The Mischief of the Mistletoe

Chapter 17

Arabella’s head snapped up.

What?

In the meantime, Turnip blithered blithely on. “Think that pudding might be related to what happened to your room. Too much of a coincidence otherwise. Deuced strange goings-on and whatnot.”

“You made a scene in the middle of the virgin birth because you wanted to talk to me about puddings.”

“It wasn’t the middle of the virgin birth,” said Turnip, looking virtuous. “I waited until the shepherds.”

“Naturally,” said Arabella. Because that made such a difference.

“Sally told me about the notebook that was taken. Said it was in French.”

“French exercises,” Arabella corrected. “French exercises.” Presumably written by an English student. In the process of learning French.

Turnip nodded in agreement, although agreement with what, Arabella wasn’t quite sure. “Cunning, ain’t it?” he said admiringly. “Who would think anything of a notebook full of French exercises?”

“The French mistress who has to mark them?”

“But that was just the thing!” said Turnip triumphantly. “What if the marks weren’t marks, but replies? Sitting on the windowsill like that, anyone could reach out from the outside and take it down, read it, reply, and put it back.”

“In plain sight of the gardener, the games mistress, and at least a dozen bedroom windows?”

Turnip ignored her and carried blithely on. “Might have been a sort of code. Really quite brilliant when you think about it — people put all sorts of ridiculous things into school exercises, all that rot about borrowing the plume of one’s aunt’s sister’s second cousin twice removed...”

Arabella listened to him go on about his inventive and entirely imaginary scheme for smuggling information and felt her fingers clench tighter and tighter into fists at her side. This was why he had shouldered his way into the prompting booth with her? This was why she had risked discovery and disgrace to meet with him in private? So he could talk about imaginary spies?

Clearly, their kiss had been entirely beside the point for him, just one of those little things that happened in between climbing trellises and lying in wait for puddings, nothing to remark upon and certainly nothing worth remembering a whole long two days later. He’d probably forgotten all about it by now.

All that was merely incidental to the more pressing issue of how spies meant to convey information at an all-girls’ academy that was obviously the center of espionage for the entire British Empire — no, Arabella corrected herself recklessly, the world. Bonaparte was probably, at this very moment, making plans to produce reams of student notebooks, written in bad schoolgirl French, purely for the purpose of infiltrating Miss Climpson’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies. It made perfect sense, thought Arabella flippantly. He must want her recipe for miniature mince pies. Then he could get all the pastry chefs in France to band together to produce them in bulk and deploy them as a weapon of mass destruction against the combined forces of the Allied Army, which would fall into disarray and defeat, their jaws glued together with mismade mince.

Now that was a brilliant plan. Maybe she should suggest it.

“. . . could use vocabulary charts as the decoding key. Don’t you see? Then...”

Arabella could see Turnip’s lips moving and his hands rising and falling as he gesticulated, but the words themselves were entirely drowned out by the angry roaring in her ears.

“There are no spies.”

Turnip took a step back under the force of her statement. “Pardon?”

“Read my lips.” Turnip obediently looked at her lips. Arabella enunciated very carefully. “There are no spies. There are a series of schoolgirl pranks and a mildly mad music master with poor taste in facial hair. But there are NO SPIES.”

Turnip rubbed his ear. “Didn’t need to read your lips for that. They could hear you in France.”

“Good,” said Arabella viciously. “I am sick unto death of spies. Your sister and her friends are all spy mad. I don’t know why they can’t swoon over Drury Lane actors like normal sixteen-year-olds.”

Turnip looked at her with interest. “Did you swoon over Drury Lane actors?”

Kemble had been lovely in his tights. She had kissed her copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream before going to bed every night for an entire month.

There were some truly gemlike lines in that particular play. But there was one line above all that stood out as particularly apt to the occasion: Lord, what fools these mortals be.

Of the two of them, she wasn’t sure who was the greater fool, she or Turnip. It was a close-run contest.

“That,” said Arabella stiffly, “is beside the point.”

