Page 13 of Blackmail at Beckwith Place
He was reclining in a chair to the side of the table, and like his sister, looked just as good as he had the last time I laid eyes on him. He may be a cad, but he’s a handsome cad. Like his sister, he has sleek, black hair, bright blue eyes, and a perfect nose and teeth. Which were all on display right now, in a lecherous grin.
“Lord Geoffrey,” I said politely. “How simply spiffing to see you again.”
It wasn’t, of course. If I never saw Geoffrey Marsden again for as long as I lived, it wouldn’t be too soon.
At this point Francis came back from upstairs, and clapped Crispin on the shoulder as he crossed the floor towards Constance and the Chesterfield. “You’re bunking with me, old chap.”
Crispin’s upper lip curled. “Charmed, I’m sure.”
“It was me or Pippa,” Francis told him, as he took his seat next to Constance and appropriated her hand. Crispin’s gaze flickered to me for a second before settling back on Francis again, as the latter finished, “and we decided that her reputation is in safer hands with Kit than with you. No offense.”
“None taken,” Crispin said, “although given the way she just schooled me, I don’t think there’s any danger that I’d compromise her.”
Francis chortled. “What did you do now, Pipsqueak?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just a bit of tit for tatting for something St George did to me last month.”
After a moment I continued, “I’ve known you all since I was a girl, you know. I wouldn’t worry about sharing a room with any of you.”
Crispin’s brows arched at this, and I added, “Yes, even you, St George. But Christopher and I are either misbehaving already, in which case that particular horse has already left the barn and there’s no point in keeping us apart, or we’re never going to misbehave, and it’s safe to put us in a room together. You, on the other hand, have a bit of a reputation?—”
He looked somewhere between gratified and appalled.
“—and while you don’t worry me, I’d rather not be known as one more of Crispin Astley’s conquests. I’ll just stick with Christopher if it’s all the same to you.”
“Delighted,” Christopher said, as if this hadn’t all been worked out a long time ago.
The Earl and Countess looked from one to the other of us as if we had all sprouted extra heads. I wondered whether they were so oblivious to their own children’s lives that they had no idea that Geoffrey’s reputation was at least equal to, if not worse than, Crispin’s, and that Laetitia had long since lost any semblance of propriety, or whether they were simply pretending.
After a beat, Countess Marsden turned to Aunt Roz. “Roslyn, my dear…”
Aunt Roz blinked and then straightened. “Of course, Euphemia. I forgot you haven’t met the rest of our children. This is my youngest son Christopher, and my niece, Philippa. Annabelle’s daughter.”
Her Grace’s glance flickered for a moment to a painting on the opposite wall. I didn’t turn to look at it, although Crispin did. “That’s right. That’s your mother, isn’t it, Darling?”
When I nodded, he jumped up from the arm of Laetitia’s chair—she pouted prettily—and skirted the Chesterfield with Francis and Constance on it for a closer look. “Which one?”
“Aunt Roz is on the left,” I said, “my mother on the right.”
Aunt Roslyn was born in 1874 and my mother a couple of years later. The painting was from circa 1890, when they were both young ladies in proper Victorian dress. Aunt Roz’s hair was long and piled on top of her head with little curls framing her face—not too dissimilar to the way she looked now, actually, with her bobbed brown locks—while my mother’s hair fell around her shoulders in fat ringlets from each side of a center part. They were both dressed in ruffled summer frocks with tiny waists and puffed sleeves, and they both stared out of the canvas with identical blue eyes and solemn expressions.
“We had to stand still for hours,” Aunt Roz told Crispin, with her eyes on the portrait, “and Annabelle hated it. She wanted to run and climb trees and wade in the brook and poke wasps’ nests…”
Crispin sniggered. “Sounds like you, Darling.”
I thought about making a face at him, but he was right: it did sound like me. I’m not terribly fond of sitting still even now, and I had done my best to keep up with him and Christopher, and with Francis and Robbie, when we were younger.
“You look like her,” he added after a moment, eyes back on the portrait. “At least what I can remember from this age.”
Aunt Roz nodded. “Very much so. Although you have your father’s eyes, Pippa. Annabelle’s were blue.”
And mine are green. Not blue-green, either, but the verdant side of hazel.
The Countess cleared her throat delicately. “So sad, what happened to Annabelle.”
I could see an almost imperceptible tightening in my aunt’s lips, but her voice was perfectly even when she said, “Thank you, Euphemia. The influenza epidemic stole so many lives, especially just after the war had already taken such a toll on our families.”
From the expression on the Countess’s face, I deduced that my mother’s death during the influenza epidemic of 1919 wasn’t what she had been referring to. It was more likely to be the scandal of my mother’s mad dash to the Continent some twenty years prior, and her subsequent marriage to a very unsuitable commoner with no title and no fortune—and a German to boot, which became a sin punishable by death a decade and a half later, when the war started.
