The Mischief of the Mistletoe

by Lauren Willig

  Arabella had hoped that this would be a good time to introduce Lavinia and Olivia to both the school and Miss Climpson. Arabella looked at Lizzy and Lavinia. From the way Lizzy was gesticulating with her crook, Lavinia was certainly getting an introduction to the school. Lavinia looked absolutely fascinated.

  Arabella rubbed her damp palms against the skirt of her dress. She was feeling as nervous as a schoolgirl, tense with a combination of anticipation and apprehension. She had never expected him to seek her out. Certainly not so assiduously. He might merely be doing the gentlemanly thing, apologizing in person, but he didn’t have the air of a man about to recant a kiss, all dragging feet and shifting eyes.

  Arabella had seen that before.

  It had been three months ago, a chance kiss stolen in the dark corridor between the drawing room and the dining room. She had been giddy for days, all optimism and certainty—until he had avoided her at the Selwick musicale. And again at the Belliston ball. It wasn’t until a dinner at her aunt’s that he had deigned to speak to her of it. It had been a mistake, he had told her, all shifting eyes and dragging feet, an accident. His betrothal to her aunt had been announced that same night.

  Mr. Fitzhugh’s demeanor couldn’t have been more dissimilar. He had seemed . . . well, happy to see her. Not as though he were trying to hide or pretend the kiss had never happened. There had been no dragging or shifting, none at all. Instead, he had made every effort to get as close to her as possible.

  Which in a small prompting booth was very close indeed.

  Taking deep, shallow breaths, Arabella hurried past the refreshment table, which had been set up along the back wall of the dining hall. She was nearly to the door when someone turned away from the table, directly into her path.

  Arabella clapped a hand to her mouth in horror as a small mince pie went launching through the air. “Oh dear. I am sorry.”

  The Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent pressed his now empty plate to his chest and bowed. “The lady who launched a thousand pies?”

  “It lacks the cachet of ships,” said Arabella, preparing to pass. “I am sorry.”

  “No. I am sorry. If I had known you had an aversion for pies, I would have flung something else in your path instead.”

  Arabella shook her head. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

  The chevalier flashed his dimple at her. “One ends up in far more interesting places that way.”

  Arabella looked dubiously at the long board in front of them. “Like the refreshment table?”

  The chevalier gave a particularly Gallic shrug, one that encompassed the inevitability of refreshment tables in the great scheme of the world. “Even so.” Having resolved the great philosophical issues of life with three syllables and a shoulder wiggle, he turned the force of his considerable charm on Arabella. “Since you are here, perhaps you might settle a question for me.”

  “Yes?” Arabella let her skirts fall, since she obviously wasn’t going anywhere quickly.

  Arabella glanced as inconspicuously as possible over her shoulder. The hallway on the other side of the entry hall lay dark, but she thought she could see a tiny glimmer of light all the way at the end.

  The chevalier held up another of Miss Climpson’s miniature mince pies. “These . . . pies. Are they intended for eating?”

  Arabella let out a surprised chuckle. “Intended, yes.”

  “But . . . ,” prompted the chevalier.

  “Miss Climpson is my employer and these are made to her own recipe. You really cannot expect me to say anything more.”

  The chevalier tapped the side of his nose. “Understood. Pity,” he added, surveying the refreshment table. “I had hoped there would be pudding.”

  “Pudding?” Arabella looked at him sharply.

  His attention on the table, the Chevalier appeared not to notice. “Yes,” he said mildly. “The English Christmas pudding is a source of endless fascination to me.”

  “It is? I mean, is it?”

  For heaven’s sake. There was no reason to get all twitchy just because he had said “pudding.” It was a Christmas party. Discussion of Christmas pudding followed naturally, as the night did the day. Besides, there hadn’t been any more pudding appearances since the one at Farley Castle, well over a week ago.

  Mr. Fitzhugh would no doubt claim that was due to his vigilance in crouching outside the school. Arabella thought it more likely that whoever it was—presumably a student—had simply grown bored. Or come to the realization that puddings made a remarkably ineffective mode of communication.

  The chevalier waxed philosophical. “It is not so much a foodstuff as it is a sort of icon. Think about it. You wish on it. You dress it up in muslin cloths. You adorn it with holly sprigs as if it were a pagan sacrifice.”

  “And then we eat it,” said Arabella prosaically.

  “I have heard rumors of such things,” said the chevalier, “but I prefer not to believe them.”

  “Are you ever serious?” asked Arabella, in some exasperation.

  “I try not to be,” said the chevalier. “I hear it does terrible things to the complexion.”

  Behind him, Arabella could see a large figure lurking at the other end of the foyer. Shifting from one foot to the other, Turnip scanned the crowd. He put his whole body into the exercise, his entire torso moving as he turned his head first one way, then the other. He was, Arabella realized, looking for her.

  Catching sight of her over the chevalier’s shoulder, he started to raise a hand in greeting, but dropped it when he saw who she was talking to. If she didn’t know better, she would say he looked hurt.

  Arabella broke into whatever it was that the chevalier had been saying. “Will you excuse me, Monsieur de la Tour d’Argent? I have an, er, sheep that needs grooming for the next act.”

  The chevalier bowed gallantly over her hand. “Fortunate sheep.”

  Turnip scowled at the chevalier’s back. If he had been ten years younger, he would have put out his tongue at him.

  “You wouldn’t think so if you’d seen the shepherd,” said Arabella. “And I hear fleece have fleas.”

  The chevalier seemed remarkably loath to relinquish her hand. “Not in the Petit Trianon. Nor, one imagines, in Bath.”

  “No. There are very few sheep in Bath,” said Arabella, exerting some pressure to retrieve her hand. In the hallway, Turnip was growing restless. “Other than the sort in the manger scene.”

  Turnip shifted from one foot to the other, staring pointedly at the ceiling. There was a sprig of mistletoe dangling from the doorway above him.

  “On the contrary,” said the chevalier. “There are a great many sheep in Bath, but they tend to walk on two legs.”

  Arabella blinked at the chevalier. Why was he still talking? “Well, I really must be using mine,” she said. “All two of them. It was, as always, lovely—”

  The games mistress had spotted Turnip beneath the mistletoe. She moved forward. Turnip moved back, looking like an early Christian who had just spotted a very large lion with a taste for fresh martyr.

  “Pardon me,” said Arabella desperately, “I really must be going—”

  “And so must I,” the chevalier agreed. “A very good evening to you, Miss Dempsey.”

  “Happy Christmas!” Arabella called after him and rapidly looked about for Turnip.

  There was no sign of him. He had either given up on her, gone straight to the drawing room, or been eaten by the games mistress. Arabella hoped it wasn’t the latter. The mistletoe still dangled from the center of the door as Arabella passed under it. It looked rather forlorn up there, and slightly battered, as though someone had tried to knock it down and failed.

  All the doors along the hallway were closed, in an attempt to keep the guests out of the schoolrooms. It didn’t seem to have quite worked. She could hear amorous murmurs from the music room.

  Someone had taken the mistletoe to heart.

  At the very end of the hall, the door to the drawing room wa
s very slightly ajar. Arabella pushed it the rest of the way open and stepped cautiously inside.

  Aside from the absence of Miss Climpson’s beloved china cupid, the drawing room had been restored to almost exactly its prior state after the antics of two nights ago. If one knew where to look, there were some new nicks on the legs of the chairs, and a scratch on the tabletop that hadn’t been there before, but otherwise everything had been restored to its proper place. Even the drapes had been drawn demurely down.

  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.

  The kiss.

  “—that pudding.”

  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, v
ery 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.”