By now, Turnip Fitzhugh had probably forgotten about both her and puddings and was currently engaged in hopping three times around Bath Cathedral on one foot or trying to balance a rhubarb on his nose.
Reaching for the pile of marked papers, Arabella gave them a brisk shake, making sure all the corners were neatly aligned, all the edges in place. It was for the best, really it was. The casual intimacy of the pudding hunt had been nothing more than the product of the moment, a strange little moment, and very much momentary.
A gentle tap-tap-tapping on the door interrupted her thoughts.
Arabella swiveled in her chair. “Come in!”
Drat. Where had her shoes got to? Arabella scrounged desperately for her slippers with a stockinged toe. Arabella’s big toe connected with the side of the shoe and sent it skidding even farther under the desk.
“Miss Dempsey?” The door creaked a few inches open, revealing a hem of gray skirt very like Arabella’s own.
The hem was followed by the rest of the dress, as its wearer pushed open the portal with her hip, her hands occupied with two cups balanced on saucers.
“I thought you might be in need of some refreshment,” said Mlle de Fayette, extending one of the steaming cups in a hand that trembled from the strain of holding it upright.
Arabella blinked stupidly at a curl of steam rising above the rim of the cup. “Oh. Thank you.”
The saucer wobbled in Mlle de Fayette’s hand. Arabella belatedly launched herself forward to take it from the other teacher. “How kind of you,” she said, and wished it didn’t sound so much like a question.
“It is of no moment. I was fetching one for myself; it was no bother at all to carry another.” Mlle de Fayette set her own cup down on the desk, next to Clarissa’s composition. She nodded knowingly at the crumpled piece of paper. “Miss ’Ardcastle?”
Arabella scooted her chair back slightly to make room for the other woman. “Yes. How did you know?”
Lifting her cup, Mlle de Fayette blew gently on her tea. “The blots, mostly. Miss ’Ardcastle has a way with blots.”
“Unfortunately, some of the words still got through,” said Arabella wryly.
Mlle de Fayette’s cheeks creased, displaying a dimple very like that of her cousin, the chevalier. “Not everyone can be clever. With that sort of dowry, I shouldn’t bother to be clever either.”
“Is Miss Hardcastle an heiress, then?”
It shouldn’t have been surprising. Most of the girls in the school came from money of some sort. With a few exceptions, they tended to be the daughters of the landed gentry — untitled, but secure in both their birth and their fortunes.
“Her father is a — what do you call it? A ‘cit.’ ” Mlle de Fayette pronounced the word in inverted commas. “Something to do with the manufacture. He makes the guns. Or is it the cannon?”
“Something that makes loud banging noises and produces smoke,” Arabella provided for her. “I can’t tell one firearm from the other either. It’s what comes of not having brothers.”
Mlle de Fayette’s fingers stilled on the handle of her teacup. She looked like a lady on a cameo, her profile still and pale in the uncertain light. “I had brothers. Two of them.”
Arabella could have kicked herself for tactlessness. What had the girls said that afternoon of the pudding? It had been something to do with their French mistress, and the awful fuss she made over her brother’s head being chopped off. Arabella felt a cold chill creep along her spine at the thought. Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.
In the sudden hush, she heard herself asking, “What happened to them?”
Mlle de Fayette stared out over the garden, somewhere a million miles away. For a moment, in the unnatural calm of the ill-lit room, it seemed as though she might actually answer.
A light flickered on the grounds — or more likely, thought Arabella, blinking, just the guttering of the candle reflected in the dark glass of the window. Mlle de Fayette turned with an uncharacteristically abrupt movement, sloshing tea over the rim of her cup onto the gray fabric of her dress.
“Tiens! How clumsy I am.” She scrubbed at the spill with her handkerchief. “And tea is so very difficult to get out.”
“Here, let me.” Crossing the room, Arabella wet her own handkerchief from the washbasin and handed it to the other woman. “I am sorry about your brothers.”
Mlle de Fayette dabbed at the blotch with the damp handkerchief, succeeding only in spreading the stain. “I have Nicolas now. He is more trouble than three brothers put together.”
“He seems very charming,” said Arabella at random.
“The devil charms for his own purpose.” Having created a very wide, damp patch with no visible diminution of the stain, Mlle de Fayette shook out the handkerchief and handed it back to Arabella. “Your Mr. Fitzhugh has his measure of charm as well. A very different sort of charm, but charm nonetheless.”
He wasn’t her Mr. Fitzhugh. He had only been borrowed for a little while, like a piece of jewelry taken on loan.
“Sally tells me that charm runs in the family,” Arabella said with careful neutrality.
Mlle de Fayette accepted the tacit change of subject. “Ah, she gets far with charm, that one. But do not be fooled. She is charming like a fox.”
“A very nice fox,” said Arabella loyally. For all her airs, Sally had been kind, taking her under her wing as she had.
“A friendly fox,” Mlle de Fayette agreed. Or perhaps it wasn’t agreement, after all. Friendly wasn’t at all the same thing as nice. “She would be quite clever if she weren’t expending so much energy trying to avoid being so.”
Arabella perched against the side of the desk, sliding her own teacup aside to prevent further spillage. “What else should I know about the girls?”
Settling herself down on the other end of the desk, Mlle de Fayette contemplated the remains of her tea, and thought better of it. “Miss Anstrue, she has the habit of helping herself to the belongings of the other girls. Only the small things, and she always returns them by and by, but it is of the most awkward.”
Sally had warned her of the same, advising Arabella to keep her jewel box locked up. Arabella hadn’t liked to tell her that she didn’t have a jewel box, only the one strand of coral that Aunt Osborne had given her for her eighteenth birthday.
Mlle de Fayette frowned at her own reflection in the window. “Miss Grandison likes to pretend to the ague so she can spend the day in bed reading novels. Miss Reid copies her sums from Miss Fitzhugh.”
Arabella hitched herself up higher on the desk, letting one foot dangle. Gossiping like this, she felt like the schoolgirl she had never been. “I would have thought they both would have been copying from Miss Wooliston.”
“Oh no. Miss Fitzhugh, she has the way with maths. Miss Wooliston helps the others with their drawing. Miss Reid cannot draw a straight line.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Arabella. Lizzy Reid seemed to have an endless reserve of restless energy. Her very hair bristled with it. “What about Catherine Carruthers?”
Mlle de Fayette made a face. “I am glad she is yours rather than mine for the rest of the term. She is cunning, that one, and very determined.”
“Not so very cunning if she got caught,” Arabella pointed out.
“It is not good that Catherine came to Farley Castle,” said Mlle de Fayette somberly. “It was to avoid the scandal, you see, that her parents agreed to leave her at the school until the end of term, but only under the condition that she remain under the strictest supervision.” Mlle de Fayette lowered her voice, leaning forward. “Catherine is to be betrothed to someone else at Christmas.”
“Oh. Oh.” Arabella grimaced to show her comprehension. “So if it got out...”