Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

This was my first time seeing Crispin since the engagement was announced in the London Times . Christopher, I was fairly certain, had spoken to his cousin on the exchange in the couple of weeks since then, but he hadn’t told me anything about the conversation they may have had. I had no idea, at this point, whether Crispin was regretful of what he had done, or whether he was happy to have done it, and how he felt about my part in any or all of it.

He looked like a gentleman should at his engagement, resplendent in white tie with mother-of-pearl studs and cufflinks, and a platinum watch fob dangling from his waistcoat pocket. His hair was slicked back from his face into its usual sleek coiffure, a few degrees darker than the platinum shade it is naturally, and his eyes were the cool gray of metal. Steel, or perhaps chromium. Something hard and impenetrable. Something I hadn’t seen in a while. Not since we had managed to bury the hatchet we had been carrying since we were children—not in each other’s backs—and become something almost like friends.

“Darling.” He showed teeth. There’s really no other word for it. Although the smile became a touch more genuine when he turned to Christopher. His voice warmed, too. “Kit.”

“Crispin.” Christopher leaned in, one hand on Crispin’s shoulder, and I could see his lips move as he murmured something in Crispin’s ear. The latter closed his eyes for a moment, and leaned into the comfort, before he nodded.

“Miss Darling,” Laetitia’s voice cut through my preoccupation like the shrill sound of a police constable’s whistle, and when I turned to her, she was showing teeth, as well. “How thoughtful of you to stop by to wish us well.”

She’s an inch or so taller than me, so she could quite literally look down on me, something I did not appreciate. Her tone wasn’t very pleasant, either.

“It seemed the least I could do,” I answered, with a show of teeth of my own, no more sincere than hers. “We were delighted to hear that St George had found someone worthy of him.”

Meaning, of course, that they were both base individuals who belonged together. Next to Laetitia, Crispin tensed, although it might have been because of something Christopher said, not anything to do with me, or more likely, with his fiancée.

Laetitia’s eyes narrowed. They’re blue, surrounded by long, thick, mascaraed lashes, and they matched the flowers on her evening gown. After a moment, and an up-and-down look, she told me, condescendingly, “What a charming frock. Although I’m frankly surprised you left off the orange blossoms.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, with a toss of my head. Until Francis said something upstairs, it hadn’t crossed my mind that anyone would think I was making a statement by showing up in white, but now I was determined that no one should get the wrong idea. Least of all Laetitia; she might believe I was jealous, and that was the last thing I wanted. “I’m hardly likely to tell Crispin to propose to you and then show up to your engagement party in a wedding frock, am I?”

Her expression flickered a bit over that, so perhaps he hadn’t mentioned my involvement in the proposal.

There was no reason why he would, of course, although I might have expected some sort of acknowledgement for my suggestion, seeing as it had worked out so well for the both of them.

“Trade places,” Christopher murmured in my ear. A second later, he had tugged me over to his right and taken my place in front of Laetitia.

He’s charm incarnate when he wants to be, and when he congratulated Laetitia on her betrothal, he sounded warm and sincere. I could see her practically melt under his regard. She clearly couldn’t tell, as I could, that he was putting it on with a trowel, and was no happier about the engagement than I was.

Crispin cleared his throat, and I turned back to him. “St George.”

“Darling.” He gave me an up-and-down look of his own. “Is that for me?”

“The frock?” I looked down at it and back up. “You can have it if you’d like. But it’s not precisely your color, and I expect it would be a bit short on you. Besides, your fiancée might not approve, you know.”

“The mourning,” Crispin said.

“Mourning?” I flicked a glance at Laetitia. “Isn’t your fiancée the one in mourning?”

“Laetitia has no reason to mourn,” Crispin said. “She’s got me. You don’t.”

I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t want you, you realize. If I had done, I wouldn’t have told you to propose to someone else.”

He shrugged. “So why the mourning?”

“I’m not in mourning. Who mourns in white?”

“The Chinese,” Crispin said.

