“How about some dessert?” Amy said. “I make this dessert called ‘floating island.’ It’s a bowl full of custard with toasted egg whites floating in it. Sometimes when my girls are beating egg whites by hand I’d give anything to have an electric mixer. Have you two missed anything like that?”
“We’re not like you,” Zoë said, her teeth clamped together. “We haven’t been here for fourteen months. What I want to know is what you’re doing besides fooling around with past lives. You haven’t hired any witches, have you?”
“You’re being ridiculous and I’m sorry I told you.”
“I’m not,” Faith said. “Look, you two, we only have one another and we need to stick together. We need to listen and learn and find out what we can to save Tristan’s life. I guess it would be too much to ask that someone sleep in his room.”
Zoë looked at Amy and started to say something.
“I paid a boy,” Amy said quickly, “to sleep outside his door, but Tristan made him go away. And he won’t let me sleep there either.”
Both Faith and Zoë nodded at her.
“Lock him in?” Zoë asked.
“That makes him furious,” Amy said.
“Move him to another bedroom?” Faith asked.
“He moves back,” Amy said.
“A dog?”
“He says they snore and keep him awake.”
“A guard at the bedroom window?”
“That makes him triple angry,” Amy said.
“Well,” Faith said, “it looks like you’ve tried quite a few things.”
“If either of you have any new ideas, let me know.”
“I’ll bet you won’t hesitate to try them,” Zoë said.
“No, I won’t,” Amy said firmly. “He’s my husband’s ancestor and I want to help him.”
“Your husband’s ancestor?” Zoë asked.
“I think so,” Amy answered. “Tristan is a lot like Stephen. All right, that’s it. I think we’re done examining my motives for today. Do you two have plans for tomorrow?”
“I’d like to look in on the uncle,” Faith said. “Is it William?”
Amy nodded. “I’ll have to get rid of his nurse. She’s like a bulldog standing over him.”
Faith looked at Amy. “A touch of orris root?”
“My thoughts exactly.” They smiled at each other.
“Oh great,” Zoë said. “Herb bonding. If it’s okay with you two, I think I’ll go to bed. We don’t have to sleep on a blanket on a stone floor, do we?”
“How about a feather bed? But you have to share it,” Amy said.
Zoë looked at Faith.
“Sorry I’m not Mr. Johns,” Faith said.
“Me, too,” Zoë said, and the three of them laughed.
“Did he really ask you to marry him?” Faith asked as they followed Amy up the stairs.
Zoë only smiled, then gave a big yawn. “Tomorrow we’re going to draw some of the people around this place. I wish I had a digital camera and fifty charged batteries. What I could take back to our time!”
“Who knows?” Amy said. “Maybe your drawings will survive the ages, and when we get back, they’ll be in some museum.”
“What I wonder is why Russell’s paintings aren’t in books.”
They had reached the top of the stairs and they looked at one another for a moment. It was likely, even probable, that Russell hadn’t lived long enough to make enough paintings, or that his work had been destroyed.
“I think you should make sure that his name does live,” Amy said, and Zoë smiled.
“Good idea. So where is this feather bed? I have to be up early to—”
“Go out with—” Amy looked at Faith and they said in unison, “Russell.”
“Grow up!” Zoë said, but she was smiling.
Sixteen
“Amy,” Tristan said softly as he bent over her. It was night and the only light was from the moon outside his bedroom window. They were in the hallway, just outside his door. Amy was curled on the floor, a blanket over her, a small pillow under her head.
“Come on,” he said gently. “Get up now.”
When Amy didn’t move, he picked her up in his arms. He took a step toward the stairs, as though he meant to carry her to her own room downstairs, but instead, he looked up and down the dark hall, then carried her into his room. He put her into his bed, where she snuggled down into the warm covers and kept sleeping.
But she didn’t stay asleep. Within seconds, she awoke with a start and sat up. She was fully dressed. “You should have left me there,” she said as she watched Tristan light a candle at the far end of the room.
“I cannot leave you out there in the hallway like a piece of baggage. I have told you over and over not to sleep there.”
“I know,” she said. “I shouldn’t but—”
“You had the dream again,” he said.
Amy nodded as she flung back the covers and got out of bed. “Come on, get back in here. You must be freezing.” He was wearing a long white nightshirt and his feet were bare.
“What about you?” he asked. “You were in the hall on the floor, with just a blanket over you. Do you know what woke me? Your shivering was making the door rattle.”
Amy smiled as she held the covers back. “Better that than that you never wake up.”
Tristan climbed back in the bed, then held out his hand to her in invitation.
“Please don’t ask me again,” she said, her voice low and near to tears.
“I hope that someday I will break you down and you’ll come to me.”
“I have—”
“Do not say it again!” he said loudly. “I know! You have a husband. You have two children. I know everything there is to know about them. I could pick your children out of a room full of brats.”
She was standing at the side of the bed, smiling at him. “I can’t,” she said. “I really can’t. It wouldn’t be fair to Stephen. He wouldn’t do this to me.”
“You are mad if you think that a man would spend over a year with another woman and not bed her.”
