Chapter 1

Chapter One

We were sitting in the tearoom at the Savoy when a gentleman approached.

I use the word advisedly. He was clearly quality: his suit the equal of one of Crispin’s—the Viscount St George, future Duke of Sutherland, has a penchant for expensive clothes, expensive motorcars, and expensive women—and his demeanor at least as entitled as St George’s, as well. He looked at us down the length of his nose and intoned, without much apology in his voice at all, “ Entschuldigung , but am I looking at Fraulein Philippa Marie Schatz?”

Heads turned, of course. Not only was the gentleman’s voice penetrating, with a slight foreign accent that sent something warm swirling through my stomach for a second before icy discomfort replaced it, but the German honorific combined with the German surname (not to mention the German accent) still gets attention, eight years after the Great War.

“I’m Pippa Darling,” I said, perhaps a bit coldly, and gave the gentleman my best fishy stare. It was less effective than usual, as I was seated at table and he was close to two meters tall.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps he was only an inch or two above six feet. But that still made him taller than any other gentleman of my acquaintance, except perhaps Uncle Harold, the current Duke of Sutherland. It put him at almost half a head taller than Crispin and Christopher.

The latter was sitting across the table from me, indulging in tea and hot buns, and looking from me to the German gentleman with a slightly puzzled, slightly suspicious—and it must be said, slightly awed—expression on his pretty face.

Crispin, just to have said it, was nowhere around. Christopher and I are best friends, the next thing to siblings. Christopher’s other cousin and I are… not mortal enemies, certainly—not anymore, at least—but we’re also not daily associates. Lord St George was, as far as I knew, in Wiltshire. It was a Tuesday, and Uncle Harold was no doubt keeping his son and heir chained up in his rooms at Sutherland Hall. St George does sometimes escape, and comes up to Town to carouse with his friends in the Society of Bright Young Persons, but that only happens on weekends, and then only occasionally. He’d only be in London midweek if something was going on, and if anything was, we’d probably have heard about it.

“ Freulein Darling.” The German gentleman clicked his heels together and bowed in a very precise, very dashing, and quite foreign way. He took extra effort with the R in the middle of my name, too. “May I introduce myself? I am Graf Wolfgang Ulrich Albrecht von und zu Natterdorff.”

There was a moment’s pause. More than a moment, if I’m honest, while I tried to come up with something to say.

In my defense, it wasn’t just the fact that he was exceedingly foreign, nor was it the plethora of names and titles. Crispin has those, too, so I’m used to them. Christopher has his own string of names even without the honorific. But in addition to all that, there was the fact that Graf Wolfgang was quite possibly the best-looking man I had ever set eyes on. And I’m honestly not spoiled for choice as far as that goes. Christopher is quite attractive, and so is Crispin, for all his annoying ways. So, for that matter, is my elder cousin Francis.

And if I didn’t happen to like the fair-haired and -complexioned, there’s Lord Geoffrey Marsden, who is an awful cad, but with the glossy good looks and shiny black hair of a matinee idol.

There’s also Thomas Gardiner, a Detective Sergeant with Scotland Yard and an old friend of my late cousin Robert’s, although I have a feeling that Christopher might take it amiss if I extoll Tom’s virtues too loudly. He’s undeniably handsome, though, with brown, wavy hair and hazel eyes.

The Graf to and from Natterdorff was fair. His hair was parted down the middle and smoothed back from his face in golden waves, while his eyes were a dark blue. His face looked like something that might have been carved in marble, with a chiseled jaw, straight nose, and high cheekbones. The only thing marring its perfection was a scar, thin and white, long healed, that ran diagonally across his left cheek. It did nothing to destroy the overall effect, but instead added a touch of recklessness or danger to a face that might otherwise have been almost too classically handsome. I didn’t need Christopher’s foot nudging my ankle under the table to know that I was looking at something—or someone—extraordinary.

Of course I didn’t let it show. If there’s one thing I’m adept at, it’s keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of unfairly charming men who do their best to throw me off balance. So I merely smiled politely and told him, “I’m pleased to meet you. May I present my cousin, Mr. Christopher Astley?”

The count—for that’s what he was—clicked his heels together and bowed again. “ Mein Herr .”

“ Graf von Natterdorff.” Christopher’s eyes were enormous in his rapt face. “Won’t you have a seat?”

He nudged one of the chairs with his foot so it moved slightly. The Graf eyed it for a second before putting a hand on its back. “ Freulein Darling?”

“Of course,” I said. “Please, be comfortable.”

