It was unclear whether the adjective referred to the location or the event.

“Frightfully bad ton,” complained her mother, who looked more like a Pekingese than a Pekingese, “eloping with music masters.”

“Bad idea eloping at all,” said Catherine’s father, looking stern. If Mrs. Carruthers was a Pekingese, Mr. Carruthers was an elderly blood-hound. He had a long, narrow face, made longer and narrower by the fact that his cheeks seemed to have slowly slid straight off the side of his face to dangle on either side of his jaw, like the droopy jowls of a tired old dog.

“Wasn’t intending to,” Turnip said hastily. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Deuced hard on the shins, climbing down bedsheets and all that.”

The Carrutherses, parents and child, give him strange looks, but Turnip didn’t notice. So that explained what the music master had been doing, blundering about the school in the wee hours.

“An heiress, I take it?” said Turnip.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Carruthers, as though the word soiled her mouth. “Her father does something in the city. Something with guns. Frightful. I don’t know what Miss Climpson was thinking.”

About the music master or munitions heiresses? Turnip decided not to ask. He was spared the necessity by the arrival of Catherine’s intended, Lord Grimmlesby-Thorpe, who was tricked out in a getup nearly as brilliant as Turnip’s, with a canary yellow waistcoat sewn with brilliants and a pair of breeches so tight they creaked when he walked.

The creaking sound might also have been the corset that he, like his great friend, the Prince of Wales, wore to contain the embonpoint attendant on too much port and game.

Grimmlesby-Thorpe set his hand on Catherine’s half-bared shoulder. “There you are, my dear.”

He was the only one who didn’t notice the way Catherine flinched away from his touch. The expression on her face reminded Turnip of a half-broken horse he had once seen. The horse had rolled his eyes and bared his gums in just the same way — right before dumping his rider, stomping on his knee, and jumping three fences and a small brook before he was finally caught.

Turnip had never liked Catherine — she had pulled one too many supposedly friendly tricks on Sally during the duration of their intimacy — but, at this moment, he felt sincerely sorry for her. It wasn’t right marrying a young girl like that off to an old bon vivant like Grimmlesby. No matter how many half-pay officers she had tried to run off with, it just wasn’t right.

On the other hand, from the look Catherine was giving her intended, she fully planned to get her own back. Turnip didn’t envy Grimmlesby-Thorpe his half of the marriage bed either. If ever he had met a junior Lady Mac-whatever-it-was in training, Catherine was it.

Speaking of marriage beds... Turnip peered across the couples on the dance floor to make sure that Arabella was still with her aunt. She was, although she had been ousted from her seat on the settee by the Dowager Lady Pinchingdale, forced instead to stand beside the settee, her back against the wall. She didn’t see him. She was watching the dancers in the center of the floor, her skirt moving almost imperceptibly as her foot tapped in time to the music. There was a wistful look on her face as she watched the couples move through the patterns of the dance. Then her aunt tapped her on the arm, demanding her attention, and her face cleared and her foot stilled. The patient mask was back in place.

Turnip was suddenly reminded of a conversation they had had a very long time ago, in the ruins of Farley Castle, something about inhabiting opposite sides of the ballroom. And he, carelessly, had promised that the next time they found themselves in the ballroom, they would meet in the middle, to dance.

He had failed in his promise so far, but there was still time to redeem it, and to the devil with all French spies and interfering aunts.

Mrs. Carruthers was saying something to him, but Turnip couldn’t have vouched for a word of it.

At the front of the room, the master of ceremonies was banging his long stick and calling all couples to line up for the Fairy Queen.

“Excuse me,” he broke in on a startled Mrs. Carruthers. “Must go. Debts of honor and all that, don’t you know.”

“The impertinence!” he heard her say, but he was already halfway across the room, making for the spot where the dowagers sat.

He must have looked rather fearsome, because Arabella looked at him with an expression of mingled inquiry and alarm.

He grinned at her to set her at her ease, a big, silly grin that expanded straight through to both his ears, a grin so big his face hardly had room to contain it.

He grinned and held out a hand that was, considering his bounding joy, surprisingly steady.

