Crack.
The report of a gun echoed somewhere to Turnip’s right.
“Not yet, you idiot!” someone shouted, flown on champagne and brandy cakes. “Wait until you see the green of their leaves!”
The duchess’s male guests jostled into the forest clearing in a whooping, staggering, gleeful mass. The acrid smell of gun smoke warred with the sickly sweet scents of pomade, cologne, and hot-house fruits. A vast bonfire sent sparks flaring into the sky, turning the faces of the laughing, shouting men into something out of primitive history. They might have been their own ancestors, charging forward to cut down a Roman brigade, rather than a few tree spirits.
Free of feminine oversight, wigs had been discarded, cravats loosened, waistcoasts unbuttoned. Some had liberated champagne from the feast and were chugging directly out of the bottle; others refreshed themselves from flasks. A safe distance from the bonfire, the servants had set out a table, the delicate Irish linen covering the raw boards in stark contrast to the rough pottery casks that had been lined up in two rows on top of the table.
“Cider!” someone shouted, and everyone made a dash for the table, eager to get to the famed Norfolk cider that had been known to lay grown men low.
“Shall we get on?” said the Duke of Dovedale.
Turnip couldn’t have agreed more. The sooner they got this over with, the sooner he could get back to Arabella. She had to like him at least a little bit to kiss him back like that. She wasn’t a Penelope, to cast her kisses on the wind like bread unto the waters. Penelope. Turnip shook his head to himself, eliciting several funny looks from the people around him. How could she have thought he was carrying a torch for Penelope? He wasn’t holding even a very small candle.
Still, if she was jealous, that had to mean something. Rather encouraging, really. Turnip drew in a deep breath. Once they had finished with this ridiculous list, he could put his courage to the sticking point, corner Arabella on a balcony — he’d rather liked that balcony — and make a declaration she couldn’t mistake.
It didn’t matter that she didn’t have a dowry. He had income enough for two — well, for ten, really, if one totted up the numbers and all that, but he didn’t want ten, he just wanted Arabella. He could send her younger sisters to school and find her father a nicer spa and give that cranky sister a season and hire half a dozen paid companions to make demmed sure that Arabella never had to fetch another vinaigrette for Lady Osborne ever again.
Turnip circled warily around the tree. “I say, are we meant to shoot at the tree or away from it?”
For all that it was meant to be stuffed full of evil spirits, it still looked like a tree to him.
“At it, I should think,” opined Lord Freddy Staines, shining the already shiny stock of his pistol. It was as elaborately designed as a lady’s dresser set, polished to a fine sheen and chased with delicate curlicues of sterling silver. “How else are we to kill the evil spirits?”
Good point, that. Turnip nodded intelligently.
The Duke of Dovedale bared his teeth in an unconvincing imitation of a smile. “I’d say shooting at the tree would be a jolly dangerous idea.”
“Why?” demanded Lord Henry Innes, joining the group, a jug of cider in one hand, pistol in the other. “It ain’t going to shoot back.”
Turnip eyed Innes thoughtfully. If Innes were here, he couldn’t be in the house. Which meant, in a rather roundabout way, that now would be an excellent time to dispose of that list. From the size of that jug, Innes should be occupied for a good long while. He wasn’t going to be dragging anyone off behind bushes anytime soon.
Sir Francis Medmenham delicately reached out and turned Innes’s pistol away from the tree. “Ricochet,” he said succinctly. “I, for one, have no desire to breathe my last because of a bullet bouncing off a tree.”
Turnip didn’t wait to hear the rest of the argument.
“Just going for refreshments, don’t you know,” he said to no one in particular, and began to back away, past the bonfire, past the table with the cider jugs, past another table set out with a variety of hearty foods to sustain the tree-hunters on their midnight quest. No namby-pamby lady foods such as were served at the ball, but good, hearty meat pastries, cold meats, the smelliest of cheeses, and hefty loaves of fresh-baked bread. There was also, set out to one side, a neat pyramid of Christmas puddings, each adorned with its own sprig of mistletoe.
Hmm. Struck by inspiration, Turnip snatched up a pudding in passing before bolting back towards the house. It was, he decided, practically a sign. Anyone could bring flowers, but nothing said I love you like a slightly squished Christmas pudding.
It made Turnip feel warm inside just thinking about it. It was a pudding that had brought them together, after all. Amazing, the way the rest of one’s life could hinge on one little ball of suet and dried fruit.
Turnip looked down at the muslin-wrapped ball in his hand and grinned. He was sure they could find excellent use for that mistletoe trimming, too.
The gallery was all but deserted when he entered, save for the silent army of servants sweeping up the last of the feast, scrubbing squished lobster patties off the gleaming parquet floor, setting the room to rights for tomorrow’s festivities. Turnip was about to look elsewhere when one of the long silk curtains shading the ornamental alcoves rustled and Lady Henrietta Dorrington wiggled her way out, still speaking to someone in the alcove behind her.
