Page 27 of Death at the Dower House
“Am I all right on this side of the bed?” I asked.
“Of course.” She turned on her side, toward me. I could just make out the shine of her eyes in the dark. “I’m sorry that happened in our house, Pippa.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I told her. “You were dancing with Francis.”
“I should have been paying attention.”
“If anyone should have been paying attention, it was your brother.” But he had been too busy scowling at Johanna and Crispin to keep an eye on his other guests.
Constance didn’t say anything to that, and I added, “At any rate, St George came and rescued me. It all turned out fine. I was just a bit rattled afterwards, that’s all.”
“Well, the door is locked from the inside,” Constance said, “and we’re safe, so let’s try to get some sleep. Gilbert was talking about croquet in the morning.”
Croquet? “Really?”
Was it a good idea to let this group loose with croquet mallets? Speaking only for myself, I’d be quite tempted to ‘accidentally’ break Marsden’s kneecap if he came too close to me.
Constance shrugged, or tried to. It’s hard to do, lying down. “That’s what he said.”
“On his head be it, I guess.”
She nodded, and yawned. “Good night, Pippa.”
“Good night,” I said, and let her go to sleep.
I did tryto sleep myself, too. But there was activity outside on the landing—Christopher and Francis using the loo before bed—and before long it was borne in upon me that I might need to visit the facilities myself, before I could sleep again. I’d had several cocktails downstairs, and by now they had caught up to me. If Constance hadn’t woken me, I might have slept through until morning—or perhaps not—but since I was most definitely awake now, and not likely to become otherwise until I had relieved myself, I waited until the door shut behind Christopher or Francis, and swung my legs out of bed.
The landing was quiet, and I scurried across to the water closet on bare feet while I registered, faintly, the presence of raised voices from below. It sounded as if an argument had broken out in the parlor.
By then I was on the other side of the landing and could close the door behind me and shut the voices out, so I did.
And I do recognize, just to mention it, that it’s rather unorthodox, in a narrative like this, to make so much out of a visit to the lavatory. I wouldn’t mention it if something hadn’t happened while I was in there.
As already mentioned, with the door closed I could no longer hear the raised voices from downstairs. I could hear, and feel, the closing of the parlor door—the one leading from the back of the Dower House onto the terrasse—when someone pushed it open and then slammed it back into the frame. There was an irate scream from below, to go along with someone’s escape, but I couldn’t make out the words, just that the voice sounded female.
At that point, I was in a position where I could get up, so I turned out the light and squeezed my way over to the window, between the toilet and the sink, and peered out.
It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the change in lighting, and then a few more to find the figure I was looking for among the hedges and bushes and other dark and lumpy things in the garden. Tall, dark, clearly male—wearing an evening suit, not a dress—and with the faint light of the quarter moon shining on a head of white-blond hair.
Crispin Astley, Viscount St George.
Not only was he the only one of the men left downstairs who had fair hair—Lord Geoffrey’s hair was the same shiny black as his sister’s, and Peckham’s a shade or two lighter than Constance’s, still solidly brown—but I recognized the set of his shoulders and the tilt of his head.
He stalked across the grass until he was brought up short by the stone wall at the back of the garden, and there was clear frustration in his posture and in the way he was glancing over his shoulder at what I assumed was the parlor door. He even kicked the wall once, for good measure, before digging in his pocket for his cigarette case and lighting up.
Then something else happened downstairs, and he swung back around to face the house. The moon illuminated a triangle of white shirtfront as a figure came pelting out of the shadow of the house and onto the terrasse.
Pale blue dress, gold hair. Johanna.
She hesitated for a moment at the edge of the flagstone, and then must have figured out where he was, because she loped that way, hair bouncing and scarves fluttering on her way across the grass. And she didn’t stop until she had flung herself at him.
His arms were a little slow in coming up to catch her, so it must have been unexpected. But by then her mouth had fused to his—it was almost as bad as when Lady Laetitia had done it in the parlor earlier, except less calculated and more clumsily passionate, which might just make it worse, actually. At any rate, at least she didn’t do it in front of an audience. The cigarette went flying, an arc of tiny red through the darkness, as Crispin bent to the task.
I stepped back from the window as my nose wrinkled.
Really? Two of them in the same evening? Had he no shame whatsoever?
I wandered backto bed after that, and fell asleep eventually, and it was later—I don’t know how much later, as it was too dark to see the hands on the small ormolu clock on top of the tallboy—when I woke up to the sound of footsteps outside the room.
