Page 82 of Peril in Piccadilly
The late Duke Henry had been almost ninety when he passed, and it hadn’t been from natural causes. He might have gone on for another decade if not for that.
“Did your grandfather only have the one son?” I asked, and watched Wolfgang hesitate. “In this country, an heir and a spare is the general rule.”
With an occasional girl when the genetic lottery doesn’t turn out in the parents’ favor. Really, it’s as if they don’t realize that for the succession to continue to the next generation, they need an equal number of women.
Wolfgang nodded. “In Germany, too.”
“It doesn’t always work out, of course. Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert had three boys, and I’m sure they probably hoped that Christopher would be a girl?—”
Wolfgang’s lips twitched, but he didn’t say anything. And because he might have found the idea funny even without the knowledge that Christopher has a penchant for pretty gowns and makeup, I couldn’t even draw the conclusion that he knew more about Christopher’s disappearance than he let on. It was frustrating.
I ignored it and continued, “—but then they got me, of course, and I suppose I filled that spot. Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Harold only had Crispin.”
“If anything happens to him?” Wolfgang asked.
“If Crispin dies without issue, Uncle Herbert is next in line for the title. Then his eldest son, who is Francis. And after that it’s Francis’s eldest son, if he has one.”
Which he probably would have. Constance was the maternal type, and only twenty-three, so there was plenty of time for her to pop out an heir and a spare, along with a girl or two for good measure.
“My grandfather had another son,” Wolfgang said, somewhat reluctantly. “But he’s dead now, too, along with my father and mother.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said politely.
Wolfgang inclined his head. “There has been a lot of death in the past decade.”
Yes, there had been. Between the war and the influenza epidemic, I had lost my father, my mother, and Cousin Robbie, and Wolfgang’s story was likely similar. “Your uncle died without issue?”
“He was disowned and removed from the succession,” Wolfgang said, which didn’t answer the question, but which clarified enough of what had happened.
My lips twitched. “Did he fall in love with the wrong girl?”
“Eventually,” Wolfgang said darkly, “but before that he read Karl Marx and threw off the fetters of the aristocracy in favor of living in communistic squalor and working with his hands.”
He sounded as if such was a fate worse than death. “My father worked with his hands,” I reminded him gently, “and I’ve read Marx. There’s nothing wrong with either of those things.”
He seemed to regain himself. “Of course not.” He managed a smile, although it was a bit stiff. “And it’s all water under the bridge, isn’t it? He died during the war. There’s only Opa and I left. When he passes, I will become theGraf von und zuNatterdorff in truth, not just in title, and my son will become theErbgraf.”
His son? “Do you have one of those?”
“No,” Wolfgang said. “But I have hope for one in the future.”
He smiled at me in a way that told me that he still hoped I would be the one to fulfill that wish. And although he didn’t say so, I was certain that in addition to the son and heir, he’d most likely also want the requisite spare, and perhaps a daughter or two to boot, as well.
Unlike Francis’s fiancée, I’m not particularly maternal. Or not yet, at any rate. Marriage and children at twenty-three might be all right for Constance and her ilk, but I wanted no part of it. And I certainly don’t want to be responsible for the next generation of an aristocratic dynasty.
But I was at this table for a reason, and part of that reason was to make certain that Wolfgang was happy and didn’t suspect that Tom and Crispin were standing by to follow him home after our meal. So I smiled back, and tried to make it look doting, as if raising his children was at the top of my list for how I wanted to spend the next twenty-five years.
We got through the rest of supper in the same manner. I simpered, and Wolfgang seemed to believe that I meant it. We spoke mostly of innocuous things. He asked me to tell him about growing up with Christopher, perhaps because he could sense that I had a hard time thinking of anything else, and although it was the last thing I wanted to talk about—what if I never saw Christopher again? Dwelling on what I had lost wasn’t going to make me feel any better—I obliged. If nothing else, it was something safe to talk about, and assurance that I wouldn’t let slip anything about any suspicions I might have had towards Wolfgang himself.
He certainly didn’t behave suspiciously. Nothing he said threw up any red flags in my mind, and his eyes were warm as he watched me expound on my close friendship with my cousin. He nodded sympathetically from time to time—especially when I lamented over how awful Crispin had been as a child, because I could hardly talk about growing up with Christopher without mentioning the best friend I had replaced in his affections.
The only thing I might say about it that wasn’t complimentary to Wolfgang, was that he had asked me to talk about Christopher at all. Anyone else who cared for me would have tried to take my mind off my missing cousin and my worry for him by talking about other things. But we’re all different, and perhaps talking his problems to death was how Wolfgang coped with them, and so he thought the same would be true for me. He might have been trying to do me a favor.
At any rate, we made it through supper and onto coffee and pudding without me having given anything away and without incident of any kind. And that was when things went sideways.
I suppose it was a case of various bits and pieces of information turning themselves over in the back of my head while I was talking about other things, such as the time when Crispin left me in the middle of the Sutherland Hall hedge maze at eleven, and Christopher had had to rescue me. The following year, I mapped out the maze with paper and pencil, so it wouldn’t happen again, or so, if it did, I could rescue myself, and I suppose I was doing something of the same thing now, only subconsciously, while I was talking. Mapping out twists and turns and connections.
However it happened, a few disparate pieces of information seemed to bump into one another in the back of my head, with a noise like a click, and then, like magnets, they stuck together.
