“Right, of course,” said Miss Dempsey, shaking her head slightly. “Naturally.”
The man stuck out his hand at Turnip. “Speaking of guineas... Care to cross my palm and we’ll call it no ’ard feelings about the jaw-box?”
“How about a shilling?” asked Turnip, digging into his pocket.
Miss Dempsey edged around him. “This woman. Where did she come from? What did she look like?”
The man’s fist closed around the shilling Turnip dropped into his palm. “Dunno. She promised me a guinea for the pudding is all.”
And with that, he touched his forelock and sauntered away.
Miss Dempsey looked at Turnip thoughtfully. “Where did you get the pudding?” she asked.
Turnip scratched his temple, displacing his hat in the process. “My sister, Sally,” he said. “Can’t think why she’d be hiding messages in — oh.”
“Oh?” Miss Dempsey tilted her head quizzically.
“No,” he said decidedly, dismissing the idea as quickly as it had arisen. It would be deuced unfair to Sally to go about accusing her of setting up illicit assignations. He had every faith in his sister’s moral rectitude. And her ingenuity. If Sally were to arrange an assignation, she wouldn’t do it in such an addlepated way. He was the addlepated one in the family, and he was sticking to it. “It ain’t like Sal to set up assignations through puddings. She’s not the assignating kind.”
“My assailant did say a woman,” Miss Dempsey murmured. “Perhaps one of the instructresses? Your sister might have got hold of the pudding by accident.”
Turnip clapped his hat firmly back onto his head. “Only one way to find out, isn’t there? We can ask her.”
“We?”
“You will come with me, won’t you, Miss Dempsey?” Turnip flashed her his most winning smile. “You can’t expect a chap to venture back into that den of females unprotected, can you? No offense meant. Your being a female and all that, I mean.”
“How kind of you to notice,” muttered Miss Dempsey.
“Nothing against the breed — er, gender,” Turnip hastened to reassure her. “Some of my favorite people are females. But it’s when you put lots and lots of them together in a room... it becomes...”
“A bit overwhelming?” Turnip spotted a hint of a smile beneath Miss Dempsey’s bonnet brim and knew he was winning.
Turnip nodded vigorously. “The very thing.”
“I have three younger sisters,” Miss Dempsey contributed. “All of them at home.” She didn’t need to explain what she meant. Turnip felt for her, right down to the bottom of his waistcoat. There was no saying what younger sisters might get up to.
“Will you come with me?” he asked eagerly.
Miss Dempsey looked at the pudding cloth in her hand and then back at Turnip. “Why not?” she said. “This day certainly can’t get any stranger.”
It was not exactly a resounding affirmative, but Turnip knew how to seize his advantage when he had it. “Jolly good!” he exclaimed, hustling her forward before she could change her mind. “Shan’t regret it! Lovely girl, Sally. Most of the time.”
“Most of the time?” repeated Miss Dempsey as she hurried along beside him into the foyer. Turnip pretended not to hear her.
“Right this way!” he said with exaggerated cheerfulness. “Can’t think they will have gone far. When I saw them last they were — ah, right. Here we go.”
The three girls were still together in the blue salon, their heads together, cackling like those three hags in that play he had slept through last month. Something to do with a Scotsman.
Miss Dempsey, he noticed, was still limping slightly, undoubtedly from her tumble on the cobbles. Pluck to the backbone, she was, he thought admiringly. Not a word of complaint out of her.
The same couldn’t be said of Sally.
“Reggie!” exclaimed Sally, her pearl earbobs swinging as she jumped up. Technically, Miss Climpson’s girls weren’t supposed to wear earbobs, but Sally was firmly of the opinion that foolish rules were for other people. “What are you doing back so soon? When I told you to be early, I didn’t mean this early.”
“Oh, ha, ha,” said Turnip cleverly. “What’s the idea of giving me a pudding with a message in it? Oh, this is Miss Dempsey. Miss Dempsey, my sister Sally and her two most peculiar friends.”
“You mean my two most particular friends,” corrected Sally through gritted teeth. Donning the mask of sweetness she wore in front of non-family members, she dipped into a curtsy. “Miss Dempsey. How did you ever come to be associated with my ridiculous brother?”
Miss Dempsey extended the cloth. “We were brought together by an accident of pudding.”
“The one you gave me,” Turnip prompted, looking sternly at Sally. “A thief knocked Miss Dempsey over in an attempt to retrieve it.”
“Really?” Lizzy Reid’s eyes were as round as... well, as very round things. “A footpad? How simply smashing!”
“Yes, if you’re the pudding. It was quite smashed, and so was Miss Dempsey.”
“I wouldn’t say I was quite smashed. Just a trifle shaken.” Taking the chair that Turnip offered her, Miss Dempsey turned to the girls. “The odd thing about it was that there was a message on the pudding cloth. Would you know anything about that?”
“What sort of message?” asked Lizzy.
Miss Dempsey and Turnip exchanged a look. Turnip nodded slightly, and Miss Dempsey went on, “The message appears to be an invitation to an assignation. It was written in French.”
Agnes Wooliston sat up straighter in her chair. “In French?”
Sally ignored the linguistic angle. “That wasn’t the pudding you were planning to send to your brother in India, was it? Lizzy has a brother in India,” Sally added, turning to Arabella.
“Two of them, in fact,” said Lizzy. “But only one gets pudding. The other is currently In Disgrace. No, I already sent Alex’s Christmas basket. Who else do you think could be going about sending messages in puddings?”
“I’d say Catherine Carruthers,” said Sally authoritatively, “but she’s already been found out and put under house arrest. Besides, I think her artist was English, not French.”
“It was a half-pay officer,” corrected Agnes. “And he was quite definitely English.”
“I can assure you, brother mine,” said Sally, “that I have not been arranging assignations. The pudding was here in the parlor when we came in. Wasn’t it, Agnes?”
“Ye-es... ,” said her friend, scanning the room as though trying to fix in her memory where she had seen it. “On the windowsill, there. That was how you came to pick it up. You were standing next to it.”
“And you’d not seen it before?” asked Miss Dempsey quietly.
The three girls looked at one another. They all shook their heads.
“There is such a lot of Christmas pudding going about right now, you see,” said Agnes apologetically, “with everyone getting their Christmas hampers. It’s hard to remember every one.”
“Except for the one with the live chickens,” put in Lizzy Reid helpfully. “That was a very memorable hamper.”
“Do. Not. Mention. The chickens,” said Sally darkly.
“She has an unaccountable fear of fowl,” explained Turnip to Miss Dempsey in an aside.
“They are nasty, they are smelly, and they peck,” said Sally passionately. “Does anyone else have anything more to say on the matter?”
“What about eggs?” There was a glint of mischief in Lizzy Reid’s eye. Turnip began to understand why she had been sent back from India. India probably didn’t know what to do with her.
“Eggs,” said Sally repressively, “grow into chickens.”
“Could the message in the pudding be a prank?” interjected Miss Dempsey, intervening before the eggs hatched into full-blown fighting cocks. “You do have pranks here, I take it?”
“Oh, don’t they!” contributed Turnip feelingly. That had been his last visit. He had been forced to endure a very trying hour with the headmistress, trying to explain why Sally’s tying another girl’s corset ribbons to a drainpipe was nothing more than a case of girlish high spirits and not a cause for sending Sally home. Fortunately, the other girl hadn’t actually been in her corset at the time.