“ Danke .” He pulled the chair out and seated himself. Up close, when I didn’t have to stare up at the underside of his nostrils, he was even more spectacular-looking than I had originally thought. Perfect bone structure, perfect teeth, eyes of such a dark blue that they were almost navy. “I will not take up much of your time.”

His speech was extremely precise, every word chosen with deliberation and placed carefully into the sentence. I knew what that felt like. It had taken me at least a year after landing in England at eleven to get over my habit of thinking in German and translating my thoughts into English before speaking them out loud. My mother was English, so I had learned the language at her knee, but we had lived in Germany all my life.

At this point, twelve years later, I hadn’t thought in, or even spoken, German in at least a decade. The back of my mind was churning, trying to access old channels of words and sentence structure.

“Take up as much time as you want,” Christopher said brightly.

The years since the Great War has, in many ways, been extremely kind to many of us. My skirts are short, and so is my hair. I smoke cigarettes and drink liquor in public. I’m unmarried at twenty-three, and not just that, but I share a flat in London with an unmarried man of marriageable age (consanguineous marriage is legal in England, so the fact that we’re first cousins is not an impediment to our being romantically involved, theoretically anyway) without servants or a chaperone on the premises, and nobody (or nobody much) remarks on it.

Not that there’s anything romantic going on, of course. Which is the point I was getting at. The post-War society that allows me the short hemlines and bobbed hair, also allows Christopher not to hide—or not to hide to an extreme degree—the fact that he prefers the company of other men. The buggery laws are still in effect, so he can’t be too obvious about it—no hand-holding or kissing in public—but to many of us, it’s not a matter worth much thought, and certainly no condemnation. Christopher is the way Christopher is, and I love Christopher like a brother, so why would I care on whom he bestows his personal affections?

He has bestowed them on Tom Gardiner, as far as I know. I’m fairly certain Christopher has at least a little crush on his late brother’s best friend. I don’t know whether Tom reciprocates, although I’m fairly certain he at least likes and cares about Christopher. He has yanked him out of a couple of uncomfortable situations that might have ended with Christopher’s arrest and imprisonment for running afoul those buggery laws I mentioned, but I don’t know if things have gone any farther than that, or whether they ever will. It could just be a crush on Christopher’s part and goodwill towards a late friend’s little brother on Tom’s.

In any case, it didn’t stop Christopher from being visibly taken with the Graf . He put his chin on his hand and eyed him admiringly from the other side of the table.

The Graf cleared his throat. “You do not remember me.”

There was no question mark at the end of the sentence, but I suppose it might have been the German inflection.

“My apologies,” I said. “I wasn’t aware that we were previously acquainted.”

Christopher glanced at me, question in his eyes. I glanced back. If I had ever seen the Count before, it was news to me.

“It was many years ago,” the latter said. “Perhaps you were too young to remember.”

He couldn’t be more than a couple of years older than me—maybe three or four at most—so if I had been young, he hadn’t been much older when—if—we’d met.

“You look very much like your mother,” he added, “but you have your father’s eyes.”

Christopher shot me another look. I didn’t return it this time, although I knew what he wanted. Yes, the Graf was correct. I looked like my mother had done at my age, but instead of her blue eyes, I had inherited my father’s green ones.

And if he knew that?—

“You knew my family?”

He sighed. “Alas. It was terrible, what happened.”

Yes, it had been. When war broke out, my father had been conscripted for the German army. My mother had refused to leave him, but had sent me to her sister in England for safety. My father had died in the trenches, and my mother had succumbed to the Spanish Influenza the year after the Armistice. By then, I had settled into the Astley family as if I had always been a part of it. Losing both my parents before I was eighteen had been difficult, of course, but not as difficult as if I had been alone in a war-ravaged Germany when it happened. I was surrounded by people who loved me, I had surrogate parents in Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert, and surrogate brothers in Francis and Christopher. Losing Robert during the war had been as hard as if he had been my own sibling. So compared to some, I was very lucky indeed.

“And you?” I asked politely. “Did you come through the war unscathed?”

He shot me a look, a quick flash of blue. “I was too young for conscription. My father was too old.”

He’d have to be under twenty-seven, then, unless the Germans had had different rules for their conscription than the English. Here, my cousins Robert and Francis had gone to war, at eighteen and twenty respectively. No one younger than Robert had been conscripted, although I had heard that lads as young as fourteen had enlisted, more or less voluntarily, some of them under duress from the White Feather Brigade.

