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.