In any case, it really would be a shame for her to lose her breakfast all over them. Not so much for her sake as for the shoes’. It’s hard to get stomach acid out of suede.
It was Gilbert Peckham who spoke up. “That’s a capital idea.” He smirked at Crispin, totally without bothering to sound like he meant it. “Sorry, old chap, but I should probably stick with my sister. Be the older brother, you know. I’m sure you understand.”
“Oh, certainly.” Crispin did sarcasm beautifully. “Wouldn’t want her sitting next to my cousin as he drives down the road for the next hour without some sort of oversight.”
Peckham had nothing to say to that, but Crispin didn’t wait to hear it, anyway. “Hop in then, Darling.”
At least he opened the door for me this time. I dropped my weekender bag at his feet and scooted past him into the back of the Hispano-Suiza. “Thank you, St George.”
“My pleasure, Darling.” I’m not sure either of us meant it, and the way he heaved the bag in after me certainly indicated that he wasn’t thrilled about the way things had worked out. “Are you coming, Kit?”
“I’ll go with Francis and Miss Peckham,” Christopher said, which made Crispin blink and my mouth drop open.
“Christopher?” He was abandoning me? To spend an hour in the car with Crispin?By myself?
“Perhaps there’s room for me after all, then?” Johanna asked brightly. Gilbert opened his mouth, but at this point there was little he could say, after he had insisted that his sister needed his chaperonage. “I would so much appreciate not being stuck inside the stuffy old saloon car on the way home. And your racing car…”
She let her fingers slide over the bright blue panel of the Hispano-Suiza in a prolonged caress, before she looked up and fixed Crispin with a limpid stare, “—is beautiful.”
It was almost too blatant to be believed, and I wasn’t sure whether to stare in horrified bemusement or burst out laughing. When Crispin’s throat moved with a hard swallow, I decided to do neither, but rolled my eyes instead, violently enough that they almost disappeared into the back of my head. “Get a grip, St George. Unless you’d like me to slap you on the back so you don’t choke on your tongue?”
The look he gave me wasn’t very friendly, nor was hers. But she removed her hand from the motorcar, and he avoided her eyes when he got her settled in the passenger seat. And when he headed out of the courtyard and down the hill towards the village, the H6 was traveling fast enough that I didn’t have to listen to any vapid flirtation from the front seat. Johanna may have tried, but the words were gone before they reached me. Once or twice, I thought I noticed Crispin looking at me in the mirror, but if he were trying to catch my eye, he must have thought better of it by the time I got around to looking back at him, because by then his attention had moved on. And that was perhaps just as well, since I would have been tempted to stick my tongue out, and thenhewould have had cause to callmeimmature.
All in all, the trip went as quickly as one could have hoped. Johanna had the sense not to try to touch St George, and as a result, we stayed on the road on the way there. We pulled up in front of the Dower House well ahead of the Crossley. (They had, in fact, got a late start, as Christopher shared with me later. Just as they were ready to leave, Gilbert had made an exclamation about having misplaced something or other—Christopher wasn’t sure what; perhaps he had wanted a lavatory and was too shy to mention it—and had run back inside the Hall. It had been almost five minutes before he’d come back outside and they had got off. And Francis isn’t the daredevil that Crispin is, or perhaps he simply lacks the latter’s death wish, so they had proceeded at a more decorous pace, too. As a result, we had already been at the Dower House for fifteen minutes by the time they pulled up out front.)
By then, I had had a look around and got the lay of the land. The Dower House turned out to be a lovely two-story cottage in creamy stone, roughly one-third the size of Sutherland Hall. On the ground floor, there was a parlor, a small library, a study, a dining room, and a box room in addition to the entry foyer/reception room and a small water closet tucked away under the stairs. The kitchen and maids’ quarters were below-stairs, of course, and I’m sure the chauffeur had his lodgings above the garage. Upstairs in the main house, there were five bedrooms, four of which were occupied, and two bathrooms, along with a dressing room attached to the dowager’s chamber.
“I’m in with Constance,” I announced, as soon as everyone had piled out of the second motorcar with their bags. “Christopher, why don’t you and Francis take Crispin and see if the spare room is big enough for all three of you?”
I had halfway expected someone to object to that—perhaps Crispin himself, perhaps Johanna, or perhaps Francis, who wasn’t a lot fonder of Crispin than I was—but no one did. And it was clearly the only reasonable solution. Crispin couldn’t share a room with either Gilbert Peckham or, when he arrived, Laetitia Marsden’s brother. He wasn’t likely to survive the night in either scenario. I certainly wasn’t willing to share with either Johanna or Laetitia, and no one, I was quite sure, would let me share with Christopher. Peckham wouldn’t countenance putting Crispin in a room of his own, I assumed—too much opportunity for mischief that way, with Johanna or Laetitia (or both) tiptoeing across the landing in the middle of the night—and with nine of us and only five rooms, one of which was Lady Peckham’s bed chamber, it was obvious that we’d have to double up. Gilbert could deal with Lord Geoffrey, and if Johanna and Laetitia murdered each other overnight, so much the better for everyone else.
We spent the afternoon exploring the house and wandering the grounds. I made Constance show me around, and of course Francis attached himself to us, and so did Christopher. We invited Crispin to come along, mostly to be polite, but he declined. He did look tired, so I couldn’t very well quibble when he said he wanted to rest, not walk all over creation.
If he had an ulterior motive, he wasn’t likely to get what he wanted. Gilbert Peckham stayed behind, too, jealously guarding the lovely Johanna, and I didn’t think Crispin had a chance of getting anywhere close to her.
“You should have seen her caress the Hispano-Suiza earlier,” I told the other three, who hadn’t been close enough to see the shameless performance with their own eyes. “It was absolutely indecent. She stroked it, and then she looked up at Crispin when she told him how beautiful it was, in this very significant voice. I thought he was going to swallow his tongue.”
Francis sputtered a laugh. “She isn’t shy, is she?”
I shook my head. “Not at all. And good God… St George is supposed to be this great seducer, right, with a trail of broken hearts in his wake?”
Or if not that, at least a trail of women who maybe hadn’t minded being used. I guessed I’d see how Laetitia Marsden felt later this evening.
“He turned as red as a schoolboy and looked like he had absolutely no idea what to do with himself. Or with her.”
Christopher and Francis both chuckled, while Constance looked very prim indeed.
“Perhaps he prefers being the pursuer to being the pursued,” Francis said. “Maybe his entire reputation comes from women chasing him.”
“His title, you mean.” But that was a possibility. Christopher had his own share of women trying to nail him down, simply because he was the grandson of a duke, and I’m sure Francis had experienced the same. Crispin, as the actual heir to the title and estates, no doubt got it worse than either of them.
Although with the old duke dead, and Uncle Harold in that role now, things might get easier for both Christopher and Francis, who were now merely fourth and fifth in the line of succession, if anything should happen to Crispin before he could sire his own heir. That would take some of the heat off them.
And fire it up under Crispin, of course, but that wasn’t likely to be my problem.
“At any rate,” I said, “she seems to have made a dead set for him. It’ll be interesting to see what happens once Laetitia Marsden shows up tonight, and which of them makes it out of that shared bedroom in one piece tomorrow.”
“If he has any sense,” Francis said, “he’ll avoid them both. Although of the two, Lady Laetitia will make a much better match, if he’s looking for one.”
