Page 81 of Peril in Piccadilly
“He’s a homicide detective with Scotland Yard. Until Christopher turns up dead—” I grimaced, “—it’s not his job.”
“So it’s just you looking for him, then?”
“I talked his parents into staying in Wiltshire another day,” I said. “I had to tell them what had happened, of course. Just in case he had phoned them or they had heard something I hadn’t.”
“But they hadn’t?”
I shook my head. “I tried to make it sound less serious than it is, because I didn’t want them to worry.”
He nodded, sympathetically.
“And I won’t say that I’m looking, precisely. I wouldn’t know where to start. But yes, it’s just me.”
I had already disavowed Tom, and there was no reason, none at all, to mention Crispin.
“I’ll take care of you,mein Schatz,” Wolfgang said, and reached out to cover my hand with his. It was much larger than mine, and swallowed it completely. I tried not to feel suffocated. “I’ll help you,” he added. “And if the worst comes to the worst?—”
I winced, since the worst would definitely be Christopher not coming home, and I didn’t want to imagine that. Wolfgang, however, seemed to have something else in mind.
“—and your family turns their backs on you, you will always have a home with me.”
I opened my mouth to say that Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert would never turn their backs on me, any more than Cousin Francis and Constance would do, but then I imagined how Christopher might not come back, and I saw my aunt’s tearful look of blame because I was older than Christopher and should have kept him safe, and I shouldn’t have let him go off on his own to be kidnapped or murdered or God knows what else. And suddenly I couldn’t force the words out. Laetitia would keep Crispin away from me, and Uncle Harold already hated me, and while Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert loved me, I wasn’t their daughter, not the way that Christopher was their son, and if it came down to a choice between us—if it came down to me having facilitated Christopher’s death, because I hadn’t taken seriously enough the responsibility they implicitly gave me when I moved to London with him—my aunt and uncle might well turn their backs on me in their grief over losing yet another son. Robbie was a decade gone, lost in the war, and if they lost Christopher too, I wasn’t sure how they would survive.
So instead of telling Wolfgang that my family would never cast me off, and would hold on to me all the harder for having lost Christopher—because I simply couldn’t be certain that they would do—I swallowed the words, and blinked back the tears, and faced him across the table.
“Thank you.”
He patted my hand. “Of course, my dear.” And then the waiter approached with our cocktails, and Wolfgang withdrew his hand to his own side of the table.
“Tell me about your grandfather,” I said when the waiter had retreated again and it was just the two of us once more. I couldn’t talk about Christopher anymore, and I needed something to distract myself from the thought that my family—the only family I had left—might disown me if he didn’t return.
Wolfgang looked non-plussed. “My grandfather?”
“You mentioned once that he is still alive. We are both orphans, but you told me that your grandfather is living.”
He nodded. “So he is.”
“Is that your Natterdorff grandfather, or your mother’s father?”
Of course I already knew the answer to that, but Wolfgang didn’t know that I knew, and just in case this came up again at a later date, I wanted him to have told me the information himself.
“It’s theGraf von und zuNatterdorff,” Wolfgang said. “My father’s father.”
“I thought you were theGraf von und zuNatterdorff. That’s what you said when we first met you.”
“We are bothGrafen,” Wolfgang said. “He is theGraf. My father was theErbgrafuntil his death, and now I am theErbgraf.”
So the same thing Crispin had explained to me and Tom.
“That sounds confusing,” I said. “Before the old Duke of Sutherland died in April, Uncle Harold was the Viscount St George, and Crispin was the Honorable Crispin Astley. Now Uncle Harold is the duke, and Crispin is the viscount. It’s easier when they all have different titles.”
Wolfgang nodded, but he also asked, “And your cousin Christopher? He is also the grandson of the former duke, yes?”
“He is. But his father, my Uncle Herbert—Lord Herbert—was Duke Henry’s younger son. Uncle Harold is older. So Harold gets the title, and his son becomes the Viscount St George. Uncle Herbert is a Lord, but his children don’t have titles.”
Wolfgang nodded. “And if something happens to the current duke?”
“Crispin gets the title,” I said, “and his son, if he ever has one, grows up as the Viscount St George. But Uncle Harold isn’t sixty yet. And he’s too ornery to die young.”
