The Mischief of the Mistletoe

Chapter 4

Turnip snapped his fingers. “There’s a frost fair at Farley Castle tomorrow! Knew I had heard that name before.”

“A frost fair?” Miss Dempsey echoed.

“Like a big picnic, but colder,” Turnip explained. “Outdoor entertainment among the castle ruins, with mulled wine and all that sort of thing. Huh.” Turnip turned the scrap of fabric around. “Deuced funny coincidence.”

“It’s too coincidental to be a coincidence,” said Miss Dempsey. There was a slight smudge of dirt on one cheek. “We seem to have stumbled upon someone’s assignation. How very...”

“Irregular?” suggested Turnip.

To his surprise, her lips turned up at the corners. “I was going to say intriguing, but irregular would suit as well.” Turning to the would-be pudding thief, who had levered himself up off the ground, she asked, “Who was it who sent you after the pudding?”

“Dunno. She came running up to me all distressed-like, grabbed my arm, and told me there’d be a guinea in it for me if I got ’er pudding back.” He shrugged. “That’s all.”

“And you never asked why?” asked Miss Dempsey.

The man gave her a look, as if to wonder why she would suggest such a harebrained thing as that. “There was a guinea in it,” he repeated.

“Right, of course,” said Miss Dempsey, shaking her head slightly. “Naturally.”

The man stuck out his hand at Turnip. “Speaking of guineas... Care to cross my palm and we’ll call it no ’ard feelings about the jaw-box?”

“How about a shilling?” asked Turnip, digging into his pocket.

Miss Dempsey edged around him. “This woman. Where did she come from? What did she look like?”

The man’s fist closed around the shilling Turnip dropped into his palm. “Dunno. She promised me a guinea for the pudding is all.”

And with that, he touched his forelock and sauntered away.

Miss Dempsey looked at Turnip thoughtfully. “Where did you get the pudding?” she asked.

Turnip scratched his temple, displacing his hat in the process. “My sister, Sally,” he said. “Can’t think why she’d be hiding messages in — oh.”

“Oh?” Miss Dempsey tilted her head quizzically.

“No,” he said decidedly, dismissing the idea as quickly as it had arisen. It would be deuced unfair to Sally to go about accusing her of setting up illicit assignations. He had every faith in his sister’s moral rectitude. And her ingenuity. If Sally were to arrange an assignation, she wouldn’t do it in such an addlepated way. He was the addlepated one in the family, and he was sticking to it. “It ain’t like Sal to set up assignations through puddings. She’s not the assignating kind.”

“My assailant did say a woman,” Miss Dempsey murmured. “Perhaps one of the instructresses? Your sister might have got hold of the pudding by accident.”

Turnip clapped his hat firmly back onto his head. “Only one way to find out, isn’t there? We can ask her.”

“We?”

“You will come with me, won’t you, Miss Dempsey?” Turnip flashed her his most winning smile. “You can’t expect a chap to venture back into that den of females unprotected, can you? No offense meant. Your being a female and all that, I mean.”

“How kind of you to notice,” muttered Miss Dempsey.

“Nothing against the breed — er, gender,” Turnip hastened to reassure her. “Some of my favorite people are females. But it’s when you put lots and lots of them together in a room... it becomes...”

“A bit overwhelming?” Turnip spotted a hint of a smile beneath Miss Dempsey’s bonnet brim and knew he was winning.

Turnip nodded vigorously. “The very thing.”

“I have three younger sisters,” Miss Dempsey contributed. “All of them at home.” She didn’t need to explain what she meant. Turnip felt for her, right down to the bottom of his waistcoat. There was no saying what younger sisters might get up to.

“Will you come with me?” he asked eagerly.

Miss Dempsey looked at the pudding cloth in her hand and then back at Turnip. “Why not?” she said. “This day certainly can’t get any stranger.”

It was not exactly a resounding affirmative, but Turnip knew how to seize his advantage when he had it. “Jolly good!” he exclaimed, hustling her forward before she could change her mind. “Shan’t regret it! Lovely girl, Sally. Most of the time.”

“Most of the time?” repeated Miss Dempsey as she hurried along beside him into the foyer. Turnip pretended not to hear her.

“Right this way!” he said with exaggerated cheerfulness. “Can’t think they will have gone far. When I saw them last they were — ah, right. Here we go.”

The three girls were still together in the blue salon, their heads together, cackling like those three hags in that play he had slept through last month. Something to do with a Scotsman.

