Olivia puffed up like an angry budgerigar, and her voice approached the range that only dogs can hear. “Don’t you ‘now, Livvy’ me, you bastard! You killed my best friend!”
Lady Euphemia winced, whether at the accusation, the epithet, or both.
Geoffrey shook his head. “No, I didn’t. Nobody killed Violet, Livvy. Violet isn’t dead.”
Olivia stomped her foot on the floor. It made quite a satisfying sound, I had to say. “Not Violet, you pillock.Cecily!You dosed Cecily with pennyroyal, and you bashed Dom over the head, and you put poison in Violet’s tea so she couldn’t tell on you!”
Lady Euphemia gasped and Laetitia paled, but Geoffrey merely shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”
Olivia looked ready to kill him, and I sympathized. I wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him until something useful came out, too.
“Well, if you didn’t,” she hissed, “who did?”
Yes, that was the question, wasn’t it? If it truly had been someone at their table, then it was either Geoffrey or the Honorable Reggie, Olivia or Violet herself.
Was it possible that Violet had dosed her own tea? If she had killed Cecily and Dominic Rivers, once Tom arrived and she realized that she wasn’t likely to avoid going to prison for it, could she have decided to take that way out?
But if so, who had put the empty vial in her nightstand? The pennyroyal would have been in it, I assumed, until it was in the cup of tea, and she would have had to have had it at the table, and she hadn’t, as far as I could recall, left the table during the time we had sat there…
“Let me try, Livvy,” Crispin’s voice said, and when I looked over, he had put a hand on Olivia’s arm and was tugging her away.
Laetitia’s eyes narrowed, and so did Olivia’s—probably for different reasons—but she stepped back. “I suppose of all of us, you speak his language,” she said viciously.
Crispin, who would have taken offence had I said the same thing to him, merely gave Olivia’s arm a little pat—“I suppose I do, old bean,”—before he turned to his future brother-in-law. “Geoffrey, old chap.”
Geoffrey beamed back at him. “St George. There you are.”
“Yes,” Crispin said, “here I am,” as if he hadn’t been standing right next to Geoffrey this whole time. “Tell me, Geoffrey, do you remember the last weekend in April? The Jungman sisters were having a Black and White party, and we played Nebuchadnezzar charades?”
Geoffrey nodded. “Of course I do, old chap. That was when you had to do the banana dance on top of the coffee table, wasn’t it? Jolly good bash.”
“Yes, it was,” Crispin agreed dryly, even as the top of his cheekbones burned. I snorted—Josephine Baker’sDanse Sauvagewas a bit of a joke between us, and I would rather have liked to have seen the coffee table performance—and he flicked a glance my way before turning back to Geoffrey. “You went home with Cecily at the end of the night, didn’t you?”
Geoffrey opened his mouth, and then closed it again. “Did I?”
“You did, old bean.” Crispin sounded almost apologetic. “She was a bit unsteady on her feet, you know, and needed some help, and you said you’d get her home.”
Geoffrey chewed on his lip, while on the other side of the foyer, his mother gave a horrified bleat.
“Did Cecily tell you that she was expecting?” Crispin asked gently.
Geoffrey shook his head. “She didn’t, old chap.”
“Did someone else tell you?”
Geoffrey’s eyes flicked to Olivia, and then away again. “Violet mentioned something about it last night. I asked her why Cecily looked like a wrung out dishrag, and she said it was because she was having a baby.”
Olivia shifted on her feet, clearly offended on Cecily’s behalf, but she didn’t say anything.
“Cecily did look ill last night,” Crispin agreed, diplomatically. “But you didn’t know about it before then?”
Geoffrey hesitated. After a moment, he admitted, “I may have heard something. Not from Cecily.”
“From whom?”
“Letty,” Geoffrey said, with a glance at his sister. Laetitia looked thunderstruck for a moment, but then she tossed her head. The ends of her black bob swayed, and so did the ornatediamond earrings weighing down her lobes. They matched the Sutherland engagement ring, so Crispin must have handed over the ostentatious Sutherland parure in its entirety.
“It wasn’t a secret,” she said shrilly. “Nobody said I couldn’t talk about it.”
