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  “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.

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