Page 89 of Death at the Dower House
It wasn’t even Tom’s.
No, it was Crispin who had somehow made it over to the door of the bedchamber without me noticing, and who was staring at Laetitia with shock and horror in his eyes.
“You—” He could barely get the words out, his voice was shaking so much. “You spiked Philippa’s drink and almost killed Kit?Why?”
“It was hardly enough to kill anyone,” Laetitia said petulantly. She tossed her head so the glossy, black hair swung and settled back into its usual sleek bob. “Just a few grains. Not even a full dose. She’s smaller than I am, so I didn’t want to give her too much. I just wanted her out of the way for the night.”
My jaw dropped. After a moment I realized I was gaping, and I lifted it back up again.
Nobody bothered to askwhyshe had wanted me out of the way. I guess it was obvious. That little performance we had put on must have worked better than any of us had dared to hope. Laetitia must have thought I was actually going to give her competition for Crispin’s affections, and she had decided to get me out of the way for the rest of the evening.
When she’d started screaming, she’d been alone in her—in Johanna’s—room, though, and he had been in his own bedroom along with Francis and Christopher, so something must have gone wrong with the plan somewhere along the way.
Unless the plan had simply been to preventmefrom spending time with Crispin, and not so she could spend the time with him herself.
And all that aside, Christopher had clearly ingested a lot more than an extra-small dose of sleeping draught. If she had given me—or given Peckham to give to me—less than she normally took herself, it should have had even less of an effect on Christopher.
“You tried to drug me?” fell out of my mouth. “You tried to drug me to keep me away from St George, and instead you drugged Christopherandhe almost died?”
“I didn’t drug anyone!” Laetitia protested. “I gave Gilbert a few grains of sleeping powder to mix into your drink. Just a few, I swear. It was supposed to make you drowsy, nothing more. I just wanted to make sure you’d go to bed and stay there. That’s all!”
“Oh, that’s all?” Crispin asked, somewhat bitterly, from the doorway where he was still leaning. He had his mouth open to say something else, but Tom looked at him, and he closed it again.
“Kit doing all right?”
Tom’s voice was bland, but just the question was enough to make Crispin pull a face and disappear back into the room. I wasn’t worried, though, nor, I expected, was Tom. If Christopher hadn’t been all right, Crispin wouldn’t have left him, not even to stand in the doorway and talk to Lady Laetitia. Whatever other faults he had—and they were plentiful—he clearly cared about Christopher’s wellbeing.
“So you gave Gilbert Peckham a few grains of a sleeping powder to put into Miss Darling’s drink,” Tom said. “This was in the parlor last night?”
Laetitia nodded. “He mixed her a drink before dinner, after that exchange—” She cast a glowering look at the door where Crispin had disappeared, “—about the yellow dress.”
“There was nothing whatsoever wrong with that drink,” I said. “It was a Last Word, and it was delicious.”
“You always do enjoy having the last word, don’t you, Darling?” Crispin’s disembodied voice said from Christopher’s bedside.
I glowered at the door, too. “I do, thank you very much. Now pipe down, St George. Nobody asked you.”
I think this might have been greeted by a snigger from inside the room, but I can’t be sure. At any rate, Tom continued the conversation—or questioning—without paying attention to it. “So there was nothing wrong with your Last Word?”
“Nothing at all,” I confirmed. “I finished it, and I felt fine.”
Laetitia nodded. “After dinner, while we were setting up for the séance, I asked Gilbert, if he had a chance to mix another drink for you, whether he’d be willing to add a couple of grains of something to it. He said he would, and I watched him put the powder paper in his pocket.”
“And he didn’t question it at all?” Tom wanted to know. “Not what it was or what you wanted him to do with it?”
Laetitia shook her head. “I told him it was a sleeping draught, and that I wanted her out of the way for the rest of the night. That it wouldn’t harm her at all, it would just make her go to sleep and wake up tomorrow morning like nothing had happened.”
And instead Christopher was in the next room looking like the next best thing to a corpse.
“Then,” she said, “in the parlor after the séance, he mixed another drink, and he tipped me the wink that he had added the powder.”
“So that was why he scurried over to Marsden to get him to talk to you,” I said, enlightened. “It wasn’t about St George and his peccadillos at all.”
“I know all about Crispin’s peccadillos,” Laetitia said, with a haughty tilt of her chin. “Better than you do, I imagine.”
Maybe, maybe not. Grimsby’s dossier had been fairly comprehensive in that regard. However—
“What happened to the drink?” Tom wanted to know.
