The Mischief of the Mistletoe
Page 6
“Mmm. Pie,” said Mr. Fitzhugh, looking longingly after them. “Meat in a pastry shell. One of the greatest inventions known to man.”
“I had always thought it was the wheel,” said Jane.
Mr. Fitzhugh looked meaningfully at Arabella, raising his eyebrows as far as they would go. “Might be an excellent place to find a spot of pudding.”
“We can always look,” she said, although she rather doubted they would find anything of the kind.
Mr. Fitzhugh raised his hand in an enthusiastic wave. “Look! There’s Vaughn.”
The man in question, sleekly dressed in a well-tailored black coat, glanced over at the sound of his name. His eyes narrowed. It might just have been the glare of the sun, but Arabella doubted it.
“He doesn’t look pleased to see us,” observed Jane in an undertone.
“Lord Vaughn never looks pleased to see anyone,” Arabella murmured back.
“That’s just his way,” said Mr. Fitzhugh cheerfully. “Can’t take it too to heart. If I had a penny for every time the chap has greeted me with, Oh, it’s you again. . . .”
“Yes?”
Mr. Fitzhugh waved a hand. “I’d have lots of pennies. Jolly useful things, pennies. Vaughn, old bean! Didn’t think to see you out here!”
“The feeling is mutual,” said Lord Vaughn drily. “This party was by invitation only.”
“Got the invitation straight from the horse’s mouth,” Mr. Fitzhugh protested indignantly. “Henry Innes told me to come. Saw him at Miss Climpson’s yesterday, bringing parcels to his cousin.”
“How delightful,” said Lady Vaughn, in a voice that suggested it was anything but.
Arabella took a step back from the glare of Lady Vaughn’s rubies. “We didn’t mean to intrude upon your party.”
“Such a pity, then, that your intent didn’t match your execution,” said Lady Vaughn, so smoothly that it took one a moment to notice the stiletto beneath the silk. “Miss . . .”
Arabella knew that the former Miss Alsworthy knew very well who she was. Aunt Osborne and Miss Alsworthy’s mother had been cronies of sorts. They went shopping together, spurring each other on to ever more egregious purchases. But now that Miss Alsworthy was Lady Vaughn—and now that it was known that Arabella was no longer likely to be her aunt’s heiress—Lady Vaughn couldn’t be bothered to recall a mere Miss Dempsey.
“It’s Dempsey,” Mr. Fitzhugh provided for her, looking sternly at Lady Vaughn. “Miss Dempsey. And her friend, Miss Austen.”
“Dempsey?” Lord Vaughn eyed her lazily through his quizzing glass. “Not Lady Osborne’s ward?”
“Her niece,” Arabella corrected. Ward implied a status that Arabella no longer enjoyed.
The sun glinted off the serpent scrolled around Vaughn’s quizzing glass. “Ah,” said Vaughn. “You must be here to see your aunt. How . . . touching.”
So they were here. For all her speculations, she hadn’t really expected they would be.
Arabella felt her fingers go hot, then cold.
“Oh, no,” said Mr. Fitzhugh blithely, immune to nuance. “We’re here to see the ruins.”
Lady Vaughn looked innocently up at her husband. “Isn’t that what you said, Vaughn?”
Her meaning was impossible to mistake. Arabella squirmed, feeling uncomfortable for her aunt, for Jane, for herself. Aunt Osborne’s marriage had made all the papers. The scandal sheets had reveled in the ridiculous spectacle of an aging woman marrying an ambitious young man. Arabella had, for the most part, been left out of it, but there had been one or two mentions made of dashed hopes and disinherited relations.
Just so long as no one ever realized exactly which sorts of hopes had been dashed.
“Farley Castle is accounted very picturesque,” Jane was saying, when a woman came hurrying out of the castle gates, nearly bumping into their party.
“I do beg your pardon—,” she began.
“I say!” Mr. Fitzhugh’s face lit up with recognition. “Don’t I know you? Met you at Miss Climpson’s yesterday. You’re the French mistress.”
“Mademoiselle de Fayette,” said the lady in a soft voice. “And you are Mr. Fitzhugh.”
