The Mischief of the Mistletoe: A Pink Carnation Christmas (42 page)

“Hard to tell, really. It keeps growing on me. Deuced inconvenient that way.”

The two shared a long and extremely soppy look.

Arabella fluttered her lashes at him. “I love the way you hit yourself in the head when you've forgotten something.”

“Good,” said Turnip, “because I'm deuced forgetful.”

“So long as you don't forget me.”

Turnip twined his fingers through hers. “Couldn't do that if I tried. You're engraved on my heart, don't you know.”

Arabella batted her eyelashes at him. “How very uncomfortable for you.”

Captain Musgrave peered over his shoulder, checking to see if anyone had heard. “You're making a scandal of yourself, Arabella,” he said in low, urgent tones.

“Good,” said Arabella cheerfully. “I've been far too well-behaved for far too long.”

Shame having failed, Captain Musgrave tried guilt. “If you won't think of yourself, think of your aunt.”

“I'm not thinking. I'm acting. No more Hamlet for me.” Turnip grinned proudly. It went straight to Arabella's head. Turning back to her step-uncle, she said giddily, “If you're not careful, I might invade Scotland next.”

Musgrave looked at her with genuine concern. “I know this year has been difficult for you, but I hadn't realized quite how difficult. Maybe you should go lie down. You aren't yourself.”

Arabella smiled ruefully at him, thinking how little he knew. “On the contrary, I am most entirely myself. More so than I've been for years.”

Musgrave shook his head in determined negation. “This isn't the you I know.”

“That's because you didn't know me. You wouldn't have wanted to.” It was true. If she had said half the things she had been thinking, it would have scared him to death. Arabella turned back to Turnip. “As for you, Mr. Fitzhugh, didn't you promise me a grand display of the scandalous and embarrassing variety?”

“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
:

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?

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 Tournelle'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.