He held the door open. “Go home, Miss Caulden,” he said tiredly. “This is no place for you. You are merely a recording device and nothing more. If I wanted to hear Caulden’s platitudes, I’d have asked him. Now go home and stay hidden inside until the hops are picked and what’s going to happen has happened.”
Amanda walked past him into the hall. “You have made up your mind and I can’t change it,” she said stiffly. “But you will see. I just hope you’re man enough to admit when you’re wrong. Good day, Dr. Montgomery.” She turned away from him and left the Union Hall.
On the drive back to the Caulden Ranch, her anger rose to the boiling point. The union organizers wanted to believe something was wrong, wanted to sing their union songs, wanted to believe they were the equivalent of slaves building a pyramid for a power-mad pharaoh. Today the picking started and by tomorrow they would have had time to see that at the Caulden Ranch human beings were treated as such.
She smiled to herself as she thought of how Dr. Montgomery would react. Would he be disappointed when there was no reason for his union? He wanted to present a petition for water to be delivered to the fields. She’d like to see his face when he found water, food and cool, delicious lemonade was being handed out to the workers. Perhaps she’d ask her father if she could distribute the lemonade. She had a vision of offering Dr. Montgomery a tall, frosty glass and smiling at him graciously. She doubted very much that he would admit he was wrong.
She left the limousine to go into the house, and the first person she encountered was Taylor. His eyes looked a little tired but he compensated for it by holding his spine especially rigid.
“Amanda,” he said sternly, “I was just coming to get you. Your job at that place is now ended. The picking began today, and I see no reason for you to further expose yourself to those people.”
“They are not ‘those people’; they are human beings. If you do not have the courtesy to think of them as such, at least my father does.”
“I will not be spoken to in such a manner, Amanda.”
Amanda started to contradict him but she closed her mouth. In a few more days Dr. Montgomery would go home, defeated, and she would be left here alone with Taylor. She had better do what she could to placate him. “I apologize. It’s the heat. It makes me on edge. I have already quit my job and I won’t be returning.”
“Good,” he said quickly. “Now I think you’d better stay in your room until this is over. You’ve been involved more than enough.”
“Of course,” she murmured and started for the stairs, but she paused and turned back. “Taylor, I wonder if it might be possible for me to go to the fields and help. I would like to distribute the lemonade, perhaps.”
Taylor’s eyes widened. “Distribute the—” He calmed himself. “The men will be in the fields and I do not believe it’s a place for a lady.”
“But I worked with those men at the Union Hall.”
“Amanda! Do not defy me. I cannot allow you to go into the fields. You would be horribly in the way. Do you want to cause everyone more work?”
“No,” she said and realized her hand was tightly clutching the banister. It didn’t seem that she was needed anywhere. They didn’t need her at the Union Hall and they didn’t need her in the fields.
“I have written out a schedule for you and put it on your desk. I cannot stay to test you as I am needed in the fields. And, Amanda, when the hops are in, you and I are going to talk about your dismissal of Mrs. Gunston. I could not persuade her to remain.” He stood there and watched as she climbed the stairs.
Once inside her room, Amanda realized that her jubilant mood was gone. She held up the new schedule and remembered Taylor telling her there would be no more schedules. She also remembered his talking about their being lovers. But the Taylor who she had just seen was as formal and cold as she had ever seen him.
She tossed the schedule, unread, on the desk and flopped across her bed. It was so hot and she felt so restless. She tried to recapture her good mood by imagining Dr. Montgomery when he realized how wrong he had been,
but she couldn’t quite conjure the vision.
She stood, looked at the schedule, saw she was to translate Caesar’s Campaigns from Latin and groaned. Out the window she could see her mother sprawled on a lounge chair under the shade of a tree, reading and eating what looked to be chocolates. Amanda grabbed her writing materials, her Latin book and went to join her mother.
She spent a very pleasant afternoon lazing about in the shade in the company of her mother. Her mother gave her a fascinating novel written by a woman named the Countess de la Glace. It was all about romance and passion and a woman suffering over the love of a man who wasn’t worth suffering over. Amanda read it avidly and put away a pound and a half of chocolates.
The next day her father and Taylor were too busy to notice that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be, doing what she’d been told to do, so she spent more time with her mother. Amanda, feeling that she was greatly daring, asked her mother about the time she’d danced on stage. Grace talked for hours, and Amanda began to realize that what her mother had done sounded more like hard work than sinful.
“But you had courage,” Amanda said. “I wish I had courage.”
“I think perhaps you do,” Grace answered. “You just haven’t found what you need courage for.”
“You mean like Ariadne?” Amanda asked, motioning toward the Countess de la Glace’s novel. “To decide I love a man and fight for him?”
“Who do you love, Amanda?”
“Taylor, of course,” Amanda answered quickly, but her face turned red. Her time with Dr. Montgomery had been an experiment, nothing more. But part of her imagined how he’d act when he found out he was wrong about the workers on the Caulden Ranch. Would he be so contrite that he’d propose marriage? “I was wrong, Amanda, my darling,” she imagined him saying. “I want to spend the rest of my life with a woman as wise as you are.” She loved the idea of his admitting that she wasn’t stupid—the way he always made her feel. But did she love him? Would she marry him? Leave Taylor and the parents she loved to travel about the world in his little yellow car?
“Amanda,” Grace said, interrupting her daughter’s daydreaming, “is that possibly your Dr. Montgomery?”
Amanda turned to look. It was he, coming from the direction of the fields. This was it, she thought. He was coming to apologize and to…Dare she hope for more?
“Amanda,” Grace said, and there was concern in her voice, “I don’t know Dr. Montgomery personally, but it’s my guess from the way he’s walking that he’s angry.”