The Mischief of the Mistletoe: A Pink Carnation Christmas (13 page)

“That about sums up my current condition,” Arabella admitted. “Does it get any better?”

Mlle de Fayette eyed Clarissa's paper. “The compositions? No. The fatigue? Yes. One grows accustomed.”

Something about the way she said it made Arabella wonder what it was that she had been accustomed to before. Something other than this, that was quite sure. Many émigrés had come to England during the Revolution with little more than the clothes on their backs, forced to make their way as best they could. But it did seem rather odd that Mlle de Fayette's cousin was dazzling in town tailoring, chumming about with the likes of the Vaughns, while Mlle de Fayette herself was reduced to teaching her native tongue to the daughters of prosperous squires and socially ambitious cits.

Mlle de Fayette sketched a slight gesture of apology. “It is most unkind of me to keep you when you will be wanting your rest.”

“Thank you. Really. I'm so glad you decided to come by.” Arabella wondered if the other woman was lonely too. The other schoolmistresses were a closemouthed bunch, and all at least a decade older. The chevalier was very dashing, but he didn't seem the sort to pay regular calls. Immured in the school as she was, Mlle de Fayette couldn't have formed a broad acquaintance in Bath. And, as she was learning, even when one did have the chance to get out, the rigors of the schedule tended to dampen one's ardor for excursions. “The girls are lovely, but I'd forgotten what it is to talk to another adult. And the tea was just what I needed.”

Hopefully, Mlle de Fayette wouldn't notice that she hadn't drunk any of it.

Mlle de Fayette smiled at her. “If you need me, I am only one floor down. My room is directly below yours, the third door on the left.”

“If I need you, I'll simply stamp on the floor,” said Arabella, getting into the spirit of it. “Two stamps for ‘Come up for a chat,' three stamps for an emergency.”

“Er, yes. Quite. The very thing.” Mlle de Fayette backed towards the door. “Good night, Miss Dempsey.”

“I wasn't really going to stamp on the floor.” Arabella found herself addressing the whitewashed panels of the door.

Too late.

Oh well. That was what came of actually saying the odd things that popped into her head. She had been much better at holding her tongue at Aunt Osborne's. Be grateful, they had told her. Be quiet. Be obedient. And so she had, for twelve long years.

And what had that got her?

Marking papers at Miss Climpson's, that was what. There was no point in dwelling on might-have-beens; she had work to do. Shoving the teacup aside, Arabella reached for Clarissa's composition. She paused, her hand on the paper, as a twinkle of light caught her eye.

Bracing both hands on the desk, Arabella leaned forward, feeling the edge of the desk cutting into her stomach. Through the floating image of her room and the blob of light that was her reflected candle flame, she could just make out the garden, the high shrubs that bounded the edges of the property, the faint herringbone pattern of the brick walks, the square shape of the gardener's humble habitation.

There it was again. Sparks of light. Flicker. Flicker. Pause. Flicker. Too stationary to be fireflies, too precise to be the wavering of a candle. It looked, in fact, as though someone were drawing the shutter of a lantern open and closed, creating a pattern and then repeating it.

Flicker. Flicker. Pause. Flicker.

Almost as though someone were signaling.

A
rabella watched, frozen, as the lights oscillated in the garden.

There it was again, two quick flashes followed by a pause and then a third. There was no doubting it. It was unmistakably a signal, and it was directed from someone lurking in the garden to someone waiting in the school.

Arabella's nose hit glass as she stretched full-length across the desk, squinting for a better view. Her breath fogged the glass, and she impatiently wiped it away. If she tried hard enough, following the direction of the flashes of light, she could almost make out a human figure. It was hard to tell. Whoever it was out there had taken the precaution of wearing dark clothes. The flashes of light were so short and her own candle proved an impediment, casting weird reflections of her own room, in reverse, over the image of the garden, like seeing two pictures one on top of the other.

What if it were meant for Catherine?

Papers rustled as Arabella levered herself upright. Mlle de Fayette claimed that the gardener was rumored to have helped Catherine and her lover by unlocking the garden gate. It seemed like the sort of thing young lovers would do, signaling from a garden. Catherine's room was on the same side as Arabella's, the garden side, just two doors down the hall.

Mlle de Fayette had also said something about a parentally arranged betrothal. If Catherine were to be chivvied into marriage over Christmas, that might be cause enough to drive her to do something desperate. Like an elopement.

Elopements were bad. Very, very bad. Catherine was on Arabella's floor, Arabella's responsibility. If Catherine eloped, Arabella would be to blame. She could lose her position over it.

The light in the garden twinkled again and then went out.

Arabella's desk chair rocked on its legs as she ran for the door. Outside, the hallway was quiet and dark, all the candles in the sconces already snuffed for the night. In the light from the landing window, she could just make out the shadowy outline of door after door, all closed, just as they should be.

Her own breathing was loud in her ears as she stood there, one hand on the doorknob. From behind the ranks of closed doors, she could hear the usual nighttime sounds: the thwack of a pillow being pounded into place, the creak of a mattress, the hushed rustle of a blanket. There was nothing the least bit out of the ordinary. Even the dust lay quiet on the wainscoting.

Arabella applied her knuckles lightly to Catherine's door. “Miss Carruthers?”

No response.

“Catherine?”

Silence.

A bristling shock of ragtag ends popped out from the doorway next door. “Catherine's gone out again, hasn't she?”

It looked like a sea monster, all bristling locks and staring eyes. It was, in fact, Lizzy Reid, her hair done up in rags and her eyes alight with curiosity, like a squirrel scenting a cache of nuts.

