Zoë smiled back. “I’m beginning to see why Jeanne sent us up here together. I guess she knows that I have a few things I refuse to tell her and so do you.”
“More than a few,” Faith said, and her smile widened.
“Isn’t it odd that even though Amy is the one with the cute little life, she’s the one having the bad dreams?” Zoë said.
“Until tonight, I thought they were good dreams.”
“Me too,” Zoë said as she picked up her sketch pad off the couch.
“You don’t think there’s any truth to what Amy seems to believe, do you?” Faith asked.
“You mean about going back in time?” Zoë smiled. “Not in the least. None whatsoever.”
“That’s what I think too,” Faith said as she looked about the room. It was tidy, nothing left out. She turned out the light as she and Zoë went to their bedrooms.
The next morning, Amy was the only one who was chipper. She’d had a good night’s sleep after her bad dream, and she felt good. She’d even braided a few strands of her hair, intertwining it with a narrow ribbon her oldest son had painted for her. “I think we should go the first thing this morning,” she said as she flipped pancakes on the grill.
Zoë was huddled over her sketch pad and Faith was looking at her plate.
“Come on, you two,” Amy said as she put a tall stack of pancakes on the table. “This will be fun.”
“I don’t think so,” Faith said.
Amy sat down beside her. “What is it that you two are so afraid of? Being trapped in the eighteenth century? I told you that Primrose said we’d only be there for three weeks.”
Zoë looked at her. “I think I can speak for Faith when I say that, no, we’re not afraid of being trapped in the eighteenth century.” Her voice dripped sarcasm.
Amy ignored her tone. “Then why are you two so glum?”
“We’re afraid of what we’ll be told!” Faith said loudly. “You may have a wonderful past and a truly glorious future, but I don’t. If this woman is a psychic she might see things that I don’t want to see, she might tell me things I don’t want to know.”
“Primrose said her sister isn’t a psychic. She—” Amy broke off. They didn’t believe her and Amy wasn’t sure she did either. “Maybe she’ll see something good.”
Faith just snorted.
“Glass half empty,” Amy said under her breath. “What about you, Zoë? Are you afraid of the same things?”
“More or less,” she said. “I know that I did something truly bad in my past and I really don’t want to know what it is.”
“So you’re going to spend the rest of your life hiding, running from one house to another, and never getting to know anyone?” Amy asked.
“That sounds good to me,” Zoë said cheerfully.
“If I could paint, that’s what I’d do,” Faith said. “Escape. Get as far away from my mother-in-law as I can. Did I tell you that when I’m home she calls me three times a day?”
“Even after you put her in the hospital?” Zoë asked, then bit her tongue for having given that information away.
“I don’t want to know how you found that out, but yes, even after I beat her up, she still calls me. I’ve changed my number so many times that I can’t count them, but she pays people and Web sites to find it. Wherever I go, she finds me. She keeps three private detectives on retainers.”
“What does she say when she calls?” Amy asked softly.
“She cries and wants me to talk to her about Eddie. He was her entire life. She had no friends, no relatives who she liked. She just had Eddie. And me.”
“That’s it,” Amy said, standing up. “The more I hear from you two, the more upset I become. And to think that I thought I had problems because I like to stay in my safe little world. Let’s go. You two have fifteen minutes, then we’re out of here.”
“Sometimes I think you actually believe that you’re going to…I can’t even say it out loud,” Zoë said.
Amy leaned toward her. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m going to make an effort. I’m not going to sit here and whine about my life.”
“But then, your life is wonderful, isn’t it?”
“True, it is, but I think that maybe my husband’s life isn’t so great and if there is anything I can do to fix it I’m going to do it.”
That made Faith and Zoë look at her in astonishment. “All this is about your hunk husband?” Zoë asked.
“Yes. At least I think it may be. I don’t really know what’s going on, but I want my baby to want to be born to us.”
Faith and Zoë were still blinking at her.
“Get dressed,” Amy said. “I’ll tell you about it on the way.”
“You’re sure about this?” the woman called Madame Zoya said. She was as round as her sister, Primrose, but there was no coziness about her. She was as stern and unbending as her sister was sweet.
“Yes,” Amy said firmly while the other two said nothing.
They were in a pretty sunroom of the Victorian house. When Amy had led them down Everlasting Street, Faith said that the street had not been there the day before. “I was right here. I went from that shop to that one.” She pointed to opposite sides of the street. “There was nothing in between them.”
“This town is magic,” Amy said.
“Or it needs a good city planner,” Zoë said, looking at the forest around them.
When they stood on the little porch and rang the bell, Amy said, “I hope Primrose’s sister opens the door. I think that’s the signal that she’ll do it.”
Faith and Zoë stayed behind her, both of them torn between nervousness and feeling ridiculous.
A short, stout woman opened the door and her frown had nearly made Faith and Zoë back down the stairs. But Amy smiled broadly and stepped into the house.
“I received your card and they’re going with me,” she said brightly as she surreptitiously slipped three one-hundred-dollar bills into the woman’s hand. She hadn’t told Faith and Zoë about the money for fear that they’d say that was proof the woman was a huckster.
