“He seemed like a nice enough chap for the few minutes that I saw him yesterday,” I added, “but I hadn’t the chance to spend much time with him.”
“At least Lady Violet kept Geoffrey busy, so you didn’t have to deal with him.”
Yes, indeed. “Now, he’s someone who?—”
“Later,” Christopher said, pointing to a stand of stalks up ahead. “Over there. Is that?—?”
I squinted. It wasn’t thistle, but it didn’t look too dissimilar, either.
“It might be.”
We made our way over, and then I waited on the road while Christopher lowered himself into the ditch and waded over to it. “Ugh. I’m getting wet.”
“Never mind that,” I told him. “You’ll be shifting into dancing shoes later.”
He flicked me a look. “I doubt there’ll be much dancing when the older generation gets here, Pippa. It’ll be a stuffy sit-down dinner under the beady eye of Uncle Harold and my parents,and Crispin’s future inlaws, and whatever eagle-eyed old ladies arrive from the Marsden side of the family. Laetitia has a grandmother, doesn’t she?”
She might have. I had a vague memory of it being mentioned at some point or another. Not by Laetitia, but by Constance, who shared her.
“I’m certain there’ll be dancing afterwards,” I said. “Or if not, at least there will be card games or some other form of entertainment. Unless it’s deemed too callous under the circumstances, I suppose.”
“I thought about ringing up Beckwith Place,” Christopher said, “and telling Mum and Dad to stay home. But nobody said anything about canceling the celebration.”
He reached a hand towards a purple-flowered stalk and I snapped out, “Don’t touch!”
“I thought I’d bring it back for Constable Collins to have a look at.”
I scowled at him. “Not without gloves, Christopher! If the plant is toxic, I don’t want you to touch it with your bare hands.”
“I’ll be careful,” Christopher said, and before I could stop him, he had ripped off a stalk with four or five pale purple flowers and oval leaves. “There.”
“I wish you wouldn’t have done that,” I grumbled, as I watched him scramble back onto the pavement. “We could have simply told Collins that they were here, and let him do his own gathering.”
“I’ll wash my hands when we get back to the house.” He shoved the stalk towards me and I leaned back, out of its way.
“I’m not touching that.”
He shook his head. “I don’t expect you to. I’m going to keep it in this hand until we get back inside, and then I’ll hand it off to Collins and visit the lav. That way, I won’t be touching you, and I won’t accidentally stick my thumb in my mouth…”
I rolled my eyes. “As if you still suck your thumb, you nitwit.”
“I don’t. But I do sometimes touch my face with my hands when I’m not thinking. I can’t imagine it would do me any good to get it in my eye, either.”
I shuddered. “No, I imagine not.”
“Look at it, though. Do you believe it’s pennyroyal?”
“It looks like what Constable Collins described,” I said, leaning in a bit and drawing in a deep breath. “And I think it definitely smells like mint.”
Christopher lifted the stalk to his own face and inhaled. “Spearmint, not peppermint.”
“Precisely.”
“I think we may have found it, then. And no more than a few minutes’ walk from the manor.”
I nodded, as we turned around and headed back towards the big, gray structure in the distance. “There are a couple of issues with this scenario, you know.”
He glanced acrss at me. “And what are those?”
