He squeezed her shoulders. “Arabella?”
Moving very slowly, she stepped back, extricating herself from his arms. When she did, she didn’t quite meet his eyes. “Someone grabbed me once before. At Miss Climpson’s.”
“When? How?” The very thought of it was enough to make him frantic. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Arabella bit her lip, looking away. “It was right after we, er, quarreled. Someone seized me as I left the drawing room. I couldn’t see who it was, only that he was disguised in one of the wise men’s robes.”
“And you didn’t come to me?”
“How could I? I had just told you I never wanted to speak to you again, remember?”
“That wasn’t exactly how you phrased it.” He should know. He had every word of that interview burned into his memory in a way his Latin lessons never had. Amazing the way a chap could remember things when they really mattered.
“But it amounted to the same thing. I couldn’t come running to you after that. And I didn’t think it was important.”
“Someone assaults you and it’s not important? Good Gad! It may not be important to you, but it’s jolly well important to — well, to the people who care about you.”
Arabella gave him a crooked smile, rubbing her hands over her arms. “I’ll bear that in mind the next time someone attacks me.”
Before Turnip could point out that there wasn’t going to be a next time, not if he had to chain himself to her wrist, she added hastily, “I really didn’t think it was important. The man used a paper sword, one of the papier-mâché scimitars we had constructed for the wise men. I thought it was someone’s brother being bribed to pull a prank.”
“There are altogether too many bally pranks,” grumbled Turnip, not liking the thought of Arabella being dragged into a dark hallway, even if it was only with a paper sword. “It’s not funny.”
“I didn’t think so either, not until I realized about the sword, and then it just seemed silly. Imagine, trying to scare someone with a paper sword.” She frowned, remembering. “He kept saying the same thing over and over. It was the same thing he said today.”
Turnip was all attention. “What? What did he say?”
Arabella shook her head. “It made no sense. It still makes no sense.”
“Tell me anyway,” said Turnip. He had a very bad feeling about this.
Arabella looked up at him, her pale blond brows drawing together. “He kept saying, ‘Where is it? Where’s the list?’ ”
“This list,” Turnip repeated. “You’re sure he said ‘list.’ ”
“Yes, quite sure. After all,” she joked wearily, “I heard it several times.”
“By Gad.” He sat down heavily on a stone bench. I told you so had no savor to it. This was one occasion when he would have preferred not to be right.
He looked up to find Arabella looking down at him with concern. “Turnip? Are you quite all right?”
“Sit. Please.”
She sat, tucking her tumbled hair back behind her ears. “What is it?”
“That list — it’s not nonsense. I know what it is.” He drew a long breath in between his teeth. There are no spies. “You’re not going to like this.”
She looked at him, waiting.
“It’s a list of Royalist agents in France,” said Turnip, all in one breath, “and Catherine Carruthers’s father lost it somewhere at Miss Climpson’s.”
Arabella blinked. “Catherine Carruthers’s father?” She seemed to be struggling to put it all together. Fair enough. If he’d just been blindfolded, pulled behind a bush, and threatened with a knife, he wouldn’t be feeling all that sprightly either.
“He’s something high up in the government. Claims he misplaced it, but he doesn’t remember where. Last time anyone saw it, it was floating around Miss Climpson’s.”
“And someone thinks I have it.”
She was taking it better than he expected. Of course, he had also carefully omitted any use of the word “spies.” Best not to tempt his luck.
Turnip nodded vigorously. “Looks like it. That would explain why someone tore apart your room.”
Arabella’s head lifted as though jerked by a string. “That explains why Rose was complaining — ” Her fingers curled around the edge of the bench. Turnip doubted she even realized she was doing it. “They did it again. Today. Someone must have gone through my things. Rose thought I had been rummaging.”
“And when he didn’t find it, he came after you with a knife. A real one,” Turnip concluded. “Dead serious, this lot. It’s an eyeteeth sort of thing.”
“Eyeteeth?”
“As in people being willing to give them. Gather Bonaparte wants that list rather badly. You don’t know how dangerous these spy chap-pies can be.”
Arabella looked at him, her expression inscrutable. But all she said was, “You aren’t really the Pink Carnation, are you?”
“Er, no. Though it’s often quite convenient for people to think I am. Convenient for the Carnation, that is. Deuced inconvenient for me. But one does like to do one’s bit. King and country and all that.”
“So it’s not entirely just a rumor, then. You do have something to do with the Pink Carnation.”
Turnip gave a modest shrug. “Not all that much to write home about. I run the odd errand, sow a bit of confusion here and there, all that sort of thing. Nothing terribly important.”
“I imagine you shouldn’t be telling me all this, should you? If I weren’t reliable, it could get back to the wrong people, and then they could use you to get to the right people. Am I wrong?”
“Er...” Strictly speaking, the answer to that was no.
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I want to keep you safe,” he said earnestly. “Because you won’t believe me without an explanation. Because I’m worried about you. Because I trust you.”
“Thank you,” she said gravely. She tentatively rested her hand on top of his. “I trust you too.”
Turning her hand over, Turnip threaded his fingers through hers. “Jolly glad we’re agreed on that.”
She dipped her head. “I am too.”
Turnip gave her hand a little squeeze. “Now about this chap who keeps grabbing you...”
For a moment, Turnip thought she was going to draw her hand away, but she didn’t. She left it in his as she looked away, across the rows of ordered boxwood and the empty flower beds.
“I can’t say much about him for sure other than that he’s quite definitely taller than I am and he wears a large ring.”
“You didn’t recognize the voice?” He rubbed his thumb reassuringly along the side of her hand.
“No.” She looked down at their joined hands. “His voice was muffled, first by a headdress, then by this absurd hood. It might have been nearly anyone.”
“And they all wear rings,” said Turnip. “Staines, Innes, Danforth, the whole lot of them.”
“You think it’s one of them?”
“Who else would have had the chance? Unless — ” Turnip sat up straighter. Now, there was an idea.
“Unless!..” Arabella prompted.
“Unless that Cheval-whatsis followed you here.”
“I can’t really see the Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent” — the foreign name rolled grandly off her tongue, a symphony of euphonious syllables — “lurking in gardens.”
Bloody showy name. “ ’Course you couldn’t,” said Turnip. “You were wearing a hood. That’s the genius of it.”
“Unlike some people I know, I doubt the chevalier would sit outside my window in the cold for four nights running.” Arabella’s lips quirked into a lopsided smile. “He probably doesn’t have a Gerkin.”
He loved that smile. He loved that she found amusement in the oddest things, at the oddest times. He loved that she remembered the name of his groom. He loved her hair and her eyes and that thing she did with the corners of her lips.
Good Gad. He loved her.
It hit Turnip with the force of the proverbial coup de foudre. Love. Not just liking, not just lust, but the whole package, all the bits and pieces rolled into one — liking, lust, possessiveness, fear, anxiety, the urge to roll her up into a little ball and put her in a velvet-lined box where he could keep her safe for, oh, the next sixty years or so. He looked at her and he smelled fresh milk and raspberry jam and freshly cut hay.