Page 35 of Echoes of the Sea (Storm Tide #2)

Amelia wasn’t certain how she knew, but as she looked up from her flowers, she was absolutely certain she would see Kipling nearby.

He was walking toward her with the soft look on his face that he wore more and more often of late.

It never failed to make her pulse pick up.

He cared about her; she was certain of it.

And she knew he liked her, which was wonderful enough.

But she was allowing herself to believe, to hope, that he felt something deeper, just as she did.

“I hoped to see you at dinner tonight or in the drawing room this evening.” She used her cane to get to her feet as he drew nearer. “I’ve had an idea that I’m excited to tell you about.”

“I’m excited to hear it.”

People hadn’t generally been interested in her thoughts. She wasn’t yet used to that. It was a rather lovely thing.

She pulled off her gardening gloves and tucked them into the pocket of her gardening apron. Then he held out his hand to her, and she set hers in it, using her other hand to manage her cane as they walked through the garden.

“I’ve been pondering my uncle’s return to Guilford. I wish you could have been nearby while he and Mr. Winthrop were here. You could have served as something of a buffer. That was my entirely selfish reason.”

He shook his head. “Every person is entitled to basic dignity and safety. Wishing for that isn’t selfish.”

“Would it shock you to know that I suspect those are very modern views? Though I don’t doubt there are those in this time who agree with you, it is not a common thing.

Ladies, in particular, are subject to the whims of the men in their lives, including those who simply stumble into them.

The idea of being granted any voice in our own lives is a very foreign one. ”

“Then I shouldn’t be looked at too askance for espousing the idea, as apparently my voice gives me away as being a ‘very foreign’ person.

” She could tell she hadn’t offended him, and she appreciated that he was willing to give her the benefit of his good opinion when she wasn’t entirely certain that she was expressing herself well.

“You’ve been very clear that I can’t simply be staying here as an unattached gentleman in the home of an unmarried lady without that proving disastrous,” Kip said. “So I am assuming you have thought of a means of getting around that.”

She nodded. “It came to me while I was working in the garden this morning.”

“This truly is your happy place, then.”

Her happy place . She had not ever heard that term or phrase, but it was very fitting. “This is a place where I am happy.”

Amusement entered his smile. “I suspect I am going to accidentally teach you a lot of phrases from my time.”

“Am I expected to say them in your accent?” She pretended to be horrified at the possibility.

Kipling laughed. “I would love to hear you try.”

“You must be desperate for entertainment,” she said through her own laughter.

“Not desperate. I simply like spending time with you.”

She smiled up at him. “You’ve said that before. I am beginning to think you mean it.”

“I absolutely do.” He squeezed her hand. “And I absolutely want to hear your idea regarding your uncle’s next visit.”

“I think it is a good one,” she said. “What makes your presence here scandalous, should it be learned of, is that there is no one else here. Were a gentleman and his wife to visit or a gentleman and his mother or aunt or even sister, that wouldn’t be scandalous.

If I had a companion, provided she were a dragon of a lady and probably old enough to be my mother, then you being here would not be so horrifying to those who are eager to be horrified. ”

His smile grew broad once more. Now that she was no longer entirely thrown off her balance by the brilliance of his smile, she found she simply enjoyed seeing it.

“Smudge and Mick must know of someone,” she continued, “a woman of the appropriate age to play the role, who would be willing to come here and pretend to be kin to you. We could make certain she was dressed for the part, though doing so would likely mean asking a seamstress to create a wardrobe of some sort. I have enough funds for that.”

That he wasn’t immediately objecting gave her hope enough to press forward.

“When my uncle returns, he will be told that you and your aunt are traveling the countryside, seeing the fine estates in the area, which brought you to Guilford. I suspect a few words of praise for it will be enough to garner my uncle’s acceptance.

And I think he will be eager to show it to advantage. ”

Kipling nodded as he listened. “Which would help you, as he would be forced to praise the things you have accomplished.”

“While we wait for his return,” she said, “we can go on as we have been, with the addition of finding a woman to play this role and making certain she has what she needs and the two of you deciding what your feigned connection and story are. When my uncle returns, we will be ready. And you won’t have to go into hiding. ”

“I would actually appreciate that. While I can’t see myself being on particularly friendly terms with your uncle or his uncomfortable friend, being resigned to exclusively my own company in my bedchamber would grow tedious should your uncle choose to extend his stay next time.”

“I can’t imagine your company ever being tedious.”

Whether it was her sincere compliment or simply the impulsive amendment, Kipling kissed her hand. Men in the future really were more openly affectionate than they were now. It must not have been considered scandalous in whatever year it was he’d come from.

That was still such a strange thing to believe. She didn’t truly doubt it, but she had to continually convince herself that it really was true. If not for the ample evidence he provided in his odd turns of phrase and views of the world, she might have talked herself back out of it.

“There is one hitch in your plan,” he said. “I have only just learned of this complication, and I know it hasn’t been communicated to you.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t panic,” he said. “I’m certain we can sort out a way around it.”

She set her shoulders once more, reminding herself that she knew how to weather storms, both figurative and literal.

“Mr. Ivers has explained an additional unspoken reason why the villagers have, thus far, been unwilling to come to Guilford and help.”

“Something other than their fear of the Tides of Time?”

“That does make them nervous,” he acknowledged, “but in years past, it hasn’t been enough to stop them from making the journey across the sea road.

