Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE

“Murderer?” Christopher echoed.

Crispin nodded. And turned to me. “Isn’t that right, Darling? People in books say the name of the murderer with their last breath? And write it in the dust with their fingertip and such?”

“In books,” I said. “But she wasn’t in any kind of condition to communicate. Besides, what makes you think anyone murdered her?”

He looked nonplussed. “Well, she certainly didn’t kill herself.”

I exchanged a look with Francis and one with Christopher. “We assumed this was accidental, as a result of taking steps to deal with her…” I hesitated, “problem.”

He looked at me. “You mean, she took an abortifacient.”

I nodded.

“Not on purpose,” Crispin said.

“How do you know? The tea—what was left of it—smelled of spearmint, so we thought…”

“Pennyroyal.” He nodded. “She wouldn’t.”

“Did she tell you that?”

It was Christopher who asked this time, not me. Crispin turned to him and shook his head. “But if she wanted to, don’t you think she would have done it before now? She was several months along. And don’t you think she would have done it somewhere else? Not here, during my engagement party?”

“Unless she was making a statement,” Francis said, and Crispin’s eyebrows arched.

“What is that supposed to mean? What sort of statement would that be?”

Francis arched his own brow back. “There’s one reason why she might want to do it here, in front of you and your new fiancée, isn’t there?”

If the baby had been Crispin’s, I assumed he meant.

Crispin shook his head. “Her situation wasn’t my doing.”

“Does your fiancée know that?”

“We haven’t discussed it,” Crispin said coolly. After a second he added, “I don’t know whether Laetitia knew that Cecily was expecting. She didn’t hear it from me, if so.”

“If it was yours,” I said, “Cecily would have made certain that Laetitia knew, wouldn’t she have? And not relied on you to do it?”

He turned to me. “ Et tu, Brute ?”

I shook my head. “You misunderstood me. I believed you last night, you know. You’re many things, St George, but you’re not someone who would leave a pregnant woman to fend for herself and your child.”

He grimaced. “Thank you. I suppose.”

“Besides, we all know that you don’t love Laetitia enough to kill Cecily to stay with her. Although does Laetitia know that?”

“I have no idea what Laetitia knows,” Crispin said, and leaned back in his—or rather, Christopher’s—chair. The latter was perched on the arm of it. “And I’ll thank you to keep your voice down, Darling.”

I eyed him. “Why on earth should I? You told me yourself that she’s under no illusions about it being a love match.”

“That’s no reason to rub it in,” Crispin said, and pushed to his feet. “Excuse me. I should find my fiancée and see what I might do to help.”

“Before you go…” Christopher said, and Crispin turned to him with an expectant sort of expression. “When you were out there, stalking quail…”

Crispin grimaced, but nodded.

“Did you happen to notice anyone shooting in this direction?”

“Shooting in—” He stopped. I got the impression that he lost his breath, and it took him a moment to find it again. Then he turned back to the table, and those stormy gray eyes ran the circle of faces again, from Christopher to Francis, to Constance and to me, before going back to Christopher. He braced himself, visibly, before asking, “What happened?”

“Pippa came to find us,” Christopher said, and Crispin shot me a look. “Or Francis more so than me. Someone to look at Cecily and perhaps be able to tell what was wrong with her. When I was taken ill, back in May?—”

“You weren’t taken ill, Kit. You were poisoned.”

Christopher nodded. “When that happened, Francis was the one who figured out what was wrong. And you, of course, but you were out with the shooting party.”

“Get to the point, Kit. What happened?”

“Someone shot at us,” Francis said. He was tilting the almost empty brandy glass in his hand, watching the little bit of liquid at the bottom slosh around. “It’s been a while since I was in that position.”

No wonder he was so out of sorts. That must have brought back bad memories, too, that he had suppressed to be able to help me with Cecily.

It hadn’t been that long for me, sadly. I still had the scar on my upper arm from late April, when a bullet had graced me. It was covered by my blouse at the moment, but I didn’t miss Crispin’s flicker of a glance at it. “Who?”

“If we knew that,” I said, “do you suppose we would be asking you?”

He lifted his upper lip in a sneer, but it was half-hearted. “I’m sure I don’t know, Darling. It was all rather unorganized out there in the woods. I know that Laetitia stuck pretty close to me. I don’t know about everyone else.”

“The Kraut?” Francis said.

I turned to him with my mouth open, ready to take umbrage, but he gave me a stern look. “We know nothing about him, Pipsqueak. Everyone else is a known entity?—”

“I don’t know half the people who are here this weekend!”

