“Why don’t the kittens ever fight?”
Young Caspar posed that question to Dunfallon after Friday’s story hour had descended into bickering refereed by Miss Armstrong. Dunfallon had made sure to get the coal hauled up from the cellar before the reading had begun and had dusted the downstairs while Miss Armstrong once again regaled London’s aspiring pickpockets with a tale of Mr. Dingle’s four intrepid kittens.
“I’m sure the kittens aired their occasional differences, as most siblings do. Pass me that orange.”
Caspar’s assistance had been inflicted on Dunfallon’s efforts to hang the cloved oranges. Some of the oranges resembled dyspeptic hedgehogs, with cloves mashed into them willy-nilly. A few had aspirations to symmetry. Little Mary Smith, whom Miss Armstrong had described as a reluctant reader, had taken the better part of an hour to carefully adorn her orange, and all the while, Dunfallon suspected she’d rather have been eating it.
Caspar tossed him the orange. “I don’t mean, why don’t the kittens spat and tiff? I mean, why don’t they fight, like when that mean man put ’em in a sack? They should have clawed his face off and bit his fingers and pissed on his shoes.” Caspar took a few swipes at the air, his hands hooked like claws. He hissed for good measure and—perhaps the boy had thespian capabilities—backed up to the nearest bookshelf and wiggled his skinny backside, tomcat-fashion.
Dunfallon tied off the orange and tried not to laugh. “Often, fighting makes a situation worse. The fellow who tried to kidnap the kittens might have taken to hurling rocks at them as they fled if they’d chosen your tactics. Another orange, please.”
Caspar tossed over another specimen, this one still a bit green on one side. The best of the lot had been reserved for snacks later in the morning.
“I tried to cover the green bits with ribbon, but the ribbon kept sliding around.”
Dunfallon came down the ladder, an awkward undertaking while holding an orange. “We can do some rearranging,” he said, pushing the ribbon one direction, pinning it with cloves, and hiding the unripe area. “Is that better?”
“Now it’s lopsided. You didn’t move the ribbon on t’other side.”
“My tutor claimed the artistic temperament abhors compromise.”
More fiddling ensued, with Caspar providing detailed directions and the occasional insult—“Don’t you know nuffink?”—as Dunfallon attempted to obey his commanding officer. When Miss Armstrong came by on an inspection tour, Caspar was pressed against Dunfallon’s arm, holding forth about the orange having to hang straight, while Dunfallon attempted to fashion a bow out of the dangling ribbon.
“Are we having a council of war?” she asked.
“We are,” Dunfallon replied as Caspar straightened. “We’ve been battling crooked, unripe fruit unfit for holiday duty. This specimen,”—he held up Caspar’s orange—“has been brought to rights, but it was a very near thing.”
“The results are lovely,” Miss Armstrong said. “Let’s hang it on my office door.”
“That un’s mine.” Caspar had acquired the swagger of a royal herald.
“I suspected it was. Tie some gold ribbon around the bow and fasten your magnificent orange to my door latch, would you?”
Caspar snatched the fruit from Dunfallon with the skill of a cutpurse and was off across the library.
Dunfallon watched him go, a pang of something like sadness accompanying the boy’s departure.
“Caspar asked why Mr. Dingle’s kittens never fight their way out of difficulties,” Dunfallon said. “I hadn’t much of an answer for him. He’s so damned skinny under those too-big clothes. If he weren’t a fighter, he’d probably be dead.”
“Mr. Dingle must be an interesting character.” Miss Armstrong took up a perch on a lower rung of the ladder. “His stories are so… The children are inspired by them. That Caspar would put the query to you—about solving his problems with his fists—shows that the boy has been rethinking some assumptions.”
What a picture she made, at her ease against the ladder, the morning sun catching the glints of gold ribbon on the oranges hung in the window above her, and the fresh scent of cloves warming the old library.
“Did Mr. Dingle do the boy any favors by throwing into a questionable light the tactics that have served the lad so well?” Dunfallon asked.
“Yes.” Miss Armstrong was off her ladder and marching toward him, skirts swishing. “Yes, he did, and I wish dear old Mr. Dingle would come out of retirement and write more stories, though I suspect Dingle is a missus. The kittens found their way home because they stuck together and used their heads. Hammerhead—the supposedly slow one—had the strength and courage to climb the trees and look for landmarks. Jewel, who loves books, remembered which landmarks were near home from the maps their mama had shown her.”
Miss Armstrong picked up an orange and hefted it as if warming up for a rousing game of cricket.
