A Knight in Shining Armor (Montgomery/Taggart #15)

A Knight in Shining Armor (Montgomery/Taggart #15) Page 15

Grabbing Nicholas’s arm, Dougless pulled him away from the buzzing door and back through two rooms.

“What trivial knowledge is remembered through these hundreds of years,” Nicholas said in anger.

She looked up at him with interest. “Is it true?” she asked. “About Lady Arabella? About the table?”

He frowned at her. “Nay, madam, such did not happen on that table.” Turning, he walked away.

Smiling, Dougless was relieved that the story wasn’t true—not that it mattered, but still . . .

“I gave the true table to Arabella,” he said over his shoulder.

Dougless gasped as she watched him walk away, but she hurriedly followed him. “You impregnated—” she began, but when he halted and looked down his nose at her, she stopped speaking. He had a way of looking at a person that could make you believe he was an aristocrat.

“We will see if these sottish people have violated my cabinet,” he said, again turning away from her.

Dougless had to run to cover the distance his long legs were eating up. “You can’t go in there,” she said as he put his hand on a door that had a NO ADMITTANCE sign on it. Ignoring her, Nicholas pulled on the latch. For a moment, Dougless closed her eyes and held her breath, waiting for a buzzer to go off. When there was no sound, tentatively, she opened her eyes and saw that Nicholas had disappeared behind the door. With a quick look around to see if anyone was watching, she followed him, expecting to walk into a room full of secretaries.

But there were no secretaries in the room, nor any people at all. There were just boxes stacked to the ceiling, and from what was printed on the sides, they looked to be full of paper napkins and other items for the tearoom. Behind the boxes was beautiful paneling that Dougless thought was a shame to hide.

She caught sight of Nicholas as he opened another door, so she ran after him. She followed him through three more rooms and got to see the difference between restored and unrestored. The rooms not open to the public had broken fireplaces, missing paneling, and painted ceilings spoiled by a leaky roof. In one room some Victorian had put wallpaper over the carved oak panels, and Dougless could see where workmen were painstakingly removing it.

At last Nicholas led her to a small room off a larger one. Here the ceiling had leaked until the plaster was a dirty brown, and the wide floorboards looked to be dangerously rotten. Standing in the doorway, she saw Nicholas looking about the room, sadness in his eyes.

“This was my brother’s chamber, and I was here but a fortnight ago,” he said softly, then shrugged as though to block the regret from his mind. He walked across the rotten boards, went to a section of the paneling, and pushed at it. Nothing happened.

“The lock has rusted,” he said, “or someone has sealed it shut.”

Suddenly, he seemed to become enraged and began hammering on the paneling with both fists.

Mindless of the disintegrating floor, Dougless ran to him, and not knowing what else to do, she put her arms around him, pulled his head to her shoulder, and stroked his hair. “Sssh,” she whispered as she would to a child. “Quiet.”

He clung to her, held her so tightly she could barely breathe. “It was my intent to be remembered for my learning,” he said against her neck, and there were tears in his voice. “I commissioned monks to copy hundreds of books. I began building Thornwyck. I have . . . Had. It is done now.”

“Sssh,” Dougless soothed, holding his broad shoulders.

He pushed away from her and turned his back, but Dougless saw him wipe away tears. “They remember a moment on a table with Arabella,” he said.

When he looked back at her, his face was fierce. “If I had lived . . .” he said. “If I had but lived, I would have changed all. I must find out what my mother knew. She believed she had knowledge that would clear my name and save me from execution. And once I know this, I must return. I must change what is now said about me and about my family.”

As Dougless looked at him, it was at that moment that she knew he was telling the truth. It was the way she, too, felt about her family. She didn’t want to be remembered for all the idiot things she’d done. She wanted to be remembered for her good deeds. Last summer, she’d volunteered to help children who couldn’t read. For four summers in a row she’d spent three days a week at a shelter where she worked with children who, for the most part, had had very little kindness in their lives.

“We’ll find out,” she said softly. “If the information still exists today, we’ll find it, and when we have the information, I’m sure you’ll be sent back.”

“You know how to do this?” he asked.

“No, I don’t. But maybe it’ll just happen once you know what you were sent here to find out.”

