“Pippa!”
“What?” I asked.
He nodded to something over my shoulder. I spun and found myself, of course, face to face with St George. Johanna was latched onto his arm, and Laetitia was standing nearby, scowling.
He arched a brow. “Dear me. I go outside for five minutes, and already you’re off again. What is it this time, Darling?”
“It’s you!” I said. “You’re utterly despicable, St George.”
He sighed. “I know, Darling. You’ve told me so before.” He glanced at Christopher. “Perhaps you should take her up to bed, Kit. She seems a bit overwrought.”
“I’m not overwrought,” I told him, “you absolute git—”
But Christopher nodded and grabbed my arm. “He’s right, Pippa. It’s time for bed.”
“It’snot—”
It was barely eleven. Hardly the shank of the evening. But by then, I was halfway to the door, propelled by his hand at my elbow, and Christopher had his head bent and was talking to me. “You’re causing a scene, Pippa. You don’t want to do that, not in front of Laetitia and Johanna. Not to mention Francis. You falling apart would not be good for Francis, and you know it.”
“I’m not going to fall apart,” I said, but I felt tears prickle at the back of my eyes, and Francis was watching me from the corner of the room where he was standing with Constance, his eyes worried. I tried to send him a reassuring smile, but I’m not sure how successful I was. I’m afraid it probably looked more like a grimace than a smile.
Then we were outside in the foyer, or reception room as they called it at the Dower House, and on our way to the stairs. “I’m just put out with St George,” I said, blinking hard.
“You’re always put out with St George, Pippa.” Christopher’s voice was warm, and so was his hand on my back through the dress. “And I doubt it’s Crispin so much as it was the incident with Marsden. And I suppose having Crispin actually be kind and considerate.”
I sniffed. “That would be enough to discomfit anyone.”
Christopher nodded, but I could tell it was just to humor me. “It’s been an uncomfortable evening all around. An uncomfortable few days, to be honest.”
Yes, it had. “There are entirely too many predators at this party.”
Christopher nodded. “Johanna and Laetitia both pursuing Crispin. Marsden putting moves on you. And Peckham looking at Crispin and Francis like he’d like to murder them in their sleep.”
“I don’t know why I’m so distraught,” I confessed as I sniffed back another tear. “Nothing happened to me. What Laetitia did to St George was certainly worse. Marsden was just a bit too persistent—he didn’t even ask first, and I have no idea where he got the impression that I would welcome that kind of advance…”
“From that look you gave Crispin at the dinner table,” Christopher said promptly as he nudged me towards the door to Constance’s room. “I thought I was going to die laughing when you fluttered your eyelashes at him and said, ‘sometime when we’re alone.’ Like you ever do anything but bicker when you’re alone together!”
“We bicker when we’re not alone together, too. All we ever do is bicker.”
Those things he’d like to call me—the remark which had prompted the ‘sometime when we’re alone’ response—weren’t likely to be pet-names, after all.
Christopher shrugged. “It’s not all you do. You just spent a pleasant couple of minutes dancing.”
“And bickering,” I said.
“Perhaps. At any rate, I’m sure that’s where Marsden got the idea. If you amuse yourself with Crispin when he isn’t amusing himself with other girls…”
“Disgusting,” I sniffed.
“I know, Pippa. Marsden isn’t very bright, is he?” He pushed the door to Constance’s room open and nudged me inside. “Here we are.”
Once past the door, he glanced around, at the light blue walls and muslin curtains and soft, pale coverlet. “This is quite lovely, isn’t it? Very girlish and pretty. Peaceful.”
He turned back to me. “Yes, I know quite well that you’d never put up with something like that. If you were involved with Crispin, and he’d allowed Laetitia to kiss him that way, they’d both be dead now.”
They absolutely would. Or at least I’d no longer be involved with him, and he could console himself with the woman he’d been stupid enough to kiss in front of me.
“St George would need a complete personality change before I’d consider having anything to do with him,” I said, “and I doubt I’d do it then. Although he was surprisingly decent earlier. A pity it didn’t last longer.”