“When,”—she shook the orange at him—“is cooperation in the face of troubles a bad idea? The children often leave here in pairs and trios since we started reading Mr. Dingle’s collection. They are safer that way. Some of them aspire to writing stories of their own, and thus they are paying better attention to their reading lessons. Mary hasn’t exactly developed the vocabulary of a barrister, but she has learned to write her name.”
Miss Armstrong finished this tirade standing barely six inches from the toes of Dunfallon’s boots. Lemon verbena begged to be sniffed at closer range even than that. Dunfallon instead plucked the orange from her, bent down, and spoke softly.
“Wellington tried cooperating with the Spanish loyalists, and the Spanish Bonapartists laughed all the way to the safety of the hills. Some Scots tried cooperating with the English, and all that did was cost the rest of us our Parliament, our dignity, and the right to farm our ancestral lands. Cooperation can be a very bad idea indeed.” He’d taken some rhetorical license with history and hoped she’d correct him.
Miss Armstrong brushed at a streak of dust on his sleeve. “One must choose collaborators carefully. Perhaps Mr. Dingle should have included that caveat. Did you serve in Spain?”
Dunfallon had the oddest urge to hold still, like a cat who, having once been petted, refuses to budge until all hope of another caress is lost.
“Aye, I served, if you can call mud, death, gore, and bad rations serving.”
“I did wonder why you’re still a curate,” she said, backing up a step. “They tend to be youngish. The oranges look very nice.”
Dunfallon hung the last orange from the window latch, which upset the careful symmetry of Caspar’s design. “I’m oldish?”
“You are not a boy, just as I am not a girl.” Miss Armstrong took to studying plain fruit decorated for the holidays. “I rather like that you aren’t a boy.”
“You like ordering me around.” And Dunfallon, oddly enough, enjoyed doing her bidding. He’d been distracted as he’d plowed through yesterday’s ream of correspondence, wondering how Miss Armstrong was managing at the library without a ducal dogsbody to step and fetch for her.
“Oh, I adore ordering you about,” she said. “You take on your tasks as if they matter.”
Those tasks mattered to him because they mattered to her. “Miss Armstrong, you will put me to the blush.”
“As if one could. We have need of the ladder elsewhere.”
Something about that request brought out a subtle diffidence in the usually forthright Miss Armstrong. “You are ready to hang the mistletoe. If you think I will permit you to climb this ladder when I am on hand to be ordered about, you are very much mistaken.”
“Mr. Bevins and Mr. Pettibone are happy to assist.”
“They will be happy to argue with one another about the proper approach to climbing a ladder, where the damned stuff should hang, how the bow should be tied on each bundle, and how one properly holds a ladder still. They will ignore your advice, while I will heed it to the letter.” Dunfallon hefted the ladder and gestured with one hand. “Lay on, Macduff.”
Miss Armstrong led the way. “‘And damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”’ Are we fighting to the death over some greenery, Mr. Dunn?”
“Of course not. We will cooperate to see the job done, miss, as any self-respecting pair of kittens would.”
Her shoulders twitched as she wound her way between bookshelves. “You are not a kitten, Mr. Dunn.”
“Glad you noticed, Miss Armstrong.” Dunfallon smiled at her resolute and retreating form, even as part of him had embarked on a mental lecture straight out of old MacAlpin’s vast repertoire: Laddie, what the hell are ye aboot?
While Dunfallon pondered the answer, he set up the ladder by the front door. Pettibone and Bevins launched into their opening salvos, and little Mary Smith dragged a chair in the direction of the grandfather clock beneath the mezzanine.
Miss Armstrong uncovered a basket overflowing with mistletoe. “I left the pine swags on my balcony. We can hang them outside when Mr. Dunn joins us again on Monday.” She shot him the merest hint of a questioning glance.
“Wild unicorns couldn’t keep me away, Miss Armstrong.”
She selected a kissing bough from among the pile in the basket. “We’ll hang the mistletoe, and then Mr. Dunn can fetch the nooning. Perhaps, Mr. Pettibone and Mr. Bevins, you might take turns holding the ladder?”
If Dunfallon waited for the combatants to sort out who held the ladder first, he would be fetching the nooning on Doomsday Eve.
“Perhaps Mr. Bevins might investigate what the fair Mary is attempting to do to the hands of the grandfather clock,” Dunfallon said. “My guess is, she’s famished for an orange and moving the minute hand ahead accordingly.”
“She don’t have the clock key,” Bevins said. “Miss keeps the key in the office.”
“The girl might have a penknife,” Pettibone retorted. “A pick or two, a hairpin. Them old clocks ain’t the vault at the Bank o’ England.”
“You two had best go see,” Miss Armstrong said. “That grandfather clock was donated by Mrs. Oldbach, and I wouldn’t want it to come to any harm.”
