A Yuletide Treasure Read Free Page A

that soon became covered as before, making her skirts heavier. She realized that her feet were cramped with cold. If she did not walk on at once, she’d soon find herself cowering down in the middle of the road, covered with snow like a tree stump.
    But it was hard to will herself to move on. Far easier to stand still, dazzled and mesmerized by the dancing flakes buzzing before her eyes like white bees. The cramp in her feet became a flame, driving her a few stumbling steps forward.
    It seemed to take forever to walk the hundred yards of the road in the hollow. Nanny Mallow’s cottage should be just a little farther beyond this point. “It might as well be on the moon,” Camilla grumbled.
    Just then, she heard a muffled howling. The sound cut through the cold fog, rising up to unearthly levels before stopping abruptly. Camilla staggered onward. She’d gone no more than a few steps before she heard the ululation again, dark with all the misery of the world.
    Camilla could have no more refused to succor the maker of that cry than she could melt a path through the snow. She could only struggle on, her direction now determined by the howling cry.
    Ahead, she spied the dim grayish outline of a building. She started toward it. At once, a dog began to bark, dry, weary barks that yet held something of joy in its tone. Camilla permitted herself to whistle, since there was no one to hear her.
    She half tripped over a wooden bowl and, putting her hand out to balance herself, touched fur. A black and white dog, wet and shivering, stood next to a post sunk into the ground. The rope that tethered him was wound many times around the post until he could only move a few inches in any direction. She looked into bright brown eyes and thought, This is a nice dog. Why would anyone leave a dog tied out in a snowstorm?
    Pulling off her gloves, she let him sniff her fingers. Despite his situation, he licked her hand, perhaps as much to taste the melted snow as to show his harmlessness. “There now,” she said. “Let me just...”
    She found the knot under his jaw. The thin rope tied around his collar was wet and seemed to have fused into a solid mass. She broke a nail and was about ready to use her teeth when a loop loosened at last. Once she’d broken the back of it, the rest came undone quite easily.
    “You’re free,” she exclaimed.
    The dog took a few halting steps, stopping at the same distance from the post he must have learned by half strangling himself every time he tried to go farther. Camilla backed up and clapped her hands, calling the dog to her. “Come on, come on, sirrah!”
    The moment the dog realized he was no longer tied, he bounded away over the crust of snow, running toward the house. “You must be thirsty,” Camilla said, picking up the wooden bowl and her gloves. She had to brush the snow away to find them. “I’ll find you some water.”
    He stood outside the door, pawing restlessly at the smooth brown varnish and whining. “Stop that,” she said. “You’ll scratch it.”
    The dog danced backward, whined again, and charged at the door, leaping up to claw at the knob.
    Ordinarily, Camilla would have no more walked uninvited into a stranger’s house than she would have spoken to a strange man in a coach. But the freezing weather, the dog’s imploring eyes, and her own increasingly miserable condition would have to explain her being so bold. Even so, she hesitated until, the wind having died for the moment, she heard a faint human cry for help.
     

Chapter Two
     
    The cottage had been built in a typical fashion, a series of small whitewashed rooms telescoping out from each other. She peered into the largest of them, an impeccably clean and tidy square room with a sloping chimney-breast. The mantel was crowded with mementos, bracketed by a pair of Staffordshire lovers, she in pink panniers, he waving a tricorne hat. Along one wall was a row of square windows, like the rear galley of a ship. All the curtains