Page 24 of Peril in Piccadilly
“I fail to see whyI’dbe such a terrible wife,” I said with an offended sniff.
Not to Crispin, obviously. I didn’t want to marry Crispin. I just didn’t like to be told that I wasn’t good enough for him.
Most of Crispin’s conquests had been higher-born, admittedly—Lady Laetitia Marsden, Lady Violet Cummings, the Honorable Cecily Fletcher, and the Honorable Gladys Long. Even Millicent Tremayne was the granddaughter of someone or other. On the other hand, I wasn’t as objectionable as that waitress he had dallied with back in June. I was young, healthy, and reasonably attractive. My hips weren’t any skinnier than Laetitia’s, and she was expected to produce children. I was the ward of the brother of the Duke of Sutherland, and my mother had been an Honorable. It wasn’t as if I were a street urchin.
“It’s the German thing,” Christopher said apologetically.
Yes, of course it was. Although it wasn’t as if my country of origin wasmyfault. I hadn’t asked my mother to marry a foreigner, nor had I asked to be born. If Francis, who had fought the Boche, could forgive me for my birth, then surely Uncle Harold, who hadn’t lifted a finger in defense of his country, should be able to do the same. Half of me was very respectably English. And if Crispin didn’t mind?—
At that point, my brain rebelled, as it was borne in upon me just how much Crispin apparently didn’t mind.
I shook my head, as if to dislodge the thought. “You can’t be serious about this.Hecan’t be serious about this. It must be a joke. Otherwise, it’s… it’s madness, Christopher!”
“Believe me,” Christopher said, “I have told him so. More than once. How he imagined he was going to win you over behaving the way he does is beyond me.”
“That’s not…” I shook my head in frustration. “Never mind. Just… let us never speak of it again, please. I won’t bring it up, and you won’t either.”
“Fine by me,” Christopher said easily. “It brings me no pleasure to imagine my cousin and my other cousin going at it like rabbits.”
My face puckered. “That’s foul, Christopher. I beg you won’t put that kind of image in my head again.”
“It’s in mine,” Christopher said, “and you can’t blame me for wanting to share the misery.”
I absolutely could, and told him so. “All of this aside, I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t have tea with Wolfgang later. St George is marrying Laetitia, and wouldn’t have been allowed to marry me anyway, and that’s assuming I would have wanted to marry him…”
Christopher opened his mouth, and I waved him off. “I might as well reconsider Wolfgang’s proposal in this new light. Perhaps going off to Germany with him would be the best thing for everyone.”
It would keep me from gnashing my teeth for the next half-century while I watched Laetitia make herself at home as mistress of Sutherland Hall. And if Christopher wasn’t pulling my leg and Crispin truly did have more than familial feelings for me, getting out of his way so he could find whatever happiness he could with a woman he didn’t love, might be the kindest thing I could do for him.
“Not for me,” Christopher said.
Well, no. Of course not for him. But— “Do you foresee us staying together for the rest of our lives, Christopher?”
Didn’t he want a life and a relationship of his own at some point? With someone like—say—Tom Gardiner?
“I foresaw you doing as you promised,” Christopher said severely, “and marry me if we are both still single at thirty.”
Well, yes. I had promised that, hadn’t I? Although that had been before anyone else had wanted to marry me. Or at least before I had known about it.
“After all,” Christopher added, “it’s the only way I’m likely to get an heir, isn’t it?”
An heir? “I didn’t know you cared about having an heir.”
He huffed. “A child, then. You know Mum and Dad care about grandchildren.”
“Of course. But surely Francis and Constance have that in hand? If anyone has child-bearing hips, it’s Constance.”
“Now, now,” Christopher said, albeit not without a twitch of his lips, “don’t be unkind, Pippa.”
“I’m not being unkind. I love Constance. But you have to admit that she’s not exactly the Roaring Twenties ideal of woman.”
Quite unlike Lady Laetitia, who had the appeal of the decade down to an art.
Constance had the bobbed hair and the lipstick, of course. Everyone did these days. But she was an old-fashioned girl in that all she wanted to do, was marry Francis and settle into being a wife and mother. No cocktail parties and cigarettes for Constance.
And yes, her hips were more ample than my own, and for that matter than Laetitia’s. Everything about Constance was soft and warm. She’d be a wonderful mother when the time came.
“I suppose,” Christopher admitted, a bit reluctantly. I could tell that he still felt as if he were being disloyal to his brother’s fiancée.