Both old men shuffled off, and Dunfallon appropriated Miss Armstrong’s beribboned bundle of leaves and white berries. “Where shall I hang this? Speak now or forever hold your mistletoe.”
“Below Dr. Johnson’s portrait,” Miss Armstrong said, “and another below His Majesty’s.”
Miss Armstrong brought strategy to her deployment of mistletoe. By hanging the bundles from the mezzanine, she ringed the library with festive greenery and also made avoiding unwanted encounters easy.
“We have several boughs left,” Dunfallon said. “Shall we add a few bunches to the usual locations?”
“I don’t care for mistletoe ambushes,” Miss Armstrong said. “If we hang it from the chandelier in the foyer, or over the reading chairs, somebody could be taken by surprise.”
Somebody had ambushed her, apparently, and a few of Dunfallon’s more wayward thoughts slunk off to the far corners of his imagination to be replaced by distaste. Mistletoe was a bit of holiday silliness, not an excuse to impose advances on the unwilling.
“I can offer the extra to the chop shop,” he said, “and they can share with their patrons.”
“A good suggestion, and it must be getting time for our nooning, though I haven’t heard the clock chime.” Miss Armstrong looked askance in the direction of the grandfather clock. “Perhaps it needs winding.”
“I suspect it needs repairing. I saw Ralph Patterson pushing the hands forward earlier, and he probably broke the mechanism. Mary might have been thinking to fix what Ralph put wrong. According to that clock, it’s still a quarter past ten.”
“And Ralphie is nowhere to be seen,” Miss Armstrong said. “I fear you are right, and if we don’t pick up our order at the chop shop on time, they will sell it to other customers.”
Dunfallon passed her his pocket watch. “It’s barely past noon. I’ll have a look at the clock when I get back. Keep hold of my timepiece for now and see what has detained Caspar abovestairs.”
She flipped open his watch—Uncle Quintus had given it to him upon the occasion of his departure for university—and pretended to puzzle over the inscription. “I do believe you are attempting to order me about, Mr. Dunn.”
“The lad’s probably fallen asleep on your sofa, but he might also have found a book to interest him. I’d be curious to know which volume could hold his fancy.”
That lure was too much for Miss Armstrong to refuse. She snapped the watch closed and bustled off. Dunfallon grabbed his cloak and the basket holding the remaining bunches of mistletoe. He earned the merriest of smiles from passersby on his way to the chop shop, and before he’d arrived, he had an answer to the question that had plagued him earlier.
Laddie, what the hell are ye about?
“I’m falling in love,” he muttered, handing a few mistletoe bouquets to a flower girl on the corner. “I’m finally falling in love.”
“Two inches t’ the right,” Bevins called from the left side of the ladder.
“To the left,” Petty retorted from the other side. “Are ye blind as well as deef, old Bevvy?”
Mr. Dunn left the pine wreath right where he’d tied it and came down the ladder. “Miss Armstrong says the wreath goes where I hung it, and there it shall stay. I daresay if you gentlemen had the benefit of her central vantage point, and not slightly to either side, you’d agree with me.”
Emmie watched two old soldiers decide whether to continue the skirmish or accept the dignified retreat Mr. Dunn had offered them.
“Mr. Dunn is correct,” she said. “If we stand off to the side, our perspective is different than if we’re standing at the center of a view. Shall we see what mayhem the children have wrought while we’ve been hanging our greenery?”
In point of fact, Mr. Dunn had done the hanging of the greenery, while Emmie had watched him and wondered how so mundane a task, when done competently, could be so attractive. He’d scampered up and down the ladder, sometimes holding string or twine between his teeth. He’d draped the swagging with perfect symmetry and had known exactly where a dash of red or gold ribbon should go.
And—wonders abide!—he’d heeded Emmie’s suggestion to hang a double length of swagging over the main door. The library had never looked so festive, and Emmie had never felt so muddled.
“I’m for a warm fire,” Mr. Dunn said, hefting the ladder before custody of same could also provoke debate. “Unless somebody reads those hooligans a story, rebellion and more clock tampering are bound to ensue.”
Bevins squinted up at the largest wreath, which hung precisely at the center of the pine roping gracing the library’s façade. “Ralphie apologized about the clock. He didn’t mean any harm.”
“The little varmint busted an auntie-cue,” Petty retorted. “If Dunn hadn’t a-knowed how to tinker it back into service, Mrs. O woulda had the lad walk the plank.”
