Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

I positioned myself with my back against the door and my ears peeled, of course. But I might as well not have bothered.

Oh, I could hear what was said. Or I could hear Christopher’s end of the conversation perfectly well. He just didn’t say anything interesting. It was all a list of “Yes,” and “No,” and “Not yet,” and “Of course,” and “I know that,” and “Don’t be stupid,” and finally, “You, too. Good night, Crispin.”

I stepped away from the door to the box to let Christopher out. He smirked. “One of these days, that curiosity is going to be the death of you, Pippa.”

“But not today,” I said. “You didn’t say anything worth killing someone over.”

“Did you think I would?”

He took my arm and tugged me back down the pavement towards the Essex House.

“I thought you might,” I told him as we walked. “He clearly didn’t want to say whatever it was where I could hear it. So I thought it might be something I’d want to hear.”

“Would it please you to hear that he wondered whether we had heard from Natterdorff again since yesterday?”

“No,” I said with a scowl. “Not when we haven’t. It would have pleased me a lot more to be able to tell him that we had.”

“Of course it would.” He squeezed my arm companionably. “I’m sure the dashing Graf will be back in touch in a day or two, Pippa. As soon as he gets past Crispin snatching you out from under his nose yesterday. He’ll want to try again, I’m sure.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Do you doubt it?” He squinted at me. “You said you got on well, didn’t you?”

“I thought we did. Until St George showed up and nearly knee-capped me, and then tried to be rude to him.” And was put in his place.

“Then I’m sure you did,” Christopher said.

I wished I could be as sure. It hadn’t been my first time dining with a young man, of course, nor had it been my first time flirting with one. I had had the impression that things had progressed well, at least until the moment when the Hispano-Suiza rolled up behind me. But I was doubting myself now. It had been a full twenty-four hours, and I hadn’t heard from Wolfgang again. So perhaps I wasn’t the best judge of success in the field of supping with young men, and the date really hadn’t gone well. If he liked me, shouldn’t he have contacted us by now?

Then again, Christopher was a young man, and while he had very little experience wining and dining the fairer sex, he probably knew the proper etiquette for the beginnings of courtship. If he told me that Wolfgang would be in touch, perhaps I should trust that he knew whereof he spoke.

I shook my head. “No matter. Is that all St George wanted? To find out whether we had heard from Wolfgang?”

“That was the gist of it,” Christopher confirmed.

“Onwards, then. He drove Florence to the Strand but left her off a couple of blocks from the Savoy last night.”

Christopher nodded. “That’s what he said.”

I squinted at him. “Do you have reason to think it wasn’t what he did?”

He gave me a glance back. “Of course not. If that’s what he said he did, I’m certain it’s exactly what he did. And she might have had reasons of her own for why she didn’t want to arrive at the Savoy in his company. All Americans are puritans, aren’t they?”

“I’m fairly certain that was only true several hundred years ago,” I said, “although I’ll admit that the Schlomskys Senior did seem a bit set in their ways. They thought Flossie was a teetotaler, can you imagine?”

“If that’s the case,” Christopher said, “it would certainly explain why she wouldn’t want to turn up with Crispin. His reputation has probably preceded him to the other side of the Atlantic, too, don’t you think?”

Perhaps it had. Or if not, all the Schlomskys would have had to have done, was peek at an old copy of the Tatler or the Daily Yell since they arrived here, and all would have been made clear.

“So he set her down on the Strand, two or three blocks from the Savoy. What do you think happened after that, Christopher?”

“There’s only one of two things that could have happened,” Christopher said. “Or perhaps one of three.”

“Elucidate me, please.”

He held up a finger of his free hand. “She told Crispin that she was going to the Savoy, but she was really going somewhere else instead.”

“Why would she do that, if her parents were at the Savoy?”

“I don’t know, Pippa. For now, we’re talking about the options for what could have happened, not why Flossie may or mayn’t have actually done them. We’ll get to that later.”

“Fine,” I said. “Proceed, please.”

He held up another finger. “She planned to go to the Savoy, but was prevented from getting there.”

“In the couple of blocks between Charing Cross and the Savoy? On the Strand? How do you imagine that might have happened? A motorcar accident? Surely we would have heard about it, if it had been something like that, don’t you think? I mean, Crispin and I were both right there. Surely one of us would have noticed the upheaval.”

