“Papa! Remember you told me I’d have a love, a love like yours and Mama’s? You promised, but it hasn’t happened! I don’t love Robert!” She felt a tear escape and roll down her cheek as her desperate eyes implored his pained ones. “If something happened to him, I wouldn’t gaze at his picture, I wouldn’t—”
“Enough!” Papa stood so abruptly that Amy fell back. Never had he raised his voice to her. Now in his fear, his loneliness, he lashed out. “I loved your mother—I still do—and she’s gone! I cannot work—I stare at her painting—I loved her so! Better you and Robert think straight. Not like me!” His shoulders slumped, and his voice dropped to a husky whisper. “Not like me.”
She watched him draw a shuddering breath as he reached a hand to pull her up. “I’m sorry, poppet.” His eyes fluttered closed and then open as he ran a shaky hand through the black tangles of his hair. “That it’s come to harsh words…I’m sorry. But there’s more to life than love. It will be better for you this way. You must see a bigger picture. Tradition, continuity…this is how our guild has survived for centuries.”
The hard edges of the heavy ring bit into Amy’s clenched fist. She blinked back the tears. Like the vast majority of betrothal agreements, hers was not binding until consummation. No money had yet changed hands. There must be another way for her that would still preserve the business. “Surely there’s another jeweler…”
“Ours is a small industry. Others were apprenticed a decade ago. Many died in the plague. These matches are made for infants, and you’re seventeen. It’s time your future is cemented.” He moved to wrap an arm tight around Amy’s shoulders, as though willing her to understand, to accept the realities of her life. “Robert is a good goldsmith, a steady young man. You cannot have everything, Amy.”
You cannot have everything.
The words echoed in Amy’s head, summing up her destiny. She was stuck, as sure as an insect in amber.
Shrugging out of her father’s grasp, she picked up a cloth embedded with reddish rouge powder and rubbed the ring absently, a final hand-polish to make it gleam. It felt solid in her hands, this thing she’d created from nothing more than raw metal and elusive inbred artistry. She could never give up making jewelry. She was born to it.
Her gaze swept the cluttered workshop. Tools, hunks of discarded wax, and half-finished pieces of jewelry littered every available surface. A thin veil of the reddish rouge powder dusted the tabletops and stained her fingertips.
This was where she belonged. And if her father said Robert belonged here as well, that was the way of it.
The fire below the oven snapped, and she blinked, then knuckled the last trace of tears from her eyes.
You cannot have everything.
“Promise me, Amy. Promise me that Goldsmith and Sons won’t end with you.”
“You have my promise.”
“I love you, poppet,” Papa said quietly.
He only wanted what was best for her. As she turned into his arms, the ring slipped from her fingers and clattered to the wooden floor.
“I love you too, Papa,” she said.
IT WAS A LONG time before she bent to pick up the ring, an even longer time before Robert came in to find her staring at it.
He stood over her. “You still working on that blasted signet?”
She looked up at him, but couldn’t find the energy to summon as much as annoyance.
“It’s finished,” she said. “I’ll have it delivered in the morning.”
FOUR
“COLIN! DOWN here!”
From along the ridge where he and nine others were grappling with a huge block of limestone, Colin glanced to the path below to see his brothers climbing from the carriage and Kendra leaning halfway out the window, waving wildly.
“You’re early,” he called a minute later, heading down the rise. He wiped gritty palms on his linen breeches, his shirt billowing in the light wind that buffeted across Greystone’s quarry.
“Early?” His older brother Jason laughed, pointing at the sky.
Colin glanced straight up and then west to where the sun was nearly setting. “Sorry.” He shrugged. “I’ve been about since six this morn. In the woods, the fields…I reckon I lost track of the time.”
“I reckon you lost your hat as well?” Kendra fixed him with a half-serious frown of reproach. “Look at you, brown as a gypsy!”
With the back of one hand, he wiped at the sweat on his forehead. “Have you come to see the renovations, or to harp on my appearance?”
“To harp on your appearance,” Kendra’s twin, Ford, answered for her. “But I’ve a curiosity to see your new kitchen. Pipes and taps…do they work due to a siphon effect, or is it simple gravity? In Isaac Newton’s new paper, he says—”
“Criminy—how on earth should I know? I’m a farmer, not a scientist. They work because the mason put them in right.”
“What I want to know”—Jason patted his stomach meaningfully—“is whether we’ll find food in this kitchen.”
“Oh, yes.” Colin laughed. “Benchley’s been slaving since dawn, I expect. Go on up to the castle, and I’ll follow along shortly. Four quarrymen are down with the ague, and we’ve two more slabs to bring up.”
“OD’S FISH, IT’S quiet here.” Kendra paused before climbing from the carriage into Greystone Castle’s little courtyard. “Listen.” A few low birdcalls, distant bleating from the fields, a faint rustle from the smattering of trees that stood sentinel around the tiny circular drive. “It sounds like no one’s home.”
“No one is home,” Jason reminded her. “Colin has only Benchley for company until the renovations are further along, and he’s likely in the kitchen.”
“Let’s go see the kitchen.” Ford urged them along. “Those pipes—”
“The food—”
“Those Chase stomachs!” Kendra laughed as they walked toward the door to Greystone’s modest living quarters. “I cannot say I’m surprised that Colin restored the kitchen first.”
“A fellow’s got to eat,” Ford declared.
“I could feed an entire village on what you three pack away