“No, she would not,” Mr. Dunn replied, his burr acquiring a hint of a growl, “because nobody would peach on our Ralph unless the tattletale wanted to answer to me and to Miss Armstrong, who will soon begin shivering due to our lack of gallantry. Besides, Ralph assisted me with the repairs, so he has atoned for his misplaced curiosity. Further recriminations would only injure the lad’s dignity.”
Emmie could imagine that voice castigating the Regent for his financial excesses, or preaching forgiveness to the Archbishop of Canterbury. One did not ignore such a voice, nor the message it conveyed.
She was soon heating the pot of cider over the fire, while the children were assembling on the sofas and chairs nearest the hearth.
“You might toss in a bit of this.” Mr. Dunn withdrew a corked glass jar from his pocket.
Emmie took a whiff. “Mulling spices. These come dear, Mr. Dunn.”
“Because they are potent. A pinch or two will liven up the brew, and spices lose their pungency if they’re not used.”
The scent was delicious, evoking every sweet, warm, wonderful holiday memory from Emmie’s childhood. “A pinch or two.”
He took the bottle from her, upended about a quarter of the contents into his palm, rubbed his hands together, then dumped the spices into the pot of cider.
“My pinches are larger than yours,” he said, while Emmie goggled at his extravagance, “in proportion to my hands. What tale will you regale us with today?”
Perhaps his heart was larger than hers. The children had never had mulled cider before—and probably never would again.
“Mr. Dingle’s The Ferocious Tigers of Hyde Park.”
Mr. Dunn lifted Aristotle down from the mantel and scratched the cat gently about the nape. “A stirring tale of noise and mischief masquerading as ingenuity. The juvenile horde will be riveted.”
The cat began to purr.
“He’ll get hair all over your fine coat.” Burgundy today, and though his cravat lacked lace and the pin securing it was merely amber, he would still be the best dressed curate ever to rusticate in Wales.
“The better to keep me warm when the snow starts.” Mr. Dunn set the cat back on the mantel with a final scratch to his shoulders. “Cats are generous like that, as are horses and dogs.”
Emmie went to what was now referred to as the “orange window.” The rich scent of cloves wafted from the dangling fruit, and the bright decorations contrasted starkly with the leaden sky beyond.
“I am not fond of snow,” she said. “When I was a child, snow was great fun. My brother and I would go sledding, or rather, the footmen would be tasked with hauling us around on the toboggan, then sending us on a flying pass down from the orchard, before they had to drag the thing back up the hill again. I never realized that snow for most people is nothing but hard work or a day in the shop that sees no custom.”
Mr. Dunn stood behind Emmie, close enough that she felt his warmth, felt his height and strength.
Won’t you please hold me? The wish came from nowhere, with the power of a well-aimed blow. Hold me and keep me warm and let me rest in your embrace.
“A good snow can also give us an excuse to rest for a day or two,” Mr. Dunn said. “To be still and at peace, reading a favorite book, playing a hand of cards with family, instead of forever racketing about from one task to the next. Snow has its charms, and unless I miss my guess, we’re in for a sample of them before the day is through.”
Emmie faced him, rather than stand mooning at the oranges and wishing for the impossible. “How is it you know Mr. Dingle’s tales so well?”
“Nieces,” he said, gaze on the portrait of the Bard that held pride of place over the dramas and comedies. “I have an older sister, and she is the mother of three young ladies, though I apply that term in its most euphemistic sense. They are half grown now—they were mere toddlers last week—and I did my avuncular duty by them.”
A chant began from the children by the hearth. “Sto-ry… sto-ry… sto-ry…”
“What is your Christian name, Mr. Dunn?”
He glowered at the children, who fell silent. “My friends call me Dane.”
One of those pauses ensued, where the conversation might have gone in a friendlier, even daring direction.
I would be honored, Miss Armstrong, if you’d allow me the privilege of familiar address under appropriate circumstances. In the rarefied social circles Emmie had been raised in, such a request might well presage courting aspirations.
Might I have leave to use that name on informal occasions, Mr. Dunn? In those same, stupid circles, asking such a question labeled a woman as forward, a hoyden, or—for the fortunate, beautiful, and well-dowered few—an original.
No bold overtures ensued, and Emmie was both disappointed and relieved. A fellow who seemed too good to be true was too good to be true, and Mr. Dunn was… lovely.
He was also scowling at the front door. “You have a caller.”
Mrs. Oldbach, swathed in a black cape and scarf and carrying a bright red muffler, stood near the front desk. She clutched a walking stick, the head of which had been carved to resemble an eagle. She and her raptor both appeared to peruse the library with regal disdain.
“She must have heard about the clock,” Emmie said, dredging up a welcoming smile. “I suspect Bevins of currying favor with her underfootmen over darts.”
