The Mischief of the Mistletoe: A Pink Carnation Christmas

by Lauren Willig

  “Thank you,” she said gravely. “You make me laugh.”

  Was that a good thing? Turnip doubted it. In all the annals of romance, it was never the court jester who got the girl. It was always the knight in shining armor, dashing to the rescue in shining breastplate on a snowy white steed.

  He hadn’t even managed the rescue part properly, he thought broodingly. He had only managed to make it onto the scene after his lady fair had rescued herself, and even then he’d only made it in time for a consoling embrace rather than the requisite fencing match with the villain. Not that he was complaining about the embrace—he’d quite enjoyed it—but patting someone on the back just wasn’t the same as sweeping her into one’s manly arms after one had dispatched the villain with a ha and a ho and a take that, you cad!

  He didn’t even know who the villain was. It was all very lowering.

  “I aim to please,” said Turnip glumly. “A laugh a minute, that’s my motto. Sounds even better in Latin.”

  “Thank you. Really.” Arabella rubbed her hands over her arms to warm them. Turnip would have liked to have done it for her. “I feel much better now.”

  Funny, he didn’t.

  “This isn’t good. Can’t have you being dragged off again and again.”

  “No,” said Arabella reflectively. “I don’t much enjoy it. It’s very hard on one’s hair.”

  “We need a plan,” said Turnip. “And I think I know someone who can help us.”

  Chapter 23

  It does come as a bit of a shock, doesn’t it?” said Lady Pinchingdale kindly.

  Arabella was tucked up in the Pinchingdales’ suite of rooms, a blanket over her lap, a cup of tea in her hand, and a roaring fire at her feet. Her hair had been brushed and pinned up, the rent in her sleeve had been exclaimed over, and Lady Pinchingdale had clucked and fussed and ordered enough hot tea and biscuits for a small army. Arabella had let herself be hustled along. She was beginning to feel like a chick with not one, but two mother hens: Lady Pinchingdale and Turnip.

  Arabella suspected Lady Pinchingdale of sneaking brandy into the tea. She felt curiously floaty, although that might have more to do with her own disordered emotions than any artificial opiate. There was something very bewildering about the shift from cold to warmth, from the monochrome landscape of the December garden to the brilliant gilding and rich crimson brocades of the rooms allotted to the Pinchingdales. It wasn’t just the change in her physical surroundings that had her head spinning. After a week of being little more than a shadow behind her aunt’s chair, she found herself swamped with solicitousness, overwhelmed with goodwill. She scarcely knew how to react to it.

  And then there was Turnip, hovering over the back of her chair, checking the level of tea in her cup, shoveling enough coals onto the fire to burn down a small village. After he had practically set Arabella’s feet on fire with his wild jabbing of the poker, Lady Pinchingdale had shooed him away, taking over the operation herself.

  She looked at him, at his bare head shining in the firelight. The early winter dark had already fallen outside the heavy-paned windows, making the light inside seem even brighter in comparison, as it only did on winter days. With his bright head and brighter clothes, Turnip looked right at home among the rich furnishings, among the gilded curlicues and shimmering satins. Cameo fobs dangled beneath the dramatically cut edges of his carnation-patterned waistcoat, their gold casing catching the light as he moved. His coat, more pink than burgundy, was shot through with gold thread, and his cravat, ruffled at the edges with lace, was the last word in cravats—probably because Brummel himself would be rendered speechless at the sheer number of loops and swags. His clothing was just as absurd as the wags always claimed. But on him, they looked just right, a proper casing for his exuberant personality.

  Right now, he was not so much exuberant as anxious, drumming his fingers against the mantelpiece, pacing in short explosive bursts between Arabella’s chair and the fire, whipping around every few minutes to peer at her, as though he were afraid that she might disappear again.

  He caught her catching him staring at her and gave her a lopsided smile that didn’t hide the worry in his eyes.

  She smiled back ruefully.

  It didn’t do to read too much into his concern. He would have done the same for Lady Pinchingdale or Jane or a stray cat that sank its claws into his pantaloons and mewed for milk. That was Turnip, decent to the core.