“Do I look Chinese to you?”

He didn’t answer, because of course I don’t, and I added, “Christopher chose the dress. I thought it was a bit bland, but he insisted.” And at least Crispin couldn’t tell me that I looked like an apple, or a banana, or—most recently—a stalk of rhubarb in it.

“Of course.” He gave me—or the dress—another look before turning his attention back to my face. “What are you waiting for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t aware I was waiting for anything.”

An apology would be nice, I suppose, but I wasn’t foolish enough to think I would get one. Nor did I have any plans of apologizing myself, either. I may have felt guilty, but not that guilty.

“Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

“Of course.” I smiled toothily. “My very best wishes for your happiness, St George, and for a long—” I said it again for good measure, “ long life together. Your grandfather was almost ninety when he passed, wasn’t he?”

Of course he had been. We all knew that.

“And that wasn’t even natural causes,” I added, helpfully. “Just think: the two of you could be looking at the next seventy years side by side. Or more. You could live to be a hundred, St George, just to spite the rest of us. I wouldn’t put it past you. And through all of it, you’ll be side by side with Laetitia, and?—”

“Yes, yes.” He interrupted before I could wax poetic about the twelve children and twenty-seven grandchildren he’d have by then, not to mention the fidelity Laetitia would surely expect in exchange for it all. “I get the point, Darling.”

“I’m sure you do,” I said. “After making such a well-reasoned and deliberate choice, not rash at all, not at all emotionally motivated, I wouldn’t want your marriage to be cut tragically short. Not before you’ve had the chance to truly appreciate your decision. To wallow in it. Decade upon decade upon decade of it?—”

“Yes,” Crispin interrupted. “Thank you, Darling. Without you, I wouldn’t be here now, looking at such a glorious future.”

No, he wouldn’t. “I was delighted to be of assistance,” I said, “and I can’t wait to see you put on the old ball and chain. December, wasn’t it? Not very long at all.”

He looked like he might have winced at the reminder, and I twisted the knife, “I don’t mean to be indelicate, but that’s quite a quick denouement, isn’t it? Is there something I should know?”

For a second he looked at me, his face blank, before a flush stained the tops of his cheekbones. “Are you asking me whether my fiancée is in the pudding club, Darling?”

“I’m simply suggesting that it seems fast,” I said. “Francis and Constance got engaged before you, and they’re waiting until next summer. Of course, if you know that you love one another, there’s no need to wait…”

“No.” The syllable sounded like it had been wrung from him by force.

I arched a brow. “No?”

“No,” Crispin said, through gritted teeth. “You, of all people, know why I proposed, and it wasn’t because I had to. We are not…” He looked nauseated, “expecting.”

I patted his arm. “That’s good to know. I knew, of course, that that might have been an issue after what happened in January,” when he had brought Laetitia to Sutherland House and spent the night with her, “but I didn’t know whether it had happened again since then.”

He gave me a look. It could have flayed fish. “We are not expecting.”

“Just eager to tie the knot.” I smiled sweetly. “I understand.”

And I did, of course. Laetitia wanted to close the deal before he could change his mind. Not that he could do that at this point. Not without being subject to that breach of promise suit we had discussed over dinner last night. But even so, it was hard to blame her for wanting to make sure that the marriage—and Crispin—was in the bag before anything could happen to change anything.

His nostrils flared, and I opened my mouth, but before I could comment on Laetitia’s indecent hurry to tie him down, his eyes fixed on something over my shoulder. “What’s he doing here?”

I assumed it was Wolfgang, of course, so I preened a little. “Your fiancée invited him.”

He flicked me a look, but it was more distracted than I would have expected under the circumstances. “How do you know that?”

“He wrote to me,” I said, and watched Crispin’s eyebrow arch.

“Dear me, Darling. I didn’t realize that you and Dom were on such friendly terms.”

“Dom—?” I swung on my heel to gaze in the same direction that he was. “No, of course we’re not.”

