Return to Summerhouse

  “That won’t help,” Amy said. “You were sleeping when he stabbed you. And you had on your clothes. I’ve wondered if he stabbed you somewhere else and carried you to your bed.”

  “That is absurd. How could he do that and not be seen?”

  “What makes you think he wasn’t seen? Maybe you…I don’t know, maybe you got drunk and someone helped you to your bed in your clothes and later someone stabbed you to death.”

  “I will put away the port in the morning,” Tristan said.

  “Stop laughing at me. We only have three weeks to stop this, then—” She cut herself off because she hadn’t meant to tell him about the three weeks.

  He jumped on her words. “What does that mean, that we have only three weeks? What are you planning? Does it have to do with these two women you brought here with you? And where do they come from? They have no baggage, not so much as a hairpin, and they talk even more strangely than you do. And they know so little about our lives! The young one asked how we got water out of the ground. Who are they and what are you planning with them?”

  “Their luggage was lost,” Amy said, thinking that she would have to talk to Zoë about keeping her mouth shut. If she were to tell someone they weren’t just from a different country but a different time, Amy didn’t know what would be done to them. These people still believed in witches. “They’re friends of mine, isn’t that enough? Faith is a widow and she spent years nursing her sick husband. I thought she could help with your uncle William. Wouldn’t you like to get rid of that sour-faced woman who hovers over him now? Faith is a master herbalist.”

  She tucked the covers around him. “And Zoë is a painter and I think she’s going to apprentice to Russell.”

  “A woman painter?” Tristan said.

  “You say things like that around Zoë and she’ll take your ears off.”

  “I am sure I will be shocked as I am not used to having a woman tell me what she thinks,” he said with great sarcasm.

  She straightened up and looked at him. He was so very handsome and more than anything in the world she wanted to climb into bed with him. Maybe not for sex, but she’d like to feel a man’s arms around her, like to again feel protected and loved.

  “Amy,” Tristan whispered.

  She quickly stepped back from the bed. “I have to go. Listen, tomorrow, if you could…I mean, if we could…Uh, my friends.” She looked at him imploringly.

  “Yes, I understand. Your friends know you are married and I am not to look at you with eyes that hunger for you. I can restrain myself, but can you?”

  Amy smiled. “Easily,” she said, then slipped out the door and closed it behind her. No, it was never easy to hold herself back when she was with Tristan.

  “Stayed in there long enough, didn’t you?”

  Amy looked up to see Zoë standing in the hallway in her borrowed nightgown, her arms crossed over her chest against the cool night. Amy’s first thought was to defend herself, but she didn’t. “Didn’t I tell you that Tristan and I have mad, passionate sex every night? Some nights we’re so loud we scare the pigeons off the roof. So, did you just come back from Russell’s bed?”

  “I wish,” Zoë said. “No, it’s just the newness of the place. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “You’ll get used to it.” She started walking Zoë back to her room.

  “Amy,” she said outside the door, “have you ever thought about what will happen to us if we don’t go back? What if the three weeks end and we stay here forever?”

  Amy took a deep breath. “I think about it every day, and what I come up with is that I’ll worry about that when it’s the end of the twenty-second day.”

  “You’ll marry him, won’t you?” Zoë nodded toward Tristan’s door.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything except that I need to keep him from being killed.”

  “What if you prevent it tomorrow? Will we be sent back then or will we get the whole three weeks?”

  Amy looked at Zoë, trying to read what was in her eyes. “You like it here, don’t you?”

  “It’s not bad,” Zoë said, as usual trying to tell as little about herself as possible.

  “You’re more free here, aren’t you? There isn’t anyone in this world who hates you for whatever you did.”

  “True,” Zoë said. “I don’t think I knew how much my lack of memory bothered me until I came here. I think that in my real life I lived in constant fear that someone from my past would show up and spit at me. One time some workmen dropped a big metal frame with a crash and I threw my arms over my head and ducked. It made everyone laugh, but later I realized that I’ve always thought that at any time someone could come at me with a gun.”

  “That’s awful,” Amy said. “No one should live like that. I think that when we go back you really need to find out what happened to make all those people dislike you.”

  “I’d rather know anything than whatever I did,” Zoë said. “You know what I’d do if I went back to when I crashed my car? I’d leave town. I don’t know what happened to make everyone hate me and I don’t need to know. I’d just throw things in a bag, get on a bus, and never look back.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Amy said. “You’d miss out on being in the wreck and that’s what really matters.”

  “Yes, that’s what’s important. As long as I can still draw. If I go back and find I can’t draw…Anyway, on the day I was in the crash, I wouldn’t get in any moving vehicle.” Zoë yawned. “I think I can sleep now.” She put her hand on the bedroom door, then turned back to Amy. “What were you doing in his bedroom?”

  “Sex and lots of it.” Amy tensed again.

  “Okay, have it your way, but if you want to talk, I’d listen.”

  “Thanks,” Amy said, then pushed Zoë into the bedroom and shut the door. She looked out the window at the end of the hall. By her calculations it was only about two hours before she had to get up and start making bread. Oh, for an electric bread machine, she thought as she went down the stairs. And flush toilets and automatic washers, and great big grocery stores and trucks to carry things home.