  Arabella tried not to think about what Captain Musgrave had said. Or the very foolish things that she herself had been on the verge of saying in the garden, before he had stopped her. It was good that he had, she told herself. It had just been an impulse, born of the drama of the moment, and she would only have embarrassed both herself and him.

  For a moment, when he had twined his fingers through hers, she had thought . . . but that was all nonsense.

  Arabella blinked and tried to attend to what Lady Pinchingdale was saying.

  “I had no idea what I was getting into when I married Geoffrey,” Lady Pinchingdale was saying, as she busily poured more tea into Arabella’s cup. Fragrant steam rose from the lip of the spout. “When he first told me about the spies, I thought he was making it up.” She set the teapot back down on the tray. “Unfortunately, he wasn’t.”

  Arabella rested her saucer on one blanket-covered knee. “I hadn’t realized that spies were such a common household pest.”

  Lady Pinchingdale made a face. “They’re worse than termites. They get into everything.”

  “Chewing away at the fabric of state?” provided Pinchingdale, smiling at his wife.

  “It ain’t his teeth I’m worried about. He had a knife, Pinchingdale. A knife!” When no one responded, Turnip crossed his arms across his chest and glowered. “Well, he did!”

  “He didn’t seem to want to use it, though,” Arabella said thoughtfully.

  Maybe it was whatever Lady Pinchingdale had slipped into the tea, but she felt the tension slipping away from her.

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” said Turnip, pushing away from the mantel. “Deuced dangerous, relying on the goodwill of a scoundrel.”

  “What strikes me about all of this,” Arabella said, taking another long swig of tea, “is how tentative it all is.”

  “There’s nothing tentative about a knife at your throat,” protested Turnip.

  Arabella wiggled forward under her blankets so that she was sitting properly upright. “Yes, but he wasn’t in any hurry to do anything with it. He scratched my arm, but that was only because I kicked him and it slipped. Last time, the knife wasn’t even a real one.”

  “Last time?” asked Lady Pinchingdale. “This happened before?”

  “Yes,” said Arabella. “I was borne off by a papier-mâché scimitar filched from one of the three wise men.”

  She said it so drolly that both the Pinchingdales smothered smiles.

  Turnip was not amused. “It wasn’t papier-mâché this time. Look at the scratch on your arm.”

  “Are you trying to scare me?” Arabella asked, looking up at him over the rim of her teacup.

  “Yes!” Turnip exploded. He dropped to his knees in front of her chair, moderating his tone. “Scare you into staying safe.”

  “I’m not going to stay tucked away in my room for the next two days,” said Arabella. “That would just be silly. Not to mention incredibly dull.”

  “We could barricade your door,” said Turnip, “and tell everyone you’re ill. You have the grippe—no, a fever. An extremely nasty, contagious fever.”

  Lord Pinchingdale coughed on his tea. “Why not just say plague? That would keep the would-be murderers away.”

  Turnip scowled. “That’s not funny.”

  Arabella tilted her head up at him. He looked very odd from that angle. “You don’t find the Black Death amusing?”

  “I don’t find your death amusing. I won’t stand here and see you murdered.” Turnip’s cheeks were flushed with emotion rather than tea.

 
; “No one is going to murder me,” said Arabella, with more confidence than she felt. “Among other things, if whoever it is killed me, how would he ever find out where his list is? That’s probably a better safeguard of my health than all the goodwill in the world.”

  Turnip looked unconvinced. “I still say the best safeguard is a few solid locks.”

  “And some boils?” Arabella hitched up her blanket, which was slipping down over her lap. “It won’t work. Locks can be picked and walls can be scaled.”

  “Not these walls,” said Turnip with confidence. “There isn’t a trellis. I checked.”

  Their eyes met and Arabella felt all the heat in the room go straight to her cheeks. “Well,” she said, in muffled tones, “that is reassuring.”

  “I feel like I’m missing something,” murmured Lady Pinchingdale to her husband, not quite sotto voce.

  “A trellis, apparently,” said Lord Pinchingdale. “But you raise an interesting point. As long as our villain thinks you have the list, he has an interest in following your movements.”