He was frowning, but, slowly, his frown changed to a smile. “You have changed. You are looking at me in a different way. Do you not tell me I am lying?”

“No,” she said slowly. “No one could act this well.” She didn’t want to think about what she was saying. A sixteenth-century man could not come forward in time, but . . . but it had happened.

“Look at this,” she said as she touched the section of paneling he had been pounding. A little door stood open about an inch.

Nicholas pulled the door open. “My father told only my brother of this hidden cabinet, and Kit showed me but a week before he died. I told no one. The secret of its existence died with me.”

As she watched, he stuck his hand in the hole and pulled out a roll of yellowed, brittle papers.

Nicholas looked at the papers in disbelief. “I but put these in here a few days ago. They were new-made then.”

Taking the papers from him, she unrolled them a bit. They were covered top to bottom, side to side, no margins, with writing that was incomprehensible to her.

“Ah, here is your treasure.” He showed Dougless a small yellow white box, beautifully carved with figures of people and animals.

“This is ivory?” she asked in wonder as she handed him the papers, then took the box. She had seen boxes like this one in museums, but she’d never touched one. “It’s beautiful, and it’s a wonderful treasure.”

Nicholas laughed. “The box is not the treasure. That lies inside. But wait,” he said as Dougless began to open the lid. “I find I am greatly in need of sustenance.” He shoved the papers back into the cabinet as though he never wanted to see them again. Then he took the box from her, opened the tote bag she’d purchased, and slipped the box inside.

“You’re going to make me wait until after you’ve eaten before I can see what’s inside that box?” She was incredulous.

Nicholas laughed. “It pleases me to see that the nature of woman has not changed these four hundred years.”

She gave him a smug look. “Don’t get too smart, or did you forget that I have your return train ticket?”

She thought she had bested him, but as she watched, his face changed to softness, and he looked at her through his lashes in a way that made Dougless’s heart beat a little faster. He stepped forward; she stepped back.

“You have heard,” he said, his voice low, “that no woman can withstand me.”

Dougless was backed against the wall, her heart pounding in her ears as he looked down at her. Putting his fingertips under her chin, he gently lifted her face upward. Was he going to kiss her? she wondered, half in outrage and half in anticipation. Anticipation won out; she closed her eyes.

“I shall seduce my way back to the hotel,” he said in a different tone that made Dougless know he’d been teasing her—and he’d known exactly how his warm looks would affect her.

When her eyes flew open and she straightened up, he chucked her under the chin as a father might do—or as the gorgeous private eye might do to his soppy secretary.

“Ah, but mayhap I could not seduce a woman of today. You have told me that women now are not as they were in my day,” he said, shutting the little secret door. “Alas, this is the day of women’s . . .”

“Lib,” she answered. “Liberation.” She was thinking about Lady Arabella on the table.

He looked back at her. “I am sure I would not be able to charm a woman such as you. You have told me that you love . . . ?”

“Robert. Yes, I do,” Dougless said firmly. “Maybe when I get back to the States, he and I can work things out. Or maybe when he gets my message about the bracelet, he’ll come for me.” She wanted to remember Robert. Compared to this man, Robert seemed safe.

“Ah,” Nicholas said, starting for the door, Dougless inches behind him.

“Just what is that supposed to mean?”

“No more, no less.”

She blocked him from leaving the room. “If you want to say something, say it.”

“This Robert will come for jewels but not for the woman he loves?”

“Of course he’s coming for me!” she snapped. “The bracelet is . . . It’s just that Gloria is a brat and she lied, but she’s his daughter so of course Robert believed her. And stop looking at me like that! Robert is a fine man. At least he’ll be remembered for what he did on an operating table instead of on a—” She stopped at the look on Nicholas’s face.

Turning, he strode ahead of her.

“Nicholas, I’m sorry,” she said, running after him. “I didn’t mean it. I was just angry, that’s all. It’s not your fault you’re remembered for Arabella; it’s our fault. We see too much TV, read too much National Enquirer. Our lives are filled with too much sensationalism. Colin, please.” She stopped where she was. Was he going to walk away and leave her too?

Her head was down, so she wasn’t aware that he’d walked back to her. Companionably, he put his arm around her shoulders. “Do they sell ice cream in this place?”