“I can understand,” Turnip said, very carefully, the way one might to a peppery maiden aunt or a child prone to tantrums, “how this can all be a bit unnerving if you’re not accustomed to the idea...”

“I see no need to grow accustomed to the idea,” Arabella said through gritted teeth.

“Felt that way myself until I met my first French spy,” expounded Turnip avuncularly. “Deuced unsettling experience, that.”

“What did he do?” asked Arabella acidly. “Ask you to conjugate irregular verbs?”

“She, actually,” said Turnip mildly. “And she pointed a gun at me. Thought I was the Pink Carnation.”

“Oh.” That took the wind out of her sails.

Turnip followed up his advantage. “Someone might have hurt you, tearing up your room like that. Sally said the mattress was slashed. What if you’d been there at the time?”

“Then I imagine they would have gone away again.”

“What if they had come at night?” Folding his arms across his chest, he leaned against the window frame, looking intently at Arabella. “What if you were sleeping?”

It was a more unsettling image than she cared to admit. She could picture her room, entirely dark except for the faint illumination of the moon. She had always been a heavy sleeper. The room wasn’t large. It would take only a moment for someone to climb from the desk to the bed. And once there...

Arabella shrugged. “I doubt they would have bothered. Not everyone has your penchant for trellis-climbing.”

Turnip slowly uncrossed his arms. Straightening from his recumbent position against the window frame, his eyes locked with Arabella’s. “That depends on what’s at the top of the trellis.”

Arabella could feel color flare in her cheeks. For a very long while, they just looked at one another, and she knew he was remembering, as she was, exactly what had happened at the top of the trellis the other night.

Arabella looked away first. She licked her lips, which felt uncomfortably dry. “This is a ridiculous discussion. There is no point to it. Even if there were dangerous spies who for some obscure reason wanted a commonplace notebook full of French exercises, they have what they came for. There’s no need for them to bother me again. I’m perfectly happy to leave them alone if they leave me alone.”

“What if they don’t? What if they think you know something?”

“What? The recipe for the perfect pudding?” Arabella sat down heavily on a blue silk upholstered chair.

It would be easier to stay annoyed with him if he didn’t seem so genuinely concerned for her safety. Even if he was being absurd. She felt, suddenly, very tired. She had been on edge all day, the knowledge that she would see Turnip fizzing through her veins, distracting her from her work, making her hands tremble as she pinned hems and put up scenery. She had spent hours rehearsing and revising hypothetical conversations. In some of them, he had been apologetic and she had been gracious; in others, he had been noble and she had been humble. All of her imaginary conversations had one thing in common: In none of them had anyone said anything about spies.

She knew it was foolish, but Arabella felt distinctly let down. So much for her brief career as a romantic heroine. She had been upstaged by a notebook full of amateur French exercises.

Two worried lines indented the skin between Turnip’s brows, and there were lines on either side of his lips that had no place on his goodhumored face. He leaned over her, planting a hand on either arm of the chair, his fingers digging into the pale blue silk upholstery, and Arabella tried not to think of how those fingers had felt in her hair two nights before, or how much like an embrace it seemed.

His mind, at least, was not on dalliance. “It isn’t funny,” he said, leaning so far forward that she could smell the cloves on his breath and see the tiny gold hairs in his skin. “You could be in danger.”

Arabella looked down and away, staring at the gray fabric of her skirt. There were lines in the twill if one looked closely enough. It was an ugly fabric, heavy and serviceable. Not the sort of thing a Turnip Fitzhugh would ever encounter, but highly appropriate for what she was: a schoolmistress.

“The only thing I am in danger of is losing my position.”

As she said it, she knew it was true. Miss Climpson might be an indulgent, one might even say an absentminded, employer, but she could not possibly condone her instructresses cavorting in darkened rooms with the older brothers of students. It set a bad tone, especially in an institution where one of the students had already been caught in similar behavior. A schoolmistress at an academy for young ladies had to be like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.