  “Which means,” his wife finished for him, her eyes bright, “that we can follow him.”

  “Oh no,” said Turnip, catching their drift. “Don’t like it. Don’t like it a’tall. Won’t have Miss Dempsey being used as bait.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Arabella intervened, before he could start steaming at the ears, “is why this . . . person persists in believing that I have his list in the first place. Unlike all of you,” she added, looking from Lord Pinchingdale to his wife to, at very long last, Turnip, brooding by the mantelpiece, “I have nothing to do with spying or spies.”

  “You mean you had nothing to do with them,” contributed Lady Pinchingdale wryly. “I felt much the same way.”

  Turnip, who had been brooding into the flames, turned abruptly. “It’s the notebook. It must have been in the notebook. Everyone saw Miss Climpson hand it to you.”

  “Everyone being your sister, her friends, Miss Climpson, and Signor Marconi,” countered Arabella ticking them off on her fingers. “Somehow, I doubt that Sally has been augmenting her allowance by running an international spy ring.”

  A slight grin tweaked one side of Turnip’s lips. “Shouldn’t put it past her,” he said fondly. “But you’re forgetting someone. Signor Marconi. No man who wears false mustachios can be up to any good.”

  “Words to live by,” murmured Lord Pinchingdale. “You are right in part. Signor Marconi isn’t what he seems.”

  “Ha!” said Turnip. “Thought I saw him lurking about the place. That third dragon from the left in Monday’s mummer play . . .”

  “Couldn’t have been Marconi,” Pinchingdale interrupted him pointedly. “Marconi is, in fact, none other than Bert Marks of Tipton Downs, Yorkshire, and has never been farther abroad than Portsmouth.”

  “Oh,” said Turnip. “How—?”

  “He was Henrietta Selwick’s voice teacher,” Lady Pinchingdale provided on her husband’s behalf, snuggling down on the arm of his chair. “Apparently Italians do better as music teachers, just as Frenchwomen do better as dressmakers, so Mr. Marks became Signor Marconi. Lady Uppington had his background thoroughly vetted before allowing him into the house. He’s a fraud, but not a traitor.”

  “At least as far as we know,” Lord Pinchingdale qualified. “More honorable men have been known to turn traitor for the right sum. Marks—or Marconi—hasn’t exactly shown himself to be of sterling character.”

  “It needn’t have been Marconi,” Turnip interjected. “What with the furniture flying and the porcelain breaking, anyone could have marched through that room and no one would have noticed. Half of Bath was climbing in and out the windows of the school that night.”

  Arabella forbore to point out that he had been one of them. That would only bring up trellises again, and heaven only knew where that would lead them.

  Lady Pinchingdale’s round blue eyes were even rounder than usual. “What sort of school is this?”

  “Not one to which we are sending our daughter,” said Lord Pinchingdale. “We seem to be straying from the point.”

  “One gets to much more interesting places that way,” murmured Arabella. Who was it who had said that to her? Oh. The chevalier. That reminded her of Mlle de Fayette’s visit earlier that night, and the flashes of lights in the garden that had set the whole bizarre series of events in train. “There was someone else in the garden that night, someone signaling with a lantern.”

  “By Gad! That’s it!” Turnip slapped a hand on the mantel so emphatically that a china vase tottered on its base. “The lantern and the notebook. The chap with the lantern must have come to collect the notebook. It was always on that windowsill.”

  “It’s true,” agreed Arabella from her nest of blankets. “I saw it there almost every time I was in the blue parlor. Sometimes it moved about from window to table, but no one ever claimed it.”

  Turnip’s blue eyes were bright with excitement. “Would have been an excellent way to pass on information. So commonplace that no one remarked on it. Deuced clever when you think about it.”

  Arabella hated to destroy his pretty theory. “There’s just one problem. The notebook went missing. I don’t have it. If our villain was the one who looted my room, why is he still bothering me?”

  Turnip lost some of his glow. “Oh,” he said. “Haven’t worked that out yet.”