When there was a resident family living at Guilford, it was kept up and fully staffed, mostly with people hired out of the village.

The resident family did their shopping in the village and hired villagers to undertake various jobs.

When they had guests, those guests would hire temporary help out of the village and patronize the shops and generally create stability and opportunity and income for Guilford Village.

When the estate was abandoned, so were they. ”

Heavens, she hadn’t thought of that. “Is it that they’re angry with my family for that abandonment?”

“I didn’t get the impression that it’s exclusively, or even mostly, anger.

It sounded more like hopelessness. A feeling that even if they came to Guilford and worked to bring it back to the state it was in before, when your time there is done, it will simply be empty again and go back to what it was.

It will, as Ivers put it, ‘be left to rot,’ and that, to the people of Guilford, will feel like they have been left to rot as well.

Unless they can feel some reason to even bother, you’re unlikely to get them to come out and help do work that will simply be undone by neglect. ”

They walked on a moment, into the part of the garden she hadn’t yet tamed. She had to be more careful where she put the tip of her cane.

“I haven’t the right to stay here indefinitely,” she said, “even if I felt I could endure the sea for the rest of my life.”

“I did point that out, and Ivers seemed to think the village understood that.”

“But it doesn’t change the outcome for them.”

“Precisely.”

Tension was tiptoeing back over her once more. She’d had such a good idea, and it had felt like she’d made progress. Now she was back to feeling like she was swimming against a tide.

“I could attempt to convince my uncle, but I guarantee he will not be willing to move here. He has his own estate, and it’s a grander one than this.

Not to mention it is nearer to London, nearer to Society.

Guilford House will be left empty for the same reasons it was before, and there’s nothing I can do to change that. ”

“Unfortunately, unless we can offer the village some hope that you can change that, we are fighting an uphill battle.”

There was some comfort in hearing him say we. He’d told her more than once that he didn’t mean to abandon her to this struggle, but hearing him so easily and naturally acknowledge it was wonderful.

“Do you think your uncle could be convinced to sell Guilford?” Kipling suggested.

“It is entailed. He doesn’t have that option.”

She could tell by the immediate confusion on his face that he didn’t know what that was. Perhaps entailments were done away with two hundred years in the future.

“There’s great worry amongst the landed gentry that the estates and the land and the holdings that they’ve acquired over generations will be sold off and split up.

Land is and always has been very important to distinguishing people of rank and importance.

It also offers stability that doesn’t exist simply through bank accounts.

Land with tenant farms produces income, which builds wealth and stabilizes families.

To make certain that land all stays together, they are made part of entailments: legally binding methods of passing an inheritance down from one generation to the next.

They dictate in perpetuity that anything subject to the entailment has to stay together and can’t be broken off. It can’t be sold.”

“Ever?” That seemed to shock him.

“I suspect there are instances in which an entailment can be broken, but they are few and far between. Land is power. My uncle is not going to give that up, even for a property he doesn’t care about.”

“But Guilford doesn’t have any farmland, so it can’t be producing any income.”

That was true. Its value was more in the ability to say that the Stirling family had a vast number of holdings. It was a line on a ledger.

She stopped all of a sudden, an idea forming so wholly and instantly in her mind that for a moment, she struggled to pull in a breath. Kipling watched her, his eyes wide, with a hopefulness in his expression that told her he knew that she had thought of something.

“Guilford doesn’t produce an income right now, which makes it less important to my uncle than his other holdings, but tenants are not the only way for land to be profitable.”

Her cane slipped on a rut in the path, throwing off her balance. Kipling righted her without seeming to have his attention to her words be disrupted at all.

“Families that have extra estates,” she continued, “more than they might need for their children to use, especially if those estates aren’t producing an income, often make them available to let.”

“Oh, brilliant,” he whispered.

Warming to the idea, she spoke faster. “If we could restore the estate and make it inviting and appealing enough, my uncle could let it to a family or a gentleman, perhaps a recently retired sea captain who would like to live near the sea. The rent would give my uncle income. The funds to run Guilford are provided by my uncle’s estate. The rent would be pure profit.”

“And the villagers would not be left with an empty estate and empty pockets.”

She nodded, her mind spinning furiously.

“It would take many, many years of rental income for Uncle to make as much as he would gain by simply seizing half my dowry. But I don’t know that he is so desperately mercenary that he is entirely set on that course.

He cannot possibly be so very different from the man who essentially raised me.

There was an indifference to him, but he never seemed a truly bad person.

Surely, he can still be fair and reasonable. At least, I hope he can be.”

“And,” Kipling said, “if you have restored the estate sufficiently to offer it up for a fine family to call their home, then he certainly can’t argue that you failed to put it to rights or that you have been a bad steward of the estate. That would be proof he couldn’t argue with.”

She turned to look at Kipling, hardly daring to breathe.

“If we tell the village this, if they have this hope of a family living here again, and if they know that the only way it will happen is if we restore Guilford to what it ought to be, then they would have a stake in the success of this too. I think we could secure the help we need.”

“You might secure so much help that you would struggle to organize it all.”

She smiled broadly. “A difficulty I am willing to accept.”

“I know you aren’t allowed to leave the island, but I think between myself, Smudge, Mick, and Ivers, we can offer this idea to the village in a way that will create an alliance between Guilford Village and Guilford House.”

She closed her eyes and breathed. For the first time in more than six weeks, she felt truly and deeply hopeful.