“Not with the timeline.” He shook his head slowly. “No, it all makes sense. He’s just not very bloodthirsty, you know?”
“Crispin? He broke your arm when you were eight.”
“That was an accident. I’m not sure whether he or I cried more when it happened.”
“Perhaps he was just afraid he was going to get in trouble?”
Christopher shrugged, and turned towards the road from the Hall. This time, there was definitely the roar of an engine. A few seconds later, the Hispano-Suiza screeched to a stop in front of the surgery.
Given the car, not to mention the driving style, I had expected to see St George behind the wheel. I was wrong, nor was the figure in the passenger seat the new viscount. Tom Gardiner shot from behind the wheel, and Aunt Roz launched herself from beside him, hurtling across the cobblestones towards us. “Pippa! Pippa, dear! Are you all right?”
I braced myself for impact, but she stopped short of embracing me, which was probably a good thing, as it would have hurt. Instead, she rocked to a stop a foot in front of me and gave my arm an anxious look. “How is it?”
“The doctor says it’ll be fine in a week or two,” I said. “I might have a scar, but it wasn’t a deep wound, so maybe not.”
She nodded. Meanwhile, Tom (who had been on the other side of the car, and who had taken the trip across the street a bit slower) had stopped beside Christopher. I sharpened my ears for their conversation, but unfortunately, it turned out to be not much of one.
“Are you all right?” Tom asked.
Christopher nodded.
A moment passed in silence, then Tom gave him a pat on the shoulder and turned to me. “Miss Darling.”
“Pippa,” I said, “please.”
He nodded and looked at my arm. “We’ll need a complete statement from both of you once we get you back to the Hall. Kit wasn’t terribly coherent on the phone.”
He gave Christopher a sort of rueful look. I was glad to hear it, actually, because who wants their best friend to be calm and collected after one’s almost been shot?
“But I’ll take the broad strokes now,” Tom added, “once we get you into the car.”
He offered me his arm, which I took, and let him lead me across the cobblestones to the Hispano-Suiza. “Back or front?”
“I’ll sit in the back with her,” Aunt Roz said, and slipped into the backseat ahead of me, away from my bandaged arm. “Christopher, dear, you go up front.”
Christopher nodded and slipped into the front seat. Tom, meanwhile, made sure the door was shut safely behind me before he walked to the other side of the motorcar and slid back behind the wheel.
“Talk,” he said, after throwing the vehicle into gear so we could roll off down the street.
The High Street was too narrow to turn the motorcar around, so we ended up driving almost to the other end of the village and back before we could head back out of Little Sutherland in the direction of the Hall. Meanwhile, the story was quite easy to tell.
“We were on our way down to the village. We had just come out from behind the copse of trees to where we could see the Hall again—”
“And be seen,” I interjected.
Christopher nodded. “There was the sound of a shot, and Pippa clapped a hand to her arm and saidOw!I looked at her and saw the blood on her arm, and realized what had happened—or at least what I thought had happened—so I pushed her into the ditch and followed myself, just in case there were more shots.”
“Quick thinking,” Tom said with approval, which turned Christopher faintly pink over the cheekbones.
“Well, it turned out to be useless. There were no more shots. And when we started to talk about it, it turned out that Pippa didn’t have a bullet in her arm, after all.”
“It was just up here,” I said, as the motorcar climbed the hill at a much faster pace than we had come down. “Look, Christopher. There’s the Hall. We were… over there somewhere, weren’t we?”
Christopher nodded. “See the weeds over there? And how the dirt is stirred up on the edge? That’s where we went over.”
Tom nodded, slowing the motorcar almost to a crawl. He peered through the windshield and over the side of the car at the road, up at the Hall, and then over his shoulder.
“What are you looking for?” I asked curiously when he seemed to look straight through me.
