Page 39 of Peril in Piccadilly
He glanced around the room, having already—of course—guessed what might be coming.
“Nothing,” I said. “We’ve come to take you home.”
Christopher’s eyes narrowed and his jaw set stubbornly. But before he could inform us that he didn’t want to go home—because that opinion was absolutely coming—his dance partner got involved.
“What’s all this, then?” He squared his shoulders. Tom gave him a narrow look—it’s a classic question for any constable to ask, after all, so perhaps Tom wanted to ascertain that the chap wasn’t a policeman here undercover—but they must not know one another, because other than a perfectly natural few seconds of mutual glaring, nothing indicated previous acquaintance.
Having made his dislike plain, Tom turned his attention back to Christopher. “Time to go, Kit.”
“What if I don’t want to go?” Christopher asked. He folded his arms across his front and stuck his bottom lip out, sulkily.
“Yes,” his dance partner nodded, and shoved his shoulder between Christopher and Tom. “What if he doesn’t want to go?”
Tom’s eyes narrowed, and so did the other bloke’s. By now, other people had started to notice the four of us standing stock still in the middle of the dancefloor, and we were getting a bit of an audience.
I rolled my eyes and leaned closer to Christopher. “Do you really want him—either one of them—to prove his devotion with a fistfight in the middle of an illicit club full of boys in makeup and dresses? You know what will happen if the police show up.”
He didn’t answer, just watched Tom and the other chap squaring up, and I added, “Everyone in the room gets hauled off to jail, Christopher. Including you and me. We’ll have to apply to your father for bail money. And what do you imagine happens to Tom if Pendennis learns that he got into a bloody boxing match in a place like this? Over you?”
Christopher’s lips parted for a moment—perhaps he contemplated the idea and decided he liked it; something like that would certainly allay whatever concerns he had about Tom’s feelings, wouldn’t it?—but after a moment he glanced over at me. “We’d have to say that he did it for you, I suppose.”
“So we’d lie, is what you’re saying. You, I, and Tom get arrested for indecent behavior in an illicit establishment operating without a license—I see liquor, Christopher; I’m sure there’s no license for that—and we lie about what Tom’s doing here? And you think that’s fair to him?”
He didn’t answer, and I gave him a push. “Just agree to leave. I don’t want to say the word out loud for fear of causing a panic, but it starts with an R and ends with a D, and there have been several of them already.”
Christopher’s eyes widened, and I continued, “It isn’t certain that there’ll be another tonight, but Tom was able to dig up this location, so it’s likely that someone is keeping an eye on it. If tonight passes without any trouble, and Lady Austin decides it’s safe to come back next time, I’m sure it won’t be equally safe then.”
Christopher nodded. His eyes flickered over the room once before they returned to me. “Very well, then. I suppose if I don’t come along quietly, Tom will manhandle me out of here?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “He would never lay a hand on you, and you know it.”
“You didn’t see what happened in April,” Christopher retorted. “He threw me over his shoulder and hauled me out, kicking and screaming.”
My lips twitched. There had been an equal amount annoyance and shivery delight in his voice when he said it, which made me want to smile. Instead of doing so, I told him, “We ought perhaps to try to avoid that this time. The less attention on us, the better.”
Christopher nodded. “If there’s going to be a…” He hesitated, “a you-know-what later, I don’t feel good about leaving everyone else here to be swept up in it, Pippa.”
No, of course not. “But if you start yelling about it, you’ll start a riot, and we definitely don’t want that.”
“Definitely not,” Tom agreed. He wrapped a hand around Christopher’s wrist. “Come along, Kit.”
I waited for the chap Christopher had been dancing with to object, but Tom must have cowed him sufficiently, because when I glanced over my shoulder to where he had been standing, there was no sign of him.
“You too, Pippa,” Tom added, as he tugged Christopher towards the door. “Chop-chop.”
I gave one last look to where the other bloke had been standing before I scurried after them.
“Coming.”
We gota few stares on our way out—more because of me than either Tom or Christopher, I thought; I suppose my type wasn’t usually seen here—but no one tried to stop us. Tom shoved the door open and pulled Christopher through, and I caught it on the backswing and followed. The chap in the deerstalker arched a brow when he saw Tom— “Back so soon?”—and then lowered both when he saw Christopher. “Problem, Kitty?”
“Not for me,” Christopher said calmly, but with a flirtatious flick of his wig. “He’s ever so masterful, don’t you know?”
The tops of Tom’s cheekbones darkened, and I giggled. Christopher smirked and added, “Although you may want to close down early tonight.”
“Is that so?” The eyebrows rose again, and the doorman examined Tom a bit more closely. “Know something we don’t, do you?”
“We don’t know anything for certain,” I said, to take some of the pressure off Tom. He was caught between a rock and a hard place, poor chap: on the one hand, he wanted Christopher (and to give him the benefit of the doubt, me) safely out of the Cave of the Golden Calf before anything happened, but on the other hand, he didn’t want to totally botch a police operation, either, or so I assumed. Every other time this had happened, I supposed he had simply lain in wait so he could remove Christopher from the line of fire at an opportune moment. Here, we were practically forcing him to out himself as a police officer, as well as to give the potential arrestees advance warning of an upcoming raid, and it couldn’t have been easy. “Just forget we were here, please.”