“Miss Climpson’s, did you say?” asked Jane, looking meaningfully at Arabella. The young woman, while prettily and warmly dressed, looked harried, her hair escaping in dark wisps from its pins, her bonnet askew.
“Mr. Fitzhugh’s sister is a pupil at Miss Climpson’s,” said Mlle de Fayette. “A most apt pupil too.”
She made one of those quick, shifting movements people make as they prepare to excuse themselves, but she was forestalled by Lady Vaughn.
“A Fitzhugh?” Lady Vaughn’s laugh, sickly sweet as syrup and just as devoid of any genuine nourishment, grated on Arabella’s nerves. “Apt?”
“I shouldn’t be too hasty to condemn the entire garden on the basis of one vegetable, my sweet,” returned her husband blandly, as though the vegetable in question weren’t standing right there. “One never knows where one might find the odd flower.”
Lady Vaughn tossed her glossy head, making the crimson plumes on her hat dance. “Why bother with root vegetables when there are roses to be had?”
Lord Vaughn regarded his wife from beneath half-closed lids. “Too humble for you?”
Lady Vaughn’s gaze shifted to Mr. Fitzhugh’s dangling watch fobs, all decorated with exaggerated enamel carnations. “Too tasteless.”
Arabella remembered the hot bricks and the cold chocolate and the solicitude with which Mr. Fitzhugh had tucked blanket after blanket around them in the carriage. When had Lady Vaughn, for all her vaunted good taste, ever performed a kind deed for anyone? Turnips might be plain, but they were certainly nourishing.
“Even humble fare has its advantages,” said Arabella defiantly.
“Yes, thirty thousand of them a year,” said Lady Vaughn with a knowing arch of her brows. “And all in gold.”
Arabella looked at Lady Vaughn, at her crimson-dyed feathers and watchful eyes. “Not everyone counts a man’s worth in coins.”
Lord Vaughn lifted his quizzing glass. “Who said anything about a man? I spoke merely of cultivating one’s garden.”
Arabella could feel Mr. Fitzhugh step closer to her, ranging himself protectively beside her. It was a sweet thought, even if misplaced. Lord Vaughn’s weaponry was something other than physical.
The French mistress backed away, eager to be gone. “If you will excuse me . . .”
“Ah, Delphine!” Another man joined them, fashionably dressed, but without the ostentation of Mr. Fitzhugh’s costume. His voice had a slight French lilt to it, although less so than Mlle de Fayette, whom he addressed in tones of familial intimacy. “Have you found your lost lamb yet? Sebastian, Lady Vaughn,” he added, with a nod to the others.
Mlle de Fayette subsided, with a worried look over her shoulder. “Mr. Fitzhugh, ladies. I do not believe you know my cousin, the Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent.”
The chevalier directed his smile at Arabella and Jane. “It is a mouthful, is it not? I am Argent to my friends. Nicolas to my very, very close friends.”
“And scamp, scapegrace, and limb of Satan to his relations,” said Mlle de Fayette. She did not seem to be entirely joking.
“All terms of endearment,” explained the chevalier complacently. “It is simply their way of saying ‘I love you.’ ”
“Why not simply say it, then?” suggested Mr. Fitzhugh, with a tinge of asperity. “They could save a lot of bother that way.”
“But they would lose so much face,” the chevalier returned. “Ladies don’t like to make their affections too generally known. Do they, Miss . . . ?”
“Dempsey,” Mr. Fitzhugh provided for her, folding his arms across his chest. “Miss Dempsey. And that is Miss Austen.”
Ignoring him, the chevalier continued to direct his smile at Arabella, carrying on as though Turnip had never spoken. “What do you say, Miss Dempsey? Have hearts gone out of fashion as ornaments on one’
s sleeve?”
Arabella glanced away. “I’m sure I couldn’t say.”
Through the castle gate, she could see the fashionable set milling about. There was Lord Frederick Staines and Mr. Martin Frobisher, both tricked out in the latest of multi-caped coats; Percy Ponsonby and his sister; Lord Henry Innes, Lieutenant Darius Danforth, and a group of their cronies; others she recognized from her many years on the fringes of London’s elite.
