The Mischief of the Mistletoe: A Pink Carnation Christmas (25 page)

Just went to show what he knew.

It took him a moment to realize that Miss Austen was looking at him as though expecting him to say something and that her lips were no longer moving.

Turnip blinked at her. “Sorry. Pardon. What was that?”

“What will you do there?” Miss Austen repeated patiently.

“Oh, you know. The usual sorts of things.” Drinking and dicing with the chaps, dancing and party games with the ladies. “Christmas things.”

“We used to have splendid Christmases back in Steventon,” said Miss Austen. “My family and the Dempseys.”

“Steventon?”

“It is a small town in Hertfordshire. Mr. Dempsey's parish was not far away.”

“Mr. Dempsey is a vicar?”

He hadn't known that.

He hadn't thought to ask. He had just assumed that Arabella was like everyone else. And by everyone else, he meant everyone else at Almack's Assembly Rooms, the comfortable scion of landed interests.

Turnip could see Arabella as a vicar's daughter, taking soup to the poor and organizing the local sewing circle. She had that sort of look to her. Sensible. Capable. But one didn't generally find vicars' daughters at balls in London. It had something to do with matters of finance. Vicars seldom amassed enough in the way of worldly goods to keep a debutante in gloves and fans.

“Mr. Dempsey used to be a vicar.” Miss Austen looked briefly away. “Unfortunately, for some time now, his poor health has kept him from following his calling.”

If vicars tended not to be too plush in the pocket, what happened to vicars without a vicarage?

I am a woman and I am poor,
Arabella had said.

It occurred to him, belatedly, that the address at which he had fetched her for their excursion to Farley Castle had not been a fashionable one.

“How did Miss Dempsey come to be in London?” Turnip asked tentatively, not wanting to pry, but needing to know all the same.

“Her aunt took her in as a companion after her mother died,” said Miss Austen, seeming to see nothing wrong with the question. “But her aunt is recently remarried, so we have the great pleasure of having Arabella returned to us.”

Despite the pretty phrasing, the meaning was quite clear. “Her aunt didn't adopt her, then?”

“No. She only borrowed her a while.” Turnip had the feeling that Miss Austen didn't think much of Arabella's aunt. Neither did he.

Turnip looked around at Miss Climpson's dining hall, at the costumed girls and the platters of miniature mince pies. He hadn't thought about that, either—about why a young lady of means would suddenly choose to abandon the social whirl to direct Nativity plays at a young ladies' academy. With a sense of shame, he remembered teasing her about it.

“Is that why—?”

He had the feeling Miss Austen knew perfectly well what he meant, but she affected confusion. “Why?”

“Why she chose to teach?”

Miss Austen smiled blandly. “Miss Dempsey has a great commitment to the education of young minds.” She looked directly at Turnip. “And there is some hope that Miss Climpson will be kind enough to waive the usual school fees for Arabella's younger sisters.”

“Oh,” said Turnip. School fees. He supposed Sally had them, but paying them had never been in question. It wasn't when one had thirty thousand pounds a year. “But not if she loses her position.”

“No,” said Miss Austen gently, “not if she loses her position. Mince pie?”

Turnip took the pie. It tasted a lot like penance and a very little like pie.

ARABELLA TASTED FEAR. It rose like bile as the silver sword pressed against what she was fairly sure was an essential part of her neck.

“Where is it?” her captor demanded.

“Where is what?” Her voice came out as a mere thread of sound as she tried to speak without moving her throat.

There would be no use in screaming. The door to the music room was closed and the din created by the assorted guests in the dining hall would drown out any fragment of sound that did manage to scrape through. Any help was too far away, well down the hall. The sword was at her throat. It would be an unequal contest. She was on her own.

The hand holding her wrists twisted, hard. Arabella did her best not to flinch. Flinching would bring the blade closer to her throat. “You know what.”

“No, I don't, really.”

She could feel the clammy moisture coating her brow and the droplets of sweat beginning to form beneath her arms. It was cold in the music room, cold and dark. The shrouded forms of instruments hulked against the sides of the room like the funeral monuments in the chantry of Farley Castle.

What a wonderful sort of absurdity, if, after all that, Turnip Fitzhugh had been right. Arabella wondered where he was now. Mingling with the other guests? Scarfing down miniature mince pies? Sticking pins into a picture of her?

Something that was half laugh, half sob caught in her throat. All those nights lurking outside the school, popping up outside the drawing room window, climbing up her trellis, and now, just when she had ordered him away, would be the moment she actually needed him.

If there was some divinity that shaped man's ends, it did have a truly malicious sense of humor.

The sword pressed closer to her throat. Arabella could see her captor's knuckles white against the hilt. There was a ring on one finger, set with a single, large stone that glimmered wetly in the dark, the lack of light leeching it of color. It looked black as a sinner's soul. “What did you do with it?”

“With what?”

The sword was curiously curved, fitting around her throat like a collar. Arabella could have done without such adornments. “The list.”

“List?” Arabella squinted down at her neck. It wasn't a sword but a scimitar.

“The list,” he repeated, pressing with his scimitar.

Who in heaven's name carried a scimitar? Turkish pashas, maybe, but Arabella doubted that she was being held at scimitar point by a Turkish pasha. There were no Turkish pashas in Bath, at least that she knew of. If there were, she imagined they'd have better things to do than run around ladies' academies accosting junior instructresses.

But there were wise men.

