The Mischief of the Mistletoe

Chapter 10

Arabella watched, frozen, as the lights oscillated in the garden.

There it was again, two quick flashes followed by a pause and then a third. There was no doubting it. It was unmistakably a signal, and it was directed from someone lurking in the garden to someone waiting in the school.

Arabella’s nose hit glass as she stretched full-length across the desk, squinting for a better view. Her breath fogged the glass, and she impatiently wiped it away. If she tried hard enough, following the direction of the flashes of light, she could almost make out a human figure. It was hard to tell. Whoever it was out there had taken the precaution of wearing dark clothes. The flashes of light were so short and her own candle proved an impediment, casting weird reflections of her own room, in reverse, over the image of the garden, like seeing two pictures one on top of the other.

What if it were meant for Catherine?

Papers rustled as Arabella levered herself upright. Mlle de Fayette claimed that the gardener was rumored to have helped Catherine and her lover by unlocking the garden gate. It seemed like the sort of thing young lovers would do, signaling from a garden. Catherine’s room was on the same side as Arabella’s, the garden side, just two doors down the hall.

Mlle de Fayette had also said something about a parentally arranged betrothal. If Catherine were to be chivvied into marriage over Christmas, that might be cause enough to drive her to do something desperate. Like an elopement.

Elopements were bad. Very, very bad. Catherine was on Arabella’s floor, Arabella’s responsibility. If Catherine eloped, Arabella would be to blame. She could lose her position over it.

The light in the garden twinkled again and then went out.

Arabella’s desk chair rocked on its legs as she ran for the door. Outside, the hallway was quiet and dark, all the candles in the sconces already snuffed for the night. In the light from the landing window, she could just make out the shadowy outline of door after door, all closed, just as they should be.

Her own breathing was loud in her ears as she stood there, one hand on the doorknob. From behind the ranks of closed doors, she could hear the usual nighttime sounds: the thwack of a pillow being pounded into place, the creak of a mattress, the hushed rustle of a blanket. There was nothing the least bit out of the ordinary. Even the dust lay quiet on the wainscoting.

Arabella applied her knuckles lightly to Catherine’s door. “Miss Carruthers?”

No response.

“Catherine?”

Silence.

A bristling shock of ragtag ends popped out from the doorway next door. “Catherine’s gone out again, hasn’t she?”

It looked like a sea monster, all bristling locks and staring eyes. It was, in fact, Lizzy Reid, her hair done up in rags and her eyes alight with curiosity, like a squirrel scenting a cache of nuts.

“I’m sure she hasn’t,” Arabella said bracingly. “She must just be sleeping heavily.”

Lizzy looked like she believed that just about as much as Arabella did.

Brilliant. She couldn’t even fool a sixteen-year-old.

Lizzy wagged her rags. “That was what just Miss Derwent said.”

“Miss Derwent?”

“The mistress who was here before you,” said Lizzy blithely. “She was asked to leave.”

“Because of — ” Arabella tilted her head towards Catherine’s door.

Lizzy nodded.

Perfect. Just perfect. She should have known something was a little too easy when Miss Climpson gave her the job. There was a word for the position she had filled: scapegoat.

Pity Miss Climpson hadn’t specified that in the advertisement.

When Catherine Carruthers’s family found out Catherine had gone missing, Arabella would be out on her backside in the street faster than you could say “Christmas pudding.”

“She could be asleep,” repeated Arabella, with more hope than conviction.

She could feel Lizzy’s pitying gaze on her back as she tapped on the door, louder than last time.

“Catherine?”

Still nothing.

So much for the subtle approach. Arabella turned the knob. Unlike hers, the door was well oiled. It didn’t make a noise as she pushed it open. Holding her candle aloft, Arabella ventured into the dark cubicle.

“Catherine?”

She held her candle down towards the lumpy form in the bed. It didn’t move. It also didn’t look like a human, unless Catherine had spread in some places and shrunk in others.

“Pillows,” pronounced Lizzy, scurrying along after her like a one-woman Greek chorus.

“I knew that,” said Arabella.

