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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