Bilge and Serena Fortescue, the Honorable Reggie Fish, and Olivia Barnsley were all total unknowns to me. And it wasn’t as if I knew Dominic Rivers well enough to think that he wouldn’t turn a gun on anyone. He was a dope peddler, so anything was possible. It was less likely that Violet Cummings would do, I supposed, but I didn’t know her well enough to be certain of her idiosyncracies, either.

“You may not,” Francis said, “but someone does. No one knows him.”

“I know him!” I said. “And he wouldn’t shoot at me. Why should he?”

“Perhaps he wasn’t shooting at you,” Christopher suggested. “Perhaps he was shooting at Francis, because of the way Francis reacted to him last night.”

Well… perhaps. Although— “That seems like a rather poor motive for murder.”

“We don’t know what someone else thinks is a reasonable motive for murder,” Christopher said, “and it might not have been attempted murder. Perhaps he shot to miss.”

“Why would he do that?”

“To scare?” Christopher suggested, with a glance at Francis. The latter was staring morosely at his brandy. “To upset someone who would get flashbacks by something like that?”

Francis grimaced.

“Or perhaps someone thought they were shooting at Cecily Fletcher,” Constance said. She had been quiet so far, so her voice came as a surprise. So did the suggestion. Crispin’s eyebrows flew up. I opened my mouth to protest, but she had already gone on. “You do look a bit alike, you know. Similar bob and hair color. From a distance, someone could mistake you for her, or vice versa.”

Crispin glanced at me and then away, his cheeks turning pink. I rolled my eyes. So he had once bedded someone who looked a bit like me. He had bedded plenty of women who didn’t look like me, as well. More of them, probably. Laetitia and I had nothing in common, for one, nor did I and Lady Violet Cummings, so it wasn’t as if it were a requirement.

“Would that be someone else trying to kill her,” Christopher ventured, oblivious to or at least purposefully ignoring his cousin’s reaction, “or the same person, not realizing that she was upstairs breathing her last?”

I shrugged. “If that’s what happened, I don’t see how it could have been Wolfgang, at any rate. He’d have had no reason to want Cecily dead.”

Crispin snorted. “I’m sure Wolfie is as innocent as the day is long.”

I bristled, but before I could say anything, he added, “At least I have an alibi. I’m sure that would be your next suggestion.”

“If you wanted to shoot anyone,” I said coldly, “I’m sure you would have potted Wolfgang in the back instead of me, St George.”

He flushed angrily. “Are you calling me a coward, Darling?”

Well, yes. I was. Not because I thought he was one—he was a well-brought-up Englishman with all the usual Anglo-Saxon morals; he would never shoot an opponent in the back—but because I knew that it would anger him. Before I could double down, however, Francis had spoken up. “Enough, Pippa. So you have no idea who might have taken a potshot at the house while you were out in the woods?”

Crispin shook his head. “Sorry, old chap. We were spread out and there were trees. It could have been anyone.”

After a second, he added, “Anyone except me. And I believe Laetitia. I had her in my sights for most of it.”

“That’s too bad,” I said with a toss of my hair. “I wouldn’t have put it past her.”

Crispin scowled. “I’m sure you wouldn’t, Darling. If you could, you’d probably pin Cecily’s death on her, too.”

I scowled back. “What do you mean, if I could? I can, quite easily.” I raised a finger. “Number one, Dominic Rivers peddles dope. Number two, someone invited him here, and for a reason. That reason might have been to get their hands on something that could kill Cecily. It wasn’t you. It’s Laetitia’s family’s house, and Laetitia’s engagement party, so she—and of course Geoffrey—are the most likely culprits.”

I waited for him to tell me that I was wrong. When he didn’t, I administered the coup de grace . “If she thought you were responsible for Cecily’s condition, and that you might have to throw her over to make an honest woman out of Cecily, she had every reason to want Cecily as well as her baby out of the way.”

“Well-reasoned, Pipsqueak,” Francis said. “Is she your number one suspect, then?”

“She’s always my number one suspect.” I had, after all, suspected her of Johanna de Vos’s murder in May and of Abigail Dole’s murder in July, as well. If she had been in London last month, I would have probably suspected her of Flossie Schlomsky’s kidnapping, too.

“It’s good to be self-aware,” Christopher told me, with a twitch of his lips.

I rolled my eyes. “I can’t help it that she always has a motive whenever anyone associated with St George is murdered.” Or kidnapped.

“I was not associated with Abigail Dole,” Crispin said, “and I’ll thank you to remember it.”

“Of course not.” I gave him a condescending smirk.