She looked at the two women behind Amy. “They don’t really want to do this. They don’t even have my card.”
“I know,” Amy said, “but they promised and they have to honor that, don’t they?”
The woman looked Amy up and down. “You usually get your way, don’t you?”
“I think that may be part of the problem,” Amy said.
There was a tiny bit of a smile from the woman, then she turned and they followed her to the back of the house, to a room with windows along one wall. She sat behind a big desk and looked at Amy as the three of them sat down.
“You know the rules?”
“I think I do,” Amy said, “but maybe you’d better explain them again.”
“You may go back in time to any three weeks that you want, and when you return, you may choose to remember or not remember.”
“Remember?” Zoë asked, not understanding.
The woman looked at Zoë with a hard glare that seemed to go through her. “You were in a serious car wreck, were you not?”
Zoë just nodded and in her mind she begged the woman not to say more.
She didn’t. “If you go back and manage to prevent the car accident, you may choose to remember that it happened or not. Your choice.” She looked at all three women. “I must warn you that if you change the past, you will change the future, there is no question of that. If you choose a different…” Hesitating, she looked at Faith. “If you choose a different man back in, say, 1992, when you return here, you will have lived a new life.”
“So we wouldn’t really change just three weeks,” Faith said, meeting the woman’s eyes.
“No. It will be your entire life that you’ll change. You’ll make the decision during your three weeks in the past, but I can’t control what happens in your new life.”
“I’d like to do something that wouldn’t make me end up in mandatory ther
apy,” Faith said.
Zoë gave her a look that spoke of betrayal, that Faith was beginning to believe this absurd idea. “If we don’t go to therapy, we won’t be here visiting in Jeanne’s summerhouse.”
“That won’t change,” Madame Zoya said. “You will return here to now. You may each have lived different lives, but you’ll still end up here in this room.”
The penetrating eyes of the woman made Zoë slump down in her chair and she almost said, “Yes, ma’am.”
Madame Zoya looked from one to the other of them. “Have I made myself understood?”
The three of them nodded.
“Did your sister tell you what I want to do?” Amy asked. “I don’t want to go back into my own time. I want to go back to earlier. Your sister had never heard of that being done before.”
“My sister doesn’t know all that I do,” the woman said dismissively. “Now, if you will join hands.”
“I have a question,” Faith said.
“And what is it?”
“Is this Amy’s one time to go back and change things, or does it count as ours too?”
“This is hers,” the woman said. “Now, will you join hands, and it would be better if you close your eyes.”
“I think I’ll keep mine open,” Zoë said, and it was obvious that she wanted to see what the woman was up to. She had a little smile on her face that said she knew it was all just a joke and nothing was going to happen.
“Suit yourself,” the woman said.
They reached across the chairs, took their hands, and Faith and Amy closed their eyes. There was a bright flash, then for a moment the three women couldn’t get their breaths.
In the next moment they were sitting in darkness. “What’s going on?” Zoë asked, blinking rapidly. Even if it hadn’t been so dark, she wouldn’t have been able to see anything as the bright light had nearly blinded her.
“Sssssh,” Amy said. “Listen. I think I hear sheep.”
“My foot is wet,” Faith said.
“I think I know where we are,” Amy whispered. “In fact, I think I know a lot of things that I didn’t know ten minutes ago.”
Gradually, the darkness receded and they saw that they were sitting on straw in a horse stall in a barn. A man wearing a dirty white jacket that reached to below his waist, tight trousers, and some sort of gaiters to his knees was staring down at them. His weathered face was nearly covered by a floppy leather hat, and he was holding an old-fashioned pitchfork. “What ye be doin’ in there, Miss Amy?” the man said. “And who be your friends?”
Amy grinned. “This is Faith and this is Zoë. They’ve come from America to help me.”
“Ah, more of your friends,” he said, chuckling at some inner joke. “I brought you three bushels of beans. Think that will be enough?”
“Maybe,” Amy said as she stood up, and walked to the far side of the barn with the man.
Faith and Zoë didn’t move. They sat on the straw and looked at each other. They were wearing long cotton dresses that were high-waisted and low in the front.
Faith, with her ample breasts, was nearly spilling out over the top. She put her hand to her hair and found that it was again pulled back into a bun. She couldn’t help feeling deflated. She’d like having the long, loose hair of her younger days.
“Your hair’s still red if that’s what you were wondering,” Zoë said as she stood up, then tried to take a deep breath. “I think there’s a corset under this thing.”
Faith blinked at Zoë. “You’re pretty.” Zoë’s face was free of makeup and her beautiful skin was rosy with youth.
“Yeah, well…” Zoë said, turning pink with a blush. She lifted the long dress to see her little leather slippers. “So where do you think our clothes are?”
Faith shrugged as she stood up. “I don’t know, but Amy still has her ribbon.”
Zoë looked at Amy, chatting with the man as though she’d known him all her life, and in her hair was the little braid and ribbon she’d had this morning.
Amy came back to them, the man behind her. He looked the two women up and down.
“He won’t like this,” he said, looking at the two women. “Ye know what he said about the last lot you took on.”
