The Mischief of the Mistletoe Page 30

  “Do my best.” Turnip plopped himself down on one knee where he would be sure to cause the maximum disruption, right in the doorway of the dining room. “Arabella—er, do you have a middle name?”

  “Elizabeth.” Arabella was enjoying herself hugely. “You do have troubles with my name, don’t you?”

  “Practice makes perfect.” Turnip rubbed his hands together, gearing up for his grand scene. “Right. Here goes. Arabella Elizabeth Dempsey, I adore you. You are the plums in my pudding, the spice in my cider, the holly on my ivy.”

  “I don’t think holly grows on ivy,” said Arabella, lips twitching.

  “Well, it should,” said Turnip forcefully. “More things in heaven and earth and whatnot. Christmas is a season of miracles.”

  A snorting sound came from somewhere above Arabella’s head. It was the dowager, perched high on her litter, wearing a truly alarming headdress of holly and ivy, her sparse gray hair frizzed out like Marie Antoinette in her heyday.

  “Say yes, girl!” commanded the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale. “If he keeps talking, I hold you responsible.”

  Arabella held out her hands to Turnip, raising him up from his knees. “I love you,” she said, “and I would be honored to be your wife.”

  “You don’t mind being Mrs. Turnip?”

  “So long as you don’t mind Mr. What’s-Her-Name.”

  “Now, that’s a name I can remember,” said Turnip smugly and swept her into his arms, tilting her back at an improbable and wonderfully dizzying angle. “Happy Christmas, my own Arabella.”

  Arabella could feel her hair slipping free from its pins in a decidedly wanton way. She smiled up at him. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  Turnip paused, mid-swoop. “True love, eternal adoration, plum pudding . . . all seems to be here.”

  “There’s just one thing missing.” Raising her head slightly, she flapped a hand in the air, calling out, “Does anyone have any mistletoe?”

  An excerpt from the Dempsey Collection:Miss Jane Austen to Miss Arabella Dempsey

  Green Park Buildings, 7 March, 1805

  My dear Arabella,

  Many thanks for your affectionate letter. I should be delighted to stand godmother to baby Jane, although you have quite ruined my plans for The Watsons. I had intended you for a vicar, not for a wealthy species of vegetable. I refuse to play with puddings and paper scimitars, even for you. You have quite upset my designs, but I forgive you for the excellent diversion your letters provided.

  [Several paragraphs omitted]

  Thank you for your excellent suggestion regarding the hero in First Impressions. Can you really imagine I would change his name from Darcy to Parsnip?

  Yours ever truly,

  J. A.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, to Brooke, my little sister, and Claudia Brittenham, the best college roommate in the whole wide world, who both put in massive scads of overtime on this book. Thank you for holding my hand through character conundrums and plot nightmares and for convincing me to retrieve those first six chapters from the recycle bin. I love you both.

  To Kara Cesare, my former editor, who cheered me through the beginning of this project, and to Erika Imranyi, my new editor, who valiantly picked it up in the middle. And, as always, to Joe Veltre, my agent, who makes this and all things possible.

  To my parents, for being nothing like Arabella’s, and to my friends, for reminding me that there was light at the end of the tunnel.

  Last but not least, to Miss Austen, who set the tone for generations of novels to come. What would the world be without Lizzy and Darcy?

  Historical Note

  In the winter of 1803, Jane Austen was twenty-eight years old and living with her family at Sydney Place, in Bath. Biographers agree that Austen was less than pleased with this arrangement. The move from Steventon to Bath in 1800, just after her twenty-fifth birthday, had been much against her wishes. She found Bath, in her own words, “vapour, shadow, smoke and confusion,” and the people disagreeable. The Bath years were ones of discontent and dead ends. In December of 1802, Austen received a proposal from a family friend, a man of fortune and property, Mr. Harris Bigg-Withers. The proposal must have been a tempting one, to be mistress of her own household—but Austen, having yielded to worldly considerations and accepted his proposal, immediately thought better of it. She rescinded her acceptance the next day and hastened back to Bath. In another disappointment, in 1803, a publisher accepted her novel, Susan (later Northanger Abbey), but failed to bring it to publication.