Phew. Turnip let out the breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding. Deuced clever of Lady Hen to hide Arabella away in an alcove, he thought, as he strode towards her across the deserted dance floor. Not that he would tell her, of course. She was the gloating sort, Lady Hen.
He raised his hand in greeting as he approached. There was no need to stand on ceremony with Lady Henrietta; he had known her since she was a chubby-cheeked toddler trying to make her brother’s friends play dolls. He had managed a bally good falsetto, if he did say so himself.
“Hullo,” Lady Henrietta said cheerfully, holding the curtain for someone behind her. “Aren’t you supposed to be tree hunting?”
“Spirit hunting,” Turnip corrected her, craning his neck to try to see around her. “Is Miss Dempsey in there?”
“No,” said Lady Charlotte Lansdowne apologetically, shoving the curtain aside. “Just me.”
Lady Henrietta looked pointedly at Turnip’s hands. “Why are you holding a pudding?”
Turnip clutched his love offering protectively to his chest. “I like pudding.”
“So do I,” said Lady Henrietta, “but I don’t go around embracing it.”
Refusing to let himself be drawn, Turnip fixed Lady Henrietta with anxious eyes. “Thought Miss Dempsey was supposed to be with you.”
Lady Henrietta looked at Lady Charlotte, who shook her head. Lady Henrietta turned back to Turnip. “I haven’t see her since the Fairy Queen.”
“You haven’t?” Turnip had heard of blood running cold, but it was the first time his had actually done it. “Do you know where she went?”
“If I haven’t seen her,” said Lady Henrietta with exaggerated patience, “how could I know where she is?”
If she wasn’t with Lady Henrietta, where was she? Turnip didn’t have a good feeling about this.
“Thanks all the same,” mumbled Turnip, bolting for the doors. “Shan’t keep you.”
“What is it?” Lady Henrietta called after him. “Is something wrong?”
But Turnip was already gone.
There were only a handful of middle-aged matrons playing whist in the card room, none of whom were Arabella. The footman by the garden doors hadn’t seen a girl in a peach silk dress. Neither had the ones napping by the front door, who snapped guiltily to attention as Turnip dashed up to them.
Good Gad, had someone whisked her out through a window? Down a trellis?
The footmen at the foot of the stairs looked exactly like the ten footmen he had already spoken to. But there was one crucial distinction. These footmen remembered Arabella, and they remembered her going upstairs, not fifteen minutes before.
“Alone?” Turnip asked, bouncing from one foot to the other in his agitation. “There wasn’t a chap with a knife, or a gun, or a paper scimitar, or anything like that?”
The footman’s impassive mask never altered. “I am sure I couldn’t say, sir.”
“Her room,” he demanded, mangling the pudding in his strangle-hold. “Where’s her room?”
If the footman deemed it an improper question, he was too well trained to show it. His gaze never deviated from the correct two inches above Turnip’s left shoulder. “Two flights up, fourth door to the left, sir.”
“Two up, four left,” muttered Turnip. “Two up, four left.”
How long had it been now? Fifteen minutes? Twenty?
Turnip took the stairs two steps at a time.
“You aren’t going to scream, are you?” said Catherine. “That would be too tedious for words.”
“Catherine?” Arabella stared at her former student, trying to reconcile the conflict between the curls, the frills, the flounces, and the very businesslike pistol in Catherine’s hand. It didn’t even have silver chasing or mother-of-pearl inlay. It was simply what it was: a highly efficient instrument of death.
And it was pointed straight at Arabella.
“Don’t try anything silly,” Catherine instructed, her bracelet glinting in the candlelight as she aimed the gun at Arabella’s chest. “I can use this. And I will.”
Arabella didn’t doubt it.
“If this is about your history mark,” she said mildly, “wouldn’t it have been simpler to have seen me about it before the end of term?”
“There’s no use pretending you don’t have it. I know you do.”
“Have what?” Arabella said, as calmly as she could manage.
“The list.” Catherine’s voice was clipped and hard. There was a steeliness to her that belied the seeming frivolity of her clothes, the childlike sweetness of her still-round cheeks. There was petulance there too: adult purpose married to adolescent single-mindedness. It was a combination that made Arabella very, very afraid. “I need that list.”
Lifting her hand from the book, Arabella very slowly turned the rest of the way around, conscious of the pistol following her every movement.
“Catherine,” she began briskly.
“Just because someone invited you to this party doesn’t mean you have any right to address me so familiarly.” Catherine’s nose lifted in an uncanny imitation of her mother’s. “From now on, you will address me as Mrs. Danforth.”
