Page 96 of Death at the Dower House
Or perhaps it wasn’t a conversation at all. Perhaps she’d been trying to get him to talk for a while, and he wouldn’t, and that was why her voice had that note of wanting to slap him that was so often present in my own.
Her next words reinforced this impression.
“Crispin St George, if you don’t start talking to me right now—!”
“You’ll do what?” Crispin wanted to know, his own voice as disagreeable as ever. “Good God, Laetitia, does it really surprise you that I don’t want to talk to you after—”
“I told you!” Her voice was shrill, loud enough and whiny enough that I felt it going into the back of my head like a sharp spike. “I wasn’t trying to hurt her! I just wanted her out of the way for a few hours—”
“It doesn’t matter!” Crispin yelled. “It isn’t about her. My cousin could have died! Kit could have died because you couldn’t stand to have me pay a compliment to another woman!”
“That’s not—” Laetitia tried, and he went on as if she hadn’t said anything.
“She doesn’t even like me, you know! No—”
She must have tried to interrupt, and he had waved her to silence. Or maybe not: once he started speaking again, it seemed as if it might have been himself he had stopped and not Laetitia at all.
“That’s not true, actually. It’s not that she doesn’t like me, although she doesn’t. She doesn’t like meso muchthat she wouldn’t throw me a rope if I were going down for the third time.That’show much she doesn’t like me. And for you to almost kill my favorite cousin over her—”
“I said I was sorry!” Laetitia yelled, and in her favor I will say that I almost believed she meant it.
“I’m sure you are.” The words were understanding, but Crispin’s voice was not. “If Gilbert had succeeded in murdering her, you would have been an accessory, you know. And all because you couldn’t handle the idea of a little competition.”
Laetitia sniffed. “It was simply that after Johanna…”
“Oh, come off it,” Crispin said rudely. “I wasn’t in love with Johanna, and we both know it. As for Philippa, that was all play-acting. She’s not interested in me. She just got it in her head that you might have killed Johanna—”
Laetitia squeaked, and Crispin smirked. I had seen that smirk enough to recognize the voice that went with it. “Oh, yes. Hadn’t you figured that out? She thought you might have strangled Johanna—you were the only one of us with your own bedroom, you know, and you can’t deny you had a motive—and she wanted me to keep close to you in case you let something slip.”
There was a beat of silence in the wake of this statement.
“She thoughtIkilled Johanna,” Laetitia said incredulously, “overyou, so she pretended to be enamored with you so that she could figure out whether I’d killed Johanna? Didn’t it occur to her that if I killed Johanna over you, I might kill her over you, too?”
“I imagine it must have,” Crispin answered, “although I didn’t get the impression that it was very important.”
“That seems stupid.”
“She’s not,” Crispin said. “She just acts without thinking sometimes. Even if—” his voice turned sour, “—in this case it almost did end up getting her killed.”
“Not by me,” Laetitia pointed out. “You believe that, don’t you?”
“I suppose I’ll have to, won’t I?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “I wonder what she said to Peckham that made him decide he had to get rid of her.”
Now that he’d mentioned it, I wondered myself, something I hadn’t actually done so far. I’d been appalled that Laetitia had tried to drug me, and upset that Christopher had almost died, but I hadn’t thought to go back over the conversations I’d had with Gilbert last night to try to pinpoint what I might have said to make him feel like killing me was a good idea.
What was it we had talked about just before he had handed me the drink and the conversation had turned to Crispin and his misbehavior? The séance, wasn’t it?
Yes, that was right. We had talked about the séance, and I had asked him about Johanna and whether he thought she might have murdered Lady Peckham. He had seemed reluctant to entertain the thought at first, but then he had seemed to come around to it.
As well he would if he were looking for someone else to put the blame on, I reminded myself. He had every incentive to be happy about another possible suspect. And he had seemed delighted about his dead mother appearing to affirm her death as an accident—as of course he would be, if he had poisoned her.
And I had said something like, “You didn’t push the glass, did you?” and he had denied it, of course, and then I’d said something else, something along the lines of, “Well, I can’t think of anyone else who would have, can you?”
Which of course hadn’t meant that I suspected him, because I hadn’t. But if he had pushed the glass during the séance, which seemed obvious now, and he had killed his mother and Johanna, my innocent question might have been enough to put his back up.
And yes… it was after that, wasn’t it, that he had taken the glass out of my hand and said, “Let me refresh that for you,” even though it hadn’t needed it.
And I had turned my back on him to watch Crispin and Laetitia, while he’d dumped a fatal dose of Veronal into my glass and topped it off with more gin.
