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.