I smiled, pleased that he had come to this conclusion without me having to spell it out for him. “The thought crossed our minds.”
“Did you communicate with Miss Fletcher at all last night?” Christopher wanted to know, fetching up next to us after a leisurely wander across the floor.
Wolfgang shook his head. “I spent my time with Philippa.” After a second’s hesitation he added, “I noticed the young lady, of course. A pretty girl in a celery green dress, although she looked tired, or perhaps ill.”
“Both, I imagine,” I said, while Christopher added, “She was with child.”
“Ah.” Wolfgang looked enlightened.
“Your room is on the top floor,” I said, “isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Beside the two young puppies.”
Dominic Rivers and the Honorable Reggie, I assumed. “Did they bother you?”
“Not in the way you mean,” Wolfgang said. “Nothing was said. They kept me up with their coming and going, but not by anything they said.”
Nothing personal, then. Good. It was bad enough that Francis, and of course Bilge Fortescue and his wife, had been blatantly rude.
“I’m up there, too,” I said, “and I didn’t notice anyone walking around.”
“He probably means you,” Christopher told me. “You came in late. And then you entertained Crispin for a while. And then you dealt with Cecily.”
“I didn’tentertainSt George.” Certainly not in that tone and with that inflection.
“That’s not what he said,” Christopher said with a smirk, one that made him look uncomfortably like his cousin.
"He’s a dirty, rotten liar, then. He was only in my room for a few minutes, and only because someone came up the stairs that he didn’t want to see him there. Then St George went downstairs and I went to the lavatory and Cecily came in and I held her hair and then put her to bed.”
“Clear as mud,” Christopher said politely. “Sounds like entertainment to me.”
In retelling it, I could see why. It sounded a bit like a French farce, didn’t it? People coming and going into and out of other people’s rooms all night long.
“Sorry,” I told Wolfgang sincerely. “I didn’t mean to keep you up.”
He clicked his heels together. “You didn’t,mein Schatz. It was the others.”
“I don’t suppose you noticed who, other than St George, spent time in Cecily’s room?”
He hesitated for a moment. “The young dark-haired man—Rivers?—walked her upstairs at the end of the dancing. He went into his room for a moment, and then into hers for a bit longer, albeit not much more than a few minutes.”
A dope delivery, perhaps. I could picture them coming up the stairs together, and Rivers asking Cecily to wait a moment while he ducked into his room to pick up whatever it was she hadasked him to bring her, before crossing the hall and passing it to her.
That put Cecily on the hook for her own death, though, and while that was certainly a possibility—accidentally, I assumed—it wasn’t a thought I liked.
Then again, the idea that someone had killed her on purpose didn’t appeal, either. Nor did the idea that someone had tried to induce a miscarriage—someone other than Cecily, for their own reasons—and that it had ended up being fatal.
Truly, there was no palatable option in this whole mess. And I suppose that was the way it had to be, when a vibrant, young woman (and her unborn child) was dead.
“Anyone else?” Christopher inquired.
“Your cousin,” Wolfgang told him, with a flicker of a glance my way. “I heard a woman’s voice at one point. And I can’t swear to it that none of the other gentlemen visited, either.”
He hesitated for a second before he added, “There was a lot of traffic on the landing.”
Yes, there had been, and no, I couldn’t swear to it, either. The Honorable Reggie would have had the opportunity to stop by while Dominic Rivers was downstairs. Geoffrey Marsden had been with Lady Violet, if Nellie the maid was to be believed, but I didn’t know how long that might have lasted. Geoffrey might have walked Violet to her door and then turned around and knocked on Cecily’s on his way down. As for the woman’s voice Wolfgang had heard, that could have been me, or it could have been practically anyone else. Violet, after Geoffrey dropped her off. Laetitia, since Crispin hadn’t been with her. Olivia Barnsley, after the Honorable Reggie had gone to bed. Or Nellie, delivering the cup of tea Cecily had asked for—if she had done, and someone else hadn’t brought it to Cecily.
It might even have been the Countess Euphemia or Lady Serena Fortescue. Just because it seemed unlikely that either ofthem would bother to visit Cecily in her room, didn’t mean it was impossible that they had done.