He sneered, but before he could respond, there was the sound of Laetitia’s voice from the hallway. “Crispin, love! Where are you?”

Crispin’s face took on an expression of pure panic, and I sniggered. “Better go, St George, before she comes in here and finds you fraternizing with the enemy.”

I could see his attention flick to the door in the side wall, the one leading into the study next door. But of course there was no way around it, and in credit to him, he stood his ground as Laetitia appeared in the doorway.

“There you are.”

She glided into the room, elegant even in jodhpurs and knee-high boots. Both boots and jacket were black, of course. Trailing on her heels was Wolfgang, decked out as Constance had described to me earlier, and looking better than any man has the right to. The slate gray of his jacket managed to set off both the midnight blue of his eyes and the golden blond of his hair, ruffled from the hat he was holding in one hand, and the time outside and on horseback had brought roses to his cheeks.

Francis growled and pushed his chair back. I shot him a look, but to be honest, I was too busy gazing admiringly at Wolfgang to pay him much mind.

“Philippa.” Wolfgang snatched up my hand in his free one, and bent over it.

“Wolfgang.” I gave him my best smile as, beside me, Laetitia leaned in to peck Crispin on the cheek. I suppose she might have planned to catch his lips, but either she miscalculated or he turned his head away at the last moment.

I ignored them, of course. It was none of my business. Instead, I enjoyed the pressure of Wolfgang’s warm lips on the back of my hand as I told him, “I missed you at breakfast this morning. I’m glad you found something to occupy you in my absence.”

He raised his head, but held onto my hand for a little longer than was necessary. “It was an enjoyable time.”

“Like shooting at things, do you?” Francis asked disagreeably, and Wolfgang finally let go of my hand in order to turn to him. His eyebrows lifted.

“Pardon me?”

Francis’s brows lowered in response. “I asked if you like to shoot at things.”

“I heard the question,” Wolfgang said. “What I don’t understand, was what you meant by it. It sounds as if you are implying something.”

“I’m asking,” Francis said, “whether we have you to thank for being almost killed earlier.”

“Killed?” Wolfgang looked from him to me to Christopher, and then back to me again. “Someone shot at you?”

“I’m sure it was just an accident,” I said diplomatically, while Francis snorted.

“That wasn’t what you said earlier, Pipsqueak.”

“Well, I also said I knew that it wasn’t Wolfgang, so you can’t get me that way, Francis.”

There was a beat of silence, and then Laetitia threw herself into the fray. “Connie,” she addressed her cousin, “why don’t you and Francis sit with Crispin and myself for luncheon?”

There was a question mark at the end of the sentence, but it was clearly an order, or if not quite that, a strong suggestion. “I haven’t had the chance to get to know your fiancé,” she added, with a glance at Francis.

That was partly her own fault, honestly, since every time they had been together, Crispin had been there too, and she had focused on him. But be that as it may, there was nothing Francis or Constance could do at this point, except to agree. So Laetitia latched onto Francis’s arm, leaving Crispin, perforce, to escort Constance.

Neither of them looked thrilled about that. I think Constance is a little bit afraid of Crispin, or at least she’s not as comfortable with him as she is with me or Christopher. Considering how sharp his tongue can be, it’s hard to blame her.

Not that he’d use it on Constance, of course. She’s a dainty, lovely, soft-spoken young woman, the kind you treat gently. Nonetheless, she threw me a look of abject despair over her shoulder as he tugged her away.

“Chin up, Constance,” I called after her. “If he bites you, bite back.”

Crispin curled his lip in a sneer, but didn’t rise to the bait. They passed through the door and into the hallway and left the three of us alone.

“What is this about someone shooting at you?” Wolfgang wanted to know, sternly, and I turned my attention from the now-empty doorway back to him.

“I’m certain it was nothing. A stray shot from someone in the woods that just happened to pass within a few inches of my head.” And Francis’s.

Wolfgang paled. “That close?”

“Well… within a foot, at least. But we’re all just fine now.” I smiled reassuringly. After a moment he smiled back.

“I understand one of the young women from last night has passed on?”

“Cecily Fletcher,” Christopher said. “You may have noticed her yesterday. Looked a bit like Pippa. Same brown hair. Green dress.”

“Of course.” Wolfgang turned back to me. “Did someone shoot at you in the belief that it was her?”

I smiled, pleased that he had come to this conclusion without me having to spell it out for him. “The thought crossed our minds.”

“Did you communicate with Miss Fletcher at all last night?” Christopher wanted to know, fetching up next to us after a leisurely wander across the floor.

