The Mischief of the Mistletoe

by Lauren Willig

  Frobisher smirked. “It was quite the prank, if I do say so myself. Wish I could take credit, but it was Danforth’s idea—or maybe Miss Ponsonby’s.”

  “What was?” Turnip wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it. If it had been Miss Ponsonby’s doing, it was sure to be mean-spirited.

  “Pretending we were going to play blind man’s buff. We got one of the ladies—that quiet one—to play hoodsman, spun her around a few times, and left her. Bet you she’s still blundering around out there, wondering why she can’t find anyone.”

  Something about the way Frobisher said “that quiet one” made Turnip’s shoulder muscles tense. “Which lady?”

  Frobisher tapped his pen against the betting book, adding a few blots to the ones already enshrined within its hallowed cover. “Miss, er . . .”

  “Dempsey?” Turnip could hardly hear his own voice for the roaring in his ears.

  Unaware that his hours on the earth were now numbered, Frobisher looked smug. “That’s the one. We’re all taking bets on how long it will take her to figure it out.” Frobisher consulted the book. “Staines says five minutes; I give her ten. Danforth is down for eight.” He paused with his pen poised over the betting book. “What do you say, Fitzhugh?”

  Turnip made a low, growling noise. He hadn’t known he had it in him to growl. He also hadn’t known he had homicidal tendencies. Funny, the things one found out about oneself.

  “Was that nine?” asked Frobisher, busily scribbling.

  Turnip realized he had two choices. He could throttle Frobisher or he could rescue Arabella. Much as he wanted to, he couldn’t do both.

  Throttling Frobisher would have to wait.

  As he stormed out of the room, he could hear Sir Francis Medmenham’s drawling voice behind him, deliberately pitched so he could hear it. “By Jove, I believe the man is charging off to rescue her. Pity no one informed him that knight errantry is passé.”

  The temperature had dropped again. Turnip felt the nip of it straight through his linen, all the way down to his skin. His temper smoldered at the thought of Arabella being deliberately stranded outside in it. She would find her way out eventually, but it was cruel—cruel and vicious. He boiled with impotent anger as he marched down the garden steps. Frost crunched beneath his boots.

  He heard her before he saw her, a scuffle of footsteps against the gravel, the sound of fabric scraping against the boxwood.

  She stumbled into the clearing. There a piece of purple silk tied across her eyes, tied so tightly that her hair bulged above it. Her glove-less hands were a pale blue with cold, crisscrossed with scratches from the needle-like foliage of the shrubbery. There was a rent in her dress, an odd slice in one sleeve as though the fabric had been parted with a knife. She was tugging at the hood as she ran, skidding on the pebbles and banging into the boxwood as she attempted to yank the fabric up over her eyes.

  Turnip winced at the sight. When he got his hands on Frobisher and the rest . . .

  Blindly fighting with the hood, Arabella careened into him, banging heavily into his chest.

  Turnip’s hands automatically reached out to close around her shoulders.

  “No!” She struggled against his grasp. “I don’t have it! I tell you, I don’t have it! Go away!”

  “Arabella? Arabella!”

  He didn’t want to let go for fear she would unbalance herself, but it was proving deuced difficult to hold on to her. She was wriggling like a mad thing.

  “Arabella, it’s me.” Turnip raised his voice to a bellow. “Me! Ouch!”

  She stopped trying to stomp on his toes and raised her sightless face to his. “Turnip?”

  “The very one.”

  Her reaction wasn’t at all what he expected. Instead of pulling away, she sagged against him, body to body, resting her full weight against him and pressing her cheek into his collarbone. “Thank goodness.”

  “I’m glad to see you, too,” he said, but he couldn’t quite keep the worry from his voice. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  Turnip reached for the knots on the back of the hood, but they had been pulled so hard that they might as well have been set in mortar. He gave up and gently tugged the hood up over her head. It had snagged on her hairpins, which seemed to have riveted it into place.

  As he worked on freeing her from the hood, Arabella shook her head, burrowing deeper into his cravat.

