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.
Catherine’s curls quivered as she contemplated the inefficiency of the opposite sex. “I was appalled when I arrived this morning to find that he had been here two weeks and done nothing! Nothing! I had given him very specific instructions.”
Arabella didn’t like to think what those instructions might have been. She suspected Catherine’s methods of information extraction ran to the rack-and-thumbscrews variety.
“I can’t fault him for the delicacy of his nature,” Catherine went on, with a pro forma simper. As far as Arabella could tell, Darius Danforth was about as delicate as a goat, but Catherine apparently knew a different, more sensitive man. “His scruples become him, but it just wouldn’t do and I told him so.”
Arabella knew she should have reported Catherine’s midnight escapades to Miss Climpson while she still had the chance. This was what she got for being tolerant and understanding.
“So he got up his game of blind man’s buff,” Arabella said grimly.