“Remember me to her the next time you go down to visit, old chap,” Crispin said, with what sounded like a condescending slap on the shoulder. I was frankly surprised that Hutchison didn’t smack the no doubt obnoxious look off his face—I would have been tempted—but the conversation moved on from there without bloodshed.
It was almost midnight by the time Finchley finally got them out the door and I heard the Morris’s engine engage in the courtyard. I waited until the sound of it had faded into the distance before I got to my feet (with an unbecoming groan, like a Rock of Ages, or an old person) and staggered out from behind the screen and into the room.
“That lasted forever!”
“We couldn’t ask the initial questions and then push them out the door, Pippa,” Christopher said. He had also stood up and was stretching, while Finchley and Tom were making their way in from the foyer and the sitting room, respectively. “They would have become suspicious if we hadn’t been willing to sit and gab.”
Crispin nodded. He was rotating his head and shoulders. “They went through rather a lot of Father’s gin and brandy, but it wasn’t entirely wasted. We did learn a few things.”
“Such as?”
“Not in here.” He shot a look towards the windows. “It’s possible to see through these windows from the street, and we don’t want them to turn around and get a glimpse of us all standing here nattering.” He took my arm. “Into the sitting room. Someone close the door behind us.”
A minute later we were seated in the next room, away from any possibility of being viewed from the street, and Crispin had pulled the heavy damask curtains across all the windows for extra privacy.
“Isn’t this rather obsessive?” I wanted to know, as Christopher handed me my own gin and tonic before dropping down onto the Chesterfield next to me.
He shook his head. “I don’t think so, Pippa. Hutchison was definitely suspicious. He almost found you less than a minute after he walked into the room. Crispin had to talk fast to get him to abandon the search.”
The latter nodded. “The other two seemed willing to trust that we were all on the same side, but Hutchie was definitely wary. He was suspicious of Finchley, too. You wouldn’t have been able to see it, but he kept shooting glances at the door to the foyer for a while after he sat down.”
“That’s right,” Christopher nodded. “He didn’t bring it up again, but he kept looking in that direction. At least until he got far enough into the conversation to forget. If he ever did.”
“Was it me?” Finchley wanted to know. “Did I do something wrong?”
Crispin sniggered, but shook his head. “No, Finchley. You were the perfect under-butler. You can keep calling me ‘my lord’ for as long as you’d like.”
Tom rolled his eyes. “They were willing to talk in spite of it, it seemed.”
“For the most part,” Christopher said. “Every once in a while, something would come up that they all three, or one or the other, clammed up about.”
“Like Hutchison with his sister,” I said. “What was that about, St George?”
Crispin leaned back in his chair, languidly. He had declined another drink, having pickled his liver sufficiently already this evening, so his hands were folded across his stomach but with no glass in sight. “The usual, Darling. Hutchison has an older sister by two years or so. She was at Cambridge when we started there.”
“At one of the women’s colleges?”
“I’m fairly certain it was Newnham,” Crispin said. “Didn’t I mention that earlier?”
He had, now that I thought about it. “Did something happen to her?”
“She’s twenty-five or -six,” Crispin said, “not married, not living in Town, buried somewhere in the dark of Shropshire with her parents, and her brother gets prickly when I ask a question about her? I’d say so.”
“I thought the rioters didn’t actually get into Newnham? No one was hurt, you said.”
“No one that I know about,” Crispin said. “But the run on Newnham wasn’t all that happened that day, you know. All day long, the crowd in the King’s Parade would hassle women students who walked by. It needn’t have been an out-and-out assault for someone to be upset by it.”
No, I supposed it needn’t have been. “Did you know her? Hutchison’s sister?”
“Only inasmuch as I knew any of the older students,” Crispin said. “She’d come around now and then to see her brother. We were introduced.”
“But nothing happened that would make him prickly about you in particular asking questions about her?”
“Did I seduce the girl? Is that what you’re asking?” He slanted an amused look my way. “No, Darling, I did not seduce Hutchison’s older sister when I was eighteen. You give me far too much credit.”
“I would hardly call it credit,” I said, while Christopher sniggered. “And after all, we all have to start somewhere, don’t we?”
Crispin nodded gravely. “Indeed, Darling, we do. But in this case, no, I barely knew the girl, and only from having been introduced to her by her brother. Nothing happened that would make him object to me inquiring after her. Unless my reputation has preceded me, and my merely asking questions about any woman’s health and wellbeing is abhorrent to her relatives.”
