White Magic Christmas

Chapter 16: December 10

Ivy let worries about Gavin slip from her mind as she fell into a new routine. She helped out at the inn in the mornings then spent the afternoons baking with Brynn or going out and about the town, taking photos of buildings, people, and other scenes that caught her eye. She did some gift shopping for her family. She wondered if she'd be home in time to deliver them herself, but didn't worry about it the way she had at the beginning.

She thought about Gavin and about Shep, how completely different they were. Her mind still shied away from figuring out what she wanted to do about Gavin, but she also couldn't quite figure out what to do about Shep. He enjoyed her company, he'd said. What did he mean by that? What did she want him to mean?

On Thursday morning, which dawned sunny and pleasant, evoking disappointed grumblings at the breakfast table, she decided to stop acting like a teenager. He'd offered to let her look for the pharmacopoeias, a holy grail of her field, and she was avoiding him because she felt confused about a schoolchild's crush he might have on her? Time to pull her pants up, as her mother would have said.

She walked up the hill after lunch and found Shep sitting in the sun on the front steps with Tink, eating a sandwich from Ned's deli.

"Better view and less complaining up here," he said in reply to the question she hadn't yet asked.

"I know the sun is nice, but it's still a little cold out here, right? Objectively?"

"I'm a bit better acclimated than you are, but I don't suppose I'll stay out here for long."

"What do you do with Tink when it gets really cold?" she asked, sitting beside him. The cold from the stone step immediately started to seep through to her legs. She added a little More thickness to her leggings. Again. They were going to end up looking more like snow pants than tights, if this kept up.

"I have to leave her at my friend's house," Shep said. "Go check on her halfway through the day. We're both happier if you can keep me company up here, aren't we friend? Even if you can't come inside." He gave her an affectionate neck scratch, and she drooled happily on his knee. "But she can take a lot of cold, can't you buddy? You come from far colder climes than these."

Ivy was about to ask about the mysterious friend when Shep brushed the crumbs off his pants and stood up. "Come on, I found something I want to show you."

They walked through the house, past the kitchen, and down a narrow hallway Ivy had not noticed on the visit with Brynn. The hallway let out into a small, dark room with a low ceiling and a large quantity of bulky, dusty stuff. Ivy's eyes widened immediately.

"A still room!" she exclaimed.

"Still, like moonshine still?" Shep asked, eying the metal cannisters and stacks of what looked like dusty lab equipment.

Ivy laughed. "Wealthy families could usually afford a slightly better brew. Wine, if grapes grew nearby, or more likely in this area, beer."

"I just saw the herbs hanging and thought that might interest you," Shep said.

Desiccated plants hung from nails in the wall above the one tiny window and along each of the beams in the low ceiling. Ivy let her fingers brush the hanging plants with a feather touch. They were brown, shriveled, and so dusty she had no way to tell at a glance what they had once been.

"What's your responsibility toward preserving the history of this place?" she asked, turning to Shep.

He lifted his hands. "I'm contracted to safely remove the mosaics, that's it. No one said anything about context or the rest of the stuff in here, beyond the estate's interest in anything left that might be valuable."