“I say,” he said. “Don’t I owe you this dance?”

Chapter 25

“Promised you we would dance together. Remember?”

For her aunt’s benefit, Arabella said primly, “I shouldn’t want to hold you to the obligation should you no longer wish to discharge it.”

Turnip held out his hand, palm up. “Dance with me.”

Heaving a sigh, Arabella surrendered her hand to his with feigned reluctance. “If you insist. But I want it on the record that it was under duress.”

“Bullied you into it and all that,” Turnip agreed, tucking her hand into the crook of his arm. It looked nice there, like it belonged.

“What’s all this?” demanded Captain Musgrave, leaning over the back of the settee.

Turnip thought it was a bit rich, the man turning all guardianish when he couldn’t be much older than Turnip himself, if that, but Arabella got there first.

“What one does at a dance,” Arabella said, and there was a peculiarly militant light to her eye. “Dance.”

“Oh dear,” said Lady Osborne, hunting through the folds of her shawl in a preoccupied way that Turnip had seen time and time before. “I believe I left my — ”

Turnip saw the shades of the prison house fall across Arabella’s face and felt all his instincts for knight errantry rise to the fore. Might not be precisely in the accepted heroic model, but dragons came in all shapes and sizes. Just look at the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale.

Taking Arabella’s arm, Turnip propelled her shamelessly away. “Set’s filling up! Must go or we’ll lose our place! Coming, Miss Dempsey?”

“Did I have a choice?” asked Arabella breathlessly. He looked down to see the corners of her eyes crinkling with amusement and something else. If he weren’t a modest man, he might call it admiration. It made him feel about ten feet tall.

“Can’t let Cinderella miss all the ball,” he said jovially, swinging her into place at the bottom of the set just as the initial strains began.

Arabella sank into a curtsy as he bowed. “Is that how you see me?” she asked, as their hands came together in the first figure. “Cinderella?”

Turnip rather suspected that this was one of those trick questions females seemed always to be asking. He only wished he knew what the answer was. He suspected that it wasn’t yes, but if he told her how he really saw her, it would scandalize the people on either side of them and probably get him summarily evicted from the dowager’s ballroom.

“The only woman I want to be dancing with,” he said extravagantly.

Arabella gave him a look of mingled pleasure and skepticism before skipping off down the center of the aisle.

Of all the women he knew, she had the hardest time accepting a compliment. Maybe, he thought, watching her as she circled Darius Danforth, who was partnering Lucy Ponsonby, that was because she hadn’t received very many of them.

Men were idiots. Himself included.

If he had ever bothered to ask her to dance, all those years ago, he might have observed how enthusiastically she moved to the music. It wasn’t just that she was a good dancer — anyone with a proper sense of rhythm and time with a memory for the movements could be a good dancer — but that she was a joyful one, dancing not just with her feet, but with her whole body, putting herself heart and soul into every twirl and skip, every turn and dip. There was an innocent sort of abandon to it, all the walls she built so carefully around herself momentarily abandoned in the wordless execution of the dance.

How did everyone else not notice?

It was an energetic dance, with lots of twirling and circling and galloping about. Arabella’s cheeks were pink, her forehead shiny, and her lips very red from the exercise. Her hair, which had been so modestly smoothed down and pulled back, had escaped in little wisps around her face, clinging to her cheeks and forehead.

Turnip could feel himself growing short of breath, but not from the exertion.

As he clasped her right hand with his left, prancing in a circle with Danforth and Lucy Ponsonby, she smiled up at him and unselfconsciously gave a little puff of breath to blow a stubborn lock of hair out of her eye.

It was the most unconsciously seductive thing he had ever seen. Turnip nearly lost his footing.

Of course, at this point, she could debone a kipper with a fish knife and he would find it seductive, he was that far gone.

Well, maybe not a kipper.

As the dance drew to its close, Turnip snuck a glance at Arabella as they retreated to opposite sides of the line for the final bow. The filmy white lace that edged her décolletage clung damply to her skin, calling attention to the curve of her breasts beneath the fabric.

No wonder some puritan sects frowned on dancing. Turnip had always thought it a fairly innocent sport until now.