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

A Knight in Shining Armor (Montgomery/Taggart #15) Page 20

“Narrow-minded? They were good parents. They knew such a liaison could only end in tragedy—and it did!” he said fiercely.

Dougless’s ideas of being cool fled her mind. “The tragedy came because the parents—” They argued throughout the meal.

Later, as they walked back to the library, Dougless asked him how his brother Christopher had died.

Nicholas stopped walking and looked away. “I was to go hunting with him that day, but I had cut my arm