  “He kept asking me where it is,” she said incoherently. “But I don’t know. I have no idea what he’s talking about.”

  Turnip managed to get the hood off, taking most of her hairpins along with it.

  “He?” He stroked back her disordered hair. It had come down the last time, too, when she had been knocked down by Signor Marconi. He remembered the tangled mass of it, the way it had felt beneath his fingers as he kissed her.

  “The man who grabbed me. He pulled me back behind a hedge. I kicked him and ran.” She swallowed hard, obviously reliving it in her thoughts. “I thought you were he.”

  Turnip’s hand stilled as all thoughts of dalliance fled, replaced by other, darker concerns. This was more than just a prank. “Someone grabbed you?”

  Arabella jerked her head back, looking at him with wide, frightened eyes. “Turnip, he had a knife. A real knife this time.”

  “Good Gad.” Turnip pressed her head back against his shoulder, holding on to her as tightly as he could. Forget thrashing; he was going to kill Frobisher and his lot when he saw them. “It’s all right. He’s gone now. It’s just me. No one else here.”

  He leaned his cheek against her tangled hair, breathing in the familiar scent of her, feeling her breathing return to normal, her chest rising and falling against his, when something peculiar about what she had said belatedly struck him.

  Turnip leaned his torso back, peering down his nose at a small slice of forehead and a large amount of hair. Her hair brushed his chin. “What do you mean ‘this time’?” he demanded.

  There was silence from the direction of his cravat.

  He squeezed her shoulders. “Arabella?”

  Moving very slowly, she stepped back, extricating herself from his arms. When she did, she didn’t quite meet his eyes. “Someone grabbed me once before. At Miss Climpson’s.”

  “When? How?” The very thought of it was enough to make him frantic. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Arabella bit her lip, looking away. “It was right after we, er, quarreled. Someone seized me as I left the drawing room. I couldn’t see who it was, only that he was disguised in one of the wise men’s robes.”

  “And you didn’t come to me?”

  “How could I? I had just told you I never wanted to speak to you again, remember?”

  “That wasn’t exactly how you phrased it.” He should know. He had every word of that interview burned into his memory in a way his Latin lessons never had. Amazing the way a chap could remember things when they really mattered.

  “But it amounted to the same thing. I couldn’t come running to you after that. And I didn’t think it was important.”

  “Someone assaults you and it’s not important? Good Gad! It may not be important to you, but it’s jolly well important to—well, to the people who care about you.”

  Arabella gave him a crooked smile, rubbing her hands over her arms. “I’ll bear that in mind the next time someone attacks me.”

  Before Turnip could point out that there wasn’t going to be a next time, not if he had to chain himself to her wrist, she added hastily, “I really didn’t think it was important. The man used a paper sword, one of the papier-mâché scimitars we had constructed for the wise men. I thought it was someone’s brother being bribed to pull a prank.”

  “There are altogether too many bally pranks,” grumbled Turnip, not liking the thought of Arabella being dragged into a dark hallway, even if it was only with a paper sword. “It’s not funny.”

  “I didn’t think so either, not until I realized about the sword, and then it just seemed silly. Imagi
ne, trying to scare someone with a paper sword.” She frowned, remembering. “He kept saying the same thing over and over. It was the same thing he said today.”

  Turnip was all attention. “What? What did he say?”

  Arabella shook her head. “It made no sense. It still makes no sense.”

  “Tell me anyway,” said Turnip. He had a very bad feeling about this.

  Arabella looked up at him, her pale blond brows drawing together. “He kept saying, ‘Where is it? Where’s the list?’ ”

  “This list,” Turnip repeated. “You’re sure he said ‘list.’ ”

  “Yes, quite sure. After all,” she joked wearily, “I heard it several times.”

  “By Gad.” He sat down heavily on a stone bench. I told you so had no savor to it. This was one occasion when he would have preferred not to be right.

  He looked up to find Arabella looking down at him with concern. “Turnip? Are you quite all right?”

  “Sit. Please.”

  She sat, tucking her tumbled hair back behind her ears. “What is it?”