Wolfgang shook his head. “I spent my time with Philippa.” After a second’s hesitation he added, “I noticed the young lady, of course. A pretty girl in a celery green dress, although she looked tired, or perhaps ill.”

“Both, I imagine,” I said, while Christopher added, “She was with child.”

“Ah.” Wolfgang looked enlightened.

“Your room is on the top floor,” I said, “isn’t it?”

He nodded. “Beside the two young puppies.”

Dominic Rivers and the Honorable Reggie, I assumed. “Did they bother you?”

“Not in the way you mean,” Wolfgang said. “Nothing was said. They kept me up with their coming and going, but not by anything they said.”

Nothing personal, then. Good. It was bad enough that Francis, and of course Bilge Fortescue and his wife, had been blatantly rude.

“I’m up there, too,” I said, “and I didn’t notice anyone walking around.”

“He probably means you,” Christopher told me. “You came in late. And then you entertained Crispin for a while. And then you dealt with Cecily.”

“I didn’t entertain St George.” Certainly not in that tone and with that inflection.

“That’s not what he said,” Christopher said with a smirk, one that made him look uncomfortably like his cousin.

"He’s a dirty, rotten liar, then. He was only in my room for a few minutes, and only because someone came up the stairs that he didn’t want to see him there. Then St George went downstairs and I went to the lavatory and Cecily came in and I held her hair and then put her to bed.”

“Clear as mud,” Christopher said politely. “Sounds like entertainment to me.”

In retelling it, I could see why. It sounded a bit like a French farce, didn’t it? People coming and going into and out of other people’s rooms all night long.

“Sorry,” I told Wolfgang sincerely. “I didn’t mean to keep you up.”

He clicked his heels together. “You didn’t, mein Schatz . It was the others.”

“I don’t suppose you noticed who, other than St George, spent time in Cecily’s room?”

He hesitated for a moment. “The young dark-haired man—Rivers?—walked her upstairs at the end of the dancing. He went into his room for a moment, and then into hers for a bit longer, albeit not much more than a few minutes.”

A dope delivery, perhaps. I could picture them coming up the stairs together, and Rivers asking Cecily to wait a moment while he ducked into his room to pick up whatever it was she had asked him to bring her, before crossing the hall and passing it to her.

That put Cecily on the hook for her own death, though, and while that was certainly a possibility—accidentally, I assumed—it wasn’t a thought I liked.

Then again, the idea that someone had killed her on purpose didn’t appeal, either. Nor did the idea that someone had tried to induce a miscarriage—someone other than Cecily, for their own reasons—and that it had ended up being fatal.

Truly, there was no palatable option in this whole mess. And I suppose that was the way it had to be, when a vibrant, young woman (and her unborn child) was dead.

“Anyone else?” Christopher inquired.

“Your cousin,” Wolfgang told him, with a flicker of a glance my way. “I heard a woman’s voice at one point. And I can’t swear to it that none of the other gentlemen visited, either.”

He hesitated for a second before he added, “There was a lot of traffic on the landing.”

Yes, there had been, and no, I couldn’t swear to it, either. The Honorable Reggie would have had the opportunity to stop by while Dominic Rivers was downstairs. Geoffrey Marsden had been with Lady Violet, if Nellie the maid was to be believed, but I didn’t know how long that might have lasted. Geoffrey might have walked Violet to her door and then turned around and knocked on Cecily’s on his way down. As for the woman’s voice Wolfgang had heard, that could have been me, or it could have been practically anyone else. Violet, after Geoffrey dropped her off. Laetitia, since Crispin hadn’t been with her. Olivia Barnsley, after the Honorable Reggie had gone to bed. Or Nellie, delivering the cup of tea Cecily had asked for—if she had done, and someone else hadn’t brought it to Cecily.

It might even have been the Countess Euphemia or Lady Serena Fortescue. Just because it seemed unlikely that either of them would bother to visit Cecily in her room, didn’t mean it was impossible that they had done.

Or perhaps Cecily had simply been talking to herself. That would be the simplest explanation.

I felt pretty certain that it wouldn’t have been Constance, anyway. Of everyone here, she had the weakest motive for wanting Cecily out of the way. There was no possibility that Francis had got Cecily in the family way, and no way he would have killed her if he had. And if he hadn’t, then Constance had no motive, either.

“Is there a reason to think it wasn’t an accident?” Christopher wanted to know. “I know Crispin said otherwise, but he might be wrong.”

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “I didn’t get the impression, when I saw her yesterday, that it was something she had done to herself. She didn’t mention having taken anything on purpose. But I suppose it’s possible. It’s not something she necessarily would have mentioned to me. We weren’t friends, and she might have been concerned about the way I would react.”