Danforth. Danforth? Whatever Arabella had expected, it hadn’t been that. “As in... Lieutenant Darius Danforth?”
As she said it, she could picture him. Danforth, who was friends with Catherine’s cousin. Danforth, who had been disowned for dishonoring a young lady of good family. Danforth, who had spearheaded that game of blind man’s buff.
“The very one,” said Catherine smugly.
A host of disregarded images came belatedly and painfully into focus: Danforth passing close by Catherine, stopping to murmur something into her ear; Danforth and Catherine, exchanging glances across the drawing room; Danforth and Catherine, in collusion.
Arabella licked her dry lips. “Not Lady Grimmlesby-Thorpe?”
Catherine tossed her head. “You didn’t think I was going to marry that old sot? No. Darius and I were married by special license in November.” She preened. “He does have important connections, you know. Darius is the son of an earl.”
The disowned son of an earl, but Arabella deemed it wiser not to point that out while Catherine was holding a pistol.
It had been in November that Catherine had been expelled from Miss Climpson’s. “That was when you ran away from the school.”
“I didn’t run away,” Catherine corrected her. “I eloped.”
“Of course,” Arabella said quickly. Rule Number One: Don’t make the woman with the pistol angry. “My felicitations.”
Diving for the pistol wasn’t really an option. Arabella wouldn’t be surprised to find that Catherine really was as good a shot as she claimed.
There was a rather heavy perfume atomizer on the dressing table. If she could reach behind and grab it, she could throw it at Catherine, duck, and run. Of course, that presumed that she managed to reach it without Catherine noticing, and, once she had it in hand, that she threw true, neither of which seemed highly likely.
“Thank you,” Catherine took her congratulations as her due. “But as you can see, this is hardly a social call. You have caused me a great deal of bother since you arrived at Miss Climpson’s.”
Arabella had caused her a great deal of bother?
“I’m so sorry,” Arabella said. “Was that your pudding?”
“Whose did you think it was? The Prince of Wales’s? You had no business reading it, no business at all.”
“You left it on the windowsill,” Arabella said slowly, “so Lieutenant Danforth could pick it up.”
“Those pedants at Miss Climpson’s persisted in watching me to make sure I didn’t see Darius. But they didn’t think anything of a Christmas pudding left on a windowsill.”
“Or a notebook?”
“Clever, wasn’t it?” Catherine smirked.
Arabella was still putting all the pieces together. “That night at Miss Climpson’s Christmas performance. You were one of the wise men.”
“I gave Darius my robe and my sword while Sally and those other angels were still preening themselves onstage. It was easy enough. The robe was too short on him, but you didn’t look very closely, did you?”
“One doesn’t when one is being dragged backwards in a dark corridor.” One by one, the pieces were beginning to fall into place. “You were the one who searched my room.”
“Twice. Really, you might think of investing in some new walking dresses. That green one is disgraceful.” Catherine shuddered in distaste. If one had to paw through someone else’s belongings looking for treasonous documents, they might, in Catherine’s view, at least be fashionable ones.
Catherine’s snobbery might have been all that had kept her from discovering the paper the first few times; she would never have considered touching Arabella’s gray school dress, any more than Rose had. It was an amusing irony that Arabella would be sure to savor at her leisure. If she survived to do it.
“Whose idea was the game of blind man’s buff?”
“I came up with the idea, of course” — Catherine was leaving no doubts as to the evil mastermind in this partnership — “but I had to leave it to Darius to execute. Being a gentleman, he didn’t have the nerve to do it properly.”
Gentleman? Arabella bit her tongue on the acerbic comment that rose to her lips.
Catherine’s curls quivered as she contemplated the inefficiency of the opposite sex. “I was appalled when I arrived this morning to find that he had been here two weeks and done nothing! Nothing! I had given him very specific instructions.”
Arabella didn’t like to think what those instructions might have been. She suspected Catherine’s methods of information extraction ran to the rack-and-thumbscrews variety.
“I can’t fault him for the delicacy of his nature,” Catherine went on, with a pro forma simper. As far as Arabella could tell, Darius Danforth was about as delicate as a goat, but Catherine apparently knew a different, more sensitive man. “His scruples become him, but it just wouldn’t do and I told him so.”
Arabella knew she should have reported Catherine’s midnight escapades to Miss Climpson while she still had the chance. This was what she got for being tolerant and understanding.
“So he got up his game of blind man’s buff,” Arabella said grimly.
“My game of blind man’s buff, you mean.” Catherine wasn’t willing to be cheated out of her credit, even at the expense of her husband. “Those idiot friends of his will do anything if you tell them it’s for a wager. By the end, each of them thought it was his own idea. They all find you an utter antidote, you know.”
“Lovely,” said Arabella.
