In the end, they combined two gardens from France and one from England into one design. When they finally had what they wanted, they’d celebrated with sparkling apple juice in Waterford crystal glasses.
As soon as the weather warmed up, she helped Eddie into a deck chair, nearly drowned him in blankets, and he directed her as she used string and spikes to lay out the garden so they could see how it would look.
Eddie had been near her while she’d argued with the brick mason. “You want all them little paths just so you can plant what you can buy in jars at the grocery store?” he’d asked. “Yes,” Faith and Eddie said in unison. The man shrugged. “It’s your nickel.”
It had taken two weeks to level off the quarter acre perfectly flat, then restring the walkways. The men came and put in the bricks in the intricate design that Faith and Eddie had made. A few months after it was done, by accident, Faith overheard the brick mason bragging about the garden he’d put in. His hint was that he had designed it. She’d run home to tell the story to Eddie and they’d laughed so hard that he’d gone into spasms and the doctor’d had to be called.
Besides designing, during the winter, she and Eddie had spent long hours poring over herb catalogs and Internet sites as they planned what to plant.
Everything was timed perfectly and the huge boxes of moss-wrapped plants arrived just days before the brick was finished. Eddie sat in his deck chair with the plans on his lap as he told Faith where they were to be set.
The garden had flourished and she and Eddie had had six years with it before he died. They’d added and subtracted plants every spring, and during the winter they read about uses for the herbs. Since it was difficult for Eddie to get up and down stairs, against his mother’s many protests, he backed Faith in converting one of the upstairs bathrooms into a sort of laboratory. He read recipes aloud while she made infusions and concoctions. They’d started with potpourris, but Eddie’s mother hated the smell of them, so they’d gone on to concoct potions meant to soothe nerves and calm nervous stomachs. They’d laughed together at the hideous tastes they created and celebrated when they made something delicious. They made some great shampoos, and Faith’s favorite, bath salts.
During all this planning, planting, tasting, and trying, Faith’s mother-in-law refused to participate in any way. Even Eddie’s attempts to draw her in had failed. When Faith was outside, she’d often seen the woman watching them from the upstairs window. Faith had waved, but the woman always turned away.
The day after Eddie’s funeral, his mother had had a backhoe destroy the herb garden.
Now, Faith looked at the big herb garden and she felt at home. Even without checking, she knew what the three gardens were. One contained herbs for cooking, and the second area was for medicine. When Eddie’s condition had worsened, Faith had delved deeper into finding out what herbs could do, and she’d tried some ancient remedies on him. They hadn’t cured him, but they had helped relieve his pain and make his last days easier.
Faith knew the third area was for the poisonous plants. She crossed the first two gardens and looked through the locked gate. She saw henbane, foxglove, wormwood, and Bad Henry. Most of the poisonous plants were unfamiliar to her as she’d not grown them or used them. She knew them only from reading.
She was at the end of the huge walled garden and she looked back to see a big patch of open ground that had been temporarily fenced and inside it were geese. She knew that they’d be kept inside the fence for most of the day to do the weeding, and they’d turn the weeds into fertilizer. The geese also provided meat and eggs; they were used to weed the garden, and nobody kept watch better than geese. If a stranger came onto the land, they let out a ruckus that was louder than any alarm system. On this place, in this time, everyone worked; everything had a purpose.
Reluctantly, she left the beautiful walled kitchen garden and kept walking. She saw the barn with its dairy cattle. Two women were carrying pails of fresh milk toward the house.
There was a new stone stable and the stone-paved courtyard was as well kept as any house. Workmen tipped their hats to her, but no one questioned her.
Faith started walking through what she knew was a gentleman’s parkland that was acres of what looked like an extraordinarily beautiful woodland. But Faith knew that this look of nature at its best had actually been designed by someone, perfectly laid out, and thoughtfully planted. There were huge rocks that she was willing to bet had been hauled in by a team of heavy horses. She could imagine Clydesdales, twenty of them harnessed together, and a man shouting as the giant horses hauled the boulder to where some human had decided it would look best.
She was musing on this thought, lost in it, and breathing deeply of air that had no car exhaust in it, and looking at a sky that had never seen an airplane, when she was almost run over by a horse. “Oh!” Faith cried as she put her arm up across her face and jumped back.
The horse, as surprised as Faith was, seemed to turn its head one way and its body the other, its front feet coming off the ground. The rider pulled hard on the reins to get the animal under control.
Faith, her hand still over her face, stepped farther back and tripped over the corner of one of the boulders she’d been admiring. At last the horse put its hooves on the ground and in the next second the rider slid off and ran toward Faith.
“Are you all right?” asked a small voice.
She moved her arm to look up at a pretty young woman, no more than sixteen, wearing a riding habit that was so tight it looked painted on. She had on a perky little hat that nearly obscured her right eye.
“I’m fine,” Faith said, smiling and standing up. “I was more startled than hurt.” When she stood she saw that the girl was shorter than she was, only about five feet. She was small and exquisitely beautiful.
