Page 2 of Evil at the Essex House
Christopher glanced at me, question in his eyes. I glanced back. If I had ever seen the Count before, it was news to me.
“It was many years ago,” the latter said. “Perhaps you were too young to remember.”
He couldn’t be more than a couple of years older than me—maybe three or four at most—so if I had been young, he hadn’t been much older when—if—we’d met.
“You look very much like your mother,” he added, “but you have your father’s eyes.”
Christopher shot me another look. I didn’t return it this time, although I knew what he wanted. Yes, theGrafwas correct. I looked like my mother had done at my age, but instead of her blue eyes, I had inherited my father’s green ones.
And if he knew that?—
“You knew my family?”
He sighed. “Alas. It was terrible, what happened.”
Yes, it had been. When war broke out, my father had been conscripted for the German army. My mother had refused to leave him, but had sent me to her sister in England for safety. My father had died in the trenches, and my mother had succumbed to the Spanish Influenza the year after the Armistice. By then, I had settled into the Astley family as if I had always been a part of it. Losing both my parents before I was eighteen had been difficult, of course, but not as difficult as if I had been alone in a war-ravaged Germany when it happened. I was surrounded by people who loved me, I had surrogate parents in Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert, and surrogate brothers in Francis and Christopher. Losing Robert during the war had been as hard as if he had been my own sibling. So compared to some, I was very lucky indeed.
“And you?” I asked politely. “Did you come through the war unscathed?”
He shot me a look, a quick flash of blue. “I was too young for conscription. My father was too old.”
He’d have to be under twenty-seven, then, unless the Germans had had different rules for their conscription than the English. Here, my cousins Robert and Francis had gone to war, at eighteen and twenty respectively. No one younger than Robert had been conscripted, although I had heard that lads as young as fourteen had enlisted, more or less voluntarily, some of them under duress from the White Feather Brigade.
TheGrafhadn’t mentioned his mother, but I didn’t think I ought to pry, so I said nothing about the omission. Instead, I asked, “When did we meet?”
He eyed me for a moment. “You were very small. Perhaps five or six. A little girl in a white pinafore with a white bow in your hair.”
Quite a long time ago, then. I had some memories of being that age in Germany, but not many. He would have been seven or eight, I suppose. Perhaps a bit more likely to remember the incident than I was.
“And how did it come to be?”
“My parents and I visited you and your parents in Heidelberg,”GrafWolfgang said.
And that clinched it, because if he knew that I had spent my formative years in Heidelberg, he must have actually known my family back then. Or so it seemed, anyway.
“I’m afraid I can’t recall meeting you,” I said apologetically.
He nodded. “My apologies for intruding.”
He pushed the chair back. I had my mouth open to tell him that he didn’t have to leave just because I couldn’t remember having seen him before—he was welcome to stay and tell me more about it; I wasn’t trying to get rid of him—but then he added, “Perhaps it would be possible for me to call upon you sometime when you are not having tea with another gentleman?”
“Oh,” I said, with a glance across the table at Christopher, “he’s not?—”
Christopher arched his brows, and I trailed off.
“Go on,” he told me, smirking. “I’m not what, darling?”
“Don’t do that,” I told him. “You look and sound much too much like your cousin when you look at me like that and call me that.”
He chuckled. “Sorry, Pippa. But what is it I’m not?”
“Nothing.” Because of course he was a gentleman—fourth in line for the dukedom, after his cousin, father, and older brother—and he was also, indubitably, here.
All I had meant to say was that he didn’t count, that I wasn’t having tea with a gentleman in the sense thatGrafWolfgang had to vacate the premises to leave us alone… but that all became much too convoluted to try to explain, so I gave up. “Of course you may,” I told theGrafinstead. “We live at the Essex House Mansion flats on Essex Street. If I’m not there, you can leave a message with the commissionaire—his name is Evans—and he’ll make sure I get it.”
GrafWolfgang nodded and clicked his heels together. “Freulein.” He turned to Christopher and did it again. “Mein Herr.”
“A pleasure,” Christopher drawled, and managed, yet again, to remind me uncomfortably of his cousin Crispin, who drawls and smirks and arches his brows rather an excessive amount (if not in response to handsome young men).
