“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?”