The click sounded unnaturally loud in the quiet room.

“There,” he said, with great satisfaction, pocketing the key. “It’s a sad day when a chap can’t declare his love without half of Norfolk barging in.”

“Is that what this is?” Arabella asked, her heart in her throat. “Love?”

“Well, it’s certainly not a toothache.” It seemed belatedly to occur to Turnip that he might have somehow botched it. Stumbling over his feet and his words, he said, “Wouldn’t want you to feel obligated, if you don’t return the emotion, that is. Shouldn’t have said anything, but I thought — that is — ”

“I wasn’t sure if you were saying it just to stop Catherine.” Arabella knew she was being shameless, fishing like that, but she wanted the reassurance.

The expression of pure horror on Turnip’s face was all the reassurance she needed. That was one of the loveliest things about Turnip, she thought vaguely. One never had to worry about lies or dissembling. Everything he thought or felt was written all over his face in a very large hand.

“Good Gad, no! That day I knocked you over — you remember? Best day of my life. Didn’t know it then, of course. If I had, I would probably have thrown a sack over your head and dragged you home with me. Only you might not have liked that.”

Arabella considered the prospect. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

“The sack, I mean,” said Turnip.

“Um, yes.” Fair enough. “I think we can forgo the sack.”

Turnip clasped and unclasped his hands behind his back. “What I’m trying to say is, it’s yours, you know. My heart. If you want it.”

Arabella felt a great big silly smile spreading across her face. She stepped boldly up to him. “Is it my Christmas gift?”

Turnip rested his cheek briefly against her hair. “Wish I could wrap it in pretty words for you, all shiny and tied up in bows.”

Arabella put her fingers to his lips to stop the words. “I like it just the way it is. I like you just the way you are.”

Turnip kissed her fingers.

Arabella looked at him and thought of all the flowery things one would say if this were a romance in a book. She had read such speeches — long, elegant monologues rich with classical allusions and clever turns of phrase. They all felt all wrong somehow, not because the emotion wasn’t there, but because it was.

Next to the sheer vastness of her love, verbal frills felt superfluous. Silly, even, like trying to deck out a mountain range in lace trim.

So she made Turnip no flowery speeches.

Instead, she took a deep breath, and said, “I love you.”

“Really?” Turnip’s face lit up.

He looked at her with such tenderness and hope that Arabella had to say it again. “I love you. I want to prowl castles with you and celebrate Christmas with you and get annoyed with you for climbing things. And I’m terribly fond of raspberry jam. Lots of it.”

Turnip wrapped his arms around her, his eyes on her lips. “We’ll celebrate our anniversary with jam,” he promised, leaning forward. “With jam and Christmas pudding.”

Struck by a sudden thought, Arabella pulled back in his arms, tilting her head back to see his face.

“One last thing — ”

“Anything!” Turnip promised extravagantly.

“Why were you carrying a pudding?”

Chapter 29

Four matched footmen in medieval tabards marched into the Great Dining Room of Girdings House bearing a tremendous sugar sculpture in the shape of a dove, the ancient crest of the Dovedales. The light of two dozen candelabras glittered off crystal glasses, off crested silver, off diamonds and rubies and silks of a hundred shades. The festivities that marked the end of the Christmas season sparkled like the icing sugar that dusted the tops of the traditional Twelfth Night cakes that had been set before all the guests. The high, clear notes of trumpets rang out in a triumphal fanfare.

“I like your dress,” said Turnip.

Arabella glanced down at her own décolletage. It was a shiny white meringue of a dress, one of Aunt Osborne’s choosing, with lots of frills around the neckline.

There was one thing to be said about it. It bared a great deal of bosom.

“It makes me look like a milkmaid.”

“I know,” said Turnip happily. “Always liked the dairy, don’t you know.”

Arabella saw it all through a happy haze, like the world viewed through the side of a champagne glass, everything bubbling and beautiful and tinted with a golden glow. She didn’t even mind that the dowager had seated Penelope Deveraux on Turnip’s other side, not with Turnip’s hand discreetly clasping hers under the tablecloth.

As untitled, and therefore uninteresting, people, both Arabella and Turnip had been seated all the way down at the far end of the table. Turnip hadn’t even had to juggle placement to put them together; the duchess in her infinite wisdom had already known. Or, more likely, the duchess had decided that two of her least favorite guests ought to bore each other rather than others.

