A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong: A Blackshear Family novella (B 0.5) (17 page)

“Well, why don’t you set those things down on the hearth.” Mrs. Porter spoke from the stove, where she had water in the kettle ready to make more tea. “They ought to be dry by the time you men have finished breakfast, and then perhaps you and Mrs. Blackshear will have time to lay them out before we leave for church.”

Lucy went to fetch the teacups, her counterfeit name keeping up a private echo in her ear.

* * *

They had to hurry. He didn’t like to hurry at things, as a rule, but even less did he like to be late for church on Christmas. Not even in a foreign parish where no one knew him and no one was so high-born as to be able to stand in judgment on his punctuality. Gentlemen came to church on time, and that was that.

So he bolted his eggs and bread, washing them down with several mouthfuls of the feeble tea, and set to arranging greenery in the dining room with Miss Sharp.

“That’s very good there, that bit with the holly and the candles.” He sounded inane. He didn’t know what to say to her anymore. Or rather, he knew what he ought to say—he’d given a deal of thought to it, in the time he was outside—but he was having to fight down every instinct and habit of propriety in order to make himself say it.

While the clock ticked away his opportunity to speak to her alone.

“Thank you. We don’t do this at my house, so it’s all new to me.” She kept her head lowered, watching her hands strip sprigs from the branch of holly. Speaking with him in private was apparently more difficult than speaking in front of the Porters had been. “I must agree with you about the scent, by the way. It’s very festive.”

“I’ve always found it so.” He reversed the branches he’d laid on the sideboard, overlapping their cut ends in the middle to make the cuts slightly less conspicuous than they’d been when they’d stuck out at the furniture’s left and right sides. The arranging bit was new to him, too. He always cut the boughs and brought them in, and left it to his sisters to bestow them decoratively.

To Kitty, rather. Martha had little interest. Heaven help them all next year when the only Blackshear with an aptitude for decorating had married and gone out of the family. It would be random heaps of greenery and jagged branch-ends everywhere.

He was stalling. He was savoring this delicate quiet between them broken only by the occasional remark, and putting off the moment in which he must once again coarsen the tone, and stir up the unease that had settled and lain silt-like beneath their careful words.

“Miss Sharp.” No more putting it off, though he could wish his voice hadn’t taken that sudden dive into stiff sobriety. “Forgive my broaching a topic that must be at least as painful to you as it is to me.” He’d planned those words in advance, with the unfortunate result that he now sounded as if he were reading them from a paper. He cleared his throat. “In reviewing the events of last night, it occurred to me I’d neglected to offer you an apology.”

“It wasn’t necessary. I know you didn’t mean to do it, and there could be no doubt of your remorse.” Somewhere in this hurried speech she pricked a finger on a holly sprig, brought the finger almost to her mouth, thought better of that, and wrapped it in her other hand.

“Surely you know me well enough by now to understand that it
is
necessary, for me.” He put his back to the sideboard, to face her fully. “I apologize for what happened. I may not have intended it, but I could have prevented it by remaining in my place on the floor. I was negligent, unforgivably so, in choosing the comfort of a warm bed over what I knew to be right and proper.”

“I forgive you.” She uncovered her pricked finger to have a look, and kept it uncovered. She didn’t look at him.

Clearly she was eager to be done with this conversation, and yet he must press on. “I also fear my actions of last night may have left you with a disgust—perhaps even a dread—of what is to come after marriage. Of relations, I mean, between a husband and wife.” He lowered his voice, even though the door stood closed and he’d been employing a discreet tone already. “You mustn’t think that was any fair representation of how things will be. A decent husband will be attentive to your comfort and enjoyment.” Everything in him was screaming in protest at this line of discussion. He curled his hand into a fist and drove the nails against his palm. “You’ve grown up without a mother, so I don’t know how much you’ve been told of these things.”

“Almost nothing.” She picked up her holly branch again, gaze fixed intractably upon it. “I suppose I will be dependent on my husband for knowledge.”