The Graf hadn’t mentioned his mother, but I didn’t think I ought to pry, so I said nothing about the omission. Instead, I asked, “When did we meet?”

He eyed me for a moment. “You were very small. Perhaps five or six. A little girl in a white pinafore with a white bow in your hair.”

Quite a long time ago, then. I had some memories of being that age in Germany, but not many. He would have been seven or eight, I suppose. Perhaps a bit more likely to remember the incident than I was.

“And how did it come to be?”

“My parents and I visited you and your parents in Heidelberg,” Graf Wolfgang said.

And that clinched it, because if he knew that I had spent my formative years in Heidelberg, he must have actually known my family back then. Or so it seemed, anyway.

“I’m afraid I can’t recall meeting you,” I said apologetically.

He nodded. “My apologies for intruding.”

He pushed the chair back. I had my mouth open to tell him that he didn’t have to leave just because I couldn’t remember having seen him before—he was welcome to stay and tell me more about it; I wasn’t trying to get rid of him—but then he added, “Perhaps it would be possible for me to call upon you sometime when you are not having tea with another gentleman?”

“Oh,” I said, with a glance across the table at Christopher, “he’s not?—”

Christopher arched his brows, and I trailed off.

“Go on,” he told me, smirking. “I’m not what, darling?”

“Don’t do that,” I told him. “You look and sound much too much like your cousin when you look at me like that and call me that.”

He chuckled. “Sorry, Pippa. But what is it I’m not?”

“Nothing.” Because of course he was a gentleman—fourth in line for the dukedom, after his cousin, father, and older brother—and he was also, indubitably, here.

All I had meant to say was that he didn’t count, that I wasn’t having tea with a gentleman in the sense that Graf Wolfgang had to vacate the premises to leave us alone… but that all became much too convoluted to try to explain, so I gave up. “Of course you may,” I told the Graf instead. “We live at the Essex House Mansion flats on Essex Street. If I’m not there, you can leave a message with the commissionaire—his name is Evans—and he’ll make sure I get it.”

Graf Wolfgang nodded and clicked his heels together. “ Freulein .” He turned to Christopher and did it again. “ Mein Herr .”

“A pleasure,” Christopher drawled, and managed, yet again, to remind me uncomfortably of his cousin Crispin, who drawls and smirks and arches his brows rather an excessive amount (if not in response to handsome young men).

If the Graf was bothered, he didn’t show it, just turned on his heel and strode out of the Savoy tearoom seemingly without noticing, or at least without paying attention to, the stares and whispers that followed his passage. A table of young ladies eyed him the way young women everywhere eye handsome young men, exchanging glances and tittering behind their hands, while several gentleman, those a few years older than us, looked at him with rather less admiration and more resentment. They were, to a man, of an age where they had most likely spent some time in the trenches, and they weren’t quite as ready to welcome the enemy with open arms into the Savoy tearoom quite yet, even if he was exceedingly young and handsome.

Christopher watched until the lobby had swallowed the Graf , and then he turned to me, eyes wide. “Well!”

“Well, what?” I inquired, picking up my teacup.

“Well, rather a lot, I’d say.” He shot another glance at the door before fanning himself with his serviette. “Did you ever see anyone so handsome?”

“Geoffrey Marsden,” I said, sourly, and returned the cup to the saucer without a noticeable click.

Christopher blinked. And thought for a moment before he conceded, “I suppose.”

“But yes, I’ll award you the point. He was definitely easy on the eyes.”

Christopher nodded. “German, though.” With all that that entailed, a decade after the Great War.

“Yes,” I said. “German.”

Christopher tilted his head to look at me. “Do you not remember him?”

“You heard me say that I didn’t, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “But I thought perhaps…?”

I shook my head. “If I’ve ever seen him before, he left no lasting impression.”

“Hard to believe,” Christopher said, with yet one more look at the door, “although, if you were five, he probably didn’t look like that then.”

“I’m certain he didn’t,” I said. “He would have been eight or so, I assume. Too young to serve, so he must be younger than Tom. He’s older than us by a couple of years, wouldn’t you say? So twenty-five or -six. When I was five, he would have been seven or eight.”

Christopher nodded. “I imagine he was a handsome little boy.”

“He might have been, although it doesn’t necessarily follow, you know. You and Crispin were both buck-toothed and scrawny at eleven, and look at you now.”

He smirked. “So you’ll admit that Crispin is handsome.”

“I’ll admit that you are,” I said. “That was a singular ‘you,’ not a plural one.”

