Chapter 13 #2
He didn’t wait for me to respond, just added, “Whether or not Lady Peckham had her eye on my father when she turned up for the funeral—and I sincerely doubt that she did, Darling, as my mother had only been gone a week and a half at that point—but even so, you do know that my father wouldn’t have killed her, don’t you?
Why would he do? All he had to do was say no. ”
“Of course I know that.”
I shot a guilty look at Uncle Harold, whose attention must have been caught by the precipitate departure of Constance and Francis. He was watching the door with a wrinkle between his brows.
“Perhaps not the nicest reminder for Constance either, Pippa,” Christopher murmured, “that her brother killed her mother.”
I winced. “Perhaps not. I’ll apologize when I see her next. She knows I’m prone to speaking before I think, so hopefully she’ll forgive me.”
“At any rate,” Crispin said, “my father did not kill Lady Peckham—correct, Gardiner?”
Tom nodded.
“—and thus His Grace would have had no reason to kill Doctor Meadows, either. Besides, if he had done—killed Lady P, I mean—and the doctor knew about it, why wait six months to get rid of him?”
“He could pin it on me if he waited until now?” I suggested. “Two birds with one stone and all that.”
“Safer to arrange it as an accident when no one else was around,” Crispin opined. “Surely you’re not actually accusing your host of murder, Darling?”
“Of course not. As I said, I get going, and…”
He nodded. “Well, my job here is done.”
He pushed his chair back. “Let me walk you to my father’s table, Gardiner, so I can get an up-close look at his face, and that of my future mother-in-law, when you tell them that they’re suspects in a murder.”
Tom opened his mouth, most likely to say that they were not, neither of them, suspects in Doctor Meadows’s murder, but Crispin waved him down. “Don’t ruin it, Detective Sergeant. Just let me enjoy the moment.”
“Of course, Lord St George.” Tom got to his feet too.
Crispin waited gallantly while Tom gathered up the writing paper and pen, and then they headed across the floor towards the head table.
“I’ll come and find you later, Kit,” Tom told him over his shoulder, which sounded quite a lot like a dismissal to me.
Christopher nodded, and then he and I watched them walk away, at least until I noticed Laetitia glaring at me like she would quite like to make me the next murder victim, and at that point I came back to myself and turned to Christopher.
“Would you like to see the expression on His Grace’s face, too, or shall we get out of here?”
“I wouldn’t turn it down,” Christopher said, and nudged his chair backwards, “but I think we ought rather to find Francis and Constance so you can apologize. She’s your best friend—”
“You’re my best friend.”
Although admittedly Constance and I had become closer in the past few months than we’d ever been in our Godolphin days.
I suppose she was my best friend of the female persuasion, unless that was Aunt Roz.
Then again, Roz was my aunt, and perhaps that doesn’t count.
And Christopher would certainly never provide me with a fiancée or wife who would take that place, so perhaps he was right, and Constance truly was my best girlfriend.
Either way, I owed her an apology. “Lay on, McDuff.”
He glanced down at me. “Shouldn’t you be telling her that?”
“I doubt she’ll want to duel me, Christopher.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” Christopher said as he held the door open for me with a polite bow, and let me precede him into the hallway. “She’s nowhere near as meek and mealy-mouthed as you led me to believe she was back in May.”
No, she wasn’t. “I think she’s gained some confidence as she has grown up,” I confessed. “She was very quiet as a girl.”
“She’s still quiet. Just not the pushover you said she was.” He looked around the foyer and raised his voice. “Tidwell?”
“Master Christopher?”
“Did you happen to notice which way Francis and Constance went? Upstairs? Outside? Somewhere else?”
“I did not,” Tidwell said. And added, “No one has come through the foyer in the last few minutes.”
