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

think this tea will be just the thing for you. We made it the way you prefer, light and refreshing with none of that lingering bitterness.”
    Weak, she meant. The tea was going to be weak, so weak she felt she must warn him. His heart sank at the prospect, and plummeted pell-mell when he raised the cup and took a mouthful.
    All that long walk from the place where they’d broken down in the ditch, he’d rallied his flagging spirits with thoughts of something hot to drink. He’d reconciled himself to tea, since that’s what was on offer, but he’d been thinking of hearty, potent tea, the kind that could fortify a man for a miles-long march through cold and snow. This insipid swill wouldn’t fortify him for so much as a stroll across the room. They might as well have served him water straight from the kettle.
    He swallowed the mouthful and nodded. “Perfect. Just the thing.” Further praise he could not offer, not if his life depended on it.
    Miss Sharp beamed her approval, radiantly as if he’d committed some extraordinary deed of gentlemanly condescension rather than simply acting as common courtesy demanded. She set a bold hand on his forearm. “May I take Mr. Blackshear to see the drawing room?” She didn’t even turn to direct this over her shoulder, but kept her eyes on him, looking altogether like a wife eager to be alone with her husband. “I’m sure he’ll be pleased to know how comfortably I’ll be situated while he’s gone.”
    Distance. Formality. “Indeed I will. If Mr. and Mrs. Porter will excuse us?” Her arranging so soon a surreptitious conference was commendably pragmatic. His intense awareness of her hand’s soft weight on his arm was no fault of hers.
    The Porters raising no objection, she led him from the kitchen and across a hallway to another modest room, where she shut the door and put her back against it, dropping her hold on his arm. “I think they’re poor,” she said in an undertone, urgency taking the place of her former affectionate good cheer. “Mr. Blackshear, I truly believe the Porters haven’t much money at all.”
    “They’re not rich, to be sure. But it would have been a surprise if they had been.” He crossed to the fireplace and emptied his teacup on the bricks, where the contents hissed back at him in billows of presumably insipid steam. Maybe he could find a cup of strong coffee somewhere in the village.
    “I don’t mean simply that they’re not rich.” She gestured to his empty cup. “That tea was made from leaves that had been used before; I’m sure of it. I saw Mrs. Porter take them from where they were spread out on a pan by the hearth.”
    That was unusual for a farm family as respectable as the Porters seemed to be. And now that he took a look about this room, the furnishings did have a decidedly Spartan quality. There was no pianoforte, or bookshelf, or any other thing to suggest the family had leisure hours and the means to fill them. “It’s a fair sized house and grounds, though. Do you think they might have had some misfortune? A poor harvest?” What was he doing? What was she doing? They had troubles enough of their own. They didn’t need to engage themselves in the Porters’ fortunes.
    “I don’t know.” She pushed away from the door and took up a nearer position on the hearth, clearly assuming they were now united in concern for the Porters above all else. “Mrs. Porter didn’t say anything on the subject. But their daughter married this year, so they must have had to provide a dowry, and if you’re right about the harvest, they wouldn’t have had much money to spare. And now they don’t even have their daughter for Christmas, because she and her husband have gone to be with his family.”
    Andrew sighed, and rubbed the back of his neck. His Christmas and hers were enough for him to shoulder. The Porters would have to make the best of their own. “I’m sorry for them, Lucy.” His mouth shaped itself so naturally to her name.