Arabella might, just might, manage to pass their current tête-à-tête off as a consultation between a teacher and a concerned brother — it was a drawing room, after all, and there were candles lit — but their interlude in her bedroom the other night was completely indefensible, by any standard. She ought to have sent him packing the moment she saw him sitting there on her desk. No, more than that. She should have slammed the window when she saw him lurking outside the drawing room.

But she hadn’t. She hadn’t because she had wanted to see him, because she had been happy to see him, because she had been prepared to ignore all the potential ramifications in exchange for the immediate pleasure of his company, for that ridiculous, face-splitting grin and the absurd and unpredictable things he said and the way he looked at her, really looked at her, not as an adjunct or an addendum or another girl against the ballroom wall, but as if he saw her, Arabella.

And for that, she had been willing to play blind and deaf and dumb to potential disgrace and the failure of all her plans.

Lord, what fools these mortals be.

Arabella shoved her chair abruptly back, retreating towards the fireplace. “This is folly,” she said to the mirror over the mantel. “We can’t go on doing this.”

Turnip followed along behind her. “Doing what?”

He was so close that their noses nearly collided when she turned. Arabella took a few prudent steps back. “Meeting. Together. Alone. People will start to talk.”

Turnip’s face cleared. “Is that all?”

“All?” It seemed like rather a lot to her.

He looked at her earnestly, his blue eyes searching her face. “I don’t mind if they do talk. Do you?”

Arabella frowned at him. Didn’t he realize what that meant? That if they were caught together, there would be expectations, consequences?

Then realization hit. No one would expect him to make good for a schoolteacher, a woman of no money and undistinguished family. A woman whose aunt had titillated the ton by running off with a man half her age. Bad blood, they would all say. She would be used goods.

And Turnip could go back to kissing Penelope Deveraux on balconies off ballrooms.

“Yes!” Arabella’s fingernails cut into her palms. “I do mind.”

Turnip blinked at her. He looked... hurt? “Oh.”

Arabella pushed away from the mantelpiece, her ugly skirts heavy against her legs. She thought of Margaret and the little sisters she had left. She thought of Aunt Osborne and all the years of being quiet and good. “It’s all right for you to play at spy-catching,” she said, all in a rush. “It doesn’t matter where you go or who you’re seen with. You’ll always have a home to go back to. You don’t have to worry about what people think or getting your own living. I don’t have that luxury.”

“Arabella?”

She nearly weakened at the sound of her name on his lips. Whatever else one said about Turnip Fitzhugh, he had a beautiful voice, rich and deep. It turned her name into a thing of beauty, a jewel in a velvet case. He followed her, looking so confused that it made Arabella’s chest ache. She didn’t like herself very much right then. But she knew she was right.

“I don’t understand.”

Arabella gave a wild laugh. “I didn’t expect you would.”

Turnip looked at her expectantly.

“I am a woman and I am poor.” Saying it out loud was harder than she had thought it would be. The words came out raw and harsh, like freshly hewn granite. “Two things entirely out of your experience.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

He meant it, too. He really had no idea. Arabella looked at him, at the richly embroidered brocade of his waistcoat, the gold fobs jangling from his watch chain, the boots from Hoby, the coat from Weston, the large cameo embedded in the folds of his cravat.

The waistcoat alone probably cost something akin to her father’s annual income, an income expected to house, feed and clothe four people. Five, if Arabella found herself forced to leave Miss Climpson’s.

“I am an employee at your sister’s school. I don’t have the liberties you have. If we go on like this, I’ll only end by getting sacked.”

“I didn’t mean — ”

“It doesn’t matter what you mean or didn’t mean. And it wasn’t entirely your fault.” One didn’t blame a puppy for chasing after sticks. The fault was with the person throwing the sticks. “I should have known better.”

Turnip followed along after her. “I never wanted to make trouble for you. What can I do? How can I help you?”

Arabella moved sharply out of the way of his outstretched hand. “You can help me by staying away.”

Turnip stood rooted in front of the mantelpiece, staring at her with a puzzled little frown between his eyes. “You don’t really mean that. Do you?”