Miss Dempsey, he noticed, was still limping slightly, undoubtedly from her tumble on the cobbles. Pluck to the backbone, she was, he thought admiringly. Not a word of complaint out of her.

The same couldn’t be said of Sally.

“Reggie!” exclaimed Sally, her pearl earbobs swinging as she jumped up. Technically, Miss Climpson’s girls weren’t supposed to wear earbobs, but Sally was firmly of the opinion that foolish rules were for other people. “What are you doing back so soon? When I told you to be early, I didn’t mean this early.”

“Oh, ha, ha,” said Turnip cleverly. “What’s the idea of giving me a pudding with a message in it? Oh, this is Miss Dempsey. Miss Dempsey, my sister Sally and her two most peculiar friends.”

“You mean my two most particular friends,” corrected Sally through gritted teeth. Donning the mask of sweetness she wore in front of non-family members, she dipped into a curtsy. “Miss Dempsey. How did you ever come to be associated with my ridiculous brother?”

Miss Dempsey extended the cloth. “We were brought together by an accident of pudding.”

“The one you gave me,” Turnip prompted, looking sternly at Sally. “A thief knocked Miss Dempsey over in an attempt to retrieve it.”

“Really?” Lizzy Reid’s eyes were as round as... well, as very round things. “A footpad? How simply smashing!”

“Yes, if you’re the pudding. It was quite smashed, and so was Miss Dempsey.”

“I wouldn’t say I was quite smashed. Just a trifle shaken.” Taking the chair that Turnip offered her, Miss Dempsey turned to the girls. “The odd thing about it was that there was a message on the pudding cloth. Would you know anything about that?”

“What sort of message?” asked Lizzy.

Miss Dempsey and Turnip exchanged a look. Turnip nodded slightly, and Miss Dempsey went on, “The message appears to be an invitation to an assignation. It was written in French.”

Agnes Wooliston sat up straighter in her chair. “In French?”

Sally ignored the linguistic angle. “That wasn’t the pudding you were planning to send to your brother in India, was it? Lizzy has a brother in India,” Sally added, turning to Arabella.

“Two of them, in fact,” said Lizzy. “But only one gets pudding. The other is currently In Disgrace. No, I already sent Alex’s Christmas basket. Who else do you think could be going about sending messages in puddings?”

“I’d say Catherine Carruthers,” said Sally authoritatively, “but she’s already been found out and put under house arrest. Besides, I think her artist was English, not French.”

“It was a half-pay officer,” corrected Agnes. “And he was quite definitely English.”

“I can assure you, brother mine,” said Sally, “that I have not been arranging assignations. The pudding was here in the parlor when we came in. Wasn’t it, Agnes?”

“Ye-es... ,” said her friend, scanning the room as though trying to fix in her memory where she had seen it. “On the windowsill, there. That was how you came to pick it up. You were standing next to it.”

“And you’d not seen it before?” asked Miss Dempsey quietly.

The three girls looked at one another. They all shook their heads.

“There is such a lot of Christmas pudding going about right now, you see,” said Agnes apologetically, “with everyone getting their Christmas hampers. It’s hard to remember every one.”

“Except for the one with the live chickens,” put in Lizzy Reid helpfully. “That was a very memorable hamper.”

“Do. Not. Mention. The chickens,” said Sally darkly.

“She has an unaccountable fear of fowl,” explained Turnip to Miss Dempsey in an aside.

“They are nasty, they are smelly, and they peck,” said Sally passionately. “Does anyone else have anything more to say on the matter?”

“What about eggs?” There was a glint of mischief in Lizzy Reid’s eye. Turnip began to understand why she had been sent back from India. India probably didn’t know what to do with her.

“Eggs,” said Sally repressively, “grow into chickens.”

“Could the message in the pudding be a prank?” interjected Miss Dempsey, intervening before the eggs hatched into full-blown fighting cocks. “You do have pranks here, I take it?”

“Oh, don’t they!” contributed Turnip feelingly. That had been his last visit. He had been forced to endure a very trying hour with the headmistress, trying to explain why Sally’s tying another girl’s corset ribbons to a drainpipe was nothing more than a case of girlish high spirits and not a cause for sending Sally home. Fortunately, the other girl hadn’t actually been in her corset at the time.

“Traitor,” said Sally, but in a very perfunctory way. She turned back to Miss Dempsey. “This hasn’t any of the... the...”

