Mr. Fitzhugh would no doubt claim that was due to his vigilance in crouching outside the school. Arabella thought it more likely that whoever it was — presumably a student — had simply grown bored. Or come to the realization that puddings made a remarkably ineffective mode of communication.

The chevalier waxed philosophical. “It is not so much a foodstuff as it is a sort of icon. Think about it. You wish on it. You dress it up in muslin cloths. You adorn it with holly sprigs as if it were a pagan sacrifice.”

“And then we eat it,” said Arabella prosaically.

“I have heard rumors of such things,” said the chevalier, “but I prefer not to believe them.”

“Are you ever serious?” asked Arabella, in some exasperation.

“I try not to be,” said the chevalier. “I hear it does terrible things to the complexion.”

Behind him, Arabella could see a large figure lurking at the other end of the foyer. Shifting from one foot to the other, Turnip scanned the crowd. He put his whole body into the exercise, his entire torso moving as he turned his head first one way, then the other. He was, Arabella realized, looking for her.

Catching sight of her over the chevalier’s shoulder, he started to raise a hand in greeting, but dropped it when he saw who she was talking to. If she didn’t know better, she would say he looked hurt.

Arabella broke into whatever it was that the chevalier had been saying. “Will you excuse me, Monsieur de la Tour d’Argent? I have an, er, sheep that needs grooming for the next act.”

The chevalier bowed gallantly over her hand. “Fortunate sheep.”

Turnip scowled at the chevalier’s back. If he had been ten years younger, he would have put out his tongue at him.

“You wouldn’t think so if you’d seen the shepherd,” said Arabella. “And I hear fleece have fleas.”

The chevalier seemed remarkably loath to relinquish her hand. “Not in the Petit Trianon. Nor, one imagines, in Bath.”

“No. There are very few sheep in Bath,” said Arabella, exerting some pressure to retrieve her hand. In the hallway, Turnip was growing restless. “Other than the sort in the manger scene.”

Turnip shifted from one foot to the other, staring pointedly at the ceiling. There was a sprig of mistletoe dangling from the doorway above him.

“On the contrary,” said the chevalier. “There are a great many sheep in Bath, but they tend to walk on two legs.”

Arabella blinked at the chevalier. Why was he still talking? “Well, I really must be using mine,” she said. “All two of them. It was, as always, lovely — ”

The games mistress had spotted Turnip beneath the mistletoe. She moved forward. Turnip moved back, looking like an early Christian who had just spotted a very large lion with a taste for fresh martyr.

“Pardon me,” said Arabella desperately, “I really must be going — ”

“And so must I,” the chevalier agreed. “A very good evening to you, Miss Dempsey.”

“Happy Christmas!” Arabella called after him and rapidly looked about for Turnip.

There was no sign of him. He had either given up on her, gone straight to the drawing room, or been eaten by the games mistress. Arabella hoped it wasn’t the latter. The mistletoe still dangled from the center of the door as Arabella passed under it. It looked rather forlorn up there, and slightly battered, as though someone had tried to knock it down and failed.

All the doors along the hallway were closed, in an attempt to keep the guests out of the schoolrooms. It didn’t seem to have quite worked. She could hear amorous murmurs from the music room.

Someone had taken the mistletoe to heart.

At the very end of the hall, the door to the drawing room was very slightly ajar. Arabella pushed it the rest of the way open and stepped cautiously inside.

Aside from the absence of Miss Climpson’s beloved china cupid, the drawing room had been restored to almost exactly its prior state after the antics of two nights ago. If one knew where to look, there were some new nicks on the legs of the chairs, and a scratch on the tabletop that hadn’t been there before, but otherwise everything had been restored to its proper place. Even the drapes had been drawn demurely down.

Candles had been lit in the sconces to either side of the mantelpiece, but the room appeared to be empty.

He hadn’t waited for her.

Arabella looked again at the drapes. They bulged suspiciously in the middle. And they seemed to have sprouted a leg. She knew that leg. It was clad in very tight knit pantaloons and a very shiny Hessian boot.

“Mr. Fitzhugh?”

As she watched, the drapes underwent a series of odd contortions. After a few moments’ battle, Mr. Fitzhugh emerged triumphant. He flung the white linen away from his face.

“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” Arabella said.