That was Dominic Rivers in the flesh, though, standing just inside the door to the ballroom, side by side with another young gentleman of the bright and young variety. To my knowledge, I had never seen him before, and now didn’t seem like the time to ask for elucidation.

“That’s what I thought,” Crispin said. “So who…?”

And then the shilling dropped, and his lip curled. “Let me guess. Wolfie’s coming?”

“Don’t call him that,” I said. “And don’t look at me like that, either. I wasn’t the one who invited him. That responsibility lies with your fiancée.”

“My…” It sounded as if he lost his breath for a moment. “Laetitia invited His Highness?”

“Got it in one.”

He stared at me, eyes wide. “Why?”

“Something you’ll have to take up with her,” I said. “I just plan to enjoy the weekend. Between Wolfgang and Mr. Rivers, not to mention Lord Geoffrey, there’s no lack of eligible young gentlemen, is there? Your removal from the marriage mart will hardly be noticed at all.”

I smiled sweetly. “My felicitations, St George, to you and your betrothed. I’ll get out of the way for Mr. Rivers and his companion.”

I stepped into Christopher, who took me by the arm and tugged me away.

It was a few steps later that we came face to face with Dominic and his companion crossing the floor in the opposite direction. I smiled blandly as we stopped in front of them. “Mr. Rivers.”

He inclined his head. “Miss Darling. Mr. Astley. May I present the Honorable Reginald Fish?”

The Honorable Mr. Fish was a washed-out dirty blond, who couldn’t have been a starker contrast to Dominic Rivers’s smoldering Latin looks if he’d tried.

“Fish,” Christopher murmured, while I dimpled.

“A pleasure, Mr. Fish.”

“Call me Reggie,” Mr. Fish said. “Long time, no see, Astley. You’re here to wish your cousin well?”

Christopher nodded and glanced at me. “This is my other cousin, on my mother’s side. Miss Philippa Darling.”

“Miss Darling.” Reggie bowed.

“Call me Pippa,” I told him, “please. If you’re Reggie, I’m Pippa.”

Reggie nodded. “A pleasure.”

I waited for him to say something else, but when he didn’t, Christopher said, “A pleasure to see you both. We’ll get out of your way. Let you go and congratulate the happy couple.”

He shot a look over his shoulder to where Crispin and Laetitia were waiting. I shot one across Reggie’s, to where Lady Violet Cummings and the girl I thought was the Honorable Cecily Fletcher were standing. They had been joined by a third young woman I didn’t know, a darker-haired brunette—darker than the maybe-Cecily, whose hair was a fluffy medium brown, not unlike my own—and all three of them were watching us. When they caught me looking, the new girl and Lady Violet turned away to whisper to one another across Cecily’s body. The latter ignored them in favor of continuing to watch; us, or perhaps it was Crispin and Laetitia beyond us that she was watching. She looked somewhat pale and hollow-eyed, although that may have been the color of her frock. Not everyone can pull off that particular shade of green.

For a second I could hear St George’s voice in the back of my head, “—like a stalk of celery, Darling,” and then I shook it off. I wasn’t the one in the green dress, and Laetitia surely wouldn’t let him say anything like that to Cecily. Saying it to me was one thing; saying it to someone else came dangerously close to flirtation.

Dominic Rivers and Reggie Fish moved on towards the fireplace and the engaged couple, and Christopher pulled me in the direction of Francis and Constance, who had visited the bar cart and were now holding glasses of bourbon or brandy and some sort of cocktail and perhaps sherry. When we got close enough, Constance handed off the two cocktails to me and Christopher, and took the glass of sherry back from Francis, who gave it to her with a little bow before he lifted his own glass in a toast. “To the happy couple, and to none of us strangling the bride.”

“Or groom,” I said, and took a sip of what turned out to be some form of gin drink, with Crème de Menthe and bitters.

Francis eyed me over the top of the glass. “Were you tempted to kill him and not her?”

“I’m always tempted to kill him,” I said.

