Page 82 of Death at the Dower House
She looked confused, and I added, “Earlier tonight, that was just for Lady Laetitia’s benefit. We need her to keep talking to him—someone has to keep an eye on her; she might have killed Johanna—and she only seems to want him when someone else wants him, too. So I pretended at jealousy so she’d think she had competition for his affection. And it worked beautifully, as you saw. She’ll hardly let him off her arm now. Did you see the way she swatted him with her fan when she called him to heel?”
Constance nodded. “So you’re not…?”
“No,” I said. And reinforced it. “Of course not. You heard me. He’s insufferable. I’d kill him within the first week, and that’s if he didn’t kill me first.”
“He’s clever,” Constance said.
Yes, he was, and that was partly what made him so difficult to deal with. “He’d be easier to manage if he were a little less clever. At least I could argue him into silence, then.”
Constance’s lips twitched. “You seem perfectly able to argue him into silence now. And you have to admit he’s handsome. They all are.”
Of course they were. Not that I’d admit that out loud. “You think Francis is handsome, do you?”
She blushed. “Of course. Who wouldn’t?” But then her voice changed from breathy to chiding. “But we weren’t talking about me and Francis, Pippa. We were talking about you and—”
“Please,” I cut her off. “Not in the same sentence, I beg you.”
She blinked, and I added, “It was all for show, Constance, I promise. We worked it out after tea. Including that imbecilic banana skirt comment. Christopher asked what I’d be wearing to dinner, and I told him my yellow dress, and he tasked Crispin with coming up with something clever to say about it—one of his ‘backhanded compliments’—and that’s what he came up with, the bastard.”
“Now, now, Pippa,” Constance drawled, in a not-terrible imitation of Crispin, “you know he’s a Sutherland through and through.”
I rolled my eyes. “He is, at that. But with that kind of behavior, you can understand why I told you we wouldn’t last a week if we had to live together. Crispin lives at Sutherland with his father. He comes up to Town occasionally, and goes to a party, and gets drunk, and crashes a car, and beds a girl, and then he goes home again until the next time. Meanwhile, Christopher and I are quite happy in our service flat. And you and Gilbert could be happy in one of your own.”
Or she could marry Francis and live happily in one of the minor Sutherland properties.
Or in Beckwith Place, if she didn’t mind sharing with Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert.
Or she could do any number of other things. Go off to Africa and become a missionary, or to Paris and give Josephine Baker a run for her money. Or to some miserable watering hole on the coast, or a sheep-infested village somewhere in Scotland, somewhere one can live cheaply for a long time and not talk to anyone.
It was Constance’s life and Constance’s problem, and I wasn’t going to get in the middle of it. I had problems of my own.
“Ready for bed?” I jumped down and tugged the counterpane away from my side of the mattress while Constance did the same on her side. “Did you lock the door?”
She nodded. “But you can check again.”
I did check again. And then I checked that I’d checked, just one more time for good measure. And then, when I was in bed, I slipped my hand under the pillow to make sure that the hat pin I had tucked there—because who needs a bread knife when you travel with a three inch long stiletto in your reticule?—was still where I had put it, in case Constance turned evil and decided to attack me in the night.
All that done, I put my head on the pillow. “Good night, Constance.”
“Good night, Pippa.” She turned her head to look at me, her eyes like pale glimmers of light in the darkness of the room. “Thanks for being my friend.”
“It’s entirely my pleasure,” I told her, which wasn’t too far from the truth. The unassuming little girl I remembered from Godolphin had grown on me over the past few days. “I know it feels like a lot right now. Your mother and Johanna dead, a murderer on the loose. But the police will figure it out, and so will you. They’ll figure out the murders, I mean, and you’ll figure out your life. It’ll be all right. I promise.”
“Thank you, Pippa.”
She closed her eyes, and after a few moments her breath turned deep and even. If she had a guilty conscience, it clearly didn’t keep her awake at night.
I didn’t—have a guilty conscience, that is—but I stayed awake quite a lot longer while I went over the conversation in my head, and wondered whether I ought to leave Constance to her sleep, and scurry off across the landing to the room where the Astleys slept the sleep of the innocent, before she woke up again and tried to murder me.
It was later,but I don’t know how much later, when I was startled out of sleep. It might have been thirty minutes, or it might have been several hours. From the deep darkness of the room and the lack of any light coming in around the draperies, I guessed it was sometime in the later part of the night, the hour or two before dawn.
There was movement on the other side of the bed, soft mutters and the slide of fabric and skin before Constance’s voice rang out, rusty with sleep. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” I said, since I was wrestling with my own bedclothes and hadn’t got any farther than she had. “Someone’s making a lot of noise.”
It was by way of stating the obvious, since it sounded like the entire first floor was having a party outside our door. I could hear several different voices, steps, movement, and the shrill screams of Lady Laetitia Marsden rising above it all.
“Good Lord,” I said, “what has St George done now?”