A dimple appeared in the chevalier’s cheek. “Have you no affections, then, Miss Dempsey? Would you, as your poet says, sooner hear your dog bark at a crow than a man say he loves you?”
“The problem has never arisen.” The crowd shifted, blocking her view. “I have no dog.”
There was a moment of silence and then the chevalier laughed, a genuine, rolling laugh of the sort that made others want to laugh too. “But many admirers, I imagine.”
“The chevalier has quite the imagination,” Lady Vaughn murmured to her husband.
“Dozens of admirers,” Mr. Fitzhugh said stoutly. “Have to beat ’em off with a stick.”
“Ah,” said the chevalier with amusement. “Due to the lack of a dog. You might want to invest in one. It would save the wear and tear on the trees.”
“I thank you for your advice, Monsieur de la Tour d’Argent.”
There he was, Captain Musgrave, standing near the refreshment table, a silver cup in one hand. Arabella could see the steam rising off it in long curls, framing his face like a picture carried in a locket.
The chevalier grinned at Arabella. “Why not just call me ‘limb of Satan’ and have done with it?”
“Because some people, Nicolas, have manners,” said the chevalier’s cousin.
There were clusters of people on either side of Captain Musgrave, but not with him. He stood alone between the chattering groups while Arabella’s aunt gossiped with a nearby matron. As Arabella watched, he looked up, his eyes meeting hers across the clearing, across a divide of two months and one ring.
“Is that what you teach?” Arabella heard Jane ask Mlle de Fayette, dutifully making conversation. “Deportment?”
“Teach?” repeated Lady Vaughn, as though the word were unfamiliar to her.
The crowd moved again and he was gone, blocked out. Arabella looked abruptly away, forcing herself to focus on her companions. Act naturally, she admonished herself. The point was to look as though she were enjoying herself.
“I teach French,” said Mlle de Fayette. “It is a logical subject for me, no?”
“Oh, yes!” agreed Arabella enthusiastically. Too enthusiastically. Jane gave her a strange look.
“Do you like it?” asked Jane. “Teaching?”
Mlle de Fayette exchanged a wry look with her cousin. “It was not entirely a matter of choice, but it has its compensations. Today, however . . .” Leaning forward confidentially, she said, “There is a situation of the most awkward. A student of the school is here today, against all prohibitions.”
“A former student of the school. Asked to leave for conduct unbecoming young ladies,” chimed in the chevalier, in his nearly accentless English. “Who knew that an all-girls’ academy could be such a very interesting place?”
“It is not supposed to be,” said his cousin severely. “That is the point. It was very sad for Miss Carruthers and her family. Miss Climpson has allowed her to stay until the end of term, but after that . . .”
“Carruthers? Not Catherine Carruthers?” inquired Mr. Fitzhugh.
“I take it you know her, Fitzhugh?” said Vaughn.
“Not like that!” Mr. Fitzhugh’s ears went red. “Used to be friends with m’sister. Sally.”
“Ah,” said Mlle de Fayette, placing a hand confidingly on his arm. “Then you know the story. If you will excuse me. I must ask Signor Marconi if he has seen her. I must get her back to the school before her parents or others find out.”
“How did she get out here?” asked Mr. Fitzhugh. “Girls don’t make a usual practice of these jaunts, do they?”
“It is of the doing of the cousin, Lord ’Enry Innes. He says he did not know she was meant to be confined to the school.” Mlle de Fayette gave a brisk shake of her head. “It is of the most uncomfortable. One does not like to offend Lord Henry, but the parents of Catherine were most particular in their instructions. So I must find her and take her back. If you will pardon me?”
This time, no one stopped her. With a curtsy to the group at large, she hurried away, towards the man with the droopy mustaches, who had just moved on from “Helas” to “Flora Gave Us Fairest Flowers.”
“Signor Marconi is the music master at Miss Climpson’s,” explained the chevalier. “Although he also provides entertainment for private parties. He came very highly recommended.”
If he sounded slightly dubious, Arabella could understand why. Even to her untrained ear, Flora’s flowers were flat.
