A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong: A Blackshear Family novella (B 0.5)

by Cecilia Grant

  He was dreadfully handsome when he spoke of honor. So righteous and terrible and vigorous he nearly gave off sparks. A more persuadable lady might be pledging to run off and join an order of nuns now, or whatever it was that zealously proper ladies did, just to win his approval.

  Her part, however, was not to be persuaded but to persuade. “I’m sorry for my choice of words. I do respect your dedication to your honor.” She unfolded her arms, clasping her downward-pointing hands because that gave her a more earnest look. “I’m convinced, though, that your honor will survive a few more miles with me. Whereas I’m not convinced my maid would soon have had another opportunity like the one to which I’ve left her.”

  “Opportunity? What possible opportunity—”

  “Her whole family is gathered for the holidays, including a brother who’s usually at sea. And he brought a friend with him, a man from his ship with good prospects, and I could see this man liked her. She might have good news by the time I see her next.”

  A certain sagging came to his aspect, and the hand he’d held to his temple dropped back to his side. He walked away from her—no whirling this time—and sat on a bench against the inn wall, leaning forward to prop his elbows on his knees. “Let me be sure I understand. You left your maid behind in hopes that, between Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night, this visiting man will make her an offer of marriage?”

  “Also that she might enjoy Christmas with her family, as I would hope you’d be able to understand. But yes, I would say the deciding factor was the possibility of her receiving an offer.”

  His eyes closed for a second, as though her foolishness were some bright light that physically pained him. “What man in his right mind would propose marriage to a woman he’s been acquainted with for all of twelve days, and what woman in her right mind would accept him? They couldn’t possibly know in that time whether they’d suit.”

  “He’s a Navy man!” She didn’t mean to raise her voice, but really, he needn’t take such a patronizing tone. “He’s not on land long enough to undertake a leisurely courtship. I expect such marriages happen all the time, among men who go to sea, and I expect many of them are perfectly happy—certainly every bit as happy as marriages contracted between people who meet in ballrooms and care chiefly for their partner’s noble lineage or abundant property.”

  “That’s different. The alliance of one respectable family to another is a time-honored and useful—no. Never mind.” He swiped his hand through the air, scrubbing away the topic that apparently hung there. “Even if I believed there was likely to be a proposal, and a successful match, it’s entirely out of the question for us to continue on without your maid. You shall have to go back and tell her that you’re very sorry, but you were wrong to excuse her from her duties, and she must come with you after all.”

  “I won’t do that.” She abandoned the posture of earnest clasped hands: his arrogant order-giving called for something openly defiant, like arms folded across the chest. “It would be a terrible disappointment to her and her family. You’d never propose such a thing if you’d seen how glad and grateful they all were to hear she’d be staying.”

  “Very well, then you may prevail upon their gratitude for the next twelve days. I’m sure they’ll be honored and delighted to host their daughter’s benefactress for the holidays.”

  “I cannot possibly impose upon them in that way!” Deep within her roiling outrage, a few wisps of panic began to coalesce. She’d nearly lost the house party once already, and managed to snatch it back. Could circumstance—could Mr. Blackshear—be so cruel as to take it from her all over again? “Only think of how awkward it would be for them. How could they enjoy their Christmastide when they must be worrying over whether the accommodations and entertainment are grand enough for a baron’s daughter?”

  “Then the only other option I see is to take you back to Mosscroft.” He folded his arms, too, and leaned back against the inn wall for good measure. “I’ll convey you back there if you wish. I will not convey you even a yard farther in the other direction.”

  “Well, what sense does that make?” She hugged her cloak tighter about her as another chill wind drove through. “If driving me alone to Hatfield Hall is improper, surely driving me alone to Mosscroft is equally so. And it would cost you another three hours, and another change of horses. You’d never reach home in time for Christmas Eve dinner.”

