The Mischief of the Mistletoe: A Pink Carnation Christmas Read online

  On the other hand, it might take a very clever man to play that much of a fool. But could anyone sustain that kind of act for that long?

  “Just because Mr. Fitzhugh wears carnations embroidered on his waistcoat hardly means that he—oh, I don’t know.”

  “Flies in the face of danger? Sneers at the name of risk?”

  “Something like that. I should think that having carnations embroidered on one’s stockings would be tantamount to taking out an advertisement that one wasn’t the Pink Carnation.”

  “You question the wisdom of Bonaparte’s secret police?” The chevalier’s lightly mocking tone invited her to join in the joke at the expense of the French regime.

  “If that is the extent of their intelligence, then it’s a wonder that Bonaparte wasn’t unseated ages ago!” Flushing at her own presumption, Arabella modulated her tone. “What I mean is that Mr. Fitzhugh is a highly unlikely conspirator.”

  “So was Sir Percy Blakeney in his day,” replied the chevalier. “He played the buffoon so well that his own wife did not guess it.”

  “I hardly know Mr. Fitzhugh so well as that.”

  “No?” said the chevalier gently, steering her towards a refreshment table, where steaming silver cups of punch had been set out on an equally silver tray.

  “No,” repeated Arabella firmly. “But I would be willing to wager that he is exactly what he seems.”

  “A dangerous wager, Miss Dempsey. People are seldom what they seem.”

  Arabella didn’t appreciate being condescended to. She frowned at the chevalier. “Including you?”

  Stopping beside the refreshment table, the chevalier abstracted a silver mug from among its fellows, lifting it to his nose to breathe in the hot, scented fragrance of it before passing it over to Arabella. “That, my dear Miss Dempsey, would be telling.”

  “Telling what?” asked Lord Vaughn, coming up behind them.

  “Terrible tales of scandal,” said the chevalier, reaching for a second glass and handing it to Vaughn.

  Vaughn raised his brows. “Like an old lady by her hearth, enjoying a spot of gossip with her tea.”

  “I’ve never known you to balk at scandal, Sebastian,” returned the chevalier, unperturbed.

  Lord Vaughn looked at him with all the arrogance of two hundred years of semi-supreme rule. “I prefer to cause it, rather than discuss it. Other people’s scandals are tedious.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Lady Vaughn, “you’ve just missed your aunt. She left only a few minutes ago.”

  “She did?” What with one thing and another, with puddings and Pink Carnations, Arabella had almost forgotten about them. “My aunt and my uncle?” She was proud that her voice didn’t falter on the last word.

  Lady Vaughn shrugged. “At that age, one wants an early night.”

  Arabella pulled herself together. What had she really expected? That her aunt would fall on her bosom and tell her how much she missed her? That Musgrave would weep tears of remorse?

  Fool, she told herself. Three times a fool. She knew Captain Musgrave was false and a cad, so why did she still care what he thought of her, or want so desperately to get his attention?

  Habit, she told herself. Habit and wounded pride. He had courted her so assiduously for a time, discovering her interests, praising her prose, pressing her hand just a little too long in greeting. She had wanted—oh, something. Some sort of reparation or revenge. Some sort of acknowledgment.

  “It’s no matter,” she said, with a nonchalance she didn’t feel. “I’ll be with my aunt at Girdings for Christmas.”

  Arabella’s domestic plans didn’t interest the Vaughns. Lifting his quizzing glass, Vaughn let it trail across the shifting groups of people.

  “Here comes our favorite vegetable,” Vaughn commented languidly. “Looking rather pleased with himself. He must have outwitted a rutabaga.”

  Looking around, Arabella saw Mr. Fitzhugh striding towards them across the winter-wilted grass, his puce coat a splash of color against the time-weathered walls of the old castle. He had removed his high-crowned hat, leaving it to swing from one hand.

  “Is he still dangling after the Deveraux girl?” Lady Vaughn asked her husband in an intimate tone that pointedly cut the others out of the conversation.

  Arabella knew Penelope Deveraux. More accurately, she knew of her. It was hard not to know about Penelope Deveraux: She created an eddy of excitement around her wherever she went, a hiss hiss hiss of whisper and gossip and speculation that preceded her like the rumble of thunder before lightning.

