Page 7 of Death at the Dower House
I let this announcement sit for a moment before I added, sweetly, “Laetitia Marsden will be there, St George. I thought you’d be particularly interested.”
Peckham gave Crispin a narrow look, while I kept a pleasant expression on my face.
I had hoped he’d give some indication that he either wanted, or didn’t want, to spend time with Lady Laetitia. He didn’t. Instead, he did what I had worried he would do, which was turn to Constance and boost the charm.
“Miss Peckham.” The smile was boyish and just rueful enough to look like genuine regret. “Please forgive my inattention. I’m delighted to meet you. Darling has already told us so much about you.”
He snatched up her hand and brought it to his lips. And kept it there slightly longer than necessary. Constance blushed beet red, while her brother’s eyes sharpened.
“Take your mouth off her hand, St George,” I told him. “Nobody wants your cooties.”
Crispin’s eyes narrowed, but he kept his temper for long enough to give Constance her hand back in a polite manner—and with a brush of his thumb across her knuckles—before he turned to me. “I beg to differ, Darling. Plenty of people want my cooties. Laetitia Marsden, for one.”
“Ewww.” My face twisted. “I didn’t need that image in my head, St George.”
“Then you should have known better than to bring it up, shouldn’t you?” Crispin turned back to the billiards table. “My turn, is it?”
I rolled my eyes. “Come on, Constance. Let’s go to the salon, and leave the boys to their amusements. Tea should be ready in a moment.”
Constance nodded, but not without a glance at her brother, who looked back at her stonily, and Crispin, who didn’t look at her at all, but kept his attention on the table and the balls, and finally Christopher, who gave her a slightly apologetic smile and a small bow. “Christopher Astley,” he told her. “At your service.”
Constance gave him a quick curtsey, but she didn’t blush the way she’d done over Crispin. When she turned towards the door, however, Christopher shifted his attention to me and winked.
“Coming?” I asked him.
He nodded. “This won’t take much longer. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“We’ll see you in the salon, then.” I followed Constance out the door. “Eyes on the ball, St George.”
As I crossed the threshold, I heard the smack of wood against ivory behind me, and so quickly that it was almost simultaneous, a growl from Crispin.
“Bad luck, old chum,” Peckham said insincerely. I sniggered, loudly enough that I thought he’d certainly be able to hear me, as I headed down the hallway after Constance.
I won’t boreyou by recounting the ways all the men stumbled over their feet and their words over tea, dribbling on themselves and the table while the lovely Johanna sipped the genial beverage and pretended she didn’t notice. It was quite clearly pretense, because they were so obvious about it that there was simply no way she could have been unaware. I would frankly be delighted to assign an imbecilic level of stupidity to her, but no one is that oblivious.
But we made it through tea, and then the boys vied for Johanna’s attention while Constance and I took a walk through the grounds. The weather was nice, and the formal gardens were lovely, bursting with spring flowers now at the beginning of May.
As we progressed from the gravel paths on the east side of the house towards the rear, Constance dropped her voice. “Is that where…?”
That was indeed where Grimsby the valet had met his demise.
“The garden maze,” I nodded. “I followed St George into it last Sunday week—Christopher told me I had to apologize for having been unkind over breakfast—and there he was.”
Or there they were, more accurately. Crispin on his knees beside Grimsby’s dead body. It hadn’t been until I got closer that I’d seen the blood.
Constance gave a half-frightened, half-delighted little shudder. “Can we…?”
“You want to go inside the maze?”
That I hadn’t expected. I hadn’t been back inside since, and I had no real desire to go now. But perhaps she had been reading the works of Agatha Christie, as I had. Before I saw several freshly dead bodies in the flesh, so to speak, last weekend, I’d been curious, too.
Constance nodded, her eyes bright and her hands wound together in front of her.
“Of course,” I murmured politely. She was a guest, after all, and as a representative of the family, even a distant one, it was my duty to give her what she wanted.
So in we went, Right, then left, then left again. I had plotted the hedge maze at twelve, after Crispin had left me crying inside it one too many times. He, of course, had grown up here, and had had it memorized by the time he was five.
And speaking of St George… there he was, in the heart of the maze as we rounded the final corner into the central section, where the sundial and the wrought iron benches were.