“I think you must be one of Amy’s Americans. Your accent…I’ve never heard such a way of speaking except for Amy. Do you also have wondrous stories about your country?”
Faith smiled. The girl had a sweetness about her that made Faith like her instantly. “I’m sure I do. How do you know Amy so well?”
“She’s been here nearly a year. Did you not know that?”
“No,” Faith said slowly. “Are you…?” She didn’t know what to call an earl. “His sister?”
“Oh yes,” Beth said. “I’m Tristan’s sister, but as he says, I am young enough to be his daughter. Oh my!” she said when the horse, which had been standing still, suddenly turned and galloped away through the trees. “Someone must have filled his food bin.”
Faith laughed. “I was admiring your park.”
“Oh, it is lovely, isn’t it? Now that Sheba—that’s my mare—has run home I’m afraid we’ll have to walk back to the house. Do you mind?”
“No, I love it here.” They started walking back toward the house, Faith feeling much taller and bigger than the tiny young woman. “Everything looks so new.”
“It is. Did Amy not tell you about us?”
“Not much,” Faith said. Except that her brother is very soon to be murdered in his sleep, she thought. “I’d love to hear everything.”
“Amy does not tell us much about herself either,” Beth said, looking at Faith as though she hoped she would elaborate. When Faith said nothing, Beth went on. “My brother built all this for his wife, Jane.”
“I didn’t know he was married.”
Beth took a moment before answering. “She died less than a year after they were married.”
“I’m so sorry,” Faith said.
“My brother and she were deeply in love. They had been since they were children.”
“Like Amy,” Faith said under her breath.
“Yes,” Beth said enthusiastically. “We do know that about her. She’s told us about her husband, Stephen, and their two children.”
“Did she tell you what happened to him?” Faith asked, curious to know what lies Amy had concocted.
“That he’s waiting for her in America, but she can’t go bec
ause of the war they’re having there.”
“I thought this was 1797. Isn’t the American Revolutionary War over?”
Beth looked at Faith oddly. “Yes, but there is still great anger at us English,” she said. “You should ask Amy what her friend Thomas Jefferson writes to her.”
Faith had to cough to cover the choking sound she made at that lie. “Tell me more about your brother.”
“When our father died, Tristan was just twenty-one and what he wanted most in the world was to marry Jane. But he didn’t want to ask her to live in the house our family had lived in since…Well, my brother says we’d lived in it since the dawn of time but I think that’s an exaggeration. He spent four years building this estate.”
Dawn of time, Faith thought. That meant the house was at least medieval. “Where is this house?” she asked and tried to keep the excitement out of her voice.
“Back that way,” Beth said, turning toward the stables. “I can take you to see it if you’d like, but I warn you that it’s awful. Tristan keeps cows in it now.”
Faith had to take a few deep breaths. A house that old being used for a barn! Horrible!
“He did a beautiful job,” Faith said, getting herself back under control. “Who designed the park?”
“Mr. Brown. I cannot remember his first name, but then, he never used it.”
“Did he go by ‘Capability’?” Faith asked quietly.
“Yes! Do you know him?”
“I’ve heard of him,” Faith said, her voice hardly above a whisper. She was walking in a new garden designed by the master, Capability Brown. She reached out and touched the bark of an elm tree in reverence.
Beth was looking at her in curiosity, so Faith quit caressing the tree and tried to straighten her face. “Did your sister-in-law get to live here?”
“Only for the year after they were married,” Beth said. “She died in childbirth and the baby with her.”
“How long ago was that?” Faith asked.
“Nearly five years. My brother—” She looked into the distance for a while before she turned back to Faith. “He was not the same after Jane died. They planned everything together. They thought they’d have a long life together and many children and…” Beth sighed. “It wasn’t to be, I guess. We all thought Tristan was going to die after Jane did. My father’s brother came to look after us, but now he is too ill to do much.”
Faith remembered Amy telling about the gray-haired man who’d been so ill and that he’d been crying hard at Tristan’s death.
“But Amy has put some life back in my brother.”
“Ah,” Faith said, and thought, twenty-first-century morals meet wounded hero. Fireworks!
“No,” Beth said as she stopped walking and frowned at Faith. “It is not like that.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything,” Faith said, ashamed that what she was thinking had shown so clearly on her face.
“It’s all right,” Beth said as she started walking again. “Everyone who doesn’t live here and hears Amy and Tristan together thinks that she and my brother are…Well, you know what I mean. I’m not supposed to know, but I grew up on a farm, so how can I not?”
“How indeed?” Faith said, smiling. “So Amy and your brother aren’t…?”
“They are friends. Do you know what she does for him?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“She makes him angry. Furious. She has a way about her that enrages him to the point where he throws things across the room. He shouts and he sputters and he tells her he’s going to discharge her, but of course he never does.”
“What does she do that makes him so angry?”
Beth smiled. “Amy tells my brother how to do everything. From food to washing, to horses and gardens, even to what my brother reads, Amy tells him that there’s a better way to do it.”
“Why doesn’t he discharge her?”