“After all that, Darius made a botch of it, poor lamb. So here I am.” Catherine smiled brightly at Arabella and brought her pistol back up. “Give me the list. Now.”
In a novel, the proper sort of heroine would refuse to hand over the list, guarding it to the death.
Arabella didn’t want to die.
What good could she do to anyone dead? Other than alert the others to the treason with the sound of the shot that killed her, but, frankly, the walls of Girdings were too thick for that sort of thing. It might, in fact, be wiser to let Catherine have the blasted thing — as least, for the moment. Stranded in Girdings House, Catherine wouldn’t be able to get terribly far. While she was savoring her triumph, Arabella could muster the troops and catch her with list in hand.
“All right,” Arabella said slowly. “It was yours, after all. I only came upon it by accident. I never meant to interfere with your plans.”
It was what Catherine wanted to hear. She laughed happily. “Can you believe Darius even suggested paying you for it? I told him not to be absurd.”
Arabella reached behind her for the crumpled piece of paper. “Why do you want it so very badly? I don’t see you as a French spy.”
Catherine sniffed derisively. “As if I would be in it for that! Darius knows someone who knows someone who’s willing to pay good money for the thing. We’ll be set for life.”
“If you aren’t hanged for treason.” Seeing Catherine’s brows draw together, Arabella said hastily, “You can still put it back, you know. You can hide it among your father’s things. He’ll think he misplaced it. No one will be the wiser.”
“And live in some little hovel until my parents forgive me? No.” So much for their hard-won rapport. Catherine’s lips curved in a distinctly feline smile. Arabella could all but see her licking the cream off her whiskers. With impeccable logic, Catherine said, “They can’t hang me for treason if no one knows about it.”
Catherine was going to kill her. Arabella knew it as surely as she knew her own name. It wouldn’t have mattered if she handed over the list or not. Catherine had been planning to kill her either way. If there were no witnesses, those nasty events had never happened.
She wasn’t mad. It would be easier if she were. One could reason with a madman, suss out his distorted logic and play on it. But Catherine wasn’t mad. She was just very, very determined and entirely selfish.
What was the life of a lowly schoolmistress so long as she got her Darius and the money too?
Not to mention all of those other lives, the Royalist agents stationed between Paris and Boulogne, the English agents who relied upon them, the locals who supported them, all the hundreds of individuals whose lives would be forfeit when that list reached Bonaparte’s hands.
Arabella could see the carnage stretching out from Norfolk to Paris, life after life, all at the hands of the self-satisfied sixteen-year-old standing in front of her, gold bracelets gleaming on her wrists, all frills and ruffles and deadly self-indulgence.
Jane was right, teaching was a far more hazardous profession than Arabella had ever envisioned.
“How do you explain about the money, then?” Arabella asked desperately.
Catherine widened her eyes guilelessly. “Didn’t you hear? The money was a gift to Darius from a very elderly relative.” Dropping the pose, she added frankly, “She’s senile, you know. She’ll never know the difference. She may even think she did give it to us.”
Arabella retreated as Catherine advanced. “But someone else does know. That friend of Lieutenant Danforth’s, the one who arranged the deal.”
Catherine dismissed that with a casual wave of her pistol. “He wouldn’t dare tell. He’s in it too. You, on the other hand, are not.”
“Have you ever thought that he might be a counteragent? Perhaps he’s really working for the government and only pretending to sell secrets to the French.”
“He’s not,” said Catherine with terrifying certainty. “You forget. My father is in the government.”
“The government might pay you for it!” Arabella’s back was against the window. She could feel the latch digging into her spine. “You can tell them you found it. There might be a finder’s fee. You would be a heroine. His Majesty would invite you to tea.”
“Open the window,” said Catherine.
“Pardon?”
“Open the window.” Catherine pointed with her pistol. “You are going to have a nice little fall.”
Little wasn’t the adjective Arabella would have chosen. Her room was three stories up. They were very tall stories. The kitchen garden lay below, but, at this height, Arabella doubted that the winter-gray stalks of thyme and sage were going to do much to break her fall.
Arabella frowned at her former pupil. “These aren’t the sort of windows one just falls out of. You won’t be able to pass it off as an accident.”
Catherine looked smug. “I don’t need to. Everyone knows that you’ve been flinging yourself at Sally Fitzhugh’s brother. When he turned you down — who’s to say what you might do?”
Arabella eyed her askance. “Killing oneself for unrequited love? Does anyone really do that these days?”
Catherine jabbed the gun in her direction. “As of now, you do. Just think, you can start a whole new fashion.” She adopted an expression of mock remorse. “Such a shame that Mr. Fitzhugh didn’t return your affections.”
“ ’Fraid there’s a problem with that plan,” came a voice from the doorway.