“Maybe,” she said, “but I have to live with myself.” She glanced out the window. “I think it’s safe to leave you now.”
Tristan threw back his head for a moment in despair. “Safe! What do I care about safe? I loved a woman who was taken from me, and now you…”
“Tristan,” she whispered, “you don’t love me.”
“Do you think not?”
Amy could feel tears growing in her eyes. How could she love two men? She didn’t know, but she did. And one of them was here with her now. He wanted her, had been begging her to join him in bed for months now, but she didn’t because she was in love with—and being faithful to—a man who hadn’t been born yet.
“I cannot,” she said. “Please don’t ask me.”
“Ask you what?” he said. “Ask you to marry me and be my wife? Is that what I should not ask you? This man you say you love, where is he? Why is he not here with you?” He put up his hand when she started to speak. “I know. You say he is in your America. But I do not think he is. Sometimes I think he does not exist.”
The truth of what he was saying showed on her face. “I can’t marry you,” she repeated for the hundredth time. “We’ve talked about this. I’m the kitchen help and you’re an earl. We would have no friends, no society. You would give away everything if you were to marry me.”
“What do I care for society?” he said. “I have hardly left this place for years. I need only Beth and my uncle. But Beth will leave me soon for some man who will not be worth her, as no man is, and God will soon take my uncle.” He looked at her with great, pleading eyes. “I need you, Amy. You are the only woman who has made me feel life again. I have nothing else but you.”
Amy felt herself being drawn to him. She tried to think of Stephen and the boys. She tried to remember happiness with them, but the months of this life with Tristan kept shoving the modern memories aside.
S
he hadn’t told Faith and Zoë the truth about her and Tristan because she didn’t want them to know how close she’d become to him. This morning, when Amy had opened her eyes and found herself in the barn, she knew that Faith and Zoë were confused, even dazed, but Amy wasn’t. It was as though she’d arrived home after months away. She knew the man standing in front of them (second assistant gardener) and she knew the way to the house. The way to Tristan, is what she really thought.
When she’d run away from them, she hadn’t given so much as a thought to what Faith and Zoë must be feeling. All Amy wanted to do was to see Tristan.
He had been sitting in the library, a book open before him. For a moment she just looked at him, this man she had only seen in a pictures, but, somehow, knew as well as she knew herself.
“I’m back,” she said as she closed the library door behind her.
“I wasn’t aware you’d been away,” he said haughtily, and she knew what was wrong with him. Last night she had yet again turned down his marriage proposal.
After he’d paid her father for her, he’d dumped Amy at his house, the one he’d built for his deceased wife, and had not given her another thought. But after a day of looking about the place, she’d seen it as something that was in dire need of management. Tristan should have taken care of the estate, but he stayed in the library all day or went out riding. Other than that, he did little else. He ate sparsely and didn’t seem to notice what was put before him. Whenever anyone from the estate was around him, they spoke in whispers. No one asked him questions. The employees just did the bare minimum of work they had to, then loafed for the rest of the day.
It had taken Amy three days to fully understand what was going on. Tristan’s grief was hanging over the estate like a great dark tent. The workers were inside it with him and they couldn’t get out. His young sister walked on tiptoe. His uncle lay in bed, slowly dying. The gardens that had once been so beautiful were overgrown and tangled.
Amy wanted to repair the damage, but she knew that she could do nothing without the master’s backing.
On the fourth day, she went into the library and nearly attacked Tristan. “This place is horrible,” she said to him.
“I beg your pardon.” As an earl no one spoke to him in that tone, certainly not a woman wearing the same raggedy clothes she’d worn at her father’s pub.
“I want to put it right,” she said. “I want your permission to put this place back together, to get all your lazy servants off their tails, and do some work. Will you back me?”
Tristan just stared at her. What did he care what she did? “Go. Do what you will,” he said, then lifted his hand in dismissal.
It had taken Amy nearly a week to make the people on the estate know that she meant business, but her energy, her sharp tongue, and Tristan’s support—which consisted of a mumbled, “Do what she says” now and then—all combined to begin to put life in the place.
When Amy had the estate somewhat in order, she took on Beth. She was a beautiful young woman who spent her days with the horses and the stable lads. She wore whatever clothes would let her ride with ease, and her long hair hung down her back and was usually filled with twigs and briars.
Amy confronted Tristan and told him she wanted to send Beth to London for some lessons on how to be a lady. That had started their first serious fight. They didn’t know it, but at the sound of the raised voices, the outside workers had come running and squatted under the windows of the library, trying their best to hear every word.
When Tristan said he would not let Beth go, Amy accused him of caring only about himself and no one else. She called him selfish and self-centered. Tristan shouted at her that she was to get out, to leave his home and never come back. Amy hadn’t moved. “You need me and Beth needs me. Are you going to let her go or not?”
“Not!” Tristan shouted.
“Then I’m going to get your father’s sister to come here!” Amy shouted back.
At that, Tristan had turned pale and sat back down on his chair. “You do not know the woman. She is a shrew. She will—” He swallowed. “I cannot have the woman here.”