  “Then I suppose we’re back to the first two options. Go and repossess your maid, or go and spend the holidays with her.” He crossed one leg over the other and looked more immovable still. “I ask you to choose quickly, Miss Sharp, that I can be home for that dinner of which you were so considerate as to remind me.”

  How could she have thought him handsome or in any way pleasing? She’d never seen a more overbearing, stiff-necked, disagreeable man. He would ruin everybody’s Christmas and probably congratulate himself on the feat. He hadn’t any pirate in him after all, nor any misrule, either. He couldn’t even sprawl properly. He looked like a humorless vicar trying to blend in among the patrons in a public house.

  A horse whinnied off to the left, and she glanced that way. Mr. Blackshear’s coachman had brought the carriage round, ready to be on the road again. Coming in past him was another carriage, probably in need of fresh horses. Two more carriages, she now recalled, had been here already when they’d arrived, their passengers no doubt pausing for some refreshment in the inn before continuing their travels.

  Inspiration sprouted like an obstinate weed.

  “Very well; perhaps some other one of these travelers will be going toward Welney, and will agree to convey me. You may ask your man to take down my trunk.” She angled her body toward the inn door and set her shoulders back to look poised for walking.

  “That worked once, Miss Sharp. It won’t work a second time.” His voice spelled out intransigence, but his pupils had flared sufficiently to give the lie to his stone-like calm.

  Or so she hoped. With a sensation very much like what one must feel when stepping off a pier, she propelled herself toward the door.

  He moved like lightning, which was perhaps a little piratical after all, surging up off the bench and seizing her elbow. “For the love of—have you no sense at all?” The grip of his fingers told her everything about his anger, frustration, and disappointment in her. “Your father did you a grave disservice, bringing you up to believe in the benevolence of strangers. But he doesn’t deserve to see some terrible fate befall you because you trusted in the wrong place and got into the wrong carriage. And I don’t deserve to have to travel to Mosscroft and break that news to him, when he believed you were making this journey under my care.”

  “Precisely. Under your care.” She spoke as dispassionately as she could, to sound the more reasonable in contrast to his show of temper. “He permitted me to travel with you because he knew I would be perfectly safe. I don’t know why you find it so difficult to have the same faith in your—”

  “Not another word. Please. Not another perfectly, not another travel, not another the.” He held up the hand that wasn’t grasping her elbow, palm out to halt her speaking. For two silent, frozen seconds there was no telling what he would do. Then he jerked his head toward the carriage. “Go and get in. You can use the distance to Welney to work out how you’re going to explain arriving at this party in the carriage of an unrelated man, without a chaperone or even a maid. Don’t expect me to offer so much as a syllable in your exoneration.” He dropped his hold on her elbow, turned on his heel, and went with long strides to talk to his driver, not sparing her another glance.

  She’d carried her point. She’d been right and he’d been wrong. She’d succeeded in doing a Christmas kindness for her maid, and in a matter of miles she’d be safely arrived at Hatfield Hall, untroubled henceforward by Mr. Blackshear’s dark looks. By any measure, it was a victory.

  She picked up her skirts and made her way across the inn-yard to the carriage, an ache gathering in the pit of her stomach for
no good reason on earth.

  “Does that bird sound ill to you?” For the fifth or sixth time since leaving Downham Market, Andrew looked over his shoulder. The thing rode in a crate, covered by a cloth meant to keep it, one surmised, from being alarmed by the passing scenery. Periodically it emitted sounds.

  “Don’t know enough to venture a guess.” John Coachman kept his eyes on the horses. “Might just be talking to himself to pass the time. Whatever it is, he’s been doing it the whole of the journey. First team didn’t care for it, I can tell you. This pair don’t seem to mind.”

  Well, that was somewhat reassuring, to know the bird had been making these utterances all along. He’d bought a penny’s worth of beef at the posting inn and poked it into the crate while waiting for Miss Sharp to return. It would be too bad if his well-meant action had resulted in making the creature sick.

  What it wouldn’t be, though, was surprising, given the general trend of his actions and their outcomes on this trip.

