How she missed the sea and the tide pools with their fresh treasures every day. And she missed her pets. At Marlborough House there was only a grumpy tomcat who spat if Amy even looked at him. Back home in Ireland there was Gildo the collie dog, who spent her days lying by the front door waiting for someone to come out and play. And Daisy, the yellow and white cat, who liked to stretch herself across the kitchen window ledge. Then there were the two ponies, Fanny and Charlie. How she loved to ride them. Three years at boarding school in England was a long time to be away from them all. Amy wished she could be back home, but she couldn’t go back in disgrace. So despite feeling homesick, she hoped and prayed that Miss Kay wouldn’t expel her in the morning.
As the light of dawn began to filter through the drapes, Amy still couldn’t sleep. She thought back to the dollhouse she had been given for Christmas when she was eight years old. It was beautifully decorated and filled with dainty doll-sized furniture, but it was boring. On Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, she’d dumped the furniture out of the dollhouse and replaced it with moss for a carpet and twigs for indoor trees. That had made it a much more interesting place. She had gone out to the apple tree in the yard and collected ants and bugs and beetles and installed them in their new home. She had spent hours watching them climb all over it until her nanny found out and made her remove the moss and bugs. School was like the dollhouse. It was often boring, and sometimes Amy wished she could put moss down for carpet and move in some new friends and make it an interesting place.
Amy was bleary-eyed from lack of sleep as she picked at her breakfast. When everyone else had been dismissed from the dining room, she reported to Miss Kay. Unlike Amy, Miss Kay seemed to have had a good night’s sleep. She was in a very good mood when Amy knocked on her door. Amy stood in front of Miss Kay’s desk. Miss Kay told Amy how disappointed she was in her behavior and pointed out that Amy should use her leadership talents to lead the other girls to do the right thing instead of disobeying authority. After the long lecture, Amy waited breathlessly to see what Miss Kay was leading up to. Would she be expelled? Thankfully, she wasn’t. Instead, she was given some extra duties to perform. She had to get up half an hour early each morning and clean out the downstairs fire grates, and every Saturday night for a month she was to help the chambermaid polish all the silverware.
For the next couple of months, things went smoothly for Amy. There were no more comets or any other once-in-a-lifetime events on the horizon, so she settled in to study once again.
However, in November, just before her fifteenth birthday, Amy was again called into Miss Kay’s office. This time, Miss Kay asked her to sit down. She had “difficult” news, she said. Amy and her brothers, Norman and Ernest, who attended a nearby boys’ school, were to go home to Ireland at once. Amy’s father, David Carmichael, had not given any reason for their sudden return home, but he had said that they would not be returning to school. So in the middle of the school year, Amy packed up her belongings and, along with her two brothers, boarded a train that would take them from the Yorkshire countryside to Liverpool, where they would take a steamboat across the Irish Sea to Ireland and home. Only it wasn’t the same home they’d left. Amy’s parents and younger brothers and sisters had moved from the old, gray stone country house into the city of Belfast. The move was because of Mr. Carmichael’s work. Amy’s father and his brother William owned a large flour mill in Millisle. The mill had been in the family for more than one hundred years, but the two brothers had kept it as up-to-date as they possibly could. It was the first mill in the area to have new rollers to grind the wheat, and it was steam powered. It even had gas lighting.
The Carmichael brothers had decided to open another mill nearer Belfast. So the family had moved into a house in College Gardens while the oldest three children were away at boarding school. But things weren’t going as well as planned. For the first time in a hundred years, the Carmichaels’ flour mills were losing money. It didn’t matter how efficiently the brothers ran their two mills. The problem was not the mills; it was new fast steamships. The wheat used in the mills to make the flour came from America. It was shipped to Liverpool, England, and then sent on to Ireland. Once in Ireland, the Carmichael Mills would grind it into flour, which was sold in Ireland and England. The new fast steamships, however, made it possible to grind the wheat in America and then ship the flour straight to England, where it arrived in good condition and not infested with bugs, as was often the case during long sailboat trips across the Atlantic Ocean from North America. This meant that the Irish mills were having to produce their flour more and more cheaply to compete with American flour, until they were making hardly any profit at all. For the Carmichaels, that meant there was no money for private boarding schools, so Amy and her brothers had been called home.
Amy, though, continued to study music, painting, and singing at a private finishing school in Belfast, which suited her fine. She was glad the whole family was together again. In many ways, Marlborough House had been a lonely place for her, but she never was alone at home, not with six brothers and sisters, and Uncle William’s five children, who seemed to visit a lot. There were always enough children around the house to organize into teams for games.
Amy also liked being in the city. She was allowed to explore Belfast on her own. She loved to walk around and look at the huge five-story brick buildings that made up most of the city and stand by the side of the road and watch the horse-drawn trams go by.