  Unfortunately, there is little in Austen’s own voice to tell us about this period in her life. Due to the destruction of most of her letters after her death, only 160 remain extant. In this period, the period between 1801 and 1805, only one letter survives, written from Lyme in September of 1804.

  What we do know is that towards the end of 1803 Austen began work on a new novel. By 1800, when she made the move to Bath, Austen had already written First Impressions (later Pride and Prejudice), Elinor and Marianne (later Sense and Sensibility) and Susan (Northanger Abbey). Her later works, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and Sanditon , were all written much later in her life, after 1812. The Bath years mark a long, fallow period, broken only by one, incomplete work: The Watsons.

  The Watsons follows the plight of a young lady, who, like many characters in Austen’s books, has been wrenched from her family as a young child and sent to live with a wealthy aunt in the expectation of becoming her aunt’s heiress. When her aunt contracts an imprudent match to a fortune-hunting army officer, Emma Watson is thrown back upon the bosom of her family: an ailing clergyman father and three unmarried sisters. Critics have commented on the dark tone of this work. In Jane Austen: A Life, Claire Tomalin writes that “[t]he conversations [Austen] wrote for the Watson sisters are strikingly grimmer than anything else in her work,” while in Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels, Deirdre La Faye refers to The Watsons as “a bitter re-run of Pride and Prejudice,” positing that Austen might have dropped it because it “was becoming too sad,” the situation of Emma and her sisters and their ailing clergyman father being far too close to home.

  I borrowed the basic premise of The Watsons for this book, although in Austen’s version, Emma is the youngest sister rather than the oldest. Margaret, Arabella’s most troublesome sister, is lifted straight out of The Watsons, as are the invalid father and Aunt Osborne and the fortune-hunting army officer. Like Arabella, Austen’s Emma Watson plays with the idea of relieving the burden on her family by finding work at a school, a notion her sister strongly deplores. There all resemblance ends. There is no indication in The Watsons that the aunt’s second husband had previously courted Emma, nor are there any French spies or English gentlemen named after vegetables.

  Even more telling, Austen’s heroine decides not to take up work at a school; mine does. From her own school days at Mrs. La Tournelle’s Ladies’ Boarding School at Reading, Austen retained a distaste for young ladies’ scholastic institutions that came out loud and clear in her novels. The school in which I place Arabella is a larger, more luxurious version of the institutions with which Austen would have been familiar. Like Miss Climpson, Mrs. La Tournelle hired a number of young woman teachers who conducted the actual instruction, while she presided over the institution. For the sake of my story (and since this was a rather more luxe institution than the one Austen attended), I gave the girls private rooms; at Mrs. La Tournelle’s they would have slept six to a room.

  The haphazard nature of the educational program, however, is true to form. A contemporary of Austen’s at Mrs. La Tournelle’s described it as a place “where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into an education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.” According to Austen’s biographers, the curriculum included French, spelling, needlework, deportment, dancing, music—and, surprisingly, theatre. The inspiration for the Christmas recital at Miss Climpson’s came directly from Mrs. La T
ournelle’s boarding school, where the girls took part in a number of amateur theatricals.

  Biographers have debated why Austen failed to finish The Watsons. Her nephew, Austen-Leigh, posited that she abandoned it because her heroine was too socially lowly. Jon Spence, in Becoming Jane Austen, attributes it to her recognition of the grim tone of the novel, arguing, “She had given free rein to the expression of her own bitterness, and it signals her defeat in trying to write The Watsons. . . . [S]he did not want to write such a novel.” Claire Tomalin believes “a more likely reason” may have been because “the theme of the story touched too closely on Jane’s fears for herself.” According to Austen’s older sister, Cassandra, Austen intended to kill off Emma Watson’s father partway through the novel. Deirde Le Faye posits that the death of Austen’s own father, early in 1805, may have been the stimulus for abandoning the book. Far more fun, all around, to pretend that the cause lay in Christmas puddings, French spies, and a man named Turnip.