When she smiled at that, he tipped her chin up and wiped away a single tear. “Are you onion-eyed again?” he asked softly.

She shook her head, afraid to trust her voice.

“Then come,” he said. “If I remember rightly, there is a pearl in that box as big as my thumb.”

“Really?” she asked. She had forgotten all about the box. “Anything else?”

“Tea first,” he said. “Tea and scones and ice cream. Then I shall show you the box.”

They walked together out of the unrestored rooms, past the next tour, and out the In, which the guides did not like at all.

In the tea shop, this time, Nicholas took over. Dougless sat at a table and waited for him as he talked to a woman behind the counter. The woman was shaking her head about something Nicholas was asking, but Dougless had an idea that he’d get whatever it was that he wanted.

Minutes later, he motioned for her to come with him. He led her outside, then down stone stairs, across an acre of garden, to at last stop under the dappled shade of a yew tree with bright red berries. When Dougless turned around, she saw a woman and a man carrying two large trays filled with tea, pastries, little sandwiches with no crusts, and Nicholas’s beloved scones.

Nicholas ignored the two people as they spread a cloth on the ground and set out the tea things. “There was my knot garden,” he said, pointing, his voice heavy with sadness. “And there was a mound.”

After the people left, Nicholas held out his hand to help her sit on the cloth. She poured his tea, added milk, filled a plate full of food for him, then said, “Now?”

He smiled. “Now.”

Dougless dove into the tote bag and pulled out the old, fragile ivory box, then slowly, with breath held, opened it.

Inside were two rings of exquisite loveliness, one an emerald, one a ruby, the gold mountings cast into intricate forms of dragons and snakes. Nicholas took the rings and, smiling at her, slipped them onto his fingers, where, she wasn’t surprised to see, they fit perfectly.

On the bottom of the box was a bit of old, cracked velvet, and she could see that it was wrapped around something. Gingerly, Dougless removed the velvet and slowly opened it.

In her hand lay a brooch, oval, with little gold figures of . . . She looked up at Nicholas. “What are they doing?”

“It’s the martyrdom of Saint Barbara,” he said, his tone implying that she knew nothing.

Dougless had guessed it was a martyrdom because it looked as if the gold man was about to cut off the head of the tiny gold woman. Encircling the figures was an abstract enamel design, and around the edges were tiny pearls and diamonds. Hanging from a loop below the brooch was indeed a pearl as large as a man’s thumb. It was a baroque pearl, indented, even lumpy, but with a luster that no years could dim.

“It’s lovely,” she whispered.

“It is yours,” Nicholas said.

A wave of avarice shot through Dougless. “I cannot,” she said, even as her hand closed over the jewel.

Nicholas laughed. “It is a woman’s bauble. You may keep it.”

“I can’t. It’s too valuable. This pin is worth too much and it’s too old. It should be in a museum. It should—”

Taking the jewel from her hand, he pinned it between the collar points of her blouse.

Dougless took her compact from her purse, opened the mirror, and looked at the brooch. She also looked at her face. “I have to go to the rest room,” she said, making Nicholas laugh as she rose.

Alone in the rest room, she had some time to really look at the pin, and only left when someone else entered. On her way back to Nicholas, she couldn’t resist slipping into the gift shop to look at the postcards. It took her a moment to see what Nicholas had not wanted her to see. There, on the bottom of a rack, was a postcard of a portrait of the notorious Lady Arabella. Dougless took one.

As she was paying, Dougless asked the cashier if there was anything in any of the books for sale about Nicholas Stafford.

The woman smiled in a patronizing way. “All the young ladies ask after him. We usually have cards of his portrait, but we’re out right now.”

“There’s nothing written about him? About his accomplishments other than . . . than with women?” Dougless asked.

Again there was that little smirk. “I don’t believe Lord Nicholas accomplished anything. The only thing of importance that he did was to raise an army against the queen, and he was sentenced to be executed for that. If he hadn’t died beforehand, he would have been beheaded. He was quite a scoundrel of a young man.”

Dougless took the single postcard and started to leave, but she turned back. “What happened to Lord Nicholas’s mother after he died?”