  Seventeen

  When Faith awoke the next morning, she knew exactly where she was and a wave of excitement ran through her. She was not in her apartment in New York. She did not have an appointment with a therapist where she’d yet again have to try to make her believe she wasn’t going to kill herself. And the best, she wouldn’t have to talk to Eddie’s mother about how wonderful a man he’d been, and how he was now with the angels. She wasn’t going to have another long, lonely day with little to do and no one to do it with.

  Turning, she saw Zoë asleep beside her and heard the girl’s soft breathing. Without her makeup and her air of being tougher than the rest of the world, Zoë looked like a teenager. Faith really hoped that she would find love with this painter whom she’d talked of the day before. She didn’t care if Zoë had the man for only three weeks; it would be worth it just to see Zoë smile as though she meant it.

  Faith gently pushed the covers back, got out of bed, and reached for the gray cotton dress she’d been wearing when she’d tumbled into the barn with Amy and Zoë. It took her twenty minutes to tie the strings on her corset and pull on her petticoat and long underdrawers. She would have liked to take a shower and put on clean clothes, but she couldn’t do that.

  Her mind was whirling with all there was to do this day. She planned to spend more time in the kitchen garden, learning what she could from their methods of gardening. What had been lost in our modern world of pesticides and fertilizers that were polluting our waterways?

  She also wanted to look in on Beth’s uncle William and see what medicines he was taking. What herbal concoctions were they using that she could take back to the modern world? Yesterday, she and Amy had joked about using orris root on the man’s nurse. She’d realized it even at the moment that they were trying to impress Zoë with their knowledge of herbs. Orris root was poisonous in large quantities, but in small amoun
ts it made a person sick with vomiting and diarrhea.

  She looked out the window. The sun was just beginning to rise, and she saw several of the workers walking about, already starting their jobs. For the first time since Eddie died, Faith knew that she wanted to start the day as soon as possible.

  Smiling, she left the bedroom, silently closing the door behind her. When she turned, she saw the woman Amy had told her about going into Uncle William’s room. As Amy had said, she was fierce-looking. Tall and thin, her iron-gray hair was pulled back on her head tightly. Her face was long and looked as though she’d never smiled in her life. She reminded Faith of those portraits of American Puritans: stiff and unbending, and judging everyone they met.

  The woman looked Faith up and down and obviously found her unsatisfactory. Faith hadn’t yet pulled her hair back so it was hanging loose about her shoulders, and the front of her dress was not fully buttoned.

  The woman was holding a tray with a napkin draped over it, food for the sick man.

  “May I take that in?” Faith asked politely. “Amy asked me to look in on the patient and—”

  She broke off because the woman ignored her. She opened the bedroom door, went into the room, and shut the door behind her in Faith’s face.

  For a full minute, Faith stood outside the door with her fists clenched and felt a strong sense of déjà vu. It was exactly what she’d been through so very many times with her mother-in-law. The woman loved to make a contest about who was more needed by Eddie, her or Faith. She’d heard the woman say that only she could do so-and-so, and that Eddie liked her way of doing something better than what Faith did.

  Through all those years, Faith had given in to the woman. After all, it was her son and he was dying. How could she fight that?

  But now was different. Now she had people on her side. Faith could go to the kitchen, tell Amy what was happening, then she’d go to the earl and Faith would be allowed in the room with the sick man. Or she could go to the kitchen and mix up a batch of orris root and make the woman so sick that she’d have to leave the patient’s side.

  Faith didn’t like either of those ideas. She thought of how Amy had come to another time period, all alone, and she’d managed to put herself in a position of command.

  “If Amy can do it, so can I,” Faith said as she opened the door and went into the room.

  Her first impression was of the musty, airless smell. The windows were shut, and the curtains were drawn so that there was no light in the room. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust before she saw the woman sitting on the far side of the room. She seemed to be knitting.

  “Get out,” the woman said in a rough voice. “He is not to have visitors who are not family.”

  Involuntarily, Faith took a step backward, then she stopped. Ever since she was a child, she’d been intimidated by women like this one. They had an air of authority about them that had always made Faith want to run and hide. Her mother and Eddie’s had both terrified Faith all her life.

  Faith drew herself up, put her shoulders back, and said, “You’re wanted downstairs immediately.” To her astonishment, the voice that had come out of her was her mother’s, and there was some of Eddie’s mother in there too.

  When the woman put her knitting down, got up, and walked past Faith as though she weren’t there, she wanted to give a whoop of joy. At the door, she said, “Do not touch him,” in a threatening voice that didn’t scare Faith at all. As soon as she was gone, Faith went to the big windows at the far end of the room and pulled back the heavy curtains. The dust that came off them made her cough.

  When they were open and light was coming into the room, Faith turned back to look at the bed. There was so much dust in the air that for a moment she couldn’t see anything or anyone.

  She coughed some more, waved her arms about through the dust, and stepped closer to the bed. As her eyes adjusted, she was at last able to see a face barely visible on a pillow. It was long and pale and had scraggly gray whiskers.

