Chapter 9 #2
“Well, it is,” Christopher said sulkily. “You would have wanted that information. Nobody cares what happened to me.”
“I care,” I said, “and I still say he behaved inappropriately. The power differential alone…”
He cut me off. “Never mind that now. It’s been years, and I’m over it. Not that I wasn’t over it as soon as it happened. Nobody forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do.”
I didn’t say anything, although my expression must have said plenty, because he sighed. “We all know that there are people who would be happy to marry you right now, if the circumstances allowed. There’s no need to discuss that any further.”
“No,” Crispin agreed, and I made a face.
“Fine. But let the record show—”
“Whatever you want is on the record, Darling. We’re here.”
He pulled the motorcar to a stop at the curb, and stepped out and opened the back seat for me. I accepted his help in removing myself from the interior of the Hispano-Suiza and looked around.
We were parked on Bond Street outside Smythson, which was where I should have expected to wind up, had I thought about it.
Smythson of Bond Street has been the purveyor of fine stationery to upper class Britons since Victoria was on the throne.
Of course Crispin and Laetitia would get their Thank You notes from here.
“What sort of motorcar does Laetitia have?” I wanted to know. I looked up and down the street at the vehicles parked there while Christopher made his way from the other side of the H6 and onto the pavement with us.
Crispin glanced around, too. “None of these. The family car is the Daimler. Geoffrey has a Morris Oxford, but I don’t think he’s allowed out without some sort of chaperone these days. And Laetitia has a Citron.”
Of course she did. The bright yellow Citroen C-type is just about the most noticeable motorcar on the road.
While every copper in London recognized Crispin’s blue Hispano-Suiza on sight, surely every single person between Dorset and here must know what Laetitia drove.
It isn’t the sort of vehicle you overlook.
Not in that particular shade, at any rate.
“She couldn’t find anything more garish?”
Crispin peered at me. “Is that jealousy I hear?”
“Not at all,” I said sturdily. “A motorcar is a nice thing to have if you live outside London, but here, it’s mostly just a costly annoyance. Christopher and I much prefer the underground. Don’t we, Christopher?”
“I do,” Christopher confirmed. “It’s all well and good when you have a Mayfair mansion to park your luxury car in front of, but Pippa and I would have to pay garage fees to store it.
We couldn’t leave it outside the Essex House Mansions every night.
Evans lets you get away with that, Crispin, but it’s only because you don’t stop by often—”
“And perhaps a little bit because he likes to flaunt the fact that the infamous Viscount St George is inside,” I interjected.
Crispin grimaced, and Christopher continued, “—and Pippa and I couldn’t do it. We’re much better off without a motorcar. The tube or a Hackney cab serves very well when we’re going somewhere we can’t simply walk.”
“Well, there’s no Citron in sight,” Crispin said, “and no Daimler, either.”
No, there wasn’t. “I suppose Geoffrey might have let her take the Morris Oxford if she wanted to travel incognito?”
“I suppose he might have done, although I can’t see one of those, either.”
Nor could I, so it was moot, really. I turned back to the entrance to Smythson. “Shall we? Or would you prefer to go inside alone, St George? Christopher and I can wait here.”
“We had better all go,” Crispin said dryly. “Can’t have you doubt my word or tell me I ought to have asked questions I didn’t think to ask.”
“I wouldn’t doubt your word,” I said, offended. I didn’t say anything in response to the other accusation since, yes, there was absolutely the possibility that I might come up with questions I thought he should have asked that he hadn’t.
“I’ll go inside with Crispin,” Christopher said and put a hand on my shoulder for a moment. “It might be better if you stay out here, Pippa. You could have a look around for the Citroen while you wait.”
Fine by me. Now that I thought about it, perhaps Crispin oughtn’t to show up to his and Laetitia’s appointment with a lady who wasn’t his fiancée.
We didn’t want word to get around that something was wrong, after all.
He could easily explain Christopher away, but explaining me was a bit trickier.
Not to mention that the staff would undoubtedly show Crispin the stationery he was supposed to be here about, and there was no part of me that wanted to admire the exquisitely intertwined L and C that were sure to make up the monogram on the notes in question.
