Page 36 of Evil at the Essex House
Inside was a single sheet of paper, also with the hotel logo in the corner and a few lines of script in the same elegant handwriting.
Miss Darling, it began, with no warmer greeting than that—with no greeting at all, in fact. I lowered my brows. That certainly didn’t bode well.
Please cometo the Savoy Hotel at your first convenience.
Sarah Schlomsky.
“That doesn’t sound good,”Christopher opined when I showed it to him a minute later.
I shook my head. “How long before you can be ready to go?”
“You want me to accompany you? I’m not included in the invitation.”
“You went with me when I was meeting Wolfgang,” I said. “You can come with me now.”
“That was different. That was supper with a foreigner we didn’t know.”
“This is a meeting with two foreigners we don’t know. How do we even know for certain that they’re the Schlomskys? They said they were, but we have no proof. Maybe they’re planning to kidnap me and sell me into white slavery.”
Christopher squinted at me. “Surely you’re not serious?”
“Of course not. I’m sure they are exactly who they say they are. Why wouldn’t they be? But we don’t know anything more about them than we do about Wolfgang von Natterdorff, really.”
“Do the parents look like Flossie?” Christopher wanted to know. “Or I guess a more accurate question would be, does Flossie look like her parents?”
I thought back. “Not appreciably, I’d say. It’s not a case where you’d look at either of them and say, oh yes, that’s definitely Flossie’s mama or Flossie’s papa. Not the way you would with Lady Laetitia and the Countess of Marsden, for instance. The countess is the very image of what Laetitia will look like in twenty-five years.”
And she would still be lovely at fifty-plus. At least St George would have that to look forward to. A wife who kept her good looks well into middle age.
“But it’s not as if Florence’s parents didn’t look like her,” I added. “No more than you don’t look like your mother, at least.”
“Even if they looked completely different, it wouldn’t prove anything,” Christopher agreed. “Not all children are of their parents’ heritage. Some are adopted. Some belong to one spouse and not the other. Or some simply favor one parent more than the other. Francis and I don’t look much like Mum at all. Crispin, at least, got Aunt Charlotte’s hair and eyes, even if the rest of him is all Sutherland.”
I nodded. “So how long before we can go?”
He put the cup down on the counter. “I’m more awake than I was. Let me change and shave and deal with the hair. Fifteen minutes?”
“I’ll go get ready,” I said, and headed for my room while Christopher made for the shared washroom in the hallway.
It took morethan fifteen minutes, but we were underway in less than thirty, and at the Savoy thirty minutes after that. The lobby looked exactly as it had two evenings before, when I had been there. Same checkerboard marble floor, same wood-paneled walls, same gold topped columns, and the same high, coffered ceiling. It’s quite beautiful, in case I neglected to mention that, and of course it all practically oozes wealth and privilege. The concierge gave our approach the fishy stare it deserved, but then he did a double-take when we got close enough that he could recognize—or thought he did—Christopher.
His eyes widened. “Lord St George. Welcome back to the Savoy. How may I assist you today?”
Christopher opened his mouth, presumably to deny that he was his cousin, and I elbowed him in the ribs. Gently, of course. (I wouldn’t have held back with the real St George.) “We’re here to see Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Schlomsky.”
The concierge eyed me, and then eyed Christopher, and then eyed me again, before he reached for the telephone and rang upstairs to inform the Schlomskys that we had arrived.
Two minutes later, we were welcomed into the most expensive suite the Savoy had to offer. Or at least I assumed that Hiram Schlomsky would not have been willing to settle for anything less. Unless, perhaps, His Grace theGrafvon Natterdorff had taken up residence in the best suite before Hiram had had a chance to do so, and had relegated the Schlomskys to sloppy seconds. Crispin had interrupted the proceedings before Wolfgang had had the chance to invite me upstairs the other day, always assuming that that had been his plan, so I didn’t actually know where theGrafwas staying.
The suite was lovely, in any case. The Schlomskys were not. When we knocked on the door, Sarah Schlomsky peered out at us through the crack with wide, terror-filled eyes, as if she had expected to see something horrible outside, instead of the two people she had been reliably told were on their way up. And even as she swung the door open, and closed it again—after peering up and down the hallway behind us—Hiram Schlomsky paced back and forth in front of the big windows with the view of the Thames and the South Bank on the opposite side rapidly enough that I was honestly surprised there was no path carved in the sumptuous rug covering the floor.
“Mrs. Schlomsky,” I said when the door was closed. “Mr. Schlomsky. May I present my cousin, Mr. Christopher Astley?”
The Schlomskys had met in the middle of the floor, halfway between the door and the window, and now they looked from me to Christopher and back again. “The fellow downstairs said he was a viscount,” Hiram Schlomsky said.
“The chap downstairs mistook me for my other cousin,” Christopher answered calmly. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to explain this, after all. “Crispin is the heir. I’m His Grace’s youngest nephew.”
They both blinked without saying anything, and I decided I might as well carry the conversation forward. There was no point in going into the intricacies of the Sutherland succession. “What’s wrong?”