“Perhaps,” Christopher said, “perhaps not. For now, it’s option two. She either wanted to go to the Savoy, but something prevented her, or she didn’t want to go to the Savoy, and went somewhere else instead.”

“If she wasn’t planning to go to the Savoy in the first place, why tell Crispin that she was going there? It would make no difference to him whether she was going there or elsewhere.”

“No idea,” Christopher said. “Also a discussion for later.”

I nodded. “What’s option three, then?”

“She went to the Savoy,” Christopher said, “and her parents are lying about it.”

I squinted at him. “Why would they do that?”

“Who knows?” He gave a languid shrug. “You said yourself that her parents seemed surprised by the changes in her. Perhaps she showed up and they were appalled. Maybe things were said and they ran her off.”

Or perhaps things had escalated and she had ended up dead. I pictured the hefty silver knob at the head of Hiram Schlomsky’s walking stick, and imagined it whistling through the air and meeting Flossie’s head. I had seen a young woman with her head bashed in by a trench club less than a month ago. This would probably look very much the same.

I made a gagging noise and Christopher squeezed my arm. “I’m sure she’s fine. She’ll turn up tomorrow, I’m sure.”

“If she doesn’t,” I said, “I’m phoning Tom.”

Christopher hummed agreement. “It can’t hurt. If nothing else, he’ll be able to tell us whether she’s lying on a slab somewhere, and the news just hasn’t made it back to the Essex House and the Savoy yet.”

Yes, he would. Not that that was the outcome I was hoping for.

“I don’t believe it’ll come to that,” Christopher added, with more optimism than I, frankly, thought the situation warranted. “I’m sure she’ll turn up tomorrow and everything will be fine.”

“I hope you’re right.” I let him open the door into the lobby for me, where Evans informed us that no, Flossie had not come home in the twenty minutes we had been out, and there had been no word from her.

“Message for you, Miss Darling,” Evans’s voice said from the lobby.

It was the next morning, at the unfashionably early hour of eight thirty. Not that I wasn’t awake—it hadn’t been a late night—but who contacts someone before nine in the morning?

“Who?” Christopher mouthed from over in the kitchen doorway, where he was lounging with a cup of coffee in his hand and his hair sticking up every which way. His eyes were heavy and, I thought, a bit bloodshot. Perhaps he had spent part of the night worrying, too. I knew I had.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” I told Evans, and turned to Christopher. “If it’s Wolfgang, I don’t want Evans reading the missive to me.”

Christopher’s lips twitched. “Would there be sweet nothings, do you suppose?”

“I’d hardly think so.” But even without that, I still didn’t want Evans reading my note before I could. “I’ll be back in two minutes.”

I headed for the lobby, where Evans handed me an envelope with my name scribbled across it in elegant script and—yes!—the logo of the Savoy Hotel in the corner. I thanked him nicely and ripped the flap open as soon as the lift door had closed behind me.

Inside was a single sheet of paper, also with the hotel logo in the corner and a few lines of script in the same elegant handwriting.

Miss Darling , it began, with no warmer greeting than that—with no greeting at all, in fact. I lowered my brows. That certainly didn’t bode well.

Please come to the Savoy Hotel at your first convenience.

Sarah Schlomsky.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Christopher opined when I showed it to him a minute later.

I shook my head. “How long before you can be ready to go?”

“You want me to accompany you? I’m not included in the invitation.”

“You went with me when I was meeting Wolfgang,” I said. “You can come with me now.”

“That was different. That was supper with a foreigner we didn’t know.”

“This is a meeting with two foreigners we don’t know. How do we even know for certain that they’re the Schlomskys? They said they were, but we have no proof. Maybe they’re planning to kidnap me and sell me into white slavery.”

Christopher squinted at me. “Surely you’re not serious?”

“Of course not. I’m sure they are exactly who they say they are. Why wouldn’t they be? But we don’t know anything more about them than we do about Wolfgang von Natterdorff, really.”

“Do the parents look like Flossie?” Christopher wanted to know. “Or I guess a more accurate question would be, does Flossie look like her parents?”

I thought back. “Not appreciably, I’d say. It’s not a case where you’d look at either of them and say, oh yes, that’s definitely Flossie’s mama or Flossie’s papa. Not the way you would with Lady Laetitia and the Countess of Marsden, for instance. The countess is the very image of what Laetitia will look like in twenty-five years.”