“Thank you, Tidwell.” Christopher turned me around and nudged me back down the hallway. “The conservatory, do you suppose? Or the library? They wouldn’t invade Uncle Harold’s study or the below-stairs, I assume, and if they didn’t go through the foyer…”
“They may have taken the servants’ stairs up to the first floor,” I suggested, as I double-timed it down the hallway through the east wing, “and now they’re holed up in Francis’s room, or in Constance’s, making whoopie.”
“Constance did not look to be in the mood for whoopie. We’ll check the library and conservatory first, and if they’re not there, we’ll go upstairs.”
He bypassed the door we had come out of, from behind which a low murmur of voices could be heard—at least no one was volubly objecting to Tom’s instructions—and pushed open the door to the library. “Francis? Constance? Are you here?”
There was no answer, nor was there one from the game room next door when we tried there next.
“And small wonder,” I said, avoiding the glassy stare of a zebra whose head and neck was decorating the wall. “It’s not precisely comforting, is it?”
Christopher shook his head. “This room always gave me the pip when I was little.”
“It gives me the pip now. And I don’t think Francis is very fond of it anymore, either. After everything, I rather think he’d like to avoid anything dead, even if it’s just a zebra.”
“You may be right.” He shut the door behind us and continued towards the end of the hall. “The conservatory, then? And if not there, the upstairs.”
I nodded. “The conservatory might be a bit chilly. It’s sunny, but it is, after all, November.”
“I imagine they have ways of keeping warm,” Christopher said, and pushed the conservatory door open.
I had been wrong, I realized. The conservatory wasn’t cold at all. Rather the opposite, in fact. A wave of humid, warm air hit us in the face as soon as the door opened. If I stayed in it, it would probably make my makeup run.
Constance wears less of that than I do, so that didn’t mean anything. She and Francis might still be inside. I followed Christopher across the threshold into the jungle.
It was six months since I had been in the Sutherland Hall conservatory.
I had spent a memorable few hours there the night Grimsby the valet was murdered, while I waited for Christopher to come back inside from their assignation—or blackmail handoff—in the rose garden.
It had been a spooky experience, even before we knew that the valet was dead.
It had rained that night, thunder had rumbled and lightning flashed outside, and inside the conservatory, leaves and branches had rustled as if brushed by invisible—or invisible-to-me—bodies.
And then, at the end of it, after Christopher came back inside, we realized we were shut in, that Tidwell had locked the door between the conservatory and the rest of the ground floor for the night.
“Francis?” Christopher raised his voice. “Constance? Are you in here?”
There was no answer, and I backed out into the hallway with a heartfelt, “Thank God. I would have melted had we stayed in there any longer.”
Christopher nodded and shut the door. “Upstairs, then, I suppose.”
He reached for the unobtrusive door to the servants’ stairs. I followed him into the narrow space and up.
This was the same staircase I had come down earlier, after digging through Crispin’s belongings.
It comes out at the end of the east wing, just down from Crispin’s suite and the door to Christopher’s room.
Francis’s room, the same one he always stays in when he’s visiting Sutherland Hall, is beside it.
The door was shut, but we could hear the murmur of voices from within.
They stopped when Christopher applied his knuckles to the wood.
“Are you decent?” he directed through the door. “It’s us. Kit and Pippa.”
There was another murmur—perhaps Francis was inquiring whether Constance wanted to be bothered with me so soon—and then my cousin’s voice. “It’s open.”
Christopher twisted the knob, and in we went.
“I’m sorry,” I said, just as soon as I had cleared the threshold. “I didn’t mean to upset anyone. I just get going, and I get caught up in the mystery of it all…”
Francis and Constance were sitting side by side on the edge of the bed.
Fully dressed, thankfully, and not doing anything beyond holding hands.
Constance’s eyes were a bit puffy, and her hair perhaps a bit more ruffled than it ought to be, but otherwise, it didn’t seem as if my unpleasant reminder had done anything too awful.
“You should write a novel,” Francis said disagreeably. “Maybe you’d get some of this infernal plotting out.”