“You should be!” Turnip levered himself off the windowsill, shaking off the last of the drapes where the fabric still clung to his shoulder. “That Miss Quigley is an animal! Didn’t think I’d make it out of there with my lips intact.”

He shuddered dramatically, scrubbing a hand across his mouth.

“Sorry,” Arabella repeated.

His hair was sticking up from his tussle with the curtain. Arabella could remember what it felt like beneath her fingers, the softness of the longer hair on top, the prickle of the shorter hairs at the back of his neck.

Turnip stepped closer, sending the light from the nearer candle falling across his face like a beatification. “Are you all right?”

He cocked his head in inquiry, and Arabella remembered what it felt like to be held against him, the warmth and solidity of him, the comfort of his shoulder beneath her cheek.

It would be so easy to cross the old blue carpet, lean her head against his chest, and burrow into that absurdly embroidered waistcoat.

Arabella held herself very straight. “Yes. Fine.”

Turnip peered at her with concern. “You don’t look fine.”

Just because her stomach was hosting a whole colony of butterflies? “Thank you.”

“Didn’t mean it that way. What I meant was — well, never mind.”

“No, I know what you meant, really.” Arabella twisted her fingers together, trying not to sound too breathlessly eager. “You wanted to talk to me?”

“Er, yes. I did.”

Ducking his head, he paced a few steps forward, narrowly missing the table that had formerly held the china cupid. He looked up at her, shaking his hair out of his face as he searched for words. He looked so painfully awkward and earnest that Arabella’s heart clenched.

Turnip looked away, looked at her again, rubbed his hand together, and then tilted his head back to stare at the ceiling. “Er, yes. I did want to talk to you. I wanted to talk to you about — ”

Arabella dropped her eyes, staring at the pattern of lozenges on the carpet.

The kiss.

“ — that pudding.”

Chapter 17

Arabella’s head snapped up.

What?

In the meantime, Turnip blithered blithely on. “Think that pudding might be related to what happened to your room. Too much of a coincidence otherwise. Deuced strange goings-on and whatnot.”

“You made a scene in the middle of the virgin birth because you wanted to talk to me about puddings.”

“It wasn’t the middle of the virgin birth,” said Turnip, looking virtuous. “I waited until the shepherds.”

“Naturally,” said Arabella. Because that made such a difference.

“Sally told me about the notebook that was taken. Said it was in French.”

“French exercises,” Arabella corrected. “French exercises.” Presumably written by an English student. In the process of learning French.

Turnip nodded in agreement, although agreement with what, Arabella wasn’t quite sure. “Cunning, ain’t it?” he said admiringly. “Who would think anything of a notebook full of French exercises?”

“The French mistress who has to mark them?”

“But that was just the thing!” said Turnip triumphantly. “What if the marks weren’t marks, but replies? Sitting on the windowsill like that, anyone could reach out from the outside and take it down, read it, reply, and put it back.”

“In plain sight of the gardener, the games mistress, and at least a dozen bedroom windows?”

Turnip ignored her and carried blithely on. “Might have been a sort of code. Really quite brilliant when you think about it — people put all sorts of ridiculous things into school exercises, all that rot about borrowing the plume of one’s aunt’s sister’s second cousin twice removed...”

Arabella listened to him go on about his inventive and entirely imaginary scheme for smuggling information and felt her fingers clench tighter and tighter into fists at her side. This was why he had shouldered his way into the prompting booth with her? This was why she had risked discovery and disgrace to meet with him in private? So he could talk about imaginary spies?

Clearly, their kiss had been entirely beside the point for him, just one of those little things that happened in between climbing trellises and lying in wait for puddings, nothing to remark upon and certainly nothing worth remembering a whole long two days later. He’d probably forgotten all about it by now.

All that was merely incidental to the more pressing issue of how spies meant to convey information at an all-girls’ academy that was obviously the center of espionage for the entire British Empire — no, Arabella corrected herself recklessly, the world. Bonaparte was probably, at this very moment, making plans to produce reams of student notebooks, written in bad schoolgirl French, purely for the purpose of infiltrating Miss Climpson’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies. It made perfect sense, thought Arabella flippantly. He must want her recipe for miniature mince pies. Then he could get all the pastry chefs in France to band together to produce them in bulk and deploy them as a weapon of mass destruction against the combined forces of the Allied Army, which would fall into disarray and defeat, their jaws glued together with mismade mince.