  “That list—it’s not nonsense. I know what it is.” He drew a long breath in between his teeth. There are no spies. “You’re not going to like this.”

  She looked at him, waiting.

  “It’s a list of Royalist agents in France,” said Turnip, all in one breath, “and Catherine Carruthers’s father lost it somewhere at Miss Climpson’s.”

  Arabella blinked. “Catherine Carruthers’s father?” She seemed to be struggling to put it all together. Fair enough. If he’d just been blindfolded, pulled behind a bush, and threatened with a knife, he wouldn’t be feeling all that sprightly either.

  “He’s something high up in the government. Claims he misplaced it, but he doesn’t remember where. Last time anyone saw it, it was floating around Miss Climpson’s.”

  “And someone thinks I have it.”

  She was taking it better than he expected. Of course, he had also carefully omitted any use of the word “spies.” Best not to tempt his luck.

  Turnip nodded vigorously. “Looks like it. That would explain why someone tore apart your room.”

  Arabella’s head lifted as though jerked by a string. “That explains why Rose was complaining—” Her fingers curled around the edge of the bench. Turnip doubted she even realized she was doing it. “They did it again. Today. Someone must have gone through my things. Rose thought I had been rummaging.”

  “And when he didn’t find it, he came after you with a knife. A real one,” Turnip concluded. “Dead serious, this lot. It’s an eyeteeth sort of thing.”

  “Eyeteeth?”

  “As in people being willing to give them. Gather Bonaparte wants that list rather badly. You don’t know how dangerous these spy chap-pies can be.”

  Arabella looked at him, her expression inscrutable. But all she said was, “You aren’t really the Pink Carnation, are you?”

  “Er, no. Though it’s often quite convenient for people to think I am. Convenient for the Carnation, that is. Deuced inconvenient for me. But one does like to do one’s bit. King and country and all that.”

  “So it’s not entirely just a rumor, then. You do have something to do with the Pink Carnation.”

  Turnip gave a modest shrug. “Not all that much to write home about. I run the odd errand, sow a bit of confusion here and there, all that sort of thing. Nothing terribly important.”

  “I imagine you shouldn’t be telling me all this, should you? If I weren’t reliable, it could get back to the wrong people, and then they could use you to get to the right people. Am I wrong?”

  “Er . . .” Strictly speaking, the answer to that was no.

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because I want to keep you safe,” he said earnestly. “Because you won’t believe me without an explanation. Because I’m worried about you. Because I trust you.”

  “Thank you,” she said gravely. She tentatively rested her hand on top of his. “I trust you too.”

  Turning her hand over, Turnip threaded his fingers through hers. “Jolly glad we’re agreed on that.”

  She dipped her head. “I am too.”

  Turnip gave her hand a little squeeze. “Now about this chap who keeps grabbing you . . .”

  For a moment, Turnip thought she was going to draw her hand away, but she didn’t. She left it in his as she looked away, across the rows of ordered boxwood and the empty flower beds.

  “I can’t say much about him for sure other than that he’s quite definitely taller than I am and he wears a large ring.”

  “You didn’t recognize the voice?” He rubbed his thumb reassuringly along the side of her hand.

  “No.” She looked down at their joined hands. “His voice was muffled, first by a headdress, then by this absurd hood. It might have been nearly anyone.”

  “And they all wear rings,” said Turnip. “Staines, Innes, Danforth, the whole lot of them.”

  “You think it’s one of them?”

  “Who else would have had the chance? Unless—” Turnip sat up straighter. Now, there was an idea.

  “Unless? . . .” Arabella prompted.

  “Unless that Cheval-whatsis followed you here.”

  “I can’t really see the Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent”—the foreign name rolled grandly off her tongue, a symphony of euphonious syllables—“lurking in gardens.”

  Bloody showy name. “ ’Course you couldn’t,” said Turnip. “You were wearing a hood. That’s the genius of it.”

  “Unlike some people I know, I doubt the chevalier would sit outside my window in the cold for four nights running.” Arabella’s lips quirked into a lopsided smile. “He probably doesn’t have a Gerkin.”