  He sighed and pulled his scarf higher round his chin. Self-disgust chilled him from the inside out. Why hadn’t he delivered Miss Sharp back to her home, as he’d threatened—indeed, promised—to do? A man of truer principle would have swallowed the loss of three more hours, and grimly started back the way he’d come. Never mind the logic of her argument that an unchaperoned trip in one direction would be no more proper than an unchaperoned trip in the other. He’d capitulated not to logic, but out of expediency: he wanted to be at home, the sooner, the better.

  “Do you suppose we’ll have snow?” The air had grown decidedly colder since they’d left Mosscroft, though of course he hadn’t noticed it much during that leg of the journey when he’d ridden inside. Now Miss Sharp had the padded seat and the snug interior all to herself, almost as a perverse reward for her wrongdoing, because though he might lack principle and be swayed by expediency, he was not so bereft of propriety as to sit alone in that carriage with her.

  “Could be snow, by and by. It’s cold enough.” John Coachman frowned at the thick banks of cloud high above, but was apparently unable to divine anything certain from their shape.

  A snowfall would be pleasant on this, the last Christmastide before Kitty’s wedding started the Blackshears all going their separate ways. The memories they carried off with them would be…gilded wasn’t the right image because there was no gold, but something in that general—

  A sudden loud crack sounded, and the left front corner of the carriage dropped hard. He barely had time to know that something had gone terribly wrong before the entire conveyance veered leftward, and both wheels on that side went down into the ditch.

  He seized at the handholds, bouncing out of his seat on the box and coming back down with a jolt he felt all the way up his spine. The world began to list—they were going over—from the corner of his eye he could see John Coachman throw down the reins and launch himself clear, but Andrew stayed where he was, gripping so tightly to the handholds it seemed he might split the knuckles of his gloves.

  Miss Sharp, he thought, the one coherent thought in a haze of rapid impressions. Miss Sharp was trapped; there was no way for her to jump free, and he would not save himself and leave her to meet her fate alone.

  He flattened himself against the seat as the horizon tilted, bracing his boot on the footboard and taking a new handhold. Another thought came, tardily: it would be better to have jumped, and preserved himself as best he could. He’d be of no use to her or anyone if he was badly hurt.

  Too late now. The ground came rushing up, the vehicle’s weight asserting itself ever more adamantly, and then came a jar, and a shuddering bounce as the carriage’s left side met with the roadside hedge. His hat went flying; he lost his handhold and grabbed another. He could hear hedge-branches snapping, but the fall had been arrested. The carriage stopped at an angle to the earth, its left wheels in the ditch and its right wheels up off the road, turning in midair as though they thought they still had somewhere to go.

  Panic, dammed up for the several seconds of the crisis, burst its banks and flooded his whole body. “Miss Sharp!” He scrambled over the carriage, shinnying on his belly to the upended right side, and pounded on the skyward-facing window. “Miss Sharp, are you hurt?” God. Her father. Please, please let him not have to go and tell her father she’d broken a bone or worse.

  “I’m not. What happened?” Her voice sounded small and shaken, distant through the pane of glass, but she answered him, thank God, and answered without any delay.

  He closed his eyes and exhaled, his breath shuddering with relief. “I don’t know. I think a wheel may have broken, and then we went in the ditch. Are you sure you’re not hurt? Did you hit your head at all?”

  “No. I curled up and covered my head. Papa taught me how.” She was indeed curled up, he could see, small as she could make herself down on the carriage floor, at the far end against the door. She twisted to look up at him. “Is the falcon hurt?”

  Hang the blasted falcon; it was the last of his concerns. “I’ll look in a moment. I want to see to the horses first, if you’re quite sure you’re well.”

  “Will you look now? I think it may be frightened.” Her voice reached right into his chest and clutched at his heart. She was the one frightened. Without knowing how he knew that, he nevertheless knew it. She’d taken all the terror of those few helpless seconds and assigned it to the bird, because she didn’t know what to do with that emotion herself.