“Yes,” I agreed, “I’ll do that. I trust you to ask any question I would have thought to ask, Christopher.”
The latter nodded seriously. Crispin rolled his eyes. “Shoo, Darling.”
He flapped his hands at me. I shooed.
The weather was as it had been lately: warm for December, and wet.
No snow, but quite a bit of mizzle and fog.
The latter wasn’t as bad today as it had been a few days ago, when Christopher and I had made our way back home from Lyons Corner House in a peasouper, but while visibility was such that I could at least see the motorcars parked at the curb, I couldn’t see a whole lot else.
I kept close to the curb as I made my slow way down Bond Street, around the corner of Grosvenor, and to the entrance to Bourdon Street.
Bond is a large street, and so is Grosvenor, but Bourdon—at least the part of it that connects to Grosvenor Street, if not the part that connects to Davies—is more like a tunnel.
It’s a narrow gap between two buildings that one can just barely walk down.
There was no room for any motorcars to park there, but I knew that if I walked through, I’d end up at Bloomfield Place, and the mews that is Bourdon Place and Grosvenor Hill.
It’s a lovely little area; it was simply that the way to get to it from where I was standing was a bit daunting.
The tunnel looked dark and sinister, swirling with fog, and a part of me—the superstitious, fearful part that I like to pretend isn’t there—told me that going into it would be a bad idea.
And so I hesitated on the pavement looking at the entrance.
I hadn’t seen any sign of a yellow Citroen so far, nor the green Daimler.
There was a bullnose Morris Oxford parked across Grosvenor, which I would have to get Crispin to take a look at.
I ought to have asked him the color of Geoffrey’s motorcar, so I could have eliminated it (or not) based on that criterion.
This particular Oxford bullnose was bright red, and I found that hard to reconcile with the sophisticated Lord Geoffrey Marsden, who would surely prefer an elegant black or gleaming silver to bright cherry red, but I was open to being wrong.
The mews might hold either Citroen or Daimler, however, and I steeled myself to plunge into the swirling fog of the entrance just as I felt someone step up behind me.
There were people everywhere, of course.
I wasn’t alone on the street. Far from it, in fact.
Of the 4.4 million people who lived in Greater London, an astonishing number of them seemed to be traversing Grosvenor Street this Friday morning.
This was just someone stepping a bit more closely into my personal space than most.
I swung around on my heel and found myself nose to nose—or nose to chin, more accurately—with a young man.
He wasn’t anything particularly special to look at.
Round face, snub nose, eyes that appeared to be either brown or hazel under the dark shadow of a tweed cap.
There was nothing remarkable about him at all, other than the fact that he had appeared out of nowhere with no warning, close enough to me that I could feel his breath on my face.
Onions. I grimaced.
His hands started to come up—it was probably nothing more than an attempt to support my elbows as I rocked back on my heels, a gesture any gentleman (or any other man, for that matter), might employ—but instead of seeing it as support, my brain interpreted it as threatening and as something I ought to avoid.
I scrambled back a foot. “Pardon me.”
His hands dropped. And while he didn’t say anything, he did stare after me as I walked around him and away. The mews could wait, I decided.
It wasn’t until I had turned the corner of New Bond Street (and had a chance to catch my breath) that it occurred to me that there was something vaguely familiar about the chap.
I didn’t know him, at least not properly.
I’m young and my memory is good, so if I actually knew the bloke, I would be able to recall his name and where I’d met him.
I didn’t, so he wasn’t anyone I had been introduced to, at least not recently.
I didn’t think we’d ever spoken, because I had no memory of a voice.
He was around my age, I thought, but he hadn’t seemed like the Oxford type, so not someone I knew from university.
He had appeared to be more working class than society.
A domestic servant, or chauffeur, or gardener; something of that nature.
Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert don’t keep domestics at Beckwith Place, and I would have recognized him had he ever worked at Sutherland Hall, but it was possible that I had encountered him at Marsden Manor or at the Dower House sometime over the past six months.
Or perhaps I had seen him somewhere else: he might have delivered a telegram or held a door or driven a Hackney cab or served me supper in a restaurant…
By then he was gone, swallowed up by the fog, and I was back in front of Smythson, just in time for Crispin and Christopher to come back out.