Page 30 of Peril in Piccadilly
“Not aside from yourself,” the doorman said with a little bow. “Although theGrafvon Natterdorff is no longer a guest at the Savoy, of course.”
“No longer…?” I blinked, while the thoughts reordered themselves in my head. “How long… I mean, when… where did he go?”
“I was not informed of the gentleman’s current whereabouts,” the doorman said.
“When did he leave?”
He thought back. “The gentleman stayed with us for approximately two weeks before he left again. That was at the end of August.”
Was it, really?
I had met Wolfgang a week or two into August, while having tea with Christopher at the Savoy. He had recognized me across the lobby and half the tearoom, not to mention across the best part of two decades, and had stopped by our table to introduce himself. And I had run into him again by coincidence a week or so later, so he must still have been staying at the Savoy then, or he wouldn’t have had a reason to loiter in the lobby. But the times we had seen one another since then, he had lived elsewhere, it seemed.
During the engagement party in Dorset last month, he had lived elsewhere.
When he proposed to me in the Great Hall at Marsden Manor, he had lived elsewhere.
Last night, during supper at the Criterion, he had lived elsewhere.
At no point had he said anything about it.
And that wasn’t all: this morning, when the note had arrived inviting me to tea, it had had the Savoy logo in the corner.
“He must have taken a supply of stationary with him when he left,” Christopher said an hour later, when I was back home and was sitting on the edge of my bed, watching him put on his face in my toilet table mirror.
“That’s obvious,” I answered. How he had come to have the stationary wasn’t the concern here. The fact that he had been using it was. Or the fact that he had taken it with him with malice aforethought, perhaps. Part of a plan to do… something.
“Why wouldn’t he tell me that he had moved somewhere else?” I continued. “Why make it look like he was still staying at the Savoy?”
“Perhaps he was ashamed,” Christopher said. He leaned forward to perfect the curve of his right eyebrow. His eyes met mine in the mirror. “Perhaps he couldn’t afford the Savoy any longer, and he didn’t want you to know about it.”
“That’s silly,” I said. “He’s theGrafvon Natterdorff. Of course he can afford it.”
Christopher arched his drawn-on brows. “How do you know this? Have you contacted Germany and inquired about the state of the Natterdorff holdings? Things are tough in Germany these days, you know.”
Of course I knew that, and no, I hadn’t inquired. Christopher continued, triumphantly, “You don’t even know that thereisa Natterdorff estate!”
“Wolfgang told me—” I began, and then stopped when Christopher quirked another brow. “Why would he lie to me, Christopher?”
“Why would he move out of the Savoy and not tell you?”
There was nothing I could say to that, of course, since it was the crux of the problem. Christopher waved an expansive hand, the one with the eyebrow-pencil in it. “I don’t know why he’d lie, Pippa. Perhaps he didn’t do. Perhaps the Natterdorff estate is doing very well indeed, but he simply didn’t want to live in a hotel forever. Perhaps it wasn’t about cost but about comfort.”
“But the Savoy Hotel is comfortable, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’m sure it is,” Christopher said. “The Schlomskys certainly had a very nice suite. So perhaps it wasn’t about cost or comfort, but about privacy. Perhaps he simply wanted a space of his own.”
Perhaps so. There’s not much privacy in a hotel, with maids coming and going at all times of the day and night. Then again, that describes every noble house in England, and probably in Germany too, so he ought to be used to it.
“What do you suppose he’s doing, for which he requires privacy?”
“The same thing every young man does,” Christopher sighed, “I presume.”
“Carousing? Women, wine, and song?”
“I suppose,” Christopher said, and then seemed to think better of it. “No, wait. He proposed to you. There wouldn’t be any of that. Or oughtn’t to be, at any rate.”
Certainly not. However?—
