. “She was dressed nicely but not opulently, so I don’t think a nightclub was involved.”
“And she had her own motorcar,” Christopher asked, “so she didn’t take a Hackney?”
“No, Mr. Astley.”
That seemed to be a dead end, as well, then. “And before that?” I asked.
Thompson blinked, and I added, “You said, she only stayed the night before going back. And before that— Before that, what did she do?”
“She visited London in October,” Thompson said. “She came up in the afternoon, supped here, visited Lady Violet Cummings the next morning, and saw Miss Barnsley and the Fortescues. She left again in time to make it back to Dorset by nightfall.”
That would have been the same day Violet and the Fortescues had mentioned. “Any idea who she lunched with that day?”
Thompson blinked again. “I’m afraid not, Miss Darling. She didn’t lunch here.”
That was something, I supposed. Although we had already assumed that she’d met someone that afternoon.
I shook my head. This was frustrating, and was getting us nowhere.
Crispin must have come to the same conclusion. “Might I use your telephone to ring up Marsden Manor, Thompson? I’d like to ask if there’s any news.”
“Of course, Your Grace. The instrument is through here.” He gestured to a doorway on the left. Or his left, our right. I’m sure Crispin was well aware of where the telephone was, but he merely nodded and headed that way.
I glanced at Christopher, who was looking around the foyer speculatively, before I turned to Thompson. “Would you mind telling me where to find a lavatory, Thompson? We’ve been in and out of the motorcar all morning.”
“Of course, Miss Darling. The powder room is down the hall to the right.” He gestured.
“Thank you.” This wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
I planned to visit the loo, of course—I hadn’t been lying—but I had also hoped for an excuse to explore the upper floors.
Instead, I had to give Christopher a significant look before I headed down the hall.
Behind me, I could hear him clear his throat.
“You know, that isn’t a bad idea. I assume there’s a lavatory upstairs, as well? Do you mind if I…?”
“Go right ahead, Mr. Astley,” Thompson said.
I heard Christopher start up the stairs just as I reached the door to the powder room and turned in.
Hopefully he’d have the sense to have a look around while he was up there.
I had no reason to think Laetitia would be upstairs, hiding from the world—and her fiancé—but I thought we’d be amiss if we didn’t at least look.
I took my time in the loo, to give Christopher plenty of time to explore.
Once I couldn’t justify lingering any longer, I made my way back down the hallway to the foyer, and looked up just as Christopher started to descend the staircase from the next floor.
When he saw me, he gave me an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
He wouldn’t have had time to look everywhere, of course, but we knew where Laetitia’s room was, and he would have checked that, at least, along with a few of the others, I assumed.
From what I knew about Laetitia, she wouldn’t be caught dead on the servants’ level, so we didn’t have to worry about the top floor, at any rate.
Crispin was still in the next room—we could hear his voice through the open door—so I drifted that way. Christopher joined me in the doorway when he reached the bottom of the staircase, and we stood there and listened to Crispin’s side of the conversation.
“No, I understand— No, not in the past week. We were supposed to— No, I haven’t— No.”
“Effie?” I mouthed to him—Constance’s rather undignified nickname for her aunt—and he shook his head.
“No, Geoffrey. I have no idea.”
Ah, Geoffrey. He must be quite volubly upset about his sister’s disappearance, at least judging from Crispin’s tone of long-suffering, and the expression on his face.
In justice to him—Geoffrey, I mean—he and Laetitia had always seemed close.
They were a year or two apart in age, with Geoffrey the elder, and I assumed he must have spent his life taking care of his little sister.
Not that she wasn’t quite capable of taking care of herself, of course, but looking like that—if I haven’t mentioned it, Laetitia is stunning—she must have had men buzzing about her like flies from a young age, and I could imagine that Geoffrey would have had his hands full with keeping them off.
He had missed going to France by a year or less.
Francis had been twenty when the army started drafting young men for the war effort.
Robbie and Tom had been eighteen. Geoffrey had just squeaked by without being pulled into the mess, I thought.
Crispin and Christopher—and I—were all too young, of course.
We’d been eleven when the war started and fifteen when it ended.
Now the boys—or men—were both twenty-three, and I had just crossed over into twenty-four a week or so before.
The celebration at Beckwith Place had been curtailed by the death of His former Grace, Duke Harold, but I’d managed to get a year older even so.
But that’s neither here nor there. Crispin was on the telephone with Geoffrey, who seemed to be berating him for losing track of Laetitia, when it was Geoffrey who should have kept a better eye on her.
She had vanished from Dorset, not from Wiltshire or London.
It was hardly Crispin’s fault that she hadn’t turned up when and where she was supposed to be.
“Yes, Geoffrey,” he was saying now; perhaps a slight improvement over the ‘no, Geoffreys’ of before. “Of course I will. As soon as I hear anything. You’ll be the first.”
He hung up the earpiece with a click. The conversation must have been even more harrowing than I’d realized, because I could see his shoulders loosen as he breathed out.
For a second none of us said anything. Then— “He’s not blaming you,” Christopher asked incredulously, “is he?”
Crispin shot him a look. “Of course he is. She was on her way to meet me when she vanished. Or so she told him, anyway. That makes it my fault, don’t you know?”
“Poppycock,” I said rudely. “It’s not your fault if Laetitia gets lost on her way from Dorset to London.”
“Of course not, Darling. But Geoffrey’s missing his sister. He must have someone to blame.”