  He loved that smile. He loved that she found amusement in the oddest things, at the oddest times. He loved that she remembered the name of his groom. He loved her hair and her eyes and that thing she did with the corners of her lips.

  Good Gad. He loved her.

  It hit Turnip with the force of the proverbial coup de foudre. Love. Not just liking, not just lust, but the whole package, all the bits and pieces rolled into one—liking, lust, possessiveness, fear, anxiety, the urge to roll her up into a little ball and put her in a velvet-lined box where he could keep her safe for, oh, the next sixty years or so. He looked at her and he smelled fresh milk and raspberry jam and freshly cut hay.

  Cupid had bally strange timing.

  If he were a versifying sort of chap, he could say something about never feeling cold when she was around, or how a hundred nights beneath her window would be but the wink of an eye, or something of that nature, but the words refused to string themselves together in his head.

  They jumbled and jostled and, in the end, all he came out with was, “Splendid chap, Gerkin.”

  Sally was right. He was a national disaster.

  “So you say. I have yet to meet this paragon.” Arabella cocked her head up at him, the wheels moving in her mind, and a good thing, too, because Turnip wasn’t sure his mind was moving at all. It seemed to be stuck in one place. “Lord Henry Innes. Isn’t he Catherine Carruthers’s cousin?”

  “Might be,” said Turnip, interrupting the thought about sunshine and raspberry jam and long, lazy mornings in the hay . . . “Think he is, in fact. But why? You think . . .”

  “It isn’t much, but it’s an idea,” said Arabella. “A connection. And we know he was at Farley Castle.”

  “Was he at the Nativity play?” asked Turnip. “Didn’t notice him there.”

  “Neither did I,” Arabella admitted. “But that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. It was a large crowd, and I . . . was a bit distracted.”

  “You had other things on your mind,” said Turnip generously. “Deuced busy evening, what with all those shepherds and wise men and whatnot.”

  “Among other things.” Arabella developed a sudden and intense interest in the gravel at her feet. Turnip watched as she stirred the pebbles in a small circle with her t
oe, around and around and around. “About that evening . . . ,” she began hesitantly.

  Turnip knew, deep in his bones, that anything that was said on that topic couldn’t possibly turn out well.

  It was time for preemptive measures. Briskly patting her hand, Turnip returned it to her as he scrambled up off the bench. “It’s all right. Quite understandable. Out of line, climbing through your window and whatnot. Didn’t think. Shall we go in?”

  Arabella pressed her lips together, looking very far away and more than a little perturbed. The setting sun picked out the brighter strands in her disheveled hair, turning them to silver-gilt.

  “Sometimes,” she said thoughtfully, “I think I would be happier if I thought less.”

  “Don’t follow you there,” said Turnip.

  Arabella shook out her skirts as she rose from the bench, making a wry face that contained more than a bit of self-mockery in it. “It’s nothing. Only that I’m beginning to feel a tardy appreciation for Hamlet. Action ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’ ”

  “Pardon?”

  Arabella waved an arm in the air. “ ‘Why let I dare not wait upon I would?’ ”

  “That’s not Hamlet,” pointed out Turnip. “That’s Mac-what’s-his-face.”

  “True,” agreed Arabella. “Not exactly a good role model.”

  “Unless you’re planning to set yourself up as king of Scotland. Not sure I’d recommend it. Deuced cold country, Scotland.”

  “I really hadn’t numbered that among my ambitions. I assure you, Scotland is safe from me.”

  “Ah,” said Turnip, just because he wanted to keep her smiling, “but are you safe from Scotland?”

  She bit down hard on her lower lip. Turnip knew that expression by now; it was the one she wore when she was trying not to laugh. Slumping forward, she covered her face with both hands, making little snorting noises that weren’t quite laughter, but weren’t quite sobs, either.

  Turnip placed a protective arm around her shoulder. “You all right, there?”

  Wiping her eyes, Arabella rested her head briefly against his shoulder before, much to Turnip’s disappointment, removing it again. She turned towards him and Turnip hastily dropped his arm.