  Like Arabella, Miss Deveraux was tall, but there any resemblance ended. Rather than a dusty blond, Miss Deveraux’s hair was a flaming red—true red, no nonsense about red-blond or auburn. Her dresses skirted the edge of impropriety, cut low enough to make a matron blanch, transparent enough to set men hoping and gossips whispering.

  In short, she was everything Arabella wasn’t. Daring. Bold. Memorable.

  Mr. Fitzhugh might have escorted Arabella to the frost fair, but no one would ever believe he had designs on her. Not when there were women like Penelope Deveraux to be had.

  He was smiling as he made his way towards them, a smile that lit his face with its own inner radiance. He was, thought Arabella, one of nature’s golden children, all light and no dark, happy just to be happy.

  He and Miss Deveraux would make an exceptionally striking couple.

  Lord Vaughn shrugged. “I make it a point never to interest myself in nursery brangles. Ah, Fitzhugh! We were just talking about you.”

  “Did you save some pie for me?” Mr. Fitzhugh enquired genially, with a grin at Arabella that made her want to hit him, without quite knowing why.

  “We haven’t explored the pie yet,” said Arabella repressively. “I believe it’s on the other side of the keep.”

  Undaunted, Mr. Fitzhugh held out a hand. “Care to join me for the quest, Miss Dempsey? Shouldn’t like to tackle that pie alone.”

  Arabella set her silver mug down on the silver tray, where it made a distinctly unmusical clanking sound. Discordant. She was discordant, the odd note out in an otherwise coherent symphony.

  “Why not,” she said. Best to get it over with.

  “Splendid,” exclaimed Mr. Fitzhugh, and all but dragged her across the clearing, bursting to share his news.

  “That was well played in there,” he said under his breath. “Deuced cleverly done, getting the chevalier out. What kind of pie do you think this is?” he bellowed suddenly.

  Arabella rubbed her ears. That had been rather loud.

  “Squab, I think,” she bellowed back. When in Rome. She lowered her voice, “Did you find the pudding?”

  Mr. Fitzhugh tipped his hat to reveal a fleeting glimpse of white muslin and red ribbons. “All right and tight and accounted for. Took another look at those ribbons. That’s what took me so long.”

  He sawed energetically at a venison pie with a silver serving knife. Arabella couldn’t remember the last time she had seen so much silver in one place. Silver, like the Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent. Arabella looked at Turnip.

  “Did you know that the French secret police think that you’re the Pink Carnation?”

  An expression of intense irritation passed across Mr. Fitzhugh’s amiable face. “Not that again. Deuced inconvenient. Not that I don’t consider it a compliment, but it’s bally irritating, constantly being dogged by murderous operatives all looking to stick a carnation in their caps.”

  “Has this happened to you frequently?” asked Arabella.

  “Oh, once or twice.” Mr. Fitzhugh gestured airily with the salver. “Shouldn’t think it has anything to do with our pud—oh.”

  Mr. Fitzhugh looked blankly down at the remains of his pie, which had slid with a splat onto the red damask cloth covering the table.

  No. Impossible. No one’s acting skills were that good.

  “Let me,” said Arabella, and took the salver from him.

  “Deuced alarming, this pudding
,” said Mr. Fitzhugh, leaning over her shoulder as she deftly transferred a slice of pie onto a plate. “That bit about a deal. Don’t like the look of it a’tall. Couldn’t make out much more, but one word looked like guerre. You know what that signifies.”

  “Love is war?” suggested Arabella. The pudding was beginning to give her a headache.

  Like the rest of the frost fair, the messages in the pudding were nothing more than a game, a diversion for bored aristocrats. The authorities were probably nothing more than the headmistress, the deal nothing more sinister than an exchange of schoolgirl gifts or lovers’ tokens. The illusion of intrigue was all make-believe, like the faux medieval livery on the servants, the deliberately aged lute in the hands of the musicians, the bright pennants hanging from the crumbling walls. In a few hours, the coals would be stanched, the silver cutlery would be carted away, the gaily dressed guests would drive home, and the castle would be left as it was, empty, a ruin, all the enchantment gone.

