I could, and did. I was able to toe the brogues off, and roll down my own stockings, too, one-handed, although I needed help getting the new pair on. Aunt Roz slipped the blue and white afternoon dress back over my head after I had washed the blood off my hands and arms and face—my hair was all right—in the basin, and then she helped me buckle my shoes. “We won’t dress for dinner tonight,” she told me. “That way you can stay as you are for the rest of the evening. If you need help getting ready for bed later, just let me know.”
I said I would. “Listen, Aunt Roz. Do you know anything about St George’s… I mean, about Crispin’s birth day?”
She blinked. “Crispin’s birthday? June 5th, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“No,” Aunt Roz said, “I can’t say I do. Is something happening that we should know about? A party? It isn’t an important year. He’s turning twenty-three, isn’t he?”
“He is. But I meant his birth day. The day he was born.”
“Oh.” Aunt Roz dropped down on the edge of the bed, hands in her lap. “No, I can’t say I know much about that, either, Pippa. I had a newborn of my own, you know. Christopher was just a few months old. And I had two other small boys, as well, so I had my hands full.”
I nodded. Of course she had.
“I remember he came early. By several weeks, as I recall. And Charlotte was very worried. It had taken her several years to get pregnant, and she spent the entire term, from the moment she learned that she was with child until she went into labor, terrified that something would go wrong. I’m not sure she stirred from the grounds the entire eight months. Carrying that baby to term, making sure Harold got his heir, was her sole concern. If anything had happened, I’m not sure she would have survived it.”
“But it all went well.”
Aunt Roz nodded. “As well as any childbirth ever does. They’re a painful, messy business. But I think it was pretty quick, once it started. And he would have been a small baby. That makes it easier.”
No doubt. I refrained from contemplating the process too hard.
“We didn’t travel here until the next week,” Aunt Roz added, “and by then, of course, everything was wonderful. Charlotte was up and walking, the baby was healthy—sotiny, but perfect—and Harold was back from the Continent.”
“He wasn’t here when his son was born?”
“I’m sure he would have been,” Aunt Roz said, “but again, the baby came early.”
Right. Of course. “But there wasn’t anything unusual about it, that you can remember?”
“Unusual?” She gave me a look. “What sort of unusual?”
When I didn’t answer, because I had no idea what sort of thing might have struck Grimsby, she continued. “No. Nothing unusual. Unless you mean that the baby came early and his father wasn’t here and his mother was frantic that something would go wrong. None of which turned out to be a problem. He was born healthy, he turned out perfectly fine—”
“That’s debatable,” I said.
Aunt Roz leveled an amused look at me, but forbore to comment, “—and although Charlotte never did manage to provide a Spare, Crispin made it to his majority in one piece. Harold got his heir, and everything turned out as well as one could hope for.”
“So nothing strange about it?”
“No,” Aunt Roz said firmly. “What sort of strange?”
I threw subtlety to the wind. “Something that would have struck Grimsby as being out of the ordinary. I saw some of his notes, that he’d taken about people in the family—”
Aunt Roz sucked in a breath and turned pale.
“—and he circled Crispin’s birth date and wrote the initials L.M. with a question mark next to it. But I asked the doctor—Lionel Meadows—and he didn’t remember anything out of the ordinary.”
“Perhaps L.M. is someone else,” Aunt Roz said, and her complexion was slowly returning to normal.
“Perhaps. But I asked about it—you were there at the luncheon table; you heard—and he seemed to be the most likely choice. He was alive at the time, and delivered the baby. He was definitely involved. But he said no, that nothing extraordinary happened.”
I brooded for a moment. “Crispin brought up Lady Laetitia Marsden. You know, of the Dorset Marsdens? She was mentioned by name in Grimsby’s notes. Maybe it’s her.”
“St George comes into some of his inheritance on his twenty-fifth birthday,” Aunt Roz said. “I know that’s two years from now, but perhaps Lady Laetitia is holding out for something like that. And Grimsby saw fit to make note of it.”
Perhaps. It made as much sense as anything else. “I don’t suppose you know this Eton chap that Christopher mentioned, do you? Langston Mariner?”
