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

another half-hour, if the snowfall didn’t ease. He’d better stay in the house only long enough to swallow his tea and get a bit warm before setting out again.
    They stomped snow from their boots and brushed it from their coats when they reached the back door, and once they were tolerably fit for indoors, Mr. Porter led them in to what proved to be the kitchen.
    It was a humble kitchen indeed compared to the ones in his family home and the London house, which were the only two into which he’d ever set foot. It had a fire, though, and four walls and a roof, and to a man who hadn’t been properly indoors since the posting inn at Downham Market, it might as well have been a palace banqueting hall.
    “There you all are. I think we’ve timed this near perfectly.” Past the intervening shapes of Ned and Mr. Porter and an aproned girl, all edging round each other to get to stove or hearth or cupboard, came the voice of his falsified Mrs. Blackshear. “We saw you through the window when you came in off the road. We knew it would take you some time to get everything put away in the barn, so we had to guess when to pour the hot water. But I think we guessed well, don’t you, Mrs. Porter?”
    Somewhere around the time she uttered the word barn, the kitchen’s traffic rearranged itself to give him a view of her. She stood at the room’s other end, taking cups down from a shelf and handing them to the comparatively diminutive Mrs. Porter. She was smiling already round her stream of good-cheered narration, but when she caught his eye she somehow shaped the smile into a greeting just for him.
    And for a moment he had the oddest sensation of homecoming.
    There was no rational basis to it, nor empirical basis either. Nothing about the scene bore the slightest resemblance to the domestic life he would one day lead. On those occasions when he did absent himself from home for any length of time, then if his prudently chosen, methodically courted, sensible-natured wife had not accompanied him, she certainly wouldn’t be busying herself in the kitchen in preparation for his return.
    Nor would he enter through that room, of course. He’d come in through the front door—not, Lord knows, with arms and back aching from physical labor—and be greeted first by the butler and then perhaps by his valet before he made his way to the parlor where his wife would ring for coffee instead of tea because she’d know him, as he would know her. Because they would have built their marriage on a foundation of such thorough, rich acquaintance as only time could make possible.
    And even that sort of homecoming was but a distant prospect. The homecoming that mattered was the one he had still to accomplish today, after he’d warmed himself in this kitchen and solved the problem of the broken wheel.
    He shrugged out of his coat and followed the other men’s example in draping it over one of several battered-looking chairs that stood on the hearth. He took off his hat, too, and turned to face the room with an acute consciousness of the sorry state of his clothes and hair—but nobody seemed to take note. Indeed Mrs. Porter was entirely occupied in apologizing for the fact that he must drink his tea in the kitchen, and the fact that she hadn’t had a better room to offer Mrs. Blackshear.
    “I’m afraid we hadn’t laid a fire in the drawing room today,” she explained, pouring the tea. “I’ve had the maid start one, though, and I expect the room will be warm by the time you’ve gone on your errand. Mrs. Blackshear will have a comfortable place to wait for you.”
    “I’ve enjoyed waiting in the kitchen.” Miss Sharp took the cup and brought it across the few feet of floor to where he still stood on the hearth. “Our cook scarcely allows me over the threshold of our kitchen at home. It’s pleasant to look about and see how things are done.” She stopped directly in front of him, offering both the cup and a private, significant look. “I