  Lord Pinchingdale looked from one to the other. “The document that went missing would have been a single sheet of paper, closely written on both sides.”

  Something snagged at Arabella’s memory. Like flotsam in a river, it bobbed briefly to the surface before drifting away again.

  “The paper might have been inside the notebook,” suggested Lady Pinchingdale practically, wiggling to get a more comfortable purchase on the edge of her husband’s chair. “There’s no better place to hide a piece of paper than among other pieces of paper.”

  Lord Pinchingdale shifted to make room for her, sliding an arm around her waist to steady her. She leaned her head comfortably against his shoulder, in a gesture of such affection and trust that it made Arabella’s throat hurt to look at it.

  As Arabella watched, Lord Pinchingdale absently rubbed a finger along Lady Pinchingdale’s arm, a movement too small to be officially called a caress, and yet intimate enough to make Arabella look away. It reminded her of the casual intimacy of Turnip’s thumb stroking the side of her hand as they had sat together in the garden, her fingers twined with his.

  Clasping her hands in her lap, Arabella hastily cleared her throat. “It would be an excellent way to get messages in and out of the school,” she babbled, not looking at anyone. “People were constantly in and out of that room, and no one would have remarked on the window being open. All you would have to do is reach through the window, extract the paper from between the covers, and exit by the garden gate again.”

  She could see the tassels swinging on Turnip’s boots as he paced excitedly back and forth in front of her chair. “The first pudding was by the window too, wasn’t it? That’s where Sal said she found it. On the windowsill.”

  “Pudding?” Lady Pinchingdale said warily from the vicinity of her husband’s shoulder.

  “I’ll explain later,” said her husband. He looked at her with concern. “Are you all right?”

  Now that he asked, Arabella noticed that Lady Pinchingdale was looking very green.

  “Um-hmm,” she said, her lips pinched very tightly together. “Go on. Please.” There was a faint sheen of sweat at her brow.

  “All right.” He dragged his gaze reluctantly away from the top of his wife’s head, looking from Turnip to Arabella. “In short, your villain might have been anyone at the school. We know Mr. Carruthers lost the paper while at Miss Climpson’s. It might have been extracted from him by nearly anyone there. We have no idea who took the paper or for whom it was intended.”

  “We just know that they want it back,” contributed Lady Pinchingdale. Her lips h
ad gone very pale. Even her freckles seemed subdued.

  Turnip looked seriously at his old school friend. “Do you think if they have it, they’ll leave Miss Dempsey alone?”

  Lord Pinchingdale raised one dark brow. “So one presumes.”

  “Right,” said Turnip, squaring his shoulders. “Then we just have to give them what they want.”

  “But I don’t have it,” said Arabella, to her own knees.

  “Don’t you see?” Turnip’s eyes were blazing with excitement. He looked like a man whose team had just beat Rugby at rugby. “We give them a false list! We change names and places about. We rout the spy, stymie Bonaparte, and keep those demmed knives from your throat!”

  Lady Pinchingdale lifted her head briefly from her husband’s shoulder. “That’s brilliant.”

  “Two problems,” said Lord Pinchingdale. Both his wife and his friend shot him wounded looks. He held up his free hand in a gesture of self-defense. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m not disputing the desirability of the plan, simply the odds of executing it.”

  “Care to translate that to English?” requested Turnip.

  Lady Pinchingdale rolled her head over just enough to clear her mouth. “He thinks it can’t be done,” she said, and then rolled her face back into his sleeve.

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” said Pinchingdale affectionately to the top of her head. “Succinctly put. Our first problem is that we haven’t seen the list. He has. He’ll spot a fake.”

  “Not until he has it in hand!” said Turnip hotly. “And by then we’ll have pounced.”

  He made a pouncing motion.

  “Second,” said Lord Pinchingdale, pointedly ignoring the pouncing, “we run up against our fundamental problem. It’s almost tautological in nature.”

  “English, Pinchingdale?” prompted Turnip.

  “If we don’t know who he is, how do we communicate with him?”

  “Ha,” said Turnip, folding his arms across his chest. “I already thought of that. We leave him a pudding.”