  For those wishing to hear more of Austen in her own voice, there are her letters, reprinted by Pavilion Press (I shamelessly culled phrases from Austen’s extant letters for the letter to Arabella at the front of this book), and her juvenilia, compiled in Catharine and Other Writings. For contemporary, or near-contemporary, recollections, one can go to J. E. Austen-Leigh’s Memoir and Caroline Austen’s My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir and Reminiscences. Biographies of the authoress include, among the more recent efforts, Claire Tomalin’s Jane Austen: A Life, Jon Spence’s Becoming Jane Austen, and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen. Deirdre Le Faye’s Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels does an excellent job of situating both the authoress and her novels in cultural context. I also owe a debt of gratitude for the Morgan Library’s fortuitously timed exhibit “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy,” which provided a rare opportunity to see letters and manuscript pages written in her own hand, books from her library, and contemporary images of people, places, and events that touched on her life.

  As a final note, you may have noticed some differences between Christmas as we know it and as Arabella and Turnip experience it. Much of what we associate with a “traditional” English Christmas came over with Victoria’s Albert from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. The iconic Christmas tree was introduced by Queen Charlotte in 1800, but only became popular during the reign of her granddaughter, Queen Victoria. Carols were also a Victorian addition to the Christmas canon. Although I did include some anachronisms (like the Christmas pageant), for the folks at Miss Climpson’s and at Girdings House, I tried to re-create the earlier model of Christmas celebration, in which the halls would have been decked with holly—but no tree—and the main celebration took place on Twelfth Night, rather than Christmas proper. Different parts of England had their own regional traditions, including the fascinating Epiphany Eve ritual of frightening away the evil spirits that I co-opted for my characters.

  Christmas Pudding

  To make what is termed a pound pudding, take of raisins well stoned, currants thoroughly washed, one pound each; chop a pound of suet very finely and mix with them; add a quarter of a pound of flour, or bread very finely crumbled, three ounces of sugar, one ounce and a half of grated lemon-peel, a blade of mace, half a small nutmeg, one teaspoonful of ginger, half a dozen eggs well beaten; work it well together, put it into a cloth, tie it firmly, allowing room to swell, and boil not less than five hours. It should not be suffered to stop boiling.

  —Godey’s Ladies Book, 1860, Recipe for “Old English Christmas Pudding”

  By 1803, the year in which this story is set, plum pudding was well established as traditional Christmas fare. Traditions and mythologies abound. Some require that Christmas pudding be made no later than the twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, with each member of the household stirring the pudding three times, in tribute to the Three Kings. Likewise, the thirteen ingredients (although some recipes have more and other fewer) are said to represent Christ and the twelve Apostles, while the holly garnish is meant to symbolize the crown of thorns. Other, less religiously charged, traditions include making a wish as one stirs the pudding (I’ve always liked this one) and hiding coins, gold rings, thimbles, buttons, or other items in the pudding, as the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale does with the cakes in this book.

  There are a dizzying number of Christmas pudding recipes. While recipes vary, all seem to include the same basic components: suet, raisins, lemon peel, spices, breadcrumbs, and brandy or ale. According to one source, plum pudding originated as a medieval dish called frumenty—a soupy porridge made up of boiled mutton, raisins, prunes, spices, and wine. With the addition of eggs, breadcrumbs, and dried fruit during the late sixteenth century, the soupy porridge thickened into the glutinous ball recognizable to us as plum pudding. Christmas pudding fell out of favor during the latter part of the seventeenth century but was brought back to the fore by George I, who might not have been able to speak English, but did know a good thing when he tasted it.

