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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.”
“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.