And she would still be lovely at fifty-plus. At least St George would have that to look forward to. A wife who kept her good looks well into middle age.

“But it’s not as if Florence’s parents didn’t look like her,” I added. “No more than you don’t look like your mother, at least.”

“Even if they looked completely different, it wouldn’t prove anything,” Christopher agreed. “Not all children are of their parents’ heritage. Some are adopted. Some belong to one spouse and not the other. Or some simply favor one parent more than the other. Francis and I don’t look much like Mum at all. Crispin, at least, got Aunt Charlotte’s hair and eyes, even if the rest of him is all Sutherland.”

I nodded. “So how long before we can go?”

He put the cup down on the counter. “I’m more awake than I was. Let me change and shave and deal with the hair. Fifteen minutes?”

“I’ll go get ready,” I said, and headed for my room while Christopher made for the shared washroom in the hallway.

It took more than fifteen minutes, but we were underway in less than thirty, and at the Savoy thirty minutes after that. The lobby looked exactly as it had two evenings before, when I had been there. Same checkerboard marble floor, same wood-paneled walls, same gold topped columns, and the same high, coffered ceiling. It’s quite beautiful, in case I neglected to mention that, and of course it all practically oozes wealth and privilege. The concierge gave our approach the fishy stare it deserved, but then he did a double-take when we got close enough that he could recognize—or thought he did—Christopher.

His eyes widened. “Lord St George. Welcome back to the Savoy. How may I assist you today?”

Christopher opened his mouth, presumably to deny that he was his cousin, and I elbowed him in the ribs. Gently, of course. (I wouldn’t have held back with the real St George.) “We’re here to see Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Schlomsky.”

The concierge eyed me, and then eyed Christopher, and then eyed me again, before he reached for the telephone and rang upstairs to inform the Schlomskys that we had arrived.

Two minutes later, we were welcomed into the most expensive suite the Savoy had to offer. Or at least I assumed that Hiram Schlomsky would not have been willing to settle for anything less. Unless, perhaps, His Grace the Graf von Natterdorff had taken up residence in the best suite before Hiram had had a chance to do so, and had relegated the Schlomskys to sloppy seconds. Crispin had interrupted the proceedings before Wolfgang had had the chance to invite me upstairs the other day, always assuming that that had been his plan, so I didn’t actually know where the Graf was staying.

The suite was lovely, in any case. The Schlomskys were not. When we knocked on the door, Sarah Schlomsky peered out at us through the crack with wide, terror-filled eyes, as if she had expected to see something horrible outside, instead of the two people she had been reliably told were on their way up. And even as she swung the door open, and closed it again—after peering up and down the hallway behind us—Hiram Schlomsky paced back and forth in front of the big windows with the view of the Thames and the South Bank on the opposite side rapidly enough that I was honestly surprised there was no path carved in the sumptuous rug covering the floor.

“Mrs. Schlomsky,” I said when the door was closed. “Mr. Schlomsky. May I present my cousin, Mr. Christopher Astley?”

The Schlomskys had met in the middle of the floor, halfway between the door and the window, and now they looked from me to Christopher and back again. “The fellow downstairs said he was a viscount,” Hiram Schlomsky said.

“The chap downstairs mistook me for my other cousin,” Christopher answered calmly. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to explain this, after all. “Crispin is the heir. I’m His Grace’s youngest nephew.”

They both blinked without saying anything, and I decided I might as well carry the conversation forward. There was no point in going into the intricacies of the Sutherland succession. “What’s wrong?”

Sarah Schlomsky pulled herself together with what was an obvious effort. “Thank you for coming, Miss Darling. And so quickly, too.”

Her hair was falling down on one side, and her lips looked pale and pinched. Her husband’s complexion was florid.

“What’s happened?” I asked, looking from one to the other of them.

“A note,” Hiram Schlomsky said. “Delivered with the food this morning.”

He nodded towards the small table in front of the window. The remains of breakfast were gone, but the note was still there. I walked over to it and bent, with Christopher next to me.

The words were printed in capital letters, with a heavy dark pen. They slanted across the paper in a rather ominous way, and I don’t think it was only the words themselves.

IF YOU WANT TO SEE YOUR DAUGHTER AGAIN, brING FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS TO ST OLAVE’S CHURCH ON TOOLEY STREET AT ELEVEN TOMORROW NIGHT. DON’T INVOLVE THE POLICE OR THE GIRL DIES.