The chevalier shrugged. “To teach and to practice are two very different things. One may discuss what one might never do.” His gaze made a slow circuit of the assembled company. “Just as one might do things one might never discuss.”
A kiss for example, stolen between a dining room and a drawing room, two long months ago.
Captain Musgrave still stood by the refreshment table, his hair sticking out at odd angles under his hat. He had been joined by her aunt, a head shorter, her hand resting familiarly on Musgrave’s arm. She wore a coronet of egret feathers, spangled with some shiny substance that glittered in the winter sunlight.
Aunt Osborne started to turn, and Arabella braced herself for the greeting to come, the exclamations, the embraces, the explanations.
But before Aunt Osborne could spot Arabella, Captain Musgrave turned his wife away with a laugh and a light touch on her arm, directing her attention to the refreshment table. As Aunt Osborne exclaimed over the syllabub, Arabella fell back, the fixed smile frozen on her face.
Her aunt hadn’t seen her, that she was sure of, but Musgrave had.
“Well, jolly good meeting you,” said Mr. Fitzhugh jovially to the chevalier, and tugged at Arabella’s arm. “Shouldn’t like to keep the ladies from the ruins. Early dark in winter and all that, you know.”
Entirely unperturbed, the chevalier smiled at Jane. “If ruins you came for, then the ruins you must see. Might I commandeer the humble task of serving as your escort? Ladies? And Mr. Fitzhugh, of course.”
Arabella looked away from Musgrave and her aunt.
She put her hand on Mr. Fitzhugh’s arm and smiled prettily up at him. She made sure not to catch Jane’s eye. Jane saw far too much. As the chevalier had said, there were some things one didn’t discuss.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Let’s go see the ruins.”
Chapter 7
Turnip tucked Miss Dempsey’s arm through his as they strolled through the jagged walls where the Great Hall must once have been, following Miss Austen and the Cheval-whatever-his-name-was.
Deuced silly name, that. Foreigners. Couldn’t do anything properly.
“Not that a chap doesn’t generally like to give the chaps the benefit of the doubt, but there’s something rum about that Cheval-whatever-you-call-it,” muttered Turnip.
Not good rum, either. The sort of rum that tasted good in punch but gave a chap a headache the morning after.
“Pardon?” said Miss Dempsey. Visibly collecting herself, she turned her attention to Turnip. “What did you say?”
“Oh, nothing. Just not all that keen on the French chappy. Something deuced dodgy about him.”
Being no slouch, Miss Dempsey picked up on his meaning without his having to say anything more. “You don’t think the chevalier had something to do with the pudding, do you?”
“He is French,” said Turnip. “And his cousin works at the school. Might have been visiting her yesterday, for all we know. Skulking around out back.”
“He doesn’t seem the skulking sort,” said Miss Dempsey, regarding the chevalier with interest. Too much interest.
“Or a spy?” Miss Dempsey smiled at him. The tip of her nose was pink and her lips were slightly chapped from the wind. “If I were the French secret service, I would try to employ someone a little less obviously French. Even without the accent, his name is a dead giveaway.”
“What would you call him, then?” asked Turnip.
Miss Dempsey considered, turning her face up to the sun where it gilded the old gray battlements. The tips of her lashes glittered gold in the sunlight. “Smith,” she said. “Or Jones. Something plain and nondescript. Something English.”
Sensible, but it lacked a certain panache. Who had ever heard of a hero named Smith? The man would be laughed right out of the Black Mask Club.
“I prefer Fotheringay-Bumblethorpe, myself,” said Turnip. “Has a nice ring to it. Rolls pleasantly off the tongue.”
“Yes, but can you imagine putting that into code? It would take all day.”
“Rather like the Chevalier of Whatever Whatever,” conceded Turnip.
“ ‘The Knight of the Silver Tower,’ ” translated Miss Dempsey. “It is a bit much in English, isn’t it? A little too . . .”
“Showy,” supplied Turnip.
“I was going to say theatrical. Either way, not necessarily a good monicker for someone bent on illicit activities. It’s too unusual. Too memorable.”
Hmm. This had all been going well up until that “too memorable” bit. Turnip, for one, found the chevalier eminently forgettable.