Christopher snorted as he shut the door behind us. “Don’t think she isn’t doing just that. The flat is all over pieces of paper where she’s started and then discarded Secrets at Sutherland Hall.”
Francis sniggered. “What’s to write about that? The old man tasked his valet with digging up dirt on all his family members, and then they both ended up dead.”
“It was interesting,” I said. “Not so much what happened, but the possibilities of what might have done. So many possible motives. So many ways it might have turned out.”
After a moment’s contemplation, I added, “If I were to write it, I would have taken some poetic license in how I worked the plot. The reality didn’t end up being very interesting in the end.
There was no denouement, and no big showdown in which Aunt Charlotte was arrested.
She just killed herself and took all the fun out of it… ”
“This is what I’m talking about,” Francis said, after exchanging a glance with Christopher. “You could stand to be a little more empathetic, Pipsqueak.”
“I wouldn’t say it where Crispin could hear,” I protested. “Besides, you have to admit it would be much more interesting if there was more to it. Just like it would be more interesting if—”
I bit my tongue before I could blurt out that it would have been much more interesting if Uncle Harold had wanted to get rid of Constance’s mother, and now he had killed Doctor Meadows because the doctor knew what he had done.
Francis must have realized what I had only barely managed to bite back, because he scowled.
“You would so, Pippa. You’ve said much worse things than that to Crispin in the past.”
“Not recently,” I said.
He tilted his head. “Since when did you start becoming concerned with his feelings?”
“Since Christopher told me—” I frowned and switched tactics.
“Actually, that’s not quite true. The debacle in April was when I first started to notice how his father treats him, and I’ve been feeling a bit sorry for him ever since.
Although I’ll admit that it wasn’t until last month, when Christopher told me—”
“Christ Almighty.” Francis rolled his eyes. “Did it really take Kit to lay it out for you before you realized that our prat of a cousin has been making cow-eyes at you for years?”
It didn’t seem like a question that required a response, so I didn’t dignify it with one.
Besides, it made Constance giggle, and I appreciated that more than I wanted the chance to snipe back at Francis.
“Really, Pippa,” she said, her voice uneven, “if I could see it that first weekend at the Dower House…”
“He was mean to me!” I protested, even as my insides collapsed with relief that she didn’t seem to be angry with me anymore. “And if he wasn’t mean, then he was mocking me, always embarrassing me with innuendo and insinuation…”
Constance’s lips twitched. “And it didn’t cross your mind that a man who called you Darling in every other sentence might be harboring romantic feelings?”
I made a face. It hadn’t crossed my mind, no.
I had heard the mockery—still heard the mockery sometimes—but nothing else.
I suppose I could hear the truth behind the mockery now, too, but only since Christopher had come clean about Crispin’s feelings.
And even a month later, there were still times when I doubted that Christopher had told me the truth.
It was honestly just so difficult to wrap my head around the possibility that the Viscount St George had been nurturing tender feelings for me for the best part of five and a half years.
It was difficult to credit him with tender feelings at all, for anyone.
It was all the more difficult to credit him with feelings of any sort, other than disdain, for me.
“At any rate,” I said, “it’s more comfortable to turn everything into a mystery novel in my head than deal with the fact that real people died because of other, real people’s motives.
I don’t want to think about the fact that someone is trying to frame me for murder.
It’s easier to speculate about what might have happened, in a different world, if Laetitia killed Johanna because she wanted Crispin for herself, or if Uncle Harold killed your mother because—”
I stopped when I heard a noise outside in the hallway.
Something small and soft, like the scuff of a shoe on the carpet runner.
For a moment, time hung suspended as we all stood there, barely breathing, waiting to hear what would happen next.
From the expectant silence from outside, I got the feeling that whoever was out there did the same thing.
Christopher looked at me. “Should we see if anyone’s there?” he inquired, not quite sotto voce.
I opened my mouth, but before I could speak, there was the shuffle of rapid footsteps outside, and then the sound of a door opening.
“Bloody hell,” I muttered, and lunged for the door.