a monument to the foresight of Phillip’s great-grandfather. If the people of Westover cannot appreciate that, then the people be damned.” Her back ramrod straight, she swept out of the room.
There was a long silence, finally broken by Carolyn’s tired sigh. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know how unpleasant that was for you. And maybe she’s right. Maybe Tracy shouldn’t be forced to include Beth in her party.”
Phillip shook his head. “Not a chance. It’s time all of us got dragged into the modern world. You’ve done it for me, and maybe Beth can do it for Tracy. We’ll just keep on plugging, and eventually things will all work out.” He glanced at his watch, then drained the last of his coffee. “And as for me, I’ve got to meet one of the wrong sort of people at the mill, and if I don’t hurry, I’ll be late.”
“Wrong sort of people?” Carolyn asked archly. “Who?”
“The worst,” Phillip replied, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial level. “Your ex-husband!” Then, before she could reply, he was gone.
Alone, Carolyn sat for a few minutes staring down on the village below. Always, when she’d lived down there and gazed up at Hilltop, the house had seemed to her to be the most peaceful place on earth.
Now she was here, and there was no peace.
4
Beth pushed open the screened kitchen door, and stepped out onto the little flagstone patio that led to the back gardens. The door slammed shut behind her, and she jumped slightly at the crash, calling a quick apology over her shoulder.
“It’s all right,” Hannah replied mildly from the shadows of the kitchen. “No harm done.”
Beth stood in the small enclosure, feeling the early-morning sunshine, and looked around. Here, away from the vastness of the rest of the house, she almost felt at home. The patio, in fact, was almost like the one her father had built behind the house on Cherry Street.
At Hilltop, though, there was another terrace, a wide veranda that extended across most of the length of the house, filled with tables and chairs and chaise longues. It overlooked the tennis court and the rose garden, and Beth didn’t really like it: like everything else here, it was too big and too ornate.
She skipped down the steps, then started along a path that led under an arbor, then skirted the edge of the rose garden. Beyond that, hidden from the house by a high hedge, was the stable.
The stable was Beth’s favorite part of Hilltop. In the barn, where it was warm in winter, but cool now that summer was here, and everything smelled like horses and hay, she always felt better. In fact, she’d even made friends with one of the horses, a large black-and-white one named Patches, who always whinnied when she came into the barn, and nuzzled at her pockets looking for carrots.
She turned a corner, and almost tripped over the gardener, who was on his knees carefully digging up a border of tulip bulbs and replacing them with tiny marigolds.
“Hi, Mr. Smithers.”
The old gardener looked up, then rocked back on his heels, dangling his trowel in his right hand. “’Morning, Miss Beth. You’re out bright and early today.”
“I had breakfast with Hannah this morning.”
Smithers’s brows rose slightly, but he said nothing.
“Well, what’s wrong with that?” Beth asked. “If I want to eat breakfast with Hannah, why shouldn’t I?”
“No reason—no reason at all,” the old man assured her. Then a little grin cracked his weathered face. “But I bet Mrs. Sturgess didn’t like that.”
Beth frowned uncertainly. “Why wouldn’t she like that?”
Now Smithers’s brows arched in a caricature of disapproval. “A member of the family eating with the servants? Tut-tut, child! It simply isn’t done!”
“But I’m not a member of the family! I’m just who I always was. Remember?” Then her voice dropped. “And I wish you wouldn’t call me Miss Beth, either. You never used to do that.”
“And your mother never used to be married to Mr. Phillip, either,” Smithers replied, his voice gentle. “Things are different now, and you have to learn what’s expected of you. And part of that is that I call you Miss Beth, and you call me Ben. I’m the gardener here, and you shouldn’t call me ‘mister.’ ”
“But when we lived next door to you, I always called you Mr. Smithers.”
“That was before,” the gardener explained once more. “And I used to call your mother by her first name, too. But everything’s changed now.” Ben Smithers shrugged, shaking his head.