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Dempsey as she hurried along beside him into the foyer. Turnip pretended not to hear her.
    â€œRight 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.
    â€œReggie!” 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.”
    â€œOh, 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.”
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œThe one you gave me,” Turnip prompted, looking sternly at Sally. “A thief knocked Miss Dempsey over in an attempt to retrieve it.”
    â€œReally?” Lizzy Reid’s eyes were as round as . . . well, as very round things. “A footpad? How simply smashing!”
    â€œYes, if you’re the pudding. It was quite smashed, and so was Miss Dempsey.”
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œTwo 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?”
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œIt was a half-pay officer,” corrected Agnes. “And he was quite definitely English.”
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œYe-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.”
    â€œAnd you’d not seen it before?” asked Miss Dempsey quietly.
    The three girls looked at one another. They all shook their heads.
    â€œThere is such a lot of Christmas pudding going about right now, you