“Properties?” provided Agnes.

Sally nodded regally. “Thank you. This hasn’t any of the properties of a proper prank. First, you can’t tell at whom it’s aimed. Second, none of us has the slightest way of getting all the way out to Farley Castle. It’s not like sneaking out the back way to go shopping for a bunch of ribbons, you know.”

Turnip looked suspiciously at his sister. “About this back way...”

“And third,” Agnes broke in hastily, before Turnip could ask awkward questions about their illicit extracurricular wanderings, “it’s in French! And we all know what French means.”

She uttered that last in such portentous tones that Turnip began to wonder if he had misread the text on the pudding. He scratched his head and squinted at the piece of muslin lying open on the tea table.

“I know what that French means,” he said cautiously. “It means ‘Meet me at Farley Castle.’ Doesn’t it?”

“That is, indeed, in accord with my translation of it, Mr. Fitzhugh,” said Miss Dempsey.

None of the girls paid the slightest bit of attention to either of them.

“But of course!” said Sally breathlessly, just as Lizzy Reid leaned forward in her chair and exclaimed, “But you can’t really think...”

“Oh, but I do!” said Agnes.

Turning to Turnip, Miss Dempsey said, “Do you think?”

“As little as I can,” Turnip replied honestly. “Do you have any notion what they’re on about?”

“Chickens?” she provided, in such a droll way that Turnip felt his face break into a broad grin. He might even have chuckled.

Jolly good sport, Miss Dempsey.

Sally directed a reproving look at both of them. “This is far, far worse than chickens,” she said with relish.

“Then it must be serious,” murmured Miss Dempsey with all due gravity. Only Turnip noticed the corner of her lips twitch.

“Very serious,” agreed Agnes Wooliston solemnly. “Who would have thought that even here, one would find... spies!”

The announcement had less than the desired impact on the two adults in the room.

“Spies,” said Miss Dempsey. “Spies?”

“I wouldn’t have thought it,” said Turnip bluntly. “In fact, I don’t think it.”

“Oh, you.” Sally waved a dismissive hand. “You never think.”

“I still don’t quite understand,” said Miss Dempsey. “On what are these spies meant to be spying?”

The three girls looked at one another. Clearly, this was not a detail they had considered.

“On... something,” said Agnes.

Her peers nodded vigorously.

Something was obviously the order of the day, and a commodity for which the French were bound to pay dearly.

“Something,” repeated Turnip. He might be the greatest nodcock since the Prince of Wales had ventured into experiments with corsetry, but even he knew a dodge when he heard one.

“Well, think about it,” said Sally impatiently. “There must be oodles on which a spy could spy if he wanted to.”

“I say, Sal, I’ve browsed through your journal, and there ain’t much there of note.”

Sally’s eyes shot sparks of fire. “You’ve read my journal!”

Turnip slunk down in his chair. “I only did it because the mater asked me to. Afraid you were developing a bit of a tendre for that music master of yours.”

“Signor Marconi?” This on dit was too good to pass by. Lizzy bounced around in her chair. “You must be joking!”

“He had very nice mustaches,” mumbled Sally, doing some slinking of her own. Straightening, she gave her brother a look of death. “And I’ll thank you to stay out of my private papers!”

Turnip tapped a finger against his forehead. “Word of advice, sister mine. If you want to keep your papers private, don’t write ‘Private’ on the cover. It set the mater right off. It was all I could do to stop her sniffing around like some great sniffing thing.”

“Hmph,” sniffed Sally.

As a sniff, it wasn’t quite up to the maternal standard, but, to be fair, their mother had had years more of practice. Put a little more air into it, and Sally would be bang up to the mark in no time.

“I don’t think he’s a spy,” said Agnes thoughtfully, bringing the discussion back where it belonged. “Signor Marconi, I mean.”

“What about the new French mistress?” suggested Sally spiritedly, bouncing in her chair as she turned to her peers for confirmation. “She is awfully French.”

“Do you mean just because she speeeeeek lak zees?” contributed Lizzy, with an innocence belied by the wicked sparkle in her brown eyes.

“It’s a nice idea, but Mademoiselle Fayette does make rather a fuss about her brother’s head being chopped off,” Agnes pointed out. “That might make one rather less inclined than otherwise to cooperate with the current regime.”

“But how do we know whether she actually liked her brother?” said Sally, with a relish that made Turnip clutch protectively at his own neck. “That might be nothing more than a... than a...”

