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

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 could 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