Page 42 of Death at the Dower House
Almost certainly, I thought. Although it might not have been her at all. Instead, it might have been her murderer, going back to his—or her—own room after committing the murder.
“Very well,” Tom said. “Let us go back for a moment to the end of the evening. It was twelve, twelve-thirty. Miss Darling had gone up shortly after eleven. The Astley brothers walked Miss Peckham up and then they went to their room. Lord Geoffrey and Lady Laetitia, Mr. Peckham, Lord St George, and Miss de Vos were left downstairs, I assume?” He looked at them, one after the other. “What happened next?”
Peckham and Marsden looked at one another. Then Marsden looked at his sister, and at Crispin. Peckham looked at Crispin. Finally, Laetitia looked at Crispin.
Crispin didn’t look at anyone, but kept his eyes on the centerpiece of multicolored tulips in the middle of the table.
“The ladies got into a row,” Peckham said sourly. “Over St George.”
Eleven
Crispin flushed,all the way to the tips of his ears, and I rolled my eyes. Of course Laetitia and Johanna had got into a row over him. It had been inevitable. The only surprising thing was that they’d done it with an audience, and not in the privacy of their own shared room.
One of them must have pushed the other to the limit of her patience, I assumed, and so she had blown. The only question was who. Or rather, which.
I prepared to wallow in the tale. Until, disappointingly—
“I can get the details of that later,” Tom said, which was quite considerate of him, actually. Having to recount the scene in front of a crowd in which half the people hadn’t been present, would be quite embarrassing, not just for Lady Laetitia, but for Crispin. I had to commend Tom for his sensitivity, even if I dearly wished I could hear every gory detail for myself. There was sure to be years of torment for St George in this story, and now I would miss it.
Unless I could talk Tom into sharing his notes with me later. I didn’t think it was likely, but it would perhaps be worth the effort to try.
At any rate, Laetitia and Crispin both looked relieved at the prospect of not having to rehash the scene in front of an audience, and Tom went on. “What happened after the quarrel?”
“I went up to bed,” Laetitia said.
“Alone?”
Laetitia nodded, her line of white teeth sunk into her lower lip. “I was embarrassed. All I wanted was to be alone.”
She glanced at Crispin under her lashes, and while he didn’t look up and meet her eyes, he must have sensed it, because I saw him twitch.
“Very well,” Tom said. “So Lady Laetitia went up to Miss de Vos’s room. That leaves four of you in the parlor. What did the rest of you do?”
“I went outside in the garden,” Crispin said. “I wanted a fag and some peace and quiet.”
He probably hadn’t meant for it to sound quite as callous as it did, but Laetitia flinched. Francis managed to suppress most of a bark of laughter, but there was enough left that Crispin shot him a look. Francis chuckled and raised both hands in the universal sign of surrender. “Sorry, old chap.”
“Behave yourself, Astley,” Tom told him, but without any heat. “St George.”
Crispin looked at him.
“Did you see anyone else while you were in the garden?”
Crispin shook his head. I opened my mouth to call him on the lie, that he had most certainly seen Johanna, and not just that, but had embraced and kissed her, but then I closed my mouth again. Maybe there was a reason he didn’t want to admit it, and it wasn’t because he had committed murder. While my first instinct was always to believe the worst of him, maybe I ought to stay my hand and learn a little more first.
There were, after all, things I hadn’t come out with in this group of mixed company, too, but that I planned to tell Tom later.
“How long were you out there?” the latter wanted to know.
“Long enough to smoke a cigarette and kick the fence a few times.” Crispin still kept his eyes down, perhaps afraid that one of us who knew him well would be able to read the lie on his face. I don’t think I would have done if I hadn’t known he was lying, however. He looked embarrassed, certainly, but not like he was holding anything back.
Tom turned to Christopher, who said, “He came up some twenty minutes after Francis and myself.”
“It wasn’t a long, drawn-out scene in the parlor, then?”
“A matter of a few minutes,” Peckham said with a sneer he couldn’t quite hide, “but quite shrill.”
Lady Laetitia’s lower lip quivered.
