Blinking, Turnip recalled himself to his duty. He was supposed to be protecting Arabella from spies. Not — well.
He looked sternly at her. “I don’t care if your aunt forgot her own name. You’re not to leave that ballroom. Can’t keep an eye on you if you go on wandering about.”
Whatever else she wanted — the moon on a platter, the head of John the Baptist, tea and figgy pudding — it would be hers for the asking, but this, this was too important for negotiation. Couldn’t bring her heads on platters if she wasn’t alive to receive them, could he?
Her eyes fixed thoughtfully on his face, Arabella swiped a dust clump from the shoulder of her gown. “All right,” she said.
“It ain’t negotiable,” Turnip said belligerently. “Don’t matter if she forgot her left rib, I — all right?”
“All right,” Arabella confirmed. “Until we know who it is, I would have to be an idiot to take risks just for the sake of taking them. There’s no point in courting danger unless it gets us something.”
Turnip didn’t like the idea of her courting danger even then. He had nearly come to blows with Pinchingdale over it, an argument only derailed by Letty’s turning a pale shade of green and bolting for the bedroom again. It was, Pinchingdale had argued, the best and easiest way. How else could they get the villain to expose himself, but by giving him the opportunity — a false opportunity, he had specified carefully — to corner Arabella? Turnip’s answer to that, but for the presence of the ladies, would have been profane. As it was, it had simply been incoherent.
Turnip’s plan, that they put messages in puddings and plant them in various key places around Girdings House, had been universally voted down.
In the end, they had compromised. Arabella wasn’t to be exposed to unnecessary danger, but neither was she to be locked up in her room with a guard at her door (Turnip’s preferred plan). Instead, they were all to go about their normal activities, with someone keeping watch at all times, ready to catch the villain if he pounced.
Or, as Pinchingdale put it, when he pounced.
“If your aunt needs anything, I can get it,” declared Turnip grandly, before remembering that that, too, would rather defeat the purpose. Couldn’t keep an eye on her if he wasn’t there. “Stay where I can see you! And no more vinaigrettes.”
Arabella lifted the vinaigrette to him in salute and turned her back. She wore a thin silk shawl looped over her elbows, and he watched the gentle sway of it as she walked briskly back down the long line of rooms.
Turnip waited five minutes before following her. It felt like a great deal longer. When he returned to the gallery, it was to find the long room even more crowded than before. A set was just about to finish in the area that had been cleared for dancing, boasting a line of twenty couples. He could smell the reek of strong perfume, sweat, and the ale the dowager had provided for her country guests warring with the more familiar sickly sweet scent of champagne.
As he threaded his way through the room, looking for a good vantage point from which to keep watch on Arabella, he passed a mutinous-looking Catherine Carruthers, standing with her parents on the edge of the dance floor, wearing a dress as flounced and frilled as current fashion would allow. Her light brown hair had been twisted into curls that bounced on either side of her small-featured, oval face.
She would have been pretty enough but for the sulky expression that drew down the corners of her mouth, turning her otherwise pleasantly featured face into something one wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley.
Although her betrothal to Lord Grimmlesby-Thorpe had already been officially announced in the papers, her parents were obviously taking no further chances with her. One stood to either side, flanking her like gaolers guarding a prisoner.
As Turnip passed by, he could hear her high-pitched, slightly nasal voice saying, “At least I didn’t elope with the music master.”
What was that about the music master? Turnip came to an abrupt halt. “Beg pardon?”
Mr. and Mrs. Carruthers gave him strange looks, but Catherine took his rude intrusion into their conversation with the peculiar sangfroid known only to sixteen-year-old girls.
She gestured to Turnip in a world-weary way, showing off the very shiny gold bracelet fastened over her glove. “This is Sally Fitzhugh’s brother, Mama. You remember Sally Fitzhugh? The one I visited at Parva Magna last winter.”
“Oh, yes.” Mrs. Carruthers totted up the cost of Turnip’s clothes and decided to forgive him for his breach of etiquette. “How nice to meet you at last, Mr. Fitzhugh. Your sister is a charming girl.”
“She puts on a good show when she has to,” agreed Turnip. Mrs. Carruthers looked mildly startled, but he barreled on. “What’s that about the music master?”
“Oh,” said Catherine, looking superior, “didn’t you hear? He ran off with Clarissa Hardcastle just before Christmas. Apparently they had been meeting by night in the music room. Disgusting.”
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.