  King George’s Christmas Pudding (1714)

  Combine:1 lb eggs

  1 1/2 lb shredded suet

  1 lb dried plums

  1 lb raisins

  1 lb mixed peel

  1 lb currants

  1 lb sultanas

  1 lb flour

  1 lb sugar

  1 lb breadcrumbs

  1 teaspoon mixed spice

  1/2 grated nutmeg

  1/2 pint milk

  1/2 teaspoon salt

  the juice of a lemon

  a large glass of brandy

  Let stand for 12 hours.

  Boil for 8 hours and boil again on Christmas Day for 2 hours.

  This will yield 9 lbs of pudding.

  Don’t forget to make a wish as you stir. . . .

  A Note About the Pink Carnation Series

  Turnip Fitzhugh first stumbled his way onto the scene as a lovable bumbler in the second book of the Pink Carnation series, The Masque of the Black Tulip. For some time now, the e-mails have poured in, asking when Turnip was going to get some lovin’ (direct quote, there). For all of you who worried about Turnip’s future, this book is for you.

  I had vague ideas for a book about Turnip, but I didn’t know quite what I was going to do with him until The Temptation of the Night Jasmine, at the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale’s Twelfth Night dinner, when I saw Turnip seated all the way down at the end of the table next to a wallflower named Arabella Dempsey. And I thought, what if . . . ? “What if” always gets me into trouble.

  For those of you who have read the series, you’ll have recognized the second half of this book as Night Jasmine turned inside out, the same events and characters experienced from the point of view of minor members of the house party, whose focus and concerns are completely different from those of Robert, Duke of Dovedale; Lady Charlotte Lansdowne; and the other primary actors of that book. Ever wonder why Turnip was trying to cut down that tree with the wrong side of his ax in Night Jasmine? Now you know.

  While I tried not to turn this book into a Christmas reunion special, several characters from the prior Pink books did pop up to make appearances in Turnip’s story. As a refresher for those who have read the series, or an introduction for those who haven’t, here’s the Who’s Who of both recurring characters and some new friends and relations of pre-existing ones.

  Since we’ve already mentioned Robert and Charlotte, hero and heroine of Book V, The Temptation of the Night Jasmine, here’s the rest of the gang.

  Turnip Fitzhugh: Turnip has been around for several books now, fighting off French spies, spreading good cheer, and tripping over things. He attended Eton with the main characters of the first three Pink books: Lord Richard Selwick (aka the Purple Gentian), Miles Dorrington, and Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe. Lord Richard and Miles were the year ahead, Geoff and Turnip a year behind, which accounts for the strange rapport between the brainy Geoff and scatterbrained Turnip.

  Miss Penelope Deveraux: Heroine of Book VI, The Betrayal of the Blood
Lily. Poor Pen. It’s not easy being a femme fatale. In Penelope’s first appearance, in The Masque of the Black Tulip, she’s being scolded by Henrietta Selwick and Charlotte Lansdowne, her two closest friends, for improper behavior on a balcony with none other than our favorite Turnip. Turnip isn’t the only man with whom Penelope canoodles on projecting bits of masonry. At that very same eventful Twelfth Night ball, just a few hours after the end of this book, restless and rebellious Penelope manages to get herself into a fix she can’t brazen her way out of.

  Lord and Lady Vaughn: Stars of Book IV, The Seduction of the Crimson Rose. Lord Vaughn is related to absolutely everyone who is anyone, including dodgy French chevaliers. Having spent a decade in shadowy pursuits on the Continent, Vaughn’s loyalty is frequently suspect. His wife, the former Mary Alsworthy, likes to forget her low origins by lording it over people.

  Lord and Lady Pinchingdale: Hero and heroine of Book III, The Deception of the Emerald Ring. Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe originally served in the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, rose to second-in-command of the League of the Purple Gentian, and now freelances for the League of the Pink Carnation. Given that Geoff tends to be the mastermind behind the scenes, rather than the man in the black mask swinging from a rope, one assumes that fatherhood won’t do too much to curtail his activities for the cause.