Of course, I was usually tempted to kill her too, but this calamity was firmly on his shoulders. What happened wasn’t Laetitia’s fault; she had simply snatched at the opportunity she had been waiting for when it was presented to her.

“He’s a fool,” Francis grunted.

“No argument here.”

In front of the fireplace, Dominic Rivers and the Honorable Reggie were in the middle of their obsequies. Laetitia looked gracious, while Crispin eyed the Honorable Reggie with amused disdain and Rivers with something more like calculation.

They got along well enough, from what I knew. Crispin had occasionally made use of Rivers’s services in the past, although the last time I had seen them together, he had been trying to lure Rivers into a trap, one that Rivers had noticed and managed to avoid.

If there was bad blood between them at this point, it wasn’t evident, however. Crispin responded graciously to Rivers’s greeting and—I assumed—his felicitations, while Rivers seemed to extend them in all seriousness.

I turned my back to them, in time to see the door to the hallway open again, and Lord Geoffrey Marsden slip through.

He is, like his sister, extremely good-looking, with the same glossy, black hair and vivid blue eyes that she has. The little clique of girls tittered as he approached them, and Lady Violet went weak in the knees for a moment in what was either an abbreviated curtsey, or simply a response to such ostentatious male beauty. “Lord Geoffrey.”

The brunette—not the Honorable Cecily, the other one—fluttered her eyelashes and simpered up at him. “How simply marvy to see you, Geoffrey!”

I applied my elbow to Christopher’s ribs. When he glanced at me, I inquired, “Who’s that?”

He glanced in the direction I indicated. “You know Violet Cummings, don’t you? The blonde? And Cecily Fletcher is the one who looks a bit like you.”

I nodded. “I meant the brunette.”

“The one in blue? That’s Olivia Barnsley.”

“Lady Olivia Barnsley? The Honorable Olivia Barnsley?”

“The latter,” Christopher said, “I think.”

“Another of Crispin’s conquests?”

Francis suppressed a snort, not very successfully, and Christopher shook his head. “Not as far as I know. Or if she is, not exclusively.”

Clearly. Right now she was giving the impression of someone working overtime to keep Geoffrey’s attention on her, and away from… was it Cecily or Violet? Her eyelashes fluttered, her dimple quivered, and her bosom heaved. Lady Violet looked amused as she watched the display—a mere Honorable can’t compete with a Lady in the matrimonial stakes, and I’m sure they both knew it—while Cecily simply looked blank.

“Any idea what’s wrong with Cecily Fletcher?” I asked.

The other three looked at her and then, as a man, shook their heads. “She looks doped,” Francis opined, which was certainly something he ought to recognize. “Downers, not uppers.”

“Sedatives, do you mean?”

He nodded. “Veronal or valium or something like that. She looks out of it.”

She did. Olivia Barnsley’s attempted flirtation with Lord Geoffrey got no reaction, nor did Lady Violet’s response to it. Cecily merely blinked at them both, slowly, as if her eyelids were too heavy to move easily.

Violet put her hand on Geoffrey’s arm and as he turned towards her, Olivia shot her friend a look of concern. Cecily didn’t seem to notice that either, but simply sank back below the surface of her thoughts, her eyes vacant.

Olivia watched her for a second before turning her attention to the group in front of the fireplace. I twisted my head in that direction and saw Reggie Fish and Dominic Rivers expanding under Lady Laetitia’s regard, while Crispin watched, two steps removed. He looked indulgent, as an impending husband ought, although to someone who knows him well, the coolness in his eyes told its own story.

When I turned back to the other small group, Geoffrey was in the process of kissing Violet’s hand. That done, he kissed Olivia’s. When Cecily made no move to present him with her hand for kissing, Geoffrey looked blank for a moment before he gave a sort of mental shrug and moved on.

“Incoming,” Francis murmured.

I nodded. “I see him.”

“Who?” Constance made to turn her head, but was too late.

“Cousin Connie.” Geoffrey stopped beside her and leaned in to peck her cheek. Constance flinched, but by the time he straightened, she had managed to paste a polite smile on her face.