There was a patter of feet in the hall as the rest of the Greek chorus came scrambling in to join the fun, appropriately garbed for their parts in long white nightdresses and bare feet. The only jarring notes were the nightcaps, adorned with an idiosyncratic variety of ribbons and bows. Miss Climpson’s dress code only extended to daytime attire.

“Has Catherine snuck out again?” Miss Agnes Wooliston panted.

Like Lizzy, she didn’t look the least bit surprised. They had obviously been here before. With Miss Derwent.

“Of course she has,” said Lizzy, rag curls bouncing. She didn’t bother to whisper. Why should she? The entire hall was already awake, with the sole exception of Annabelle Anstrue, who had already demonstrated her ability to sleep through the advance of a French artillery column, cannon and all. Or at least through Miss Climpson’s morning calisthenics, which amounted to much the same thing. “It’s Catherine.”

“She’s probably in the garden,” announced Sally, craning around Agnes for a better look at the pile of pillows. Her nightcap boasted a particularly elaborate concoction of pink and green ribbons. “That’s where she usually goes.”

Arabella felt as though she was rapidly losing control of the situation. Of course, that would be to suppose that she had ever had control of the situation. Was it too much to have hoped to get through to Christmas without major disasters?

“Back to bed,” she said, shooing them in front of her. Like geese, they clucked and flapped but didn’t go very far. “I’ll deal with Miss Carruthers. I’m sure she just went to the necessary.”

“You might want to take the back stairs,” said Sally, ignoring Arabella’s theory. “That’s the fastest way to the garden.”

“And you would know this how?” said Arabella sternly.

Lizzy grinned at her. “Best not to ask. You really don’t want to know.”

“You mean you don’t want me to know,” muttered Arabella, wondering whether there was a gate on the garden, and, if so, whether there was some way to lock it. Not that there would be much use to it. She had no doubt that the girls would find a way to pole-vault over the fence.

“It’s safer all around that way,” said Sally. “What Miss Climpson doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”

“Or us,” chimed in Agnes earnestly.

“Ignorance is bliss!” contributed Lizzy.

Windowless towers. That was what was needed. Highly underrated things, windowless towers. Preferably with moats around them.

“You,” said Arabella, “are all going back to bed. Right now. And as far as I know, you know nothing about any back stairs.”

Lizzy smothered her in a quick hug. “We love you, Miss Dempsey.”

“I should have stayed in London,” muttered Arabella, and made for the back stairs.

She was tempted to take the front stairs, just because, but what was the point of cutting off her nose to spite her face? She liked her nose. And the girls were right; the back stairs were faster.

She could hear scratching and scurrying noises as she approached the main floor. Human or rodent? Arabella wasn’t sure. Keeping her skirt close to her legs, she let herself through the green baize door into the first-floor hallway. The schoolrooms lay in demure ranks on either side of the neatly papered wall, doors closed on their secrets. The music room, the dance studio, and the lesson rooms all lay shuttered and silent, waiting to be wakened in the morning with the arrival of the servants who lit the hearths and refreshed the ink and tidied the remains of the previous day’s debris.

The drawing-room door stood open.

Through the open portal, Arabella could hear a rustling sound, like the whisper of a skirt against the ground or the snick of fabric against fabric. Catherine and her lover? It made sense as a meeting place. The drawing room overlooked the garden, low enough to the ground for an enterprising suitor to wiggle his way through the long sash windows, but shielded from view by high hedges that grew on either side.

It was a pleasant room in the daylight, used occasionally for the purpose of receiving family members, but generally ceded to the older girls for use as a sort of lounge, where they wrote letters, muddled their way through lessons, and sprawled before the hearth engaging in imagined affairs of the heart. By night, the bright blue and white paper darkened to a decidedly ominous gray, the ornamental lozenges like staring eyes and open mouths in the gloom.

Squaring her shoulders, Arabella marched smartly forward. “Catherine?”

Her footfalls sounded unnaturally loud against the floorboards. She could see her own reflection in the pier glass over the mantel, distorted and blurred. There was no one else there. There was only the movement of the starched white curtains, which snicked and whispered in the breeze from the open window, snapping back and forth in the December wind.