“She might have done it and not realized how bad it would be,” Christopher said.

Perhaps. Although it still seemed to me that it was something a woman would do at home, not in someone else’s house during an engagement party.

Christopher nodded. “Unless, as discussed earlier, she was doing it to make a point.”

“What point would that be, though? St George said he hadn’t had relations with her since February. It couldn’t have been his child.”

Wolfgang was looking from Christopher to me and back, watching as we batted ideas back and forth between us like two people who are used to discussing things rapid-fire.

“Perhaps I wasn’t talking about St George,” Christopher said.

Oh, really? “Who, then? Geoffrey?”

“He does have a way of getting around,” Christopher said apologetically.

Yes, of course he did. “He spent yesterday evening tangled up with Lady Violet Cummings. Do you think Cecily would have stood for that if she were carrying Geoffrey’s child?”

Christopher made a face. “Depends on how she felt about him, I suppose. Personally, I would have been happy to have someone take Geoffrey off my hands.”

So would I, now that he mentioned it.

“How do you know that Geoffrey was exercising his wiles on Lady Violet last night?” Christopher added.

“Nellie told me,” I said. “The maid. She said Geoffrey was in the garden with Lady Violet, and Olivia Barnsley was somewhere with the Honorable Reggie. Cecily was in her bedchamber with Dominic Rivers.”

“Which is a bit suspicious, don’t you think?”

That Cecily had had a private meeting with a known dope dealer just before she ended up dead from a suspected overdose? Yes, I would have to say so. “It might have been innocent. Perhaps he’s the baby’s father. Or perhaps she wanted a vial of bismuth.”

“If she wanted bismuth,” Christopher said, “she could have gone to any corner chemist. Bismuth isn’t controlled.”

No. But pennyroyal isn’t, either. In fact, pennyroyal grows wild all over the place. Anyone with access to an AGA cooker can make a pot of pennyroyal tea, as long as they know where to find the leaves.

I tried to imagine Geoffrey, stalk in hand, wandering into the Marsden Manor kitchen to brew up a dose of lethal poison to feed to Cecily Fletcher, and drew a blank. Someone would have seen him, surely. The staff would have said something to someone, and the news would have been all over the manor by now if Geoffrey had been messing about in the kitchen.

Could he have asked someone to do it for him? Handed them a handful of leaves and asked them to turn it into tea?

That made more sense. Or did it? Someone would have mentioned that, too, wouldn’t they? Unless he had sworn someone to secrecy, of course, but if Cecily had been murdered, that someone wasn’t likely to keep it to themselves forever. People don’t tend to keep things to themselves when murder is concerned. Not unless they’re on the hook for it themselves.

Or perhaps Crispin was simply wrong, and Cecily had done this to herself. Having a child out of wedlock isn’t something a well-bred young lady should aspire to, not even in our modern day and age. Perhaps the gentleman had rejected her, or wasn’t someone she could see herself being married to.

If the gentleman in question was Lord Geoffrey Marsden, that would explain—or would at least go some way towards explaining—why this had happened here at Marsden Manor, and not in the privacy of Cecily’s own flat. And it certainly made sense that she wouldn’t want to marry him, since he would undoubtedly keep on bedding anything that moved even after he was married. Especially if the marriage was forced on him by an unexpected pregnancy.

No, that all made an unfortunate amount of sense. But then the pennyroyal had turned out to be too strong, and Cecily had died instead of simply ridding herself of the unwanted pregnancy.

It was a terrible outcome, of course, but it explained everything. And all I had to do to square it in my head, was disregard Crispin’s assertion that Cecily wouldn’t.

But then again, what did Crispin know? Until last night, by his own admission, he hadn’t had anything to do with her in months.

“I think you ought to leave the detecting to the constabulary, Philippa,” Wolfgang said, and I blinked and looked up at him. He smiled, and added, persuasively, “What’s more likely, after all? That it was an accident, or that it was murder? That someone shot at you deliberately, or that someone had a misfire?”

It was much likelier that someone had a misfire, I supposed. There was no reason why anyone would shoot at me, after all. More likely that someone would have shot at Cecily. But that only made sense if the pennyroyal poisoning had been deliberate. If that had been an accident, the shooting was no doubt accidental, as well. And Wolfgang seemed to want my attention, so I shoved all the questions and all the speculation into the back of my head and smiled up at him. “Luncheon must be ready by now. Shall we go and partake?”

He smiled back. “Let us do so.”

Christopher headed for the door, and left Wolfgang with the job of offering me his arm and escorting me out of the room and down the hall towards the formal dining room.