Three of them, in fact. In addition to the usual load of gold, frankincense and myrrh, they also carried swords. Long, curvy, silver swords, fashioned out of several layers of stiffened paper.

The panic that had held Arabella in its grip dropped away as the reality of the situation dawned upon her in all of its full absurdity. She was being held hostage with a paper sword.

“I need the list,” he rasped, jabbing her in the jugular with the now palpably pasteboard scimitar. Now that she was looking, she could even see that it was bent a bit about the edges.

So much for spies.

Now that she no longer feared for her life, Arabella found herself growing angry. Someone—and she presumed it was the same someone who had ransacked her room—must have bribed an older brother or a cousin or some other variety of male relation to come in and give her a scare. Sally had warned her that new instructresses were fair game for pranks, but Arabella had always assumed it would be something along the lines of toads in the bed, not ripped mattresses and being held in a corridor with a paper sword and menaced with vague threats about missing papers.

List, indeed. Pure nonsense. He might at least have come up with a better line. And a better sword.

“Did you know that your sword is pasteboard?” Arabella asked conversationally.

Her assailant went very still. “No, it's not.”

Arabella wriggled, trying to pull her wrists away. The paper sword bumped harmlessly against her chin. “Yes, it is.”

“How would you know?” her captor demanded breathlessly, trying to keep his hold on her wrists.

“I was the one who made it.”

“Oh.”

“You could say that,” said Arabella acerbically, and stomped down, hard, on his foot.

He was wearing boots and she was wearing slippers, so the effect wasn't all that she had hoped it would be, but he did make a very gratifying yelping noise. More important, he dropped her hands.

Pins and needles tingled in her wrists as blood rushed back through her extremities.

She barely had time to wring them out before something slammed into her back, sending her sprawling forward. As she fell heavily to her knees, her palms scraping painfully against the carpet, Arabella heard the rasp of the door being yanked open, followed by the resounding reverberation of the wood slamming heavily into its frame.

Arabella stumbled clumsily to her feet, tripping on her own skirts.

“Stop! Wait!”

Wrenching open the door, she skidded out into the hallway.

The corridor was empty.

At least, it was mostly empty. There was something shiny lying on the ground not far from the music room door. Arabella didn't need to stoop down to examine it to know what it was. One pasteboard scimitar with a hilt set with imitation jewels.

A few yards farther along, a pile of fabric showed pale against the baseboards. Arabella lifted it with two fingers, holding it in front of her like three-day-old fish. One wise man's robe.

She opened her fingers, letting the fabric slither to the floor at her feet. Her assailant must have yanked it off while she was still trying to untangle her legs from her blasted skirt and then strolled blithely back into the throng of spectators in the dining hall.

There was no way of determining whose robe it was; she had hemmed dozens of the blasted things, making some over from last year's, sewing others from scratch. The school was positively littered with the garments. Anyone could have taken one. She couldn't even identify her attacker by voice. Whoever it was had taken care to wrap cloth around his face, muffling his voice. The only thing she was fairly sure of was that her attacker had been male.

Arabella paused in the foyer, beneath the battered piece of mistletoe she had passed what felt like a lifetime ago and looked across the entry-way into the dining hall. Miss Climpson's students appeared to possess an inordinately large number of brothers, fathers, uncles, and male cousins.

Among them, she spotted Signor Marconi, who appeared to be even more than usually rumpled. He was in possession of both of his mustachios this time, but his hair was tousled and his cravat askew.

Arabella's eyes narrowed on the music master. For all the absurdity of the fake mustaches, he was younger than he tried to appear, not more than a few years older than she was, at a guess. He had participated in all the rehearsals, so he knew about the wise men's robes and the paper scimitars.

There had been no attacks on her room or her person until she had interrupted Signor Marconi in his midnight wanderings around the school.

As she stared at the music master, something else clicked into place. The music room. The attack had taken place in the music room. It wasn't exactly conclusive evidence, but it certainly militated in that direction. Either the music master thought she had seen something he wanted hidden or he was simply holding a grudge for the fact that she had caused the loss of his favorite set of mustachios.

What a tempest in a teapot it had all turned out to be.

When she told Turnip—

Arabella came up short, feeling a bit as though she had run flat into a wall without seeing it coming. She wasn't going to tell Turnip Fitzhugh about this or about anything.

It was a surprisingly lonely feeling.

She would find Jane. She would find Jane, and eat some disgusting mince pie, and plot the revenge she planned to take on Signor Marconi. Perhaps she might even confront Signor Marconi and make him squirm a bit. Arabella flexed her wrists. There were red marks in her skin that would undoubtedly darken to a lovely purple-yellow by morning. Or she could make him squirm a lot.

Rubbing her sore wrists, Arabella set off into the dining hall in search of Jane. Being so diminutive, Jane was always a bother to spot in a crowd, although less so here than usual, with all the short schoolgirls lowering the general height ratio. Arabella finally located her standing near the refreshment table.

Jane was talking to a tall man, a tall man with hair as gold as a wise man's gift and a coat made of crimson cloth that would have looked absurd on anyone else. Arabella stared at them and wished herself back in that corridor with a paper scimitar against her throat. Or in her bed with the covers pulled up over her head.

As she stood there, he looked up. His eyes briefly met hers.

And he looked away.

He looked away as though he had never seen her before and never cared to again. He turned and said something to Jane. Arabella couldn't hear what it was, but it had to be a farewell of some sort, because he was bowing, and moving away, with a celerity that would have been unflattering under any circumstances and was even more so now, because she knew she had brought it on herself.