His face dropped. “Heels? I have to wear heels, too?”
I managed to refrain from laughing, but just barely, “—you’ll do something unspeakably horrible to me?—”
He moaned. “How is it that you’re not dead yet? How is it that in the last twenty-odd years, no one has murdered you in your sleep and put the world out of its misery?”
I smiled impishly. “Just lucky, I guess.”
That, and the only person with that kind of access to me is Christopher, and he doesn’t find me as insufferable as Crispin does.
“Why don’t you start by removing your jacket and waistcoat,” I suggested, “and I’ll bring you your choice of gowns. Then you can take them into Christopher’s room and finish dressing.”
He moaned again, but he did it. Or started to. For all that he had conversed fairly normally with me, his movements were clumsy, and weren’t helped by the fact that he was literally sitting on the tails of his formal dinner jacket. It took him the best part of a minute to work out how to wrestle his way out of it. By the time I walked back into the sitting room with a dress over each arm, he was trying to unbutton the white waistcoat underneath, and was having a hard time of it.
“Dear me.” I looked him up and down. “I take back what I said about you not being two years old. Do you need assistance, St George?”
He stared at me for a long moment before he shook his head. “No, Darling. I’d rather not have the picture of you working my buttons in my head for the rest of my life. No offense.”
None taken, now that he mentioned it. I didn’t want the picture of me working his buttons in my head for the rest of my life, either. Or in his, for that matter. “Here you are, then. Light blue and pale pink. Which do you think will go better with your complexion?”
He squinted at the two dresses, one a sky blue with beadwork and one a blush pink with tassels. “Pink,” he said eventually. “The blue is a bit too close to the dress Johanna died in last month.”
It was, now that he had reminded me. I laid it over the back of the sofa with a wince. “You would have to bring that up. Pink it is, then. Should look well with your eyes.”
“Bloodshot?”
“Gray,” I said. “Christopher wore the black wig when he left, so I shall have to see if I can wind you a turban or find you a hat of some sort, since your hair isn’t long enough…”
I wandered back towards the bedroom, snagging the blue gown off the back of the sofa on the way past, while Crispin continued to divest himself of his clothes. By the time I had hung the blue gown back into the wardrobe and had dug a silk scarf in shades of gray, black, and pink from the tallboy, he was unfastening his cufflinks and shirt studs.
“Gah!” I clapped my hands over my eyes. “What are you doing?”
“What you told me to do,” Crispin said with a snigger. “Putting on the pink frock.”
I kept my hands where they were. “Can’t you do it in Christopher’s room?”
“Are you telling me you haven’t seen Kit without his shirt on?”
Of course I had. “You’re not Christopher.”
“We look practically the same, or so you said yourself.”
“Well, you’re not the same. Go and be private, St George. Don’t make me watch you undress.”
There was a moment’s pause, then— “What if I need help?”
“Undressing?” I said. “You’ve come to the wrong place, I’m afraid. If you wanted help taking your clothes off, you should have stuck with Flossie Schlomsky. She wouldn’t have objected.”
“And whose fault is it that I didn’t?” Crispin wanted to know. Without waiting for an answer, he added, “So maybe I should go outside and knock on Flossie’s door and ask for help, is that what you’d suggest?”
“No,” I said. “What I suggest is that you go into Christopher’s room—or my room, for that matter, or the bathroom; somewhere that isn’t the sitting room—and take care of it yourself. You’re an adult, St George, and not so privileged that you can’t unbutton your own shirt. You got yourself dressed and undressed during the time we were in Dorset last month. You didn’t bring a valet then. You don’t need help now.”
He heaved a put-upon sigh. “Very well. Where is your room?”
“Into the hall, first door on the left.” And whyever he couldn’t use Christopher’s room was beyond me, but at least he was moving along, so I decided not to quibble. “You’ve been here before, St George. You weren’t even drunk last time.”
“I’m not drunk now,” Crispin said and brushed past me in his shirtsleeves with the pink gown tossed negligently over one shoulder. “The coldness of your demeanor has sobered me, Darling. I’m as unebriated as a judge and likely to stay that way.”
He vanished into the hallway before I could tell him that ‘unebriated’ wasn’t a word. He’d managed to get it out without any trouble, so perhaps he was right, and he had sobered up since he arrived.
