“Well, you’re going to have to deal with them both next weekend,” Christopher said, lifting the heavy piece of stationary that had precipitated this conversation. “She invited Natterdorff.”
I blinked at him. “Laetitia Marsden? Invited Wolfgang to her engagement party? Why?”
If her fiancé despised the man enough to propose to her—a woman he didn’t love—because I lost my temper with him over his disparagement of someone who claimed to be my cousin—why on earth would Laetitia invite him to her and Crispin’s engagement bash?
“It’s obvious,” Christopher said, “isn’t it?”
Was it?
“She’s either trying to do you a good turn, after taking Crispin away from you?—”
I made a face, and he nodded. “Yes, I know. But she doesn’t. She wants him, so she thinks everyone else does, too.”
“Or?”
“Or she’s trying to make her new fiancé squirm.”
That seemed like a valid guess. Wolfgang’s presence would definitely make Crispin squirm, although why Laetitia would want that, I couldn’t tell you. I was in favor of the sentiment on a general level, though. I never pass up an opportunity to makeCrispin squirm, but of course I’m not marrying him. “How does she even know that Wolfgang exists?”
“I imagine Crispin had himself a proper rant,” Christopher said. “I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t have told everyone he knows about Natterdorff’s existence.”
“Surely not. Why would he tell his intended about another man? Especially one he clearly dislikes?” And one who, furthermore, was not only better-looking, but also higher up the aristocratic scale?
That was in German aristocracy, mind you, which is worth less than the paper it’s written on in Germany these days, since the Weimar Republic did away with their nobility in 1919, but which still counts for something in England. It counted with Crispin, I was fairly certain.
“Because he’s upset,” Christopher said, “and when Crispin’s upset, he spews bile to anyone who’ll listen. Laetitia listens to him. That’s part of the problem.”
I grimaced. “Well, if Crispin told her, that’s no more than I asked him to do, I suppose.” Go cry on Laetitia’s shoulder, and propose while he was at it. “He probably regurgitated it all. Including how much he despises Wolfgang. Which doesn’t seem like a good reason for Laetitia to include him in their engagement celebration…”
“But which makes perfect sense if you consider the people involved in this farce,” Christopher said. “At any rate, I wouldn’t let Lord Geoffrey behave as he did at the Dower House. Nor would Natterdorff. Or, for that matter, Francis. And as for Crispin?—”
“Laetitia will have him on a short leash,” I said. “He’ll be lucky if she lets him say boo to any of us.”
Or to me, at least. She hadn’t liked me before this, and she surely liked me less now. I highly doubted Christopher’sassertion that she was trying to do me a good turn by including Wolfgang in the festivities.
Unless my having essentially thrown St George at her had disposed her more kindly towards me, of course. She had gotten what she had been working towards for months, after all. The Sutherland diamonds, and Crispin’s hand—and title, and fortune—in marriage.
And all because I lost my temper and told him to kindly go self-destruct, and he had chosen to listen.
“She’ll certainly keep him far away from you,” Christopher agreed. “And that’s where Natterdorff comes in, I expect. Him and Geoffrey. You’ll be beating them both off with sticks.”
“All the more reason to stay home.” I eyed the piece of stationary in his hand. “Who wrote?”
He glanced at it, as if he didn’t already know what it said. “Natterdorff. To let you know that he’d be coming. Evans handed it to me downstairs.”
“And you decided to open it?”
“I assumed you’d eventually share the contents with me anyway,” Christopher said with a shrug and handed the single piece of paper to me. I ran my eyes over it. The Savoy Hotel logo was in the corner, and then a few lines of GermanKurrentschrift, of which I had seen enough in the past few weeks that it was easier to decipher than it used to be.
“Of course I would share it with you,” I told him, “but that’s no reason to read other people’s correspondence.”
“I wanted to know whether it was another invitation to supper.”
Wolfgang Ulrich Albrecht,Graf von und zuNatterdorff, was a young German nobleman whose acquaintance we had made a few weeks earlier at the Savoy Hotel. Or rather, I had made his acquaintance at five years old or so, it seemed, in Heidelberg. He and his parents had come to visit me and mine. I couldn’tremember the occasion, but Wolfgang said he did. We were some sort of cousins once or twice removed—I had never asked, nor been told about, the specifics—and he had recognized me, so he said, eighteen years later, across the Savoy tearoom.
Since then, we had gone out to supper a few times, and he had contributed to saving my life in that incident that had precipitated the correspondence with St George that had culminated in me telling him to propose to Lady Laetitia Marsden. And now Laetitia had invited Wolfgang to her and Crispin’s engagement do.
“You simply must attend,” Christopher said. “You can’t leave Natterdorff alone with all the women of the Bright Young Set. With Crispin off the marital mart, and Francis engaged as well, and me not exactly in the market for a liaison with a Bright Young Thing—unless it’s Cecil Beaton, I suppose…”
