Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Supper was a subdued affair. The countess glared at me and chewed on her tongue instead of the food.
The earl tucked in with good appetite, and Geoffrey stuck mostly to whiskey.
Crispin refused to look at me, and while Christopher did catch my eye at one point, enough to roll his own at me, he was too preoccupied with staring dopily at Tom to do much more than that.
After supper, we retired to the drawing room.
Crispin engaged the Marsdens in a game of bridge, and Tom excused himself to confer with Finch, who stopped by with an update.
I considered asking to be allowed to participate in the conversation—had someone followed us to Coutts and Finch had seen them?
—but it wasn’t likely that anyone would allow me to, so in the end I just let Tom walk out of the drawing room unaccompanied.
A few seconds later, Christopher dropped onto the Chesterfield next to me. “Evening, Pippa.”
“Good evening, Christopher,” I responded. “Simply spiffing to see you, old bean.”
He made a face, and I added, “We’ve been together all night, you know. I realize you’ve been preoccupied with Tom, but I’ve been here, right next to you, through most of it. There’s no need to greet me as if we’ve been apart this entire time.”
“You don’t have to tell me.” He huffed. “I can’t believe you, Pippa.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said placidly, although I had a good idea.
“Oh, is that so?” He tried to arch his brow the way Crispin can, but both of them slid up. “Now is when you decide to stake your claim on Crispin? Today? In front of his fiancée’s family while she’s missing and we’re waiting to drop off the ransom?”
“I didn’t stake any claim,” I protested. “It was obvious from the countess’s expression what she believed. I just… let her believe it.”
“You reinforced it,” Christopher corrected.
Well… “Perhaps a little. But you have to admit that it was worth it for the look on her face.”
He shook his head, exasperated. “You realize that they suspect you of doing away with her, don’t you?”
“They can’t possibly,” I answered. “Anyone who knows me knows that I would never actually hurt anyone.”
“But they don’t know you,” Christopher pointed out, reasonably. “All they know is that you’re flirting with their daughter’s husband-to-be a week before the wedding, and while she’s mysteriously missing. With a ransom demand, no less.”
I opened my mouth to protest the assertion that I had been flirting, and he arched his brows. “Does ‘anything for you’ ring any bells?”
Well, yes. But— “I didn’t mean it that way,” I said grudgingly.
He harrumphed. “That way? As in, sincerely? Tell that to the Marsdens. Or better yet, tell it to Crispin.”
I made a face. “He knows I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Oh, does he?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, just kept going. “You can’t toy with his feelings that way, Pippa. It’s unfair of you to weaponize them just to get the best of Lady Euphemia.”
“That wasn’t what I did,” I said sulkily.
“Well, if it wasn’t a joke, you’ve picked a fine time to throw your hat in the ring. You had a clear shot for five years, any time up until September. And now you decide to make a play for him?”
“I’m not!” My raised voice caused the other four to glance over at us, and I lowered my voice, my cheeks flaming.
“I’m not, Christopher. Just because I don’t want him to marry Laetitia and be stuck with her for the rest of his life, doesn’t mean I want him for myself. I’m not making a play. I’m just…”
I trailed off, trying to find a word for what I was doing that wouldn’t make me appear childish, or worse, despicable.
“Proving a point?” Christopher suggested gently. When I didn’t answer with anything but a wince, he added, “I know you, Pippa. You’ve never met a challenge you didn’t rise to, or bait you didn’t take. When someone accuses you of something, you double down, whether you’re right or not.”
I made a face.
“But this isn’t just about the Countess of Marsden and what she believes. It’s about Crispin’s feelings. And if you’re not serious—”
I opened my mouth to proclaim that of course I wasn’t serious, that he knew that quite well, and he waved me down.
“—then don’t toy with them. Or with him. He deserves better.”
I didn’t say anything to that, and he added, softly, “While you and I may be celebrating the fact that Laetitia might be out of his—and our—lives, she’s his fiancée.
This is a difficult time for him, and a difficult situation for him to be in.
The last thing he needs is you confusing him with mixed messages. ”
“I’m not—” I began, and then subsided when I had to admit that yes, I was.
It was just very hard to resist the temptation.
I’d been going head to head with Crispin for twelve years, and just because I knew about his feelings for me now, didn’t mean the urge to poke at him had gone away.
