Page 48 of Peril in Piccadilly
Nor should she. She did, in fact, look all right, but ‘well’ might be overstating the fact. I knew that it had taken several weeks before she had been able to get out of bed at all, weeks during which everyone who knew her had believed that she would never wake up again, and if by some miracle she did, she wouldn’t be the girl she had been.
She had been as slim as a snake even before the incident. Now she was downright bony, her eyes were enormous over too-prominent cheekbones, and her skin had an unhealthy pallor. She hadn’t taken the time to take care of her hair during the time she’d been bedbound, because there was a quarter inch of visible roots at the bottom of her pale blond hair. But she was dressed in a pretty afternoon frock, with her face on, and sitting upright at a table in the parlor, receiving guests, and that couldn’t be overstated.
“I’m sure someone has told you what happened in the aftermath…?” I added.
She had missed Cecily’s funeral, of course, as well as Dominic Rivers’s ditto.
She nodded. “The girl’s in prison. Geoffrey is waiting for the next Assizes.”
Precisely. “And you? How do you feel?”
“Better,” Violet said decisively. “Still weak and I tire easily, but better every day.”
“That’s wonderful.” I glanced at Christopher across the table. He glanced back at me, deadpan. I guessed it was up to me to carry on.
I turned back to Violet. “I don’t know whether you’ve heard from Lady Laetitia lately…?”
“She stopped by,” Violet said, and put a red-painted nail to her red-painted lips as she looked up at the ceiling, “perhaps a week ago?”
“Then you haven’t heard the news.”
“What news?” She smiled, just a bit wickedly, and her tired eyes sparkled. “Don’t tell me. She’s decided to throw Crispin over and take vows?”
I snorted. “Hardly.” The day Laetitia Marsden entered a convent was the day pigs flew over Nottingham. “No, they’re still together. Dining at the Criterion Restaurant just the other night.”
“Then I’m afraid I simply can’t imagine.” She raised her teacup, pinky extended delicately.
“The Sutherland diamonds are gone,” I said. “A burglary early yesterday morning.”
Her eyes widened and the tea must have gone down the wrong way, because she choked and began coughing. After a moment of watching, Christopher got up and thumped her on the back. Carefully, of course, since she appeared as if a gentle breeze could knock her down. When she had stopped gasping, he conjured a handkerchief from his pocket and held it out to her so she could mop at her streaming eyes.
“Thank you.”
She dabbed them dry. Christopher stuffed the pocket square back into his trousers, but we both knew it was a lost cause; the mascara would have transferred to the silk square, and we would have to throw it away once we left Cummings House. There’s simply no way to get petroleum jelly and coal dust out of raw silk.
Christopher took his seat again and picked up his teacup, and I turned back to Violet. “She told me that you too had had a burglary.”
Violet nodded. She was still dabbing at her pale cheeks, but with her fingertips now. “A few weeks ago. I was alone in the house. Mother and Father had gone out.”
“There were servants, surely.”
“Of course.” The look she gave me said, as clearly as words, that I ought to know that the servants don’t count.
It’s the way she has always looked at me, so I moved past it. “Did you see the burglar?”
She shook her head. “I was asleep. I didn’t know that anything had happened until the next morning, when Father found the safe in the library empty.”
“He got into your safe?”
She nodded. “Didn’t he rob the Marsdens’ safe?”
“I don’t imagine there was anything in the Marsden safe that was worth taking,” I said. “The Marsdens don’t spend much time in London, do they?”
She didn’t respond, and I added, “Laetitia was only up for the weekend. And the maid had gone to bed, so the jewelry was on the dressing table.”
“How careless of dear Laetitia.” Violet sniggered. “She’s been after the Sutherland diamonds ever since Crispin came down from Cambridge two years ago. It seems like poetic justice that she’d get her hands on them and a month later, leave them on the dressing table to be stolen.”
Perhaps it did. Unfortunately, the loss of the ring did nothing to actually release him from the engagement, more was the pity.