One day, after she had been out exploring, Amy walked into the drawing room while her mother and father were having a serious conversation. Her mother looked as if she was about to cry, and her father was shrugging his shoulders and saying, “What can I do? What can I do?” Amy backed out of the room, not wanting to disturb her parents’ privacy.
Soon enough, though, she found out what they had been talking about. On top of the money problems created by cheap American flour, Mr. Carmichael had loaned one thousand pounds to a friend to help him get back on his feet after some financial difficulties. But the friend had lost Mr. Carmichael’s money, and Mr. Carmichael would not send his friend into bankruptcy by demanding it back. As a result, there wasn’t enough money for Amy to continue attending the finishing school. Instead, she began tutoring the younger children at home.
Mr. Carmichael worried continually about money. He spent hours thinking about how he could have done things differently. He worried so much that his health began to suffer, and in April 1885, he came down with pneumonia. Amy, now seventeen years old, nursed him day and night, but he did not recover like a man of fifty-three ought to have, and within several weeks he was dead.
Everything changed for Amy the day her father died. She was suddenly pushed into adulthood. As the oldest daughter, new responsibilities fell to her. It would be her job to care for the younger children. And to stretch out as far as possible what money her father had left, she also helped her mother with the care and cleaning of the house. There was no paying for servants to do those chores anymore.
Despite it all, Amy didn’t waste time feeling sorry for herself. She had a job to do, and her mother and brothers and sisters were depending on her. If it meant she would spend the next ten years taking care of her younger siblings, that is what she would do. And she would make it as much fun as she possibly could.
Chapter 3
A Voice from the Fountain
It took a while for things to settle down, but slowly life around the Carmichael house fell into a new pattern. But one thing didn’t change. Amy’s parents had been strong Christians, and although Mr. Carmichael was now dead, each Sunday Mrs. Carmichael continued to take the children to the Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church. The family walked to church together dressed in their best clothes. On the walk home, Amy and her brothers Norman and Ernest liked to walk ahead of their mother and the other children. It was on one of these walks home after church that something happened that completely changed Amy’s life.
It was a cold, dreary day, and Dr. Park, pastor of the Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church, had preached a particularly long sermon. After an hour and a half sitting in the drafty church, the whole Carmichael family was eager to get home to the warmth of the fire in the drawing room fireplace. As usual, Amy, Norman, and Ernest strode out in front. They were winding their way through the streets back to College Gardens when an old beggar woman came staggering out of a side alley. Her clothes were tattered, and her feet were wrapped in strips of rags that were clogged with mud. Slung across her back in an old coal sack was a bundle of sticks. The old woman was doubled over under the weight of the heavy bundle. As the woman stumbled along, Amy and her two brothers stopped and looked at her. Despite their father’s money woes, the Carmichael children had grown up with much more money than most people. Yet they had also been taught to help others regardless of whether they were rich or poor. So with a shrug, the three of them walked up beside the old woman. Norman lifted the bundle of sticks from her back while Amy and Ernest each took hold of one of the woman’s arms and walked along beside her. The old beggar woman smiled a toothless smile and pointed toward another alley about half a mile farther down the street.
The three Carmichael children had expected to help the old woman to a nearby building. The alley she pointed out was farther away than they’d intended to help her. Nonetheless, they would see her safely there. As they made their way along the street, Amy and Ernest, dressed in their best clothes, guided the old woman in tattered rags, while Norman, also in his Sunday best, followed along behind with the pile of sticks slung across the back of his topcoat. What they hadn’t figured on was that at the pace the old woman was walking, other people on their way home from church would catch up with them. But that is exactly what began to happen. One by one, church members stared at the strange sight as they walked by. Amy felt her face getting hotter as each person from church passed them, especially when one woman hurried her children to the other side of the road to avoid the four of them altogether.
Embarrassed, Amy and her brothers kept their heads down, not even looking at each other and hoping no one important came along and saw them. There was a fountain in the center of the road, and trying to take her mind off walking along beside the beggar woman, Amy studied it closely. It was made of blocks of cut stone, and the water sprayed out from three spouts at its center. As she studied it, Amy suddenly stopped. Someone was talking to her. She clearly heard a voice say, “Gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw…the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward.”
Amy turned to see who was speaking. There was no one there. But she had heard a voice, plain and clear. Puzzled, she walked on with the old woman on her arm. As she did, something felt very different inside. Amy was no longer embarrassed. In fact, she walked with her head held high for all to see. The trio escorted the old woman to where she wanted to go and then ran to catch up to their mother and the other children to finish the walk home.
After lunch, Amy went to her room. She knelt down by her bed. She knew the words she’d heard at the fountain were from the Bible, and finally she located them in her small, leather-bound edition. The words were from 1 Corinthians, chapter three, verses twelve through fourteen. Amy read them again. What was their meaning to her? Amy had known for as long as she could remember that God loved her, but she began to wonder about how knowing He loved her changed the way she acted each day.
