Crispin shook his head. “Her situation wasn’t my doing.”
“Does your fiancée know that?”
“We haven’t discussed it,” Crispin said coolly. After a second he added, “I don’t know whether Laetitia knew that Cecily was expecting. She didn’t hear it from me, if so.”
“If it was yours,” I said, “Cecily would have made certain that Laetitia knew, wouldn’t she have? And not relied on you to do it?”
He turned to me. “Et tu, Brute?”
I shook my head. “You misunderstood me. I believed you last night, you know. You’re many things, St George, but you’re not someone who would leave a pregnant woman to fend for herself and your child.”
He grimaced. “Thank you. I suppose.”
“Besides, we all know that you don’t love Laetitia enough to kill Cecily to stay with her. Although does Laetitia know that?”
“I have no idea what Laetitia knows,” Crispin said, and leaned back in his—or rather, Christopher’s—chair. The latter was perched on the arm of it. “And I’ll thank you to keep your voice down, Darling.”
I eyed him. “Why on earth should I? You told me yourself that she’s under no illusions about it being a love match.”
“That’s no reason to rub it in,” Crispin said, and pushed to his feet. “Excuse me. I should find my fiancée and see what I might do to help.”
“Before you go…” Christopher said, and Crispin turned to him with an expectant sort of expression. “When you were out there, stalking quail…”
Crispin grimaced, but nodded.
“Did you happen to notice anyone shooting in this direction?”
“Shooting in—” He stopped. I got the impression that he lost his breath, and it took him a moment to find it again. Then he turned back to the table, and those stormy gray eyes ran the circle of faces again, from Christopher to Francis, to Constance and to me, before going back to Christopher. He braced himself, visibly, before asking, “What happened?”
“Pippa came to find us,” Christopher said, and Crispin shot me a look. “Or Francis more so than me. Someone to look at Cecily and perhaps be able to tell what was wrong with her. When I was taken ill, back in May?—”
“You weren’t taken ill, Kit. You were poisoned.”
Christopher nodded. “When that happened, Francis was the one who figured out what was wrong. And you, of course, but you were out with the shooting party.”
“Get to the point, Kit. What happened?”
“Someone shot at us,” Francis said. He was tilting the almost empty brandy glass in his hand, watching the little bit of liquid at the bottom slosh around. “It’s been a while since I was in that position.”
No wonder he was so out of sorts. That must have brought back bad memories, too, that he had suppressed to be able to help me with Cecily.
It hadn’t been that long for me, sadly. I still had the scar on my upper arm from late April, when a bullet had graced me.It was covered by my blouse at the moment, but I didn’t miss Crispin’s flicker of a glance at it. “Who?”
“If we knew that,” I said, “do you suppose we would be asking you?”
He lifted his upper lip in a sneer, but it was half-hearted. “I’m sure I don’t know, Darling. It was all rather unorganized out there in the woods. I know that Laetitia stuck pretty close to me. I don’t know about everyone else.”
“The Kraut?” Francis said.
I turned to him with my mouth open, ready to take umbrage, but he gave me a stern look. “We know nothing about him, Pipsqueak. Everyone else is a known entity?—”
“I don’t know half the people who are here this weekend!”
Bilge and Serena Fortescue, the Honorable Reggie Fish, and Olivia Barnsley were all total unknowns to me. And it wasn’t as if I knew Dominic Rivers well enough to think that he wouldn’t turn a gun on anyone. He was a dope peddler, so anything was possible. It was less likely that Violet Cummings would do, I supposed, but I didn’t know her well enough to be certain of her idiosyncracies, either.
“You may not,” Francis said, “but someone does. No one knows him.”
“I know him!” I said. “And he wouldn’t shoot at me. Why should he?”