  “Yes, of course I’ll look. Just a moment.” He crawled along the top of the carriage, pausing for a glance at the horses. Thank God again, this time for a harnessing system with a single pole that ran between the team, and for a partial overturn instead of a full one, because the horses had managed to stay on their feet. If things had been otherwise, he’d probably be facing broken legs now, and the swift, merciful use of a bullet or two. As it was, they were awkward and agitated, both tossing their heads as one struggled to find a standing-place that wouldn’t involve any hooves resting in the ditch, but they were upright, at least. And here was John Coachman, bless his unflappable soul, brushing the dirt from his breeches as he came to calm them and take them out of harness.

  “Is it hurt?” Miss Sharp’s voice floated faintly up from the carriage’s interior. He reached for the bird’s cloth cover and pulled it back.

  Was it hurt? He didn’t know how to tell. He didn’t want to get his eye too close to the space between the crate’s slats, with an unreasoning and disturbed creature, possessed of claws and a sharp beak, on the other side. At all events it was sitting up, or rather standing, and its eyes were open and its head swiveled about to fix him with a viperous glare.

  “I don’t think it’s hurt.” He twisted to shout these words near the window. “It probably had a fright but I don’t see any sign of injury. I’ll go tend to the horses now; then I’ll be back.”

  He slid down the roof and dropped over the hedge, careful to approach from a wide angle so as not to spook the horses. Now he’d absorbed the miracle of their all not being worse off, the degree of their plight was beginning to sink in. “Tell me how to be useful,” he said to John, because there was little point insisting on the ceremony of rank in this situation.

  “Will you take this fellow by the lead and walk him to and fro, talking quietly, while I get the other one unhitched? If you show him you’re not overset, then he’ll take your example and be calm.”

  “I am overset. I’m halfway between nowhere and nowhere else, my carriage is in a ditch, and I’ve got a lady in there who can’t get out unless she goes climbing like a damned chimney-boy through that topmost door and over the side of the carriage.”

  “Broken wheel as well.” John jerked his head toward the left front wheel. “Even could we get it out of the ditch, we won’t be going anywhere soon. Might as well take time to get the horses settled.”

  Those were the words of a man with no family. No wife, no children, no parents or siblings to count on his being home for Christmas. He cou
ld afford to put the welfare of horses first. Other men didn’t have that liberty.

  Nevertheless Andrew walked his horse. He might as well do something while working out how to proceed, and a short jaunt up and down the road gave him the chance to make a survey of the visible countryside. When had they passed the last town large enough to possibly have a wheelwright? Had there been anything sizable since Downham Market? He could see a farmhouse in the distance, and another, farther away, on the other side of the road, but nothing so large as a village.

  “You ought to be proud of yourself.” Really, he had no idea what was appropriate to say to a carriage-horse on such an occasion. He could only fall back on the sort of praise he’d been wont to dispense to Nick and Will, in younger years, since Father never contributed a great deal of that. “You didn’t try to bolt, as many might have done in your place. You were cool-headed and valiant. We owe you our thanks.”

  One of them must go for help. People in these farmhouses surely had wheels that needed repairing sometimes, and could tell him where to go for that service. As well as assisting him and John in righting the carriage long enough for Miss Sharp to properly disembark. He must hope they could provide her with a comfortable, respectable place to wait, too, while he went to deal with the wheelwright. That might take some time, it being Christmas Eve. He must prepare for the possibility the man would be ensconced in the bosom of his family, enjoying a fine meal with a Christmas pudding, and loath to leave for any cause.

  He shook his head, to dispel a creeping sense of trepidation. It was barely past noon. Hatfield Hall couldn’t be more than another hour away, and home perhaps an hour more. He had time to do his persuading, and money to help it along. Wheel repair or replacement surely didn’t take all day. He’d need another few obstacles, significant ones, before he’d recognize any possibility other than reaching home tonight.