No, she wanted to say.

“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”

Turnip looked as though she had slapped him. He stared at her, hurt, uncomprehending.

Arabella folded her arms protectively across her chest. “My life was perfectly rational until you came into it. There was no nonsense about puddings and spies. I didn’t go lurking around in the dark with strange men or... or...” She looked away. “Well, you know. The rest of it.”

He was still staring at her, as though seeing her for the first time. She didn’t want him to look at her like that. She had much preferred the way he had looked at her before. But that had been the very thing she had been complaining about, so how could she complain if he didn’t? She made no sense, even to herself.

“Beg pardon,” he said stiffly. “Swept away by circumstances and all that. Shouldn’t have forced myself on you.”

He hadn’t, and they both knew it. That just made it worse. He might have kissed her first, but she had been an enthusiastic participant in everything that had followed. And she knew, with humiliating certainty, that if he had made any sort of gesture, showed any inclination in that direction, she would have done so again.

Fortunate for her that he hadn’t.

“Under the circumstances,” said Arabella, in a voice she hardly recognized as her own, “I think it best our acquaintance be at an end.”

“If that is what you want.”

“It isn’t a question of want.” She sounded so priggish that it hurt to listen to herself. “It’s a question of conventions. And circumstances.”

“Can’t argue with circumstances, can one?” He smiled a lopsided smile without any humor in it.

It hurt to look at it.

Arabella’s mouth ached with the need to say something, to protest, to argue, to soften the blow, but she couldn’t seem to force any words past the large lump that seemed to have formed at the back of her throat.

Instead, she just nodded, a surprisingly tentative motion of her chin.

“I’ll leave first.” Mr. Fitzhugh — he was Mr. Fitzhugh now, she reminded herself, not Turnip anymore, never Turnip. Mr. Fitzhugh looked at her for a moment, all the light gone from his eyes. She had never seen him like that before. She hadn’t imagined he could look so... blank. So remote. “Wouldn’t want to cause you further bother.”

“I — ”

But it was too late. The click of his boots against the floor drowned out her feeble attempt at articulation. For a moment, he checked in the doorway, and Arabella thought he might say something else.

The door swung shut, and he was gone.

Arabella waited five minutes before following after him. Staggering their departures had been a surprisingly sensible suggestion on his part.

Why should she be surprised? Arabella leaned an elbow against the mantel, rubbing her face with her hand. So far, of the two of them, it was a toss-up as to who had shown the least sense. It was very easy, she thought, to criticize the actions of others, to upbraid them for folly, and very different when one found oneself in unpredictable circumstances, behaving in ways one would never have imagined of oneself.

Well, she had quite effectively put an end to all that.

The second hand on the mantel clock jerked stiffly up towards the center. One more minute and she could go. She tried to wipe away the image of Mr. Fitzhugh’s face, hurt and confused, his hand extended to her, palm up.

She would introduce Lavinia to Miss Climpson, she told herself brightly, pushing open the drawing-room door. This would be an excellent time to broach the topic of waiving Lavinia and Olivia’s school fees, while the headmistress was still flushed with Christmas feeling and lightly spiked punch. She would introduce Lavinia and laugh over the performance with Jane and forget that there was such a person as Turnip Fitzhugh in the world.

Arabella paused as she passed the door of the music room. Unlike the other doors on the hall, it was open.

She was about to turn, to close it, when someone jumped out from behind the door. She had only a confused impression of the edge of a white robe, like the innumerable white robes she had sewn for the shepherds and the angels and the wise men, before someone grabbed her from behind, hard enough to knock the air out of her.

Arabella staggered, gasping for breath. She tried to push away, but her assailant was too strong for her. Pinning her arms behind her back, he dragged her backwards into the dark of the music room, her heels skidding against the polished wood of the floor as she struggled for some sort of purchase.

Silver flashed in front of her as something narrow and hard was applied to her throat.

“Where is it?” a muffled voice rasped. “What did you do with it?”