“Well, please know from me that it’s meant to be pleasurable. Not only for the man. Not like last night.” Discretion argued for stopping there, but a further point presented itself, and it seemed a potentially valuable one for her to know. “It’s possible for a perfectly decent man to be in ignorance of that fact—of the enjoyment he owes to his wife. If he was raised in the countryside, for example, and formed his understanding chiefly on what he’s observed of how animals breed, and then if he hasn’t gone on to have such experience as would teach him otherwise, he might think a woman merely tolerates a man’s attentions, as a sow does a boar’s.” This wasn’t coming out right. How had he got to talking about rutting pigs? “At all events I thought you should know of that—I mean, that marital relations ought to be pleasurable for you—in case you choose a husband who’s not equipped to inform you of that fact.” He clamped his jaws shut. All the blood in his body was rushing to heat and redden his skin and make him a perfect study of embarrassment. Just as well she wouldn’t look at him.

She twisted a holly sprig back and forth, not quite ready to pluck it from the bough. “You know a good deal about this.” Her cheeks, too, had gone pink. “More than can be learned from observing barnyard animals, as you say. How is it that you…” But her words faded as her nerve apparently trickled away. She neither finished the question nor attempted to start it again. Only stood there, twisting the holly and looking unhappy.

“Lucy.” He’d gone so far beyond the bounds of propriety with her already; why not be candid on this point too? “Do I strike you as a man who frequents brothels?”

Her brows pinched together and she shook her head.

“As a seducer of innocents, perhaps? As the sort of person who would trifle with the housemaids, or carry on with other men’s wives?”

She shook her head again, this time darting a glance at him.

“You’re right. I’m none of those things. What information I have on this topic, I owe to time spent in the company of men who speak of their own experience with a deal more liberty than is becoming. I myself have never had anything to contribute to those discussions.” If it made a difference to her to know this—if she could find any comfort in the fact that at least she wasn’t the latest in a long string of women who’d served to gratify him—then he wouldn’t be sorry to have offered it up, whatever the cost to his dignity.

The cost to his dignity was not inconsiderable. He filled his lungs, and took another bough from the table where he’d piled them. “Now, is that enough awkwardness and mortification for one morning?” Heaven help him if it wasn’t. How he was to look her in the eye, henceforward, he couldn’t begin to guess.

“I think it may be enough awkwardness and mortification for a lifetime.” She kept her eyes lowered, but one corner of her formidable mouth twitched, settling briefly into a curve.

And in that instant he could glimpse a far-off day when each of them would recall these events with more amusement than alarm or self-censure. The feelings of shame, exposure, and transgression would fade—not soon, but some day. What happened last night in bed would be, from that future vantage point, just one more blunder in this Christmas when everything had gone so memorably wrong.

“It was so good of you to cut all this and bring it in.” She gestured with her holly branch, closing the painful topic and moving on to an easier one. “Chopping the firewood, too. It was such a thoughtful thing to do for the Porters.”

“No. Merely habit.” He busied himself with finding a place for the bough. “Merely what I would have done at home. And chopping wood has beneficial effects on the heart and lungs and limbs, besides being the least I owe the Porters for their generosity.”

She was smiling in earnest when he glanced at her, her eyes still averted, her mouth pulling wide with some private merriment whose source he couldn’t fathom.

His mouth tugged halfway into an answering smile, and it was on the tip of his tongue to ask what amused her so. But let it never be said he didn’t learn from his mistakes: an excess of familiarity had led him deep into disaster once already. They’d been lucky to recover as well as they had. He wouldn’t take that luck for granted.

“Are we close to finished here?” He set his bough in with the others and dusted his hands. “I think it must be nearly time to be leaving for church.”

* * *

I was negligent, unforgivably so.

I forgive you.

Could he ever have learned to live with such matter-of-fact absolution? The question scarcely bore considering—he’d offered to marry her and she’d said no—but it crossed and re-crossed his thoughts nonetheless as he sat through Christmas morning service in the Porters’ pew, Miss Sharp at his side and a heavier-than-usual burden of guilt on his shoulders.