The revelation had merely given me extra ammunition.
Ammunition that perhaps I shouldn’t employ, since it was insider knowledge and unfair, but ammunition, nonetheless.
I couldn’t stop now. If I did, he would immediately suspect that something was wrong.
He’s not stupid, and he’s far too adept at reading between the lines.
Either he’d figure out that I knew about his feelings, or—God forbid—he’d think that I had developed feelings of my own, and was too sweet on him to treat him with my usual level of disdain, neither of which were things I wanted him to know or believe.
No, the best thing for everyone was for me to carry on as usual.
Or mostly as usual. I should perhaps refrain from flirting with him, given the situation.
I did have to give Christopher at least that much.
People had been accusing us of flirtation for years, and I had always hotly denied it, so engaging in it deliberately now, with malice aforethought, was perhaps beneath me.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll stop talking to him.”
Christopher sighed. “You don’t have to stop talking to him.
No one is asking you to do that. Just don’t openly flirt with him in front of his future in-laws.
They’ll suspect you of wrongdoing, and he’ll be confused.
And hurt, when he realizes that you’re just toying with him.
And then he’ll be angry, when he realizes that you know how he feels and you’re using it against him. ”
I stuck my bottom lip out. “I said I’d stop.”
“Do,” Christopher said severely. “I love you, Pippa, but you’re being unfair.”
“I said—” I began hotly, and he shushed me, as all the bridge players looked over at us again. “I think I’ll just leave, if you can’t be nice to me.”
“You just want an excuse to eavesdrop on Tom’s conversation with Detective-Sergeant Finchley,” Christopher said calmly, and I won’t deny that that benefit of leaving had also crossed my mind. “He won’t thank you for it. Just stay where you are. He’ll be back soon, and will tell us what Finch said.”
“Optimistic of you,” I said bitterly, but I did stay where I was. After a moment I lowered my voice, “Do you think we’ll find her?”
He glanced at me, surprised. “Laetitia? I assumed so. If they get their money, there’s no reason to hold onto her.”
“For more money?”
“Crispin’s not going to keep paying,” Christopher said.
I snorted. “Of course he is. You heard him earlier. If something goes wrong, it won’t be because of anything he did or didn’t do.”
“Well, yes. But still. They can’t expect to keep making demands and having them met. It doesn’t work that way.”
“I expect it works any way they want it to work,” I said, and lowered my voice even further. “Did you happen to notice the way the Marsdens looked at the carpet bag earlier?”
“Like it held the life of their daughter in its depths?”
“No. Well, yes. That, too. But Geoffrey especially looked at it with something almost like greed. You don’t think…?”
“That the Earl and Countess of Marsden have ‘kidnapped’—” He lifted his hands to make quotation marks in the air with his fingers, “—their own daughter for ransom? Do they need money that badly?”
I had no idea, and said so. “Although is anyone doing well after the war? People are giving up their ancestral estates all over the place. Just look at Stowe House and Haversham Priory.”
Christopher made a face. “Don’t remind me.”
Stowe House, the former home of the Morgan-Grenville family—the Dukes of Buckingham, if you’re not familiar—was turned into a school in 1923, while the Finch Hattons—the Earls of Winchilsea and Nottingham—had been forced to sell Haverholme Priory to a demolition company when no one else wanted to purchase the old place.
And those are just two recent examples. There are plenty of others.
It wasn’t impossible that the Marsdens had fallen on hard times, too, and that marrying Laetitia off to Crispin was a way to remedy that.
Not that she’d had to be forced into anything, of course.
She had always seemed very keen on him. But I had also always suspected that there was a financial element to the match.
Crispin is an attractive chap in his own right—I may dislike him, but I can admit the pure facts when pressed.
However, the Sutherland title and fortune certainly don’t diminish his appeal.
While he’d undoubtedly be able to find a woman to marry him were he just plain Crispin Astley too, I couldn’t think of a single woman of his—or our—acquaintance to whom the fact that he was the (future and now current) Duke of Sutherland didn’t play at least a small part.
So yes, the fact that the Marsdens might need money had occurred to me before. What occurred now, was to wonder whether they’d kidnap their own daughter—or talk her into pretending to be kidnapped—in order to get their hands on a bit of the ready.