  And for that, she had traipsed across half of Sussex on the coldest day of the year.

  Not that there hadn’t been consolations. She had enjoyed being Mr. Fitzhugh’s conspirator—a little too much perhaps.

  “Er, was thinking more of the War Office, myself,” said Mr. Fitzhugh gamely. “I had some ideas. Some ideas for our investigation.” Mr. Fitzhugh’s blue eyes were bright with excitement.

  Thrusting the plate at him, Arabella broke in before he could go further. “Mr. Fitzhugh, this has been very amusing, but—”

  “You’re right.” Mr. Fitzhugh nodded emphatically. “This isn’t the place for it. Ears everywhere. I’ll call on you tomorrow. Safer that way.”

  For whom?

  Margaret would hover, casting suspicious glances from behind her embroidery. Her father would remain firmly planted at his desk, surfacing from time to time to quote obscure Latin lines to no one in particular. And Lavinia would probably drop the tea tray on him.

  Knowing Mr. Fitzhugh, he probably wouldn’t mind.

  But that wasn’t the point. The point was that this had been—a lark. A stolen moment in time. Mr. Fitzhugh could afford to go about chasing down puddings for the sheer sport of it, but she had a living to get and a family to care for. She was for teaching.

  And he was for Miss Deveraux.

  “There’s no need for you to call,” said Arabella quietly. “I’m sure you were right before. This is just a schoolgirl prank. Nothing more.”

  Chapter 9

  The Middle Ages were called the Dark Ages because they had no windows. In the Renaissance, they discovered glass and everything became light.”

  Arabella stifled a yawn with the back of her hand. Half past ten, five papers still left to mark, and her mind was already beginning to wander. Arabella squinted at the dense curlicues and ink blots of Clarissa Hardcastle’s history composition.

  The Middle Ages were called the Dark Ages because they had no windows.

  Arabella cocked her pen, trying to think of some tactful way to tackle Clarissa’s first sentence. Scratch, scratch, scratch went the nib against the page. Windows were, in fact, invented as early as . . .

  When were windows invented? A fine instructress she was, Arabella thought, vigorously scratching out the half-written line. Did the Romans have windows? The Greeks? All she knew was that the apertures in Farley Castle had seemed quite sufficiently windowlike to her, thank you very much.

  Sitting in the close confines of a small room on the fourth floor of Miss Climpson’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies, Farley Castle seemed farther away than its actual geographic distance. The last few days had passed in a blur of activity, as Arabella struggled to remember names and schedules. Some of the girls had already left for the holidays, but the rest of the school was in a ferment over the annual recital put on by the girls for their friends and family. In addition to her classes, Arabella had coached girls through their lines, soothed hurt feelings, and adjusted hems. Jane had been right about one thing, at least; she hadn’t seen the outside of the building since she had entered it.

  Even if she hadn’t squashed Mr. Fitzhugh’s plans, there would have been no way for her to leave the school to take part in them.

  Arabella frowned at the shadowy reflection of her own face in the window. Mr. Fitzhugh had looked so confused when she had told him not to call, confused and then hurt, like a puppy being abandoned by the side of the road. He had followed along after her back to the Vaughns, casting her troubled looks from under the brim of the hat he had stuck back on the top of his head.

  Well, whatever his hurt feelings at the time, he had obviously got over them.

  Like the pudding, she had been a two-day diversion, to be forgotten the moment the next, more interesting toy came along. There was nothing malicious about it; it was just the way of the world. Or, rather, the way of the ton, England’s perpetually bored aristocracy. Arabella had seen it before, the restless shift from diversion to diversion. They wagered on absurdities, they drove their horses too fast, they drank their way into oblivion or gorged their way into ever more ambitious exercises in corsetry.

  By now, Turnip Fitzhugh had probably forgotten about both her and puddings and was currently engaged in hopping three times around Bath Cathedral on one foot or trying to balance a rhubarb on his nose.

  Reaching for the pile of marked papers, Arabella gave them a brisk shake, making sure all the corners were neatly aligned, all the edges in place. It was for the best, really it was. The casual intimacy of the pudding hunt had been nothing more than the product of the moment, a strange little moment, and very much momentary.