Turnip had dashed off a letter to his parents, with a special postscript for Sally, and another, shorter letter to her father, formally requesting an interview, but other than that, they had made no announcements. It was still too new and precious to share.

All around them, people were prospecting in their cakes, searching for the tiny golden tokens that would proclaim the two main figures of the Twelfth Night festivities to come: the Lord of Misrule and the Queen of the Feast. In lesser households, it would be a bean and a pea. The dowager used a jester’s staff and a miniature golden crown, specially made for the occasion.

Turnip poked about his cake with his fork. “Nothing,” he announced. He took a whopping forkful of sugared dough, adding, somewhat indistinctly, “Jolly good cake.” Catching Arabella’s eye, he grinned. “Better with jam, though.”

“Everything is better with jam,” said Arabella serenely.

Turnip rocked back in his chair. “There are berry brambles all around the grounds of Parva Magna. We can go berry picking next summer.”

“With Sally?”

“And your sisters, too, if they like. Shouldn’t wonder if Sally takes your Lavinia on as a protégée.” He gave an exaggerated shudder. “Heaven help us all.”

From the middle of the table came a great roaring noise. “I say!” Henry Innes shouted. “Freddy got the staff!”

There was a great clattering as inebriated gentlemen pounded their appreciation on the tablecloth, making china tremble and crystal jump.

“Hope you put it to good use!” shouted Martin Frobisher, one hand on the claret decanter, followed by something else that Arabella didn’t quite catch, but was distinctly bawdy in nature.

Turnip turned red and looked anxiously at Arabella. “It’s all right,” Arabella said, patting his hand. “I’ve read my Shakespeare.”

Lord Freddy pumped a hand into the air, spraying crumbs across the table and down Lucy Ponsonby’s décolletage. The golden staff looked absurdly small in his large fist.

“All hail your Lord of Misrule!” he cried.

“Couldn’t have picked a better man for the job,” muttered Turnip.

“Except maybe Lieutenant Danforth,” said Arabella.

Darius Danforth had been spirited off to London that morning, the folds of his cape hiding the ropes around his wrists.

The Carruthers family had also made a precipitate departure, Catherine all but invisible between the flanking forms of her parents. Mrs. Carruthers had looked like a very angry Pekingese. Arabella hadn’t envied Catherine the long carriage ride back to London.

“Do you think they’ll get that annulment?” Arabella asked Turnip.

Turnip shook his head. “Shouldn’t think so. Marriage was illegal, and all that, but it would be too much of a scandal. Better for them to wait for a time and then announce a match.”

Remembering the hard glitter of Catherine’s eyes, Arabella shivered. “If I were Danforth’s older brother,” she said, “I would be very, very careful of what I ate. I would also avoid balconies and open windows.”

Under the table, Turnip’s fingers tightened around hers. “Lost ten years of my life when I saw her herding you towards that window. New rule: no windows.”

“That would get very dark,” Arabella pointed out.

Turnip grinned rakishly. “I don’t mind the dark, do you?”

Arabella’s blushes were spared by a loud commotion at the head table, where the Duke of Dovedale and his cousin, Lady Charlotte, sat in lonely splendor. She glanced hastily away, all too aware of Turnip’s knee bumping hers under the table.

“We have a monarch!” roared out the Duke of Dovedale. “Queen Charlotte!”

“I say, does he mean the real one?” demanded Turnip, craning to look over his shoulder, in case the Queen might have entered while he was otherwise occupied.

“Oh, do be quiet,” said Penelope Deveraux, whacking him on the shoulder with her fork. Cake crumbled down the front of Turnip’s jacket. “It’s our Charlotte — that Charlotte. Over there.”

She pointed with her fork up the table, where Lady Charlotte was blushingly allowing the duke to help her from her chair, gazing up at him as though he were all the knights of the Round Table rolled into one. The duke was a handsome man, to be sure, but there was something about him that Arabella didn’t like, something self-contained to the point of secretive.

She looked at Turnip, his mouth wide with laughter, a dusting of multicolored cake sugar glittering on one side of his jacket and felt like laughing herself. How wonderful not to have to worry about subtexts and secrets and things that couldn’t be said; everything Turnip thought or felt was in his eyes and his lips.