for waltzing didn’t mean he couldn’t trudge through snow in them, too.
He was an explorer! An adventurer! He would find something to do if it killed him.
The footman returned. “Your overclothes, Mr. MacLean.”
“Thank you, Horace.”
Jonathan shrugged into his thick coat, tugged on his gloves, pulled on his hat, wrapped his woolen muffler about his neck three times. There. He was ready for anything.
He slipped an extra vail for their trouble to both footmen as well as Mr. Oswald, the butler, then set out into the frigid weather.
Winter didn’t frighten him. He was born in Scotland, where winters were no balmier than in England. The best antidote to the cold was something warm—like pies, for example. This was the perfect opportunity to see if the bakery he’d visited the prior evening was open. They might be baking delectable bannocks and cakes regardless of a little snow.
It had indeed fallen to ankle-length, but the villagers had not been idle. The pavement had been cleared on both sides of the road, leaving an unobstructed walking path between the castle and most of the village. The snow on the road was packed down in long stretches on both sides, likely in part due to the horse-drawn sleighs carting villagers and tourists who preferred not to walk in the snow.
Both efforts appeared to cease at the entrance to the horse farm. There was nothing after that but endless miles of hills and snow and evergreens. The road out of town already looked dangerous and impassible. Horace and Morris were right.
Jonathan pulled down the brim of his hat to deflect the flurries of snowflakes caught in the wind, and headed into the bakery.
The smell of hot fresh bread nearly lifted him off his feet.
“Ho there,” he called out jovially.
“Ho there,” Mr. Bauer, the baker, called back. “Another cinnamon biscuit?”
Jonathan was so startled, he almost toppled out of his kid leather gloves and shiny fashionable boots.
Although he introduced himself to everyone, there was little reason for others to remember him. Jonathan never returned to the same town twice, thereby skipping right past any anxiety about whether he was half as memorable as he tried to be.
“Two cinnamon biscuits,” he replied, then changed his mind. “Two of every biscuit.”
Mr. Bauer’s eyes twinkled. “Are you certain you don’t want three of each?”
“I’d take all the biscuits,” Jonathan admitted, “but then what would everyone else eat?”
The baker pointed at his great oven. “Come back in a quarter hour and find out.”
“Perhaps I will come back,” Jonathan said, surprising himself more than the baker. Being recognized and remembered was just as nice as eating warm, steaming bannocks. He placed a pile of coins on the counter. Enough to cover all the biscuits, just in case the baker had been serious about selling them to Jonathan.
He moved aside as a family burst through the door, exchanging familiar greetings and updates on this sister or that dairy cow with the baker.
Each word struck like lightning through Jonathan’s chest. It was not so much envy as a bone-deep longing, a white-hot yearning to be this familiar to someone else. To be known.
He did not want Cressmouth in specific—anywhere but here!—but part of him had always been searching for a place to belong.
“Now, where did that spatula go?” The baker’s fat, flour-coated fingers tapped an empty peg on the wall. “It should be up here in its little home...”
Jonathan’s chest felt hollow. Home was a place that was incomplete without you, where someone would notice when you left, would wish you were still there so that home would feel complete for them, too.
But no one had ever looked for him with a quarter of the intensity as the baker searching for his missing spatula—or half as much delight when they stumbled across him.
“There it is!” Mr. Bauer boomed, depositing two fresh pies into the outstretched mittens of two rosy-cheeked bairns before placing the spatula back on its peg with a comforting little pat. “There you go, back where you belong, next to your brothers.”
The children’s mother turned to Jonathan with a smile. “Good morning. Are you here to celebrate Christmas, or here to stay?”
Neither.
Why would he live in a place people left? He already knew the pain of being used to someone and having them ripped away. Loving and losing his mother had been hard enough. The only way to escape such heartbreak was to avoid close ties at all costs.
“Passing through.” He accepted two large parcels of biscuits from the baker, and handed one