“Then Beth is to go to her house in London and be fitted out with some decent clothes,” Amy said. “She looks worse than I do. You cannot leave her here in this…this house of doom and gloom. She’s young. She needs to meet people.”
“Doom and gloom,” he said as he turned away from her. “I guess it is.”
She could easily handle his anger, but when he turned like this, with grief on his face, she couldn’t stand it. She moved to kneel before him and took his hands in hers. She was no longer a lower-class person, but a liberated American woman. “Tristan,” she said softly, “I know that you still grieve for your wife, but you have no right to take Beth with you. She is young and alive and she needs life.”
Tristan looked at the young woman kneeling before him. Part of him was astonished that a lowly kitchen maid would dare to talk to him like this, to hold his hands as she was doing, but another part of him reached out to her. Since he was a child he’d had Jane. They’d grown up together. Then, when the happiest day of their life together was about to begin with the birth of their first child, she was gone. Within hours he’d gone from being wonderfully happy to wanting all life on earth to end. He still just wanted to be with her wherever she was.
“Yes,” he found himself saying to this woman he hardly knew. He pulled his hands from hers. “Send Beth to my aunt, but let her come back to me soon.”
“Of course,” Amy said, standing up and looking at him. She’d wanted to touch his hair. She’d wanted to put her arms around him and comfort him, but she didn’t.
After that day, things began to change around the estate. The workers had seen and heard that Amy could manage the master. And the truth was that they were tired of working at a place where they could take no pride in their jobs.
They soon learned that Amy was a hard taskmaster, but she was fair. If a person didn’t work, he or she was discharged. And she expected a lot from everyone.
She’d had to hire a new head gardener and he’d taken over the outside, while Amy concentrated on the inside. She’d had the house cleaned from top to bottom and every piece of cloth washed, the sheets put into the sun to bleach.
When Beth returned from London after just six months—all the time she could stand of her complaining old aunt—she came back to a house that smelled of lemon and beeswax. The garden was filled with vegetables that had been seeded in the greenhouse during the winter, and the fruit trees had been pruned. The kitchen garden that had once been acres of mostly weeds now hummed with honeybees, with butterflies darting about.
The parkland had been mowed and new flowers set out. Shrubs were blooming and rabbits were cavorting on the lawns.
But to Beth, the best thing was that her brother was no longer spending his days locked in the library. It was a bit disconcerting to see him and the housekeeper shouting at each other, but she soon got used to it. When it got too bad, she slipped into her uncle’s bedroom.
Her uncle William’s deteriorated health was the only bad part of her return. When she’d left he’d been able to sit up in bed and read, but now he was on his back in the darkened room. The windows were closed, the curtains drawn, and the room smelled of sickness.
“How are you?” Beth asked as she took the chair by his side.
“Much better now that I can look on your beauty,” he said. His once handsome face was sunken, his eyes red, with deep hollows under them. He fell back onto the pillows. “Tell me every word of what you and my sister did.” As he said it, he smiled a bit. “Is she as full of herself as she was when we were children?”
“More so,” Beth said, “but she does know everyone.”
“Knows them but I do not imagine that she is friends with any of them.”
“No,” Beth said, smiling, and reaching for his hand. It was hot and dry and didn’t feel like skin at all. “I want to hear about you.”
“There is nothing to say. I am just waiting to join my loved ones and see God. I have a few questions I want to ask Him.”
Beth tried to smile, but, instead, tears came to her eyes.
He patted her hand. “Go and see everyone,” he said. “I’ll be here.” The way he closed his eyes made her think he was too tired to talk more.
“Yes,” she said, then tiptoed from the room.
Beth’s thoughts about Amy were that anything that made her brother want to live again were all right with her. But as the months went by, she saw that her brother was falling in love with Amy, and that Amy was refusing him.
“I don’t know what to do about it,” she told her uncle on her daily visits to him.
“I think that Amy is a wise woman,” William said gently. “You are like me and a romantic. I would like nothing better than to see the earl marry the kitchen maid, but Amy sees the truth of what that would bring them. They’d not fit into his world or hers.”
“I think it’s something else,” Beth said. “I don’t know what it is, but there is something more.”
“It is between them,” William said, closing his eyes and letting Beth know that he’d had enough excitement for the day.
Now, Amy and Tristan were alone in his bedroom, the moon was shining through the window, and she was again turning him down. “I cannot, I will not,” she said.
He dropped his hand to his side. “As you will,” he said.
“Don’t look at me like that. Your sadness will not get me in bed with you.”
He smiled. “What will?”
“If you turn into Stephen.”
Tristan smiled broader. “I will do my best to do that. I mean to try tomorrow and the day after that.”
Amy’s face turned serious. “If there is time,” she said.
“You cannot mean to tell me your dream again!” he said. “I have heard it until I know every second of it. We have identified the men in the room.”
“Yes,” Amy said, “and how could I have dreamed of men I didn’t know if the dream wasn’t real?”
“I do not know,” he said, “but I do know that you cannot sleep outside my door.” Bending, he opened a drawer in the bedside table and pulled out a pistol. “See this? I do take your dream seriously.”