Arabella came to a halt in the center of the room, flustered and irritated. In the empty room, the curtains flicked out at her. It felt like a taunt.

Oh, Lord. The window. The open window. Catherine. Of course, thought Arabella, disgusted at her own stupidity. Why rappel four flights down from an upper window when one could climb in comfort out of one on the first floor? It was only heroines in novels who went for the grand and impractical gesture.

“Blast, blast, blast,” Arabella muttered to herself, making for the window.

Catherine couldn’t have gotten far. The light had been signaling not five minutes ago.

Arabella stumbled backwards, clutching at the curtain for balance, as the menacing form of a man leaned forward through the window. He filled the entire aperture of the window, blotting out the feeble light of the moon.

He was huge; he was threatening; he was... “Mr. Fitzhugh?” Arabella squeaked.

She hadn’t realized her voice was capable of hitting that register. In real life, she was an alto.

In real life, pinks of the ton didn’t pop out of windows at her at strange hours of the night.

Mr. Fitzhugh didn’t look like a pink of the ton now. His brightly patterned waistcoat and exuberant cravat had been replaced by a tight-fitting garment in a coarse, dark material, worn over a pair of equally dark pantaloons. Only his boots remained the same, but even those had been matted with soot to destroy their glossy finish. He had pulled a knit cap down over his bright hair, but bits stuck out at the sides, lending him a mildly maniacal look. If Arabella had encountered him in a dark alley, she would have gone running in the opposite direction.

One thing hadn’t changed, though. His smile was as exuberant as ever. He appeared completely unconcerned by the fact that she had caught him lurking outside the window of a young ladies’ seminary on the cusp of midnight garbed in garments that could, with extreme charity, at best be termed bizarre.

“Lovely night, ain’t it?” he said cheerfully, for all the world as if they had run across each other in the Pump Room over steaming mugs of mineral water. He slapped his arms across his chest for warmth. “Stars seem brighter here, dontcha know.”

Arabella rather doubted that Mr. Fitzhugh was lurking in Miss Climpson’s shrubbery for the purpose of stargazing.

“What are you doing lurking under a window dressed like... like...”

“Like it?” Rising to his full height, Mr. Fitzhugh executed a half-turn.

“No!” Arabella peered left, then right. “You haven’t seen anyone come this way, have you?”

“Through this window, d’you mean?” asked Mr. Fitzhugh, as though it were a perfectly logical question. “Not recently. I should have noticed if they had.”

“You haven’t seen a girl? Possibly with a man? She might have come this way.”

“A girl?” Mr. Fitzhugh appeared genuinely puzzled by the concept.

“An adolescent person of the female persuasion,” Arabella clarified.

Mr. Fitzhugh considered. “No. None of those. Did see some one of those lurking about through the curtains, but that was inside, not out. If she’d come through here, I would have known.”

Arabella frowned at Mr. Fitzhugh. The coast still seemed to be clear, but they couldn’t count on that to last. “You can’t be here.”

“Don’t like to beat a dead chicken and whatnot, but I should think that I jolly well am.” Mr. Fitzhugh contemplated the ground at his feet, with its cracking pavement and the winter remains of flower bushes, now slightly squished. Looking up, he beamed at Arabella. “Yes. Definitely still here.”

There was something ridiculously infectious about Mr. Fitzhugh’s smile. Yes, like the plague, Arabella told herself sternly, and forced her lips to stop grinning back. “What I meant was that you shouldn’t be here. Someone will see you.”

“They haven’t so far.” Mr. Fitzhugh clasped his hands behind his back, doing his best to assume a modest expression. “I’ve been out here for four days. Er, nights.”

“Nights. Plural. Four?” Arabella wrapped her arms around her chest. “You’ve been sitting here in the garden. For four nights.”

Mr. Fitzhugh twirled a bit of his watch chain around his finger. “Well, five, really, if you count tonight, but since tonight is still tonight, it didn’t seem the done thing to add it to the tally. Night not accomplished yet and all that, don’t you know.”

Didn’t he realize it was December? And cold? She was cold just standing at the window. He was lucky it wasn’t snowing.