“Cousin Geoffrey.”

She might as well not have bothered, because Geoffrey didn’t look at her again. She wasn’t available to him—probably wouldn’t have been even if she hadn’t been engaged to marry Francis—and so he couldn’t care less about her presence. He nodded to Francis—“Astley,” and to Christopher—“Astley,” before turning to me, with what he undoubtedly thought was a seductive smile.

“Miss Darling.”

His eyes smoldered under lowered lids—bedroom eyes—and the smirk that played around his mouth was suggestive and practiced.

“Lord Geoffrey,” I told him, coolly. When he reached for my hand, I contemplated moving it behind my back and out of his way, but decided that it would be too rude a reaction to a man whose house I was standing in. So I let him bring it to his lips, and let him breathe on it, moistly, for several seconds longer than necessary, before he gave it back to me. I wiped it surreptitiously against my skirt before I told him, sweetly, “Congratulations.”

He blinked. While he’s brilliantly handsome, and much too well aware of it, he’s as thick as a stack of bricks. “What for?”

“Your sister’s engagement,” I reminded him. “The reason we’re all here.”

He looked around, and I could see the thoughts chasing one another, with the speed of snails, across his countenance. Eventually, his face cleared and he chuckled. “Yes, St George is quite a catch.”

“Quite so,” I agreed pleasantly. From beside me, I could hear Christopher smother a laugh.

By now, the Honorable Reggie Fish and his less than honorable companion had moved on, and Crispin and Laetitia were standing alone in front of the fireplace. But instead of smiling fatuously at his fiancée, the way she was gazing at him, heart in her eyes, Crispin was scowling in our direction. When I caught his eyes and smirked, his brows lowered further. I turned back to Geoffrey. “You must be so pleased.”

Geoffrey stuck his chest out. “Of course. Couldn’t ask for better, really.”

“Not really. He’s one of a kind.” I smirked into my gin. Francis turned a bark of laughter into a cough, and addressed his future cousin-in-law.

“Welcome to the family, Marsden.”

“Same, Astley,” Geoffrey said jovially. “Although you were there already, weren’t you?”

He flicked a glance at Constance, and of course he was absolutely correct. We were a fairly incestuous bunch, between Geoffrey’s cousin being engaged to marry Francis, and Francis’s cousin being engaged to marry Geoffrey’s sister. All we needed to tie it all together was for me to marry Geoffrey, but that was entirely out of the question, of course. I didn’t think that marriage was likely to change his proclivities—it would simply give him more opportunity to philander—and I was certainly not going to get involved with it.

Not that he was interested in me for marriage, anyway. Whoever he married would have to come with a title and preferably a fortune of her own. Someone like, I assumed, Lady Violet Cummings or, in a pinch, the Honorable Cecily Fletcher or Olivia Barnsley, whatever her title was. Not a nobody from the Continent, whose only claim to nobility was that she was the Duke of Sutherland’s younger brother’s wife’s niece, with no money or standing of my own.

And that, of course, was when the door to the drawing room opened again, and someone new entered.

I only knew about it because Crispin’s eyes, already narrowed, now turned to slits, while something that felt very much like an electrical current ran around the rest of the room. Laetitia straightened, and so did the three young ladies who had heretofore been dividing their attention between Dominic Rivers and the Honorable Reggie. The latter’s mouth shaped words that I would have been willing to bet were, “I say!” while Dom Rivers’s jaw clenched.

Francis’s eyes narrowed, too, and just as I was about to turn around to see what all the excitement was about, a presence stepped up beside me. A voice I recognized said, warmly, “Philippa.”

Francis growled, and I saw his knuckles turn white around the brandy glass he was holding. For a second, I worried that he would squeeze so hard that the glass broke and cut him, but then Constance’s hand landed on his arm and I stopped worrying.

“Natterdorff,” Christopher said blandly, and I turned on my heel with a blinding smile.

“Wolfgang. How lovely to see you.”