“This church is prettier than the one at Mosscroft. We don’t have a colored-glass window.” Her murmur floated across the few inches of space between them. From time to time she piped up with some such observation, and, though he thought silence to be the appropriate thing in a church service, at least she wasn’t muttering under her breath about superstition and mysticism. Indeed she was probably one of the more attentive people present, particularly compared to the many members of the congregation who kept fidgeting and twisting about to steal glances at the two tall, finely dressed strangers in their midst.

“Few churches in England have those windows.” He spoke out of the side of his mouth, tipping his head near to hers. “They ceased to be fashionable about the time of the Reformation.”

She nodded gravely, not catching that he’d been aiming for levity in that last remark. They might as well have spoken two different languages, so unlikely were they to ever truly understand one another. He, bowing his head to catalogue all his sins and plan how to atone for each; she, having forgiven and forgotten with reflexive ease, now tilting up her chin to study the clerestory windows and the narrow beams of light pouring through them.

Not that it mattered, the gulf in understanding between Miss Sharp and himself. If fortune favored him, he could count the remaining hours of their acquaintance on his fingers. Maybe the fingers of one hand.

“These people ought to be paying better attention to the sermon, oughtn’t they?” Her arm pressed into his as she leaned close once more. “It cannot be very pious of them to be constantly looking round at us.”

“It’s Christmas.” Even as recently as yesterday, he would have been quick to heap disapproval on every inattentive churchgoer’s head. But he’d expended so much judgment on himself, and his own failings, that he hadn’t a great deal left over for strangers. “I’m sure they all know the text by heart, and have long since heard every point their priest can make in a sermon. That they’d be distracted by a pair of newcomers is only to be expected.”

Miss Sharp’s brand of forgiveness must feel a little like this. It wasn’t bad. To let go of worrying about other people’s behavior felt rather heady, in fact, and liberating. It wasn’t the sort of sensation a responsible man could make a steady diet of, but it might be worth a taste every now and then.

The feelings of benevolence dissipated somewhat after the service, however, when he found his exit—and thus his departure for Downham Market—delayed by the necessity of their being introduced to seemingly every last member of the congregation. In twos and threes people marched or sidled up, making their greetings to the Porters while eyeing the Porters’ exotic guests with a curiosity so frank it bordered on impudence.

Again and again Mr. or Mrs. Porter was made to tell the story of the carriage in the ditch; again and again he and Miss Sharp had to confirm the account and occasionally supply more details. Partway through one of these retellings—the second? The third?—his wife-for-but-a-few-more-hours set her hand on his forearm, as a wife might do, and he covered her hand with his own, since that seemed a fit husbandly response.

You wouldn’t think the weight and shape of her hand could still have such an effect on him, after the brash liberties his body had taken with hers. But he could think of little; perceive little; know little beyond the rise of each knuckle into his palm; the occasional fidgeting of her fingers on his sleeve; the bunched leather at her wrist, beneath his fingertips. And in consequence of all this distraction, only gradually did he grasp that the woman presently addressing them was issuing an invitation.

“It’s a bigger goose even than the one we had last year,” the tiny plump-cheeked matron was saying—Mrs. Long, her name was; he’d managed to absorb that much—“and Mr. and Mrs. Porter can tell you that the one we had last year was monstrous big. Really, I don’t know how we’re to eat it all, or all the peas and tiny onions, or so much as half the pudding—it’s a fearsome pudding, the largest you ever did see—or for that matter how we’re to make up proper sets for the dancing, without we have a few more guests. It’s not a true Christmas without a Christmas party; wouldn’t you agree, Mrs. Blackshear?”

He couldn’t like the impertinence of this direct address to his wife—or to the lady posing as his wife, which for present purposes came to the same thing—by a stranger who could have no idea what might be Mrs. Blackshear’s sentiments on the subject of Christmas parties. Nor could he approve of equating a “true Christmas” with what sounded like a gluttonous revel, particularly when that equation was made in the vestibule of a church, with services but a little while ago concluded.

“I confess I haven’t been to enough Christmas parties to render an opinion.” Miss Sharp threw a smile to the Porters. “Most of my holidays have been spent quietly at home. I suppose we all develop a partiality for what we’re used to.”