Page 55 of Death at the Dower House
“No, Darling. I’m not in the habit of bedding women at Sutherland Hall. Certainly not on the evening before my mother’s funeral. I keep my flirtations, when I have them, in Town.”
“Is that what you call them? Flirtations?”
He gave me a crushing look. “I told Johanna to do her worst, and then I left her in the garden and went inside. I didn’t see her again. I certainly didn’t kill her. I didn’t want her dead. I just didn’t want to marry her.”
His voice finally took on some emotion, and he added, “Good Lord, Darling, don’t you know me better than that?”
“I didn’t think you’d strangled her,” I said. “I just wanted to know what happened.”
He nodded. “Well, now you do. May I go?”
I nodded. And sat next to Christopher on the wall and watched as he stalked away around the corner of the house. A moment later we heard, faintly, the slam of the front door.
Thirteen
“Sometimes I wonder about you, Pippa,”Christopher told me.
I took my eyes off the spot where Crispin had disappeared and turned back to him. “What do you mean?”
He gestured to the house, and by extension, to his cousin. “You’ve known him more than half your life. You’ve known him as long as you’ve known me. And you made a good case, last month, for why and how he might have killed Grandfather and Grimsby. I didn’t really think he had, but it all made sense, at least. But this? How could you possibly think my cousin could have strangled a young woman who never did him any harm? Don’t you know that he isn’t like that?”
“Of course I know that,” I said, since I had come to the same conclusion myself earlier. “I just wanted to know what happened. And to rub his nose in it, I suppose. You know St George and I have never got along.”
“You get along just fine in your own way,” Christopher said severely. “You call it not getting along because all you do is bicker, but in truth, the two of you get on like a house on fire.”
“Is that supposed to be a good thing?”
He rolled his eyes, and looked disconcertingly like his cousin for a second. “You enjoy the bickering. If he stopped twitting you, you’d miss it.”
“I would not,” I said, offended. “I would like nothing better than for St George to leave me alone. I can’t believe you’re defending him, Christopher.”
“He lost his mother and grandfather less than two weeks ago,” Christopher said. “Today he lost Johanna. And no, he mayn’t have been serious about her, but that’s still a lot of death. He’s not without feelings, you know. People think I’m the sensitive one…”
Because he comes across as softer and more open and less abrasive than his cousin. I nodded.
“—but Crispin developed that sharp tongue for a reason.” He slanted me a look. “I had Mum, Dad, Francis, Robert, and you. Who did he have?”
He’d had Uncle Harold, who had never seemed to care much, and Aunt Charlotte, who’d cared too much, and Christopher, until I took him away.
And he’d had me, always giving back as good as I got.
I grimaced. “You’re saying I have to apologize again, aren’t you?”
“No,” Christopher said. “Too much of that, and it’ll lose its effectiveness. Just try to be a little nicer to him, if you can. Don’t go out of your way to be hurtful.”
“I don’t—” I began, and then I stopped with a sigh, because yes, sometimes I did do my best to hit where I knew, or hoped, it would sting. “I’ll try.”
“Thank you, Pippa.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“I suppose we just forget all this, then,” I said, “and pretend we’re having a jolly holiday at the Dower House until we can leave?”
“I don’t think we can,” Christopher answered. He eyed the house pensively. “Someone in there is a murderer. It isn’t you or me or Crispin—or Francis; he was in our room all last night, too, and he had no motive—but what if it was Marsden and he comes after you next?”
“He’d have no reason to come after me,” I protested, even as a tendril of fear made its way down my spine. I remembered Marsden’s hand on my knee, and shivered.
Christopher glanced at me. “We have no idea what his reason might be. Perhaps he just likes to strangle women. Perhaps he made a play for her after she came in. Peckham was downstairs with the butler, Crispin said, so Marsden was alone upstairs—”