“That’s the dreaded Mrs. Oldbach?”
“She drops in from time to time, though never to borrow a book.” The children were squirming in their seats, and Caspar was glaring daggers at Mrs. Oldbach. Even Aristotle, perched on the mantel, looked displeased to see her.
Mr. Dunn bent near enough that Emmie caught his cedary scent. “I’ll read the tale for the day, miss. You go charm the gorgon.” He patted Emmie’s shoulder—a comforting stroke—and moved over to the hearth. “Cease yer fearful din, ye heathens and hooligans, and lend me thine ears.”
The children fell silent, and Mrs. Oldbach left off casting dubious glances at the mistletoe. Mr. Dunn set the storybook on the seat to the left of the fireplace, where the meager light from the windows would fall over his right shoulder.
“I’m told we’re to learn about tigers in Hyde Park today, though I’ve never heard such a silly notion in all my life. Who is to turn pages for me?”
Emmie had never thought to use a page turner. Mary Smith—who scorned reading in all its guises—held up her hand. “I can turn yer pages, Mr. Dunn.”
“And who will help serve the cider?” Every hand shot up, and Emmie realized that Mr. Dunn had engineered a display of helpful, cheerful behavior from the children for Mrs. Oldbach’s benefit.
Or for Emmie’s?
She hustled over to the door and greeted Mrs. Oldbach with all the warmth and jollity due any gorgon. Mrs. O, a spry, white-haired veteran of Mayfair’s most ferocious whist tournaments, allowed that the library was looking quite festive, but of course she did not limit herself to pleasantries.
“Who is that fellow wrangling the infantry?”
“Mr. Dunn, a curate-in-training who needs a place for some quiet scholarship prior to assuming a post in Wales.” Though as to that, he had yet to use the library for any scholarship at all.
Mrs. Oldbach snorted. “If he’s come here for peace and quiet, he has a taste for martyrdom. Good-looking for a martyr, but then, some of ’em are. You will attend my holiday tea, of course?”
Oh, not this. Please, not this. “I’ve sent my regrets, I’m afraid.”
“Again.” Mrs. Oldbach imbued a single word with toboggan-loads of reproach. “You flit about all day here with the literary riffraff and that lot,”—she sniffed in the direction of Mr. Bevins and Mr. Pettibone—“and decline the prospect of a genteel holiday tea. Your mother would despair of you.”
The cider had been distributed without a single mug spilling, and Mr. Dunn took the reading chair. He beckoned Mary, and she—the most accomplished pugilist among the younger patrons—scrambled into his lap and positively preened.
Aristotle moved three entire feet along the mantel to sit closer to Mr. Dunn.
“You have to start with ‘once upon a time,’” Ralph said. “That how all Mr. Dingle’s stories start, because that’s what he wrote.”
A chorus of “Stow it, Ralph” and “Hush, you big looby” followed in annoyed undertones.
“The Ferocious Tigers of Hyde Park by Mr. Christopher Dingle,” Mr. Dunn began. “Dedicated to fierce little tigers of every species.”
“What’s ’at mean?” Caspar called. “What’s a spee-she’s?”
“Good question,” Mr. Dunn replied, while Mary turned the page. “Save it for after the story, and that’s where we’ll begin our discussion.”
“Now comes ‘once upon a time,’” Ralph bellowed.
“So it does,” Mr. Dunn said. “Thank you, Mary. Now, attend me, my geniuses and prodigies, for our story begins… ‘Once upon a time, there were four little kittens. Hammerhead, Mark, Luke, and Jewel. They lived in old Londontown with their dear mama, and though they were good little kittens—or ever tried to be—their mama was forever begging them not to make…’” He paused dramatically and sent his audience a look. “‘So… much… noise.’”
The children had joined in on those last words, and Emmie nearly forgot Mrs. Oldbach was standing at her elbow. “This is how a story should be read,” she murmured. “Like a pub song or a prayer.”
“And the look on your face frequently characterizes young women suffering the pangs of romance,” Mrs. Oldbach retorted. “Wherever you found him, if you let that fellow disappear into the wilds of Wales, you have tarried too long on the literary battlefields, Miss Armstrong. I see my clock continues to function quite well, so perhaps rumors of vandalism here at the library were greatly exaggerated.”
“I would tolerate no mischief at West Bart’s Lending, ma’am. I hope you know that.”
Mrs. Oldbach muttered something about the folly of the young and, with a thump of her walking stick, went on her way.
Emmie, by contrast, pulled up a stool between the bookshelves, took a lean against the biographies, and let herself be swept away by the ferocious tigers of Hyde Park.