  If he hadn’t had his eyes open, she would never have believed the man was alive. He blinked at her, but it was like looking at a cadaver come to life.

  “Who are you?” the man managed to rasp out, his voice hoarse and weak.

  “Faith,” she said, staring at him in disbelief while trying not to show her revulsion. “I’m a nurse, I’m a friend of Amy’s, and I’ve come to look after you.”

  “Faith,” he said, and his thin face seemed to give a bit of a smile. “That is a good name for you. You look like an angel. Perhaps you are and you have come to take me from this earthly place.”

  She didn’t smile at his words. “I want to examine you,” she said softly as she sat down on the bed beside him. She saw that his body under the covers barely lifted them. Slowly, she rolled back the coverlet, then a dingy sheet. At last she came to the man underneath. He was the thinnest person she’d ever seen, his body wasted away to less than a hundred pounds, but by the length of him, he was at least six feet tall.

  And he was filthy. His body reeked of old sweat, as though he hadn’t had a bath in a very long time. Worse, there were bedsores all over him.

  “I apologize for my appearance,” he said. “I am taking a long time to leave this earth. I seem to be going by ounces every day.”

  She could tell he was embarrassed by his condition and didn’t want her or anyone else to see him as he was.

  “Don’t talk,” she said softly. “I’m going to turn you over now. Just be still.”

  “I will do what you wish,” he said gallantly, but she could tell he was feeling deep shame at the circumstances.

  In the last years of Eddie’s life, Faith had turned him in bed, lifted him onto bedpans, and emptied and cleaned them afterward. She was used to what needed to be done with patients in their last months alive. With expertise and great gentleness, she put her arms around his bony shoulders and turned him so she could see the back of him. She didn’t let her horror show at what she saw under his nightshirt. There were deep sores over skin that barely covered his bones. Instead, she smiled as she put him back onto the pillow.

  “You are truly an angel,” he said. “Your touch is gentle.”

  Faith was working to keep her true feelings from showing on her face. She covered him with the sheet, then stood over the bed, looking down at him for a moment.

  “You can see that there is not much to be done,” he said, smiling.

  “Do your teeth hurt?” she asked.

  “There are not many of them left to hurt,” he said, still smiling. “I lose one about every month now.” It was the closest he’d come to making a complaint.

  Faith nodded, then went to the tray of food set on the bedside table, and lifted the napkin. There was a glass of milk and a bowl of something white. “What is this?” she asked as she picked up a spoon and poked at it.

  “It is the invalid’s last meal. What a child eats. We come into the world with that and leave with the same thing.”

  “What do you have for lunch and dinner?” She looked at him. “Please don’t make any jokes. Just tell me the truth.”

  His smile left him. “It is the same, but sometimes I am allowed beef broth for dinner. I do not have much of an appetite. It does not matter what I eat. I am just waiting to leave this earth now. Dr. Gallagher assures me that I haven’t much longer to wait.”

  Faith turned away from him for a moment and stared out the window. She had to get herself under control. She took a deep breath and looked back at him.

  “William,” she said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you and I don’t know how much longer you have to live, but I can assure you—no, I promise you—that I will make what time you have left more comfortable than it is now.”

  He looked at her with wide eyes, not knowing what to say in response to her heartfelt declaration. Bending, she tucked the sheet around him, and tried to smile.

  In the next second the door opened and in walked the gray-haired woman, his nurse. “What have y
ou done?” she cried. “The light hurts him.” She hurried across the room to draw the curtains over the windows. When the room was again dark and the dust was flying about, she turned to Faith. “I will tell the doctor of this and he will see that you are kept away from this room.”

  Faith gave her a cold little smile. “You think so, do you?” She walked past the woman and left the room. When she was outside, she leaned against the door and took a few deep breaths of air, and for a moment she looked heavenward. “Did you see that, Eddie?” she whispered. “Did you ever see anything more horrible? But I’m going to fix it.” She raised her fists. “Whatever I have to do, I’m going to make that man’s last days comfortable.”

  She hurried down the stairs and went straight into the kitchen. Amy was in the middle of the room, directing some women at their cooking. Faith meant to tell Amy what she’d seen, then demand that she be given free rein over him. She meant to be adult and professional. Instead, Faith took one look at Amy and all that she’d just seen came into her mind—and her stomach rebelled. She put her hand over her mouth and started running for the back door and the stairs outside. Amy was right behind her.

  Faith threw up in the courtyard. She put her arms against the stone wall of the house and heaved up what little was in her stomach. It all seemed to go through her in great waves even after she was empty. She was aware that people were near and that Amy was saying things to them, but she didn’t know what they were doing. All that was in her mind was what she’d seen in that room.

  “Better?” Amy asked as she handed Faith a damp cloth to wipe her mouth.

  Faith nodded as Amy led her to a stone seat along the wall. They were alone so Amy must have sent the other people away.

  “Tell me what happened,” Amy said, her arm around Faith’s shoulders.

  “Have you seen him?” Faith managed to ask. Her stomach was still lurching.

  “Not for months. I told you that Tristan left everything in the care of the family doctor.”