The McCharles House, 335 S. C St., Tustin (714) 731-4063

First I tell the story of the drag queen who came to my yard sale and bought my wife’s dress shoes. (The image of this hairy man in a blond wig and pink tutu teetering down the street in a pair of red heels that Jan had once worn to her sister’s wedding is more than Rosita can stand; she hides her face in her linen napkin). Then Rose tells us about marrying an Englishman in Spain five years ago, and Rosita--Rose’s mother--reminisces about Madrid, where she was born and lived during those perilous times after the Spanish Civil War.

“Mother was a spy,” Rose says delightedly.

I raise my eyebrows, interested. Rosita sips her tea, frowns. “No, not a spy,” she says in her lovely Castilian accent. “I carried some papers, that’s all.” And then she tells us the story of being 13 and leaving mysterious packages on trains or in front of the Prado, where men she didn’t know would cautiously retrieve them and hurriedly walk away.

“And you never knew what was in these packages?” I ask her.

“No,” she says. “They did not tell me, and I did not want to know.”

Rosita did this until her mother and father found out, after a close encounter with the Guardia Civil in which she was almost apprehended.

“My father said, ‘You can’t imagine the risk you are taking, Rosita. Not just for you but for the whole family.’ He was right. I was young and naive. That was many years ago.”

I am having tea with the two Roses at the McCharles House, a tearoom and emporium in Old Town Tustin. Built in 1865, this green Victorian house, which was converted in 1985 into a shop and restaurant by another mother-daughter team, Vivian and Audrey Heredia, naturally entices the three of us to be loquacious.

We are upstairs in a small room decorated with fragrant eucalyptus wreaths, bouquets of dried lavender and a slender Christmas tree adorned with crab apples, garlands of dried pods and leaves. I imagine this was once a child’s bedroom and where our table now stands, laden with finger sandwiches and sweets, there was a bed where a little boy or girl waited impatiently for a visit from Santa, wondering what he or she was going to find after creeping down the staircase early Christmas morning.

How many children from how many families played jacks or drew pictures with friends on a cool December afternoon like this one while telling and hearing secrets and stories? Perhaps those stories have seeped into the well-worn wooden floorboards that creak whenever you shift your chair or lie hidden behind the terra rosa fleur-de-lis wallpaper. Perhaps it’s the house itself that evokes these stories we tell.

Or perhaps it’s just the ceremony of afternoon tea, the slow pace at which we enjoy tea cakes, bird’s nest cookies and still-warm scones spread with raspberry jam and clotted cream. We nibble on spicy cake, pour tea through a strainer, tell another story.

“I fell in love with my wife over a cup of tea,” I tell the two Roses. Back in college. We’d been good friends for well over a year when one rainy day, between classes, we decided to stop in at an English tearoom filled with ladies playing bridge. It was a place neither one of us had been to, and everything changed while we were there.

“I don’t know what it was,” I tell them, “but suddenly I saw Jan in a completely different way. Suddenly I wanted more than just a platonic friendship.”

“What did you do?” Rosita asks. “What did you say?”

“I told her my feelings for her had changed. I told her that I thought I was falling in love with her.”

“And what did she do?”

I laugh, remembering. “She was upset. She didn’t know what to say. So I told her not to say anything. To just think about it for a while and give me a call when she had sorted out her feelings.”

“And?” Rosita says.

I shrug, pour us another cup of tea, offer up a plate of pecan brownies. “She called me about three days later and asked if I wanted to go to a dinner party with her. I was extremely nervous. So I asked her how we would be going--as just friends or as something else. ‘As something else,’ she said. So we went. And we agreed that we would have a couple of glasses of wine rather quickly and give each other a kiss and see what that was like, and we did and it was wonderful, and neither of us could wait for the dinner party to end so we could go back to my apartment. And that’s how it all started. Over a pot of tea on a rainy December day.”

Rosita sighs. “That’s a Christmas story,” she says. “Like that Jimmy Stewart movie, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ ”

I smile at her. “Who would like more tea?” I ask. They shake their head.

“I really should get going,” Rose says, looking at her watch. “It’s almost three and I have to drive to L.A.”

Regretfully we get up, gather our things, and slowly make our way down the steep stairs, leaving our stories behind to float about in the empty room, mingling with so many others.

* Holiday hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sunday afternoon tea Sunday, Dec. 12 and 19.

David Lansing’s column is published on Fridays in Orange County Calendar. His e-mail address is occalendar@latimes.com.