“Yes, Jonathan,” Amy said tiredly, “I know quite well what he’ll say, but these women are different.” When the man started to say something else, she said, “Don’t worry, I’ll make him something great for dinner and he’ll survive. Go on, now, and see if Helen needs anything more in the kitchen. And get me some tarragon from the garden.”
She waited until he’d left the barn, then she turned to the women.
“Look, I know you two have a thousand questions, but I don’t have the answers, at least not yet anyway. I can’t explain it, but I know this place, and I know that the dreams I had were true. It’s 1797, and he bought me from a tavern from a man posing as my father.
“Since then I’ve…” Amy waved her hand. “I’ve more or less managed this place.” She glanced toward the barn door. “They need me inside. If I don’t oversee the kitchen they’ll…I don’t know what they’ll do. Can you two look around for a while and I’ll see you later?”
Zoë and Faith looked at her for a moment. “Sure,” Faith said. “We’ll be fine. Won’t we, Zoë?”
It took Amy less than a second before she was running out the door.
Zoë looked at Faith. “Look at this place! Look at us! Am I asleep or dead? Or have I just fallen into a Jane Austen novel?”
“Don’t ask me,” she managed to say. “This is Amy’s dream, not mine.” She stepped around a pile of horse manure and left the barn, Zoë close on her heels.
Part Two
Twelve
Zoë followed Amy into the house, but Faith didn’t go. She didn’t know if she’d just been transported into the past or if she was on the set of a BBC production, but she didn’t care. What she wanted to do was look at everything, and she wanted to do it by herself, with no one bothering her.
She could tell that she was at the back of a large house. It looked to be only a few years old, and it was in a style that Faith had always loved: Georgian. Everything was symmetrical. The windows were huge and she knew the rooms inside would be large and beautifully proportioned.
The big area behind the house was graveled and there was an old wagon to one side. There were two men dressed like the man in the barn, and a woman wearing a long brown dress, a cloth bonnet on her head. They were all stealing curious looks at Faith, but none of them said anything.
She nodded to them, then put her hands behind her back, turned her face to the sun and kept walking. In the years that she’d stayed at home with Eddie, while he was wasting away, Faith had spent a lot of time reading. The books about the eighteenth century were always her favorite.
If by some chance she really was back in time, she knew what she most wanted to see. She took a left down a well-trod gravel road and there it was, that paragon of industry and efficiency: the kitchen garden. As soon as she stepped through the wide gate set in the tall, brick walls, she looked about her in wonder. It was at least four acres, and every inch of the space was being used in providing what was needed to feed the people of the main house and all the many employees.
There was a walkway wide enough for a horse-drawn wagon through the center of the garden and Faith strolled down it slowly, looking at everything.
She’d read that in the twentieth century many of the old varieties had been lost. If it couldn’t be put in a truck and shipped, nobody wanted to grow it. The fruits and vegetables that were too soft, too tender, or rotted too quickly, were discarded as “useless.” Flavor was not considered in choosing what would be offered for sale in the modern grocery store. But in a time when people ate what they could grow, enormous variety was encouraged—and flavor was the deciding factor.
Smiling, she walked on. She counted ten men working in the garden, but there were more in the seven greenhouses and six potting sheds. She stopped to l
ook into one building at the magnificent compost pile. It was truly a work of art. Layers of household waste, grass cuttings, leaves, and manure were piled up and tended to as though they were beds of gold—which they almost were.
She looked up at the top of the brick walls and saw that there were troughs along the top. Her eyes followed the curved spaces down and saw that every bit of rainwater was caught and diverted into covered barrels.
Green, she thought. The twenty-first century made much ado about being “green” but here it was on a scale and intensity that modern people could only dream of.
She kept walking. There was an enormous bed of flowers and she knew it was to be used for cut flowers for the house. She paced it off and saw that the bed was nearly two hundred feet long. It would supply enough flowers for a palace, she thought. The heavenly smell of them almost made her dizzy.
Beyond the flowers were the fruits. She had never dreamed there could be this much variety as she looked at ripening raspberries, red, white, and black currants, gooseberries and strawberries. Some of the beds were edged with plants that she knew were wild strawberries. The plants made no runners and the tiny berries melted on your tongue.
At the end of the garden, she halted and her eyes opened in wonder. Before her was the herb garden and it was magnificent. It was divided into three sections, with one having a six-foot-high fence around it and a lock on the gate. She could guess what it contained.
When she’d been nursing Eddie she’d become interested in herbology. She read a lot and had even persuaded her mother-in-law to allow her to put in an herb garden. “If you hide the hideous thing,” the woman said as though Faith had asked to plant tobacco in front of the house.
The herb garden was the thing she’d most enjoyed in her married life because she and Eddie had done it together. At first it had only been Faith’s interest, but Eddie, in bed by then and horribly bored, had wanted to work with her. They’d ordered a lot of books, then they’d read and talked and planned a design for the garden. Faith knew some rudimentary drafting techniques and she’d used them as she drew what she and Eddie came up with. The garden was to be beautiful as well as useful.