He looked at me, eyebrows arched, and I sighed. “Of course he’s handsome, Christopher. He wouldn’t have half the young women in the Bright Young Set chasing him otherwise. There’s the title and money, yes, but they’ve all got titles and money of their own, don’t they, so there must be something more to it. And it can’t be his personality, since he’s an abhorrent prat. So what’s left?”

Christopher grinned. “I knew it!”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re making something out of this that absolutely isn’t there. He looks enough like you to be your brother. Your twin brother. You don’t need to be told that he’s handsome. Or that you are.”

“But I never thought you would admit it, Pippa.”

“I’ve told you that you’re handsome before,” I said.

He nodded. “Of course you have. But you’ve never admitted that Crispin is.”

“But as I said, you’re practically identical. So how could he not be?” I shook my head. “You’re getting off the subject, Christopher. We were discussing the Graf von und zu Natterdorff, not your cousin Crispin. And while he may have been a handsome child—or not—I still don’t remember him.”

Christopher gave up the pursuit of annoying me to ask, seriously, “You don’t suppose he was lying, do you?”

“Why on earth would he lie? He recognized me. Knew my name, even.” My former name. My father’s last name of Schatz had been anglicized to Darling when I landed on English soil, ostentatiously German surnames being a bad idea in 1914, and not really a much better one now. But the Graf had known it.

I continued, “He knew that I look like my mother but with my father’s eyes. Knew where in Germany we lived when I was five. Besides, what would be the point? I’m nobody important. What would be the purpose of lying to get an introduction to me? And between you and me, Christopher?—”

I shot a look at the door to the lobby myself, “—looking like that, he doesn’t need an introduction. He can just turn up and say hello, and we’d all be delighted to make his acquaintance.”

Christopher nodded. Fervently.

“Better not let Tom see you look at another bloke like that,” I told him, and he flushed.

“Tom and I are friends, Pippa.”

“Of course you are,” I said fondly. “At any rate, I’m sure I did meet him when I was a child. It’s so long ago that it’s no wonder I don’t remember. And it might not have been a very momentous meeting.”

“Unlike when you met us.”

He smirked. I smirked back. “Quite unlike.”

The meeting between myself and the family that was to become my own had taken place on the passenger docks in Southampton in the very early days of August 1914. Things took some time to get going after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand at the end of June of that year. Kaiser Wilhelm II went on vacation to Norway for the best part of a month, and it wasn’t until he came back—and was unpleasantly surprised at the war machine that had been gearing up in his absence—that things really got going.

Wilhelm, in justice to him, did try to avoid the whole mess, but when war was declared between Austria-Hungary and Serbia in late July, there was very little choice, especially when Russia came down on Serbia’s side. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1 st and sent troops into Luxembourg on August 2 nd . They declared war against France on August 3 rd , and England declared war on Germany the following day, after Germany invaded Belgium overnight.

After that, as the saying goes, it was just one damn thing after another. Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia on August 5 th ; Serbia on Germany on August 6 th ;Montenegro on Austria-Hungary on August 7 th and on Germany on August 12 th . France and Great Britain declared war on Austria-Hungary on August 10 th and August 12 th , respectively. Japan declared on Germany on August 23 rd , Austria-Hungary on Japan on August 25 th , and on Belgium on August 28 th .

By then, I was installed in a room at Beckwith Place in Wiltshire, after the infamous meeting on the Southampton docks earlier in the month. My mother had taken me as far as Bremerhaven, and had put me on a steamship bound for England, while she returned to Heidelberg to await news about my father.

Uncle Herbert and Aunt Roz had a bigger motorcar back then, a seven-passenger Pierce Arrow Touring Car with room for the entire family. When I came down the gangplank, still wearing the same clothes I had left Heidelberg in three days earlier, everyone was on the dock, holding flowers and flags and a banner that read WELCOME HOME, PIPPA! written in several colors and different hands. Christopher was waving the Union Jack, and Robbie—home from Eton between Summer Term and Michaelmas, along with Francis—had a horn he was blowing into, the next best thing to my own marching band.

I burst into tears, of course. I was eleven years old, and had just spent two and a half days alone on a steamship, after having left my father and mother and the only home I had ever known. I was frightened and overwhelmed and exhausted and sad, and it was the first time anyone had called me Pippa, and this woman I didn’t know, who looked a bit like the mother I had left behind but not enough to make me actually comfortable, just stared at me as if she had seen a ghost—I didn’t learn until much later that I looked very much like my mother had done when she was my age—and there were people everywhere, and noise, and everyone spoke in a language I wasn’t used to hearing, and eventually it was Christopher, little, scrawny Christopher, who took the first step forward and bowed and offered me his handkerchief as he told me, formally, “Good afternoon, Philippa. I’m your cousin Christopher.”

