Page 26 of How the Duke Saved Christmas

“Oh yes!” Margaret seconded. “Lady Clara must come with us!”

“It’ll be fun,” Benjamin asserted, with an agreeing nod from Aaron.

Clara’s chest constricted so hard that the pang of it pulsed down to her toes. She couldn’t go, no matter how much they wanted her to. They’d forgotten about her leg.

She lowered her head and turned her attention to reaching for the unwanted book at her feet. She couldn’t bear for them to see the grief that surely darkened her face.

She should have been grateful, she supposed, that they no longer saw her injured leg when they looked at her, that they forget how different she was from everyone else they knew. But it was misery that washed over her instead.

Anyone else would have been able to walk into the woods with them. Anyone else would have been able to hold their hands as they walked the paths and sang carols, help with the saw, and assist in plucking bunches of holly berries on higher branches and untwining ivy that was just out of their reach.

Clara couldn’t do any of that. She couldn’t even walk from her room without help. How was she supposed to walk into a forest and bring back a pine tree?

Summoning more resolve than she knew she possessed, she forced a smile and looked up at their excited faces. “I can’t go with you into the woods.” She felt her bottom lip wobble, so she broadened her smile even more to hide it. “I’ll stay here, and you can tell me all about it when you return.” But tightening her smile didn’t ease the hot blurring in her eyes. “We’ll ask Mrs. Hansen to make up pots of hot chocolate and plates of gingerbread, and we’ll have a grand time in the conservatory as we place all the greenery. How does that sound?”

All four round faces fell in disappointment. So did Michael’s.

“You’re not coming with us?” Susannah stuck out her bottom lip, but unlike Clara, she did nothing to hide the quiver in hers.

“I’m afraid I can’t,” she whispered.

Their excitement instantly deflated, along with four sets of slender shoulders. Their big eyes turned to Michael, as if they could will him into finding a way for Clara to come with them. But she could have warned them that even their Uncle Michael, as wonderful as he was, would never be able to make her walk again.

He lowered Susannah to the floor, but his eyes never left Clara. “Oh, I think we can find a way for Lady Clara to join us.”

As the children all cheered and bounced around him, her heart broke. “I can’t walk,” she reminded him in a whisper.

“Then it’s a good thing you won’t have to.”

When he winked at her, she inhaled sharply in surprise.

“Come on, everyone.” He herded the children from the room. “Go upstairs and put on your coats, boots, and mittens. All your warmest clothes.” When they all rushed past him into the hall and raced for the stairs, he looked back at her on the bed. “You, too, Clara. Mrs. Bailey!”

The woman had been waiting outside in the hall for Michael and the children to depart, having just returned from a morning of mending hems that had suspiciously frayed.

She cast a glance inside the room at Clara as she curtsied. “Your Grace?”

“Fetch Lady Clara’s warmest coat, fur muff, gloves—all the trimmings.”

The woman stared at him as if he’d just gone mad.

So did Clara. She asked warily as Mrs. Bailey slid past him and rushed to the armoire to find her outerwear, “What scheme are you planning?”

“No scheme. Just fieldwork.” As he slipped out the door, he grinned back at her. “We’re going to cut down a tree!”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Michael cast an eye skyward toward the top of the tree where Margaret was pointing. “This tree? I’ll have to cut more than the tree trunk.” He shook his head and muttered, “I’ll have to cut a hole in the ceiling to make it fit.”

“There’s plenty of room in the stair hall,” Margaret reminded him not-so-helpfully. “We could put it by the banister and decorate it from the stairs.”

“We are not using the stairs to decorate a tree,” he said resolutely. A line had to be drawn somewhere between decorations and potentially hurting themselves. Apparently, that line was the second floor landing. “Let’s find a smaller one, shall we?”

Disappointed groans rose from the children, and a dismayed expression crossed Clara’s brow as she sat on the sledge bench.

“We can still have a good-sized tree,” he conceded. When Margaret began to gesture at the tree again, he added, “But not one that tall. It has to fit it into the conservatory where we’re having the party, remember?”

Susannah looked up from where she was playing in the snow beside the lane with her doll. “With all the bows?”