“I like to think it’s because most of the time Amy is right, but I suspect that the true reason is that she makes his blood flow. Since she has been here, he has started to do things again. He has had some people to dinner, and he’s been to London twice because Amy refused to cook if he didn’t go and get her something she wanted. The best part is that life is coming back into this place. The estate was so beautiful when it was built, but for years Tristan hasn’t cared that it was falling into ruin.”
“There!” Beth said, pointing toward the big house her brother had built for his doomed bride. “See it through the trees? Isn’t it a pretty house?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a house more lovely. In fact, I think that in the twenty-first century people will still think that house is beautiful.”
Beth laughed. “The twenty-first century! How absurd. The world will end before then. There’s talk in London that the earth will end in just three more years when the century changes. But if it doesn’t, it will most certainly end before the years go to two thousand.” Laughing, she ran ahead toward the house.
Faith turned to look back at the parkland. Through the trees she could just see the walls of the kitchen garden. Had Capability Brown designed that too? She’d have to ask “him,” the sad young man Amy had saved by making him furious.
“Been there, done that,” Faith said aloud, laughing. A couple of times Amy had come close to putting her in a rage. But as Faith looked about her, she was certainly glad that Amy’s determination had won out this time. Faith thought that if she never left this place, she would be content.
Thirteen
As Zoë followed Amy into the house, they went down some stone stairs, then Amy seemed to vanish into thin air. Zoë felt frantic as she tried to find her, wandering from one stone room to another, and getting in the way of more oddly dressed men and women.
After about thirty minutes, she found a kitchen that was so busy it looked like a food processing plant—old and without electricity, but still it was a place that could deal with enormous quantities of food. There were half a dozen women in long dresses, their hair covered by white caps, rushing around everywhere. A huge, old, scarred table stood in the middle of the room and it was loaded with baskets full of vegetables, big bowls of berries, and dishes of cooked food.
In the middle of this was Amy and she was quietly, but firmly, telling everyone what to do and answering their many questions.
Zoë moved to stand beside her. “What are you doing?”
“Running this place,” Amy said. “It’s a twenty-four-hour restaurant. Thinner,” she said to a woman rolling out some dough on a marble slab. “It has to be thinner than that. Leave it that thick and it’ll break a person’s teeth.”
When Amy moved to another part of the room, Zoë went with her. “How do you know all this? You came here when we did. That means you’ve been here, what? Ten minutes?”
“I don’t understand it any more than you do,” Amy said, “but I think I’ve been here since he bought me from my father.”
When Zoë looked at her blankly, Amy said, “In my dream. Remember?”
“But wasn’t that just a few days ago?”
“In our time, yes, but I know I’ve been here for over a year. Put it in there!” she yelled at a young man with a lamb carcass over his shoulder. “So help me, Jimmy, if you drip blood over my clean floor I’ll make you clean it up!”
Amy looked back at Zoë. “I really can’t explain it, but I know this place as well as I know my own house.”
“What about the master?” Zoë asked, eyebrows arched.
Amy gave Zoë a look that made her stop smiling. “Wherever I live, I’m married to Stephen and I don’t take my vows lightly. Why don’t you go find something to do? I’m putting you and Faith in the yellow bedroom for tonight, and we can talk at supper. Until then, please find something to occupy yourself. I have masses of work to do.” With that, she ran after a young woman who was entering with a basketful of eggs.
Zoë stared at Amy’s back for a moment and thought of half a dozen scathing things to say
. If she didn’t want her and Faith to bother her while she worked, why the hell had Amy wanted them with her? It made no sense.
“Pardon, miss,” said a young man with another dripping carcass over his shoulder.
“Yuck,” Zoë said as she got out of his way. She had to move for a woman who was hurrying to the other side of the kitchen. Where was Faith? Zoë wondered. She must have run off as soon as they stepped out of the barn.
Zoë again moved out of the way of someone. Was she the only one who thought it was odd—not to mention impossible—to find herself back in time? Amy sure didn’t seem to think it was strange to one minute be in a world with computers and automobiles, and the next minute to be yelling at people carrying dead animals across their shoulders.
When Zoë had to move yet again, she found herself near a staircase and went up it. At the top was a small hallway with several built-in cabinets. She looked around, saw no one, and opened a cabinet door. It was full of serving pieces, trays, and big platters.
When she heard a noise, she quickly closed the door and moved back. She could hear voices but they seemed a long way off. She feared that if she saw anyone, she might be ordered off the place. If Amy was just the housekeeper, what authority did she have? She couldn’t order the owner to let her friends stay, could she?
Zoë walked quietly through the nearest doorway. She found herself in a dining room, a large area with a huge cherrywood table in the center. In the twenty-first century the table would be an antique, but here it looked brand-new. The chairs—all eighteen of them—were also new and the upholstery unworn.
Her artist’s eye saw the sheer beauty of the room. Along one wall were huge windows that let in the sunlight. The ceiling was decorated with great ovals of plasterwork, truly beautiful. The furniture along the walls was new and looked to be made by the same person who had made the dining table and chairs. There were porcelain ornaments on the two sideboards.