  A gentle tap-tap-tapping on the door interrupted her thoughts.

  Arabella swiveled in her chair. “Come in!”

  Drat. Where had her shoes got to? Arabella scrounged desperately for her slippers with a stockinged toe. Arabella’s big toe connected with the side of the shoe and sent it skidding even farther under the desk.

  “Miss Dempsey?” The door creaked a few inches open, revealing a hem of gray skirt very like Arabella’s own.

  The hem was followed by the rest of the dress, as its wearer pushed open the portal with her hip, her hands occupied with two cups balanced on saucers.

  “I thought you might be in need of some refreshment,” said Mlle de Fayette, extending one of the steaming cups in a hand that trembled from the strain of holding it upright.

  Arabella blinked stupidly at a curl of steam rising above the rim of the cup. “Oh. Thank you.”

  The saucer wobbled in Mlle de Fayette’s hand. Arabella belatedly launched herself forward to take it from the other teacher. “How kind of you,” she said, and wished it didn’t sound so much like a question.

  “It is of no moment. I was fetching one for myself; it was no bother at all to carry another.” Mlle de Fayette set her own cup down on the desk, next to Clarissa’s composition. She nodded knowingly at the crumpled piece of paper. “Miss ’Ardcastle?”

  Arabella scooted her chair back slightly to make room for the other woman. “Yes. How did you know?”

  Lifting her cup, Mlle de Fayette blew gently on her tea. “The blots, mostly. Miss ’Ardcastle has a way with blots.”

  “Unfortunately, some of the words still got through,” said Arabella wryly.

  Mlle de Fayette’s cheeks creased, displaying a dimple very like that of her cousin, the chevalier. “Not everyone can be clever. With that sort of dowry, I shouldn’t bother to be clever either.”

  “Is Miss Hardcastle an heiress, then?”

  It shouldn’t have been surprising. Most of the girls in the school came from money of some sort. With a few exceptions, they tended to be the daughters of the landed gentry—untitled, but secure in both their birth and their fortunes.

  “Her father is a—what do you call it? A ‘cit.’ ” Mlle de Fayette pronounced the word in inverted commas. “Something to do with the manufacture. He makes the guns. Or is it the cannon?”

  “Something that makes loud banging noises and
produces smoke,” Arabella provided for her. “I can’t tell one firearm from the other either. It’s what comes of not having brothers.”

  Mlle de Fayette’s fingers stilled on the handle of her teacup. She looked like a lady on a cameo, her profile still and pale in the uncertain light. “I had brothers. Two of them.”

  Arabella could have kicked herself for tactlessness. What had the girls said that afternoon of the pudding? It had been something to do with their French mistress, and the awful fuss she made over her brother’s head being chopped off. Arabella felt a cold chill creep along her spine at the thought. Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.

  In the sudden hush, she heard herself asking, “What happened to them?”

  Mlle de Fayette stared out over the garden, somewhere a million miles away. For a moment, in the unnatural calm of the ill-lit room, it seemed as though she might actually answer.

  A light flickered on the grounds—or more likely, thought Arabella, blinking, just the guttering of the candle reflected in the dark glass of the window. Mlle de Fayette turned with an uncharacteristically abrupt movement, sloshing tea over the rim of her cup onto the gray fabric of her dress.

  “Tiens! How clumsy I am.” She scrubbed at the spill with her handkerchief. “And tea is so very difficult to get out.”

  “Here, let me.” Crossing the room, Arabella wet her own handkerchief from the washbasin and handed it to the other woman. “I am sorry about your brothers.”

  Mlle de Fayette dabbed at the blotch with the damp handkerchief, succeeding only in spreading the stain. “I have Nicolas now. He is more trouble than three brothers put together.”

  “He seems very charming,” said Arabella at random.

  “The devil charms for his own purpose.” Having created a very wide, damp patch with no visible diminution of the stain, Mlle de Fayette shook out the handkerchief and handed it back to Arabella. “Your Mr. Fitzhugh has his measure of charm as well. A very different sort of charm, but charm nonetheless.”