Page 3 of Blackmail at Beckwith Place
“Won’t you and… um… Bess come upstairs, where we can talk privately?”
Both Evans and Flossie were unabashedly listening, and so was the young lady in blue. Abigail glanced from one to the other with a flush. “I’m here to see Mr. Astley.”
“Christopher isn’t in,” I explained. “But if you’ll come upstairs with me, we can have tea and a biscuit while we wait for him to come home.”
She took a step back. “I don’t think…”
I took one forward. “It’s perfectly all right, I assure you.”
“I just wanted to see Mr. Astley?—”
“I have photographs,” I said, inspired, “although honestly, if you’ve seen Crispin—and you have, haven’t you? Seen Lord St George?”
She took another step back, still clutching the baby. “Yes, I…” Her cheeks flushed. “I have seen Lord St George.”
I smiled winningly. “Well, then you’ve pretty much seen Christopher. They look enough alike—” at least to someone who doesn’t know them well, “—that if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen the other.”
Beside me, Flossie nodded.
“I have to go,” Abigail Dole said and turned on her heel.
And that was that. I ended up standing in the middle of the foyer, my mouth open and my hand raised, while she fled through the door into the street, the baby gurgling and bouncing in her arms as she scurried away from me.
The door shut behind her with abang, and I dropped my hand and blinked.
“Well, I never!” Flossie said. Her expression was caught somewhere between appalled and avid. “Was that…?”
I shook my head, more to clear it than in response to the question she hadn’t quite got out. “We don’t know. She never sticks around for long enough that anyone can find out.”
She slanted me a look. “You’ve seen her before?”
“Ihaven’t,” I said. “But she’s been at Sutherland House, so I knew of her existence.”
I turned to Evans while Florence and her friend exchanged a look. “You’ve never seen her before, have you, Evans?”
Evans shook his head. “No, Miss Darling.”
So she hadn’t come to the Essex House looking for Christopher before. And—although it probably doesn’t need to be said—a year or year and a half ago, whenever little Bess must have been conceived, Christopher and I lived at Beckwith Place in Wiltshire, and she had never, to my knowledge, been seen there, either.
Back then, Crispin lived—as he still did—at Sutherland Hall. His grandfather and his mother had both been alive then, along with Uncle Harold. But even during that time St George had been in the habit of traveling up to Town for occasional weekends of debauchery. The fall of 1924 was a few months after he’d come down from Cambridge, and that was when the infamous treasure hunts had been all over the newspapers.
And Francis, of course, lived at Beckwith Place, but he also traveled up to Town from time to time. He had friends from the war, as well as from school, who lived here, and there had also been a period in Francis’s life where he had spent rather more time than he should have in debauchery. Not Crispin’s juvenile carousing, either, but rather darker stuff that included a lot less fun and games and a lot more drinking and doping himself into oblivion. It was not impossible that Francis, during one of those periods, had met this girl, and bedded her, and forgotten all about it afterwards.
And she wasn’t really Crispin’s type, any more than she was Christopher’s. Crispin likes girls, yes—likes them a lot—but to my knowledge, he preferred girls from the Bright Young Set, flashy and modern, with privilege and money of their own. Not this pitiful waif in her outmoded dress with her tired eyes.
Part of me noticed, but tried hard not to dwell on, the fact that Abigail Dole looked quite a lot like Constance Peckham, the girl who had turned Francis’s head. Dainty and pretty in a soft and old-fashioned way, with the same brown hair and big eyes.
“Let me know if she comes back, will you, Evans?”
I turned to the lift without paying Florence any mind, although I could feel her eyes, and those of her friend, boring into my back as I disappeared inside the box without a word.
CHAPTERTWO
“That’s unfortunate,”was Christopher’s reaction when he made it home later that evening, and I told him about the girl’s sudden appearance and equally sudden disappearance before I could get anything useful out of her.
I nodded. “It’s a shame you weren’t home. Maybe she would have let something slip with you that she didn’t with me.”
“I can’t imagine what,” Christopher said. “It’s much more likely that she would have taken one look at me and run, the way she did with you. I’m not who she’s looking for either, you know.”
