The Mischief of the Mistletoe: A Pink Carnation Christmas (23 page)

Candles had been lit in the sconces to either side of the mantelpiece, but the room appeared to be empty.

He hadn't waited for her.

Arabella looked again at the drapes. They bulged suspiciously in the middle. And they seemed to have sprouted a leg. She knew that leg. It was clad in very tight knit pantaloons and a very shiny Hessian boot.

“Mr. Fitzhugh?”

As she watched, the drapes underwent a series of odd contortions. After a few moments' battle, Mr. Fitzhugh emerged triumphant. He flung the white linen away from his face.

“I'm sorry I kept you waiting,” Arabella said.

“You should be!” Turnip levered himself off the windowsill, shaking off the last of the drapes where the fabric still clung to his shoulder. “That Miss Quigley is an animal! Didn't think I'd make it out of there with my lips intact.”

He shuddered dramatically, scrubbing a hand across his mouth.

“Sorry,” Arabella repeated.

His hair was sticking up from his tussle with the curtain. Arabella could remember what it felt like beneath her fingers, the softness of the longer hair on top, the prickle of the shorter hairs at the back of his neck.

Turnip stepped closer, sending the light from the nearer candle falling across his face like a beatification. “Are you all right?”

He cocked his head in inquiry, and Arabella remembered what it felt like to be held against him, the warmth and solidity of him, the comfort of his shoulder beneath her cheek.

It would be so easy to cross the old blue carpet, lean her head against his chest, and burrow into that absurdly embroidered waistcoat.

Arabella held herself very straight. “Yes. Fine.”

Turnip peered at her with concern. “You don't look fine.”

Just because her stomach was hosting a whole colony of butterflies? “Thank you.”

“Didn't mean it that way. What I meant was—well, never mind.”

“No, I know what you meant, really.” Arabella twisted her fingers together, trying not to sound too breathlessly eager. “You wanted to talk to me?”

“Er, yes. I did.”

Ducking his head, he paced a few steps forward, narrowly missing the table that had formerly held the china cupid. He looked up at her, shaking his hair out of his face as he searched for words. He looked so painfully awkward and earnest that Arabella's heart clenched.

Turnip looked away, looked at her again, rubbed his hand together, and then tilted his head back to stare at the ceiling. “Er, yes. I did want to talk to you. I wanted to talk to you about—”

Arabella dropped her eyes, staring at the pattern of lozenges on the carpet.

“—that pudding.”

A
rabella'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.