Francis woke up after that, and so did Robbie, and so, eventually, did Aunt Roz. Francis called me Pipsqueak—a nickname that has lingered to this day, I’m sorry to say—and he and Robbie hauled my trunk to the Pierce Arrow and fastened it to the luggage rack in the back, and then they all bundled me into the rear of the vehicle with the three boys and we started on the long drive home to Wiltshire, while Robbie occasionally blew his horn at other motorcars on the road.

I shook the memories off and smiled at Christopher. “Definitely nothing like that. Nothing like when I met St George for the first time, either.”

That had been a few weeks later. We had been invited to Sutherland Hall, I assume so Duke Henry could get a look at the upstart German girl his youngest son had been saddled with, thanks to his daughter-in-law’s unruly sister—not that I realized any of that at the time. I had managed to settle into the family a bit by then. I still missed my parents, but my aunt and uncle had done a good job of making me feel welcome, and I had formed a fast friendship with Christopher. He was just a few months younger than I was, and he delighted in showing me his world. His older brothers both adored him, and they transferred that feeling to me with no questions asked, but they were both old enough to do things, and to be interested in doing things, that Christopher couldn’t do, so Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert were happy to provide him with a playmate of his own age, one who would be around more permanently than Crispin was.

Upon arrival at Sutherland Hall, the latter eyed me narrowly, and then suggested to Christopher that we should play hide-and-seek. Christopher said yes, and that experience set the tone for most of my interactions with St George from then on. He coolly informed Christopher that he, Christopher, was it , and then, when Christopher covered his eyes and began to count to a hundred, Crispin grabbed my hand and pulled me behind him into the hedge maze.

I suppose I trusted him because he looked so much like Christopher, and because everyone else in the family had proved themselves to be lovely. I soon learned different. The yew hedges of the maze went by in a blur, and I had no hope of remembering the left and right turns he pulled me around with lightning speed, until we were in the middle of the maze, where he pointed to a wrought iron bench, said, “Wait there,” and ran off again.

And didn’t come back.

By the time Christopher found me, I was sobbing. I can still see Crispin’s smirk, and the malicious satisfaction in those cool, gray eyes.

“Bastard,” I said half-heartedly.

Christopher chuckled. “Hasn’t he ever apologized for that?”

“You know, I don’t believe he has. He may have uttered the words, ‘my apologies, Darling,’ at some point, but that’s hardly the same, is it?” Not when there was nothing sincere whatsoever about the drawled delivery.

Christopher shook his head.

“Not too long ago,” I added, “he informed me that it’s been a long time since he did anything truly awful to me, so I assume I’m supposed to let bygones be bygones, but I’m not sure I ever received an apology, no.”

“You’ll have to rectify that,” Christopher said with a smirk of his own, and I rolled my eyes.

“Enough, Christopher. I’m sick and tired of everyone insinuating that there’s something going on between me and St George. I wouldn’t have him gift-wrapped with a bow around his neck, and you know it.”

“It’s less about that—” Christopher began, and I shook my head.

“Spare me. Lady Laetitia is welcome to him.”

“No, she isn’t,” Christopher said.

No, she wasn’t. There was no part of me that wanted Laetitia Marsden as part of the family, and it wasn’t because I wanted Crispin for my own, to be clear. She had been told that he was in love with someone else, and she was determined to wed him in spite of it. One of these days I was concerned that she’d succeed in wearing him down. His father was rooting for it, and so, of course, was her mother. The rest of us thought it a fate worse than death, but if he wouldn’t stand up for himself, there was nothing any of us could do to prevent it.

I shook off my misgivings, since there was nothing whatsoever I could do about them. “Are you ready to go home?”

“I suppose we’d better,” Christopher said with a glance at the window. “Tea-time is over. And so is the excitement, it seems.”

If the excitement had been the Graf from and of Natterdorff, then yes. The excitement was definitely over.

“We’ll have to see whether he contacts me with an invitation,” I said, as Christopher pulled my chair out and helped me up.

He shot me a glance from under his eyelashes. “Will you go, if he does?”

I shot one back. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t go, if he does?”

“Not unless you don’t want to,” Christopher said and offered me his arm. I took it and headed for the lobby and the street outside.