“Haven’t been here all night,” said Mr. Fitzhugh virtuously. “M’groom spells me. Splendid sort, Gerkin. Always good in a pickle.”

Arabella’s brain balked at the vision of frozen servants bobbing in brine. “Let’s start again. What are you doing in the garden? And don’t say ‘talking to you.’ ”

“I got to worrying about you,” Mr. Fitzhugh said confidingly, leaning his elbows on the windowsill. “I didn’t like the looks of that pudding. If there’s something rum going on, I want to know what. Couldn’t just leave you here to face it alone.”

“Oh,” said Arabella. “Oh.”

She had meant to say something clever and stinging, but Mr. Fitzhugh’s response was so entirely unexpected that the words faltered on her lips. He had been concerned about her? All this time when she had been convinced he had been off gadding and gallivanting, he had been huddling in the dirt beneath the drawing-room window, waiting to protect her.

It was ridiculous, of course, and utterly mad, but it was still rather... sweet.

“Thank you,” she said, although the words seemed entirely inadequate to express the sheer magnificent idiocy of his actions. “You really shouldn’t have.”

“Not in the slightest,” said Mr. Fitzhugh airily, although the nonchalant sentiment was slightly marred by the chattering of his teeth. Reaching under his sweater, he extracted a silver flask and took a bracing swig. “Good for the constitution and all that. Nothing like a good English December.”

“Yes, but not all night,” retorted Arabella. If Mr. Fitzhugh had been outside all this time, then... “It might have been your light I saw. Maybe Catherine really was in the convenience.”

Lowering the flask, Mr. Fitzhugh wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Catherine?”

“Catherine Carruthers.” Of course, there was no reason for Catherine to have piled pillows in her place if all she intended was a quick trip to the necessary. “She wasn’t in her bed. Your sister thought — ”

“That’s your mistake, right there,” said Mr. Fitzhugh helpfully. “Letting Sally think. Comes up with some deuced odd notions that way.”

“Sally comes up with odd notions?” said Arabella.

Mr. Fitzhugh had the grace to blush. Or perhaps it was just windburn. “Just wanted to make sure you were safe. And there was a chap lurking about here earlier in the evening. I saw him last night, too. Went around the other side.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t just your Gerkin?”

“Not a chance of it. Gerkin and I have a signal.”

Arabella had a fairly good idea of what that signal might be. “Two flashes of light, a pause, then another flash?”

Mr. Fitzhugh shook his head. “Too obvious. Someone might see the light. Sort of thing schoolgirls would do. No. Our secret signal is the mating call of the two-billed thrush.”

“How can a bird have two bills?”

“That’s the genius of it!” Mr. Fitzhugh bounced on his heels, all boyish enthusiasm. “They can’t. Made it up ourselves.”

“Then how can — never mind.” If it wasn’t his lantern, whose was it?

Arabella was about to voice that important point when a familiar creaking sound arrested her attention.

“There’s someone coming!” Arabella flapped her hands at Mr. Fitzhugh. “Quick! Hide.”

“Your wish is my — ugh.” Arabella put a hand on his head and pushed. Flailing, Mr. Fitzhugh went down.

She very much hoped he would take the hint and stay down. It was going to be hard enough explaining to Miss Climpson or one of the other mistresses just what she was doing roaming the lower floors at nearly eleven at night without the added complication of the older brother of one of her pupils squatting in the flower bed. There was no good way to explain that. Arabella doubted Miss Climpson would believe that she was updating Mr. Fitzhugh on Sally’s progress in history.

Arabella yanked the curtains closed as she turned to face the doorway. They were thin curtains, designed for ornament more than use, but they at least provided the illusion of a barrier.

Arabella took a tentative step towards the door. “Miss Climpson?” she said, peering into the darkness beyond. She held up her candle. “Is that you?”

The footsteps came to an abrupt halt.

So did Arabella.

It wasn’t Miss Climpson. Not unless the headmistress had recently taken to wearing trousers.

“Oh,” said Arabella, as the candle flame danced between them. “You’re not Miss Climpson.”