“Cunning ruse!” supplied Lizzy triumphantly.

“Not so cunning if one can see through it,” said Agnes, disgusted by the poor quality of villains nowadays. “If it were really cunning, it would be so cunning we’d have no idea at all how cunning it was.”

Turnip’s brow furrowed as he attempted to unravel the tangle of cunning.

“How... cunning,” said Miss Dempsey politely. “But whatever would spies be doing at a young ladies’ seminary in Bath?”

“They’re everywhere,” said Agnes earnestly. As if for confirmation, she added, all in a rush, “My cousin married the Purple Gentian!”

“Did she, by Gad!” Turnip smacked the flat of his hand against one knee as it all became clear. Wooliston... ha! That was where he had heard the name before. His friend Lord Richard Selwick, more dramatically known as the Purple Gentian, had married a young lady of half-French extraction who had spent her youth with cousins named Wooliston. Now that he knew who she was, Turnip could see the resemblance in the younger sister.

Ha! Who would have thought to find Selwick’s cousin by marriage bosom friends with his own little sister. Small world, that, he thought profoundly. He’d have to let Selwick know and they could have a good chuckle over it.

“The Purple who?” said Miss Dempsey faintly.

Sally tossed back her blond braids. “The Purple Gentian. A terribly dashing spy.”

“Not only dashing but terribly dashing, eh, Sal?” Turnip chuckled.

Sally went slightly red about the ears. “Well, a spy in any event,” she said in a dismissive tone, addressing herself solely to Miss Dempsey.

“An English one,” Agnes Wooliston added hastily, just in case anyone might get the wrong idea. “Not French. He married my cousin Amy last year, so we all know a terrible lot about spies now.”

This was obviously a source of both admiration and contention.

Sally shrugged, doing her best to look unimpressed. “There were rumors going about that Reginald might be the Pink Carnation, you know.”

Agnes, with all the distinction afforded by a genuine spy-in-law, gave Sally a faintly pitying look. “But he’s not.”

Sally scrunched her shoulder. “Well, no.”

His sister gave Turnip a look that made it abundantly clear that she considered it nothing short of a breach of his fraternal obligations to have been so remiss as to fail to have been the Pink Carnation.

“And a good thing, too!” said Turnip with feeling. “Some of those French spies can be deuced pushy.”

There had been the Marquise de Montval who had invited him for what he believed to be a coffee and a spot of assignation and then presented him with a pistol and three French thugs, all of whom seemed to be named Jean-Luc, all because she mistakenly took him for the Pink Carnation.

It was enough to put a chap right off dalliance. And coffee.

Since then, Turnip had confined his amorous attentions to English ladies. They might lack that je ne sais whatever it was, but at least one knew exactly where one sat.

Turning to the English lady currently seated beside him, Turnip said, “You probably know the Purple Gentian. Lord Richard Selwick. Jolly good chap, Selwick. He made rather a thing of smuggling comtes and ducs and whatnot right out from under the Frenchies’ noses. Brought back some spiffing good brandy, too.” Turnip shook his head in regret. “Deuce of a pity he had to retire.”

It was his liaison with young Miss Wooliston’s cousin that had forced the Purple Gentian’s retirement, but Turnip tactfully refrained from reminding her of that bit. Deuced silly of Selwick to go about gallivanting beneath Bonaparte’s nose like that, but Turnip supposed that was what love did to one. Cupid’s arrows, and all that. He heard they struck a devilishly hard blow.

“Goodness,” said Miss Dempsey. “You all live such interesting lives.”

The three girls preened. So, he had to confess, did Turnip. But just a little bit.

“Oh, well,” he said modestly. “Can’t take credit for one’s friends. Smashing good chaps, all of them.”

“No,” said Sally, and there was a gleam in her bright blue eyes that struck her older brother as decidedly dangerous. “One can’t take their credit. But one can seize the chance to act oneself when the opportunity arises.”

“Even,” chimed in Lizzy Reid, obviously catching his sister’s drift and running with it, “when the opportunity arises in so unlikely a vessel as a pudding.”

Agnes looked at both of her friends. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

As far as Turnip was concerned, there was far too much thinking going on among the junior set.

Miss Dempsey looked at the three girls with all the trepidation he was feeling. “What are you thinking?” she asked quietly.

Sally tossed her head, setting her earbobs bouncing. “It’s quite obvious. Someone has to go to Farley Castle. To keep the assignation!”