“I'm sure she hasn't,” Arabella said bracingly. “She must just be sleeping heavily.”

Lizzy looked like she believed that just about as much as Arabella did.

Brilliant. She couldn't even fool a sixteen-year-old.

Lizzy wagged her rags. “That was what just Miss Derwent said.”

“Miss Derwent?”

“The mistress who was here before you,” said Lizzy blithely. “She was asked to leave.”

“Because of—” Arabella tilted her head towards Catherine's door.

Lizzy nodded.

Perfect. Just perfect. She should have known something was a little too easy when Miss Climpson gave her the job. There was a word for the position she had filled: scapegoat.

Pity Miss Climpson hadn't specified that in the advertisement.

When Catherine Carruthers's family found out Catherine had gone missing, Arabella would be out on her backside in the street faster than you could say “Christmas pudding.”

“She could be asleep,” repeated Arabella, with more hope than conviction.

She could feel Lizzy's pitying gaze on her back as she tapped on the door, louder than last time.

“Catherine?”

Still nothing.

So much for the subtle approach. Arabella turned the knob. Unlike hers, the door was well oiled. It didn't make a noise as she pushed it open. Holding her candle aloft, Arabella ventured into the dark cubicle.

“Catherine?”

She held her candle down towards the lumpy form in the bed. It didn't move. It also didn't look like a human, unless Catherine had spread in some places and shrunk in others.

“Pillows,” pronounced Lizzy, scurrying along after her like a one-woman Greek chorus.

“I knew that,” said Arabella.

There was a patter of feet in the hall as the rest of the Greek chorus came scrambling in to join the fun, appropriately garbed for their parts in long white nightdresses and bare feet. The only jarring notes were the nightcaps, adorned with an idiosyncratic variety of ribbons and bows. Miss Climpson's dress code only extended to daytime attire.

“Has Catherine snuck out again?” Miss Agnes Wooliston panted.

Like Lizzy, she didn't look the least bit surprised. They had obviously been here before. With Miss Derwent.

“Of course she has,” said Lizzy, rag curls bouncing. She didn't bother to whisper. Why should she? The entire hall was already awake, with the sole exception of Annabelle Anstrue, who had already demonstrated her ability to sleep through the advance of a French artillery column, cannon and all. Or at least through Miss Climpson's morning calisthenics, which amounted to much the same thing. “It's Catherine.”

“She's probably in the garden,” announced Sally, craning around Agnes for a better look at the pile of pillows. Her nightcap boasted a particularly elaborate concoction of pink and green ribbons. “That's where she usually goes.”

Arabella felt as though she was rapidly losing control of the situation. Of course, that would be to suppose that she had ever had control of the situation. Was it too much to have hoped to get through to Christmas without major disasters?

“Back to bed,” she said, shooing them in front of her. Like geese, they clucked and flapped but didn't go very far. “I'll deal with Miss Carruthers. I'm sure she just went to the necessary.”

“You might want to take the back stairs,” said Sally, ignoring Arabella's theory. “That's the fastest way to the garden.”

“And you would know this how?” said Arabella sternly.

Lizzy grinned at her. “Best not to ask. You really don't want to know.”

“You mean you don't want me to know,” muttered Arabella, wondering whether there was a gate on the garden, and, if so, whether there was some way to lock it. Not that there would be much use to it. She had no doubt that the girls would find a way to pole-vault over the fence.

“It's safer all around that way,” said Sally. “What Miss Climpson doesn't know can't hurt her.”

“Or us,” chimed in Agnes earnestly.

“Ignorance is bliss!” contributed Lizzy.

Windowless towers. That was what was needed. Highly underrated things, windowless towers. Preferably with moats around them.

“You,” said Arabella, “are all going back to bed. Right now. And as far as I know, you know nothing about any back stairs.”

Lizzy smothered her in a quick hug. “We love you, Miss Dempsey.”

“I should have stayed in London,” muttered Arabella, and made for the back stairs.

She was tempted to take the front stairs, just because, but what was the point of cutting off her nose to spite her face? She liked her nose. And the girls were right; the back stairs were faster.

She could hear scratching and scurrying noises as she approached the main floor. Human or rodent? Arabella wasn't sure. Keeping her skirt close to her legs, she let herself through the green baize door into the first-floor hallway. The schoolrooms lay in demure ranks on either side of the neatly papered wall, doors closed on their secrets. The music room, the dance studio, and the lesson rooms all lay shuttered and silent, waiting to be wakened in the morning with the arrival of the servants who lit the hearths and refreshed the ink and tidied the remains of the previous day's debris.

The drawing-room door stood open.

Through the open portal, Arabella could hear a rustling sound, like the whisper of a skirt against the ground or the snick of fabric against fabric. Catherine and her lover? It made sense as a meeting place. The drawing room overlooked the garden, low enough to the ground for an enterprising suitor to wiggle his way through the long sash windows, but shielded from view by high hedges that grew on either side.

It was a pleasant room in the daylight, used occasionally for the purpose of receiving family members, but generally ceded to the older girls for use as a sort of lounge, where they wrote letters, muddled their way through lessons, and sprawled before the hearth engaging in imagined affairs of the heart. By night, the bright blue and white paper darkened to a decidedly ominous gray, the ornamental lozenges like staring eyes and open mouths in the gloom.

Squaring her shoulders, Arabella marched smartly forward. “Catherine?”

Her footfalls sounded unnaturally loud against the floorboards. She could see her own reflection in the pier glass over the mantel, distorted and blurred. There was no one else there. There was only the movement of the starched white curtains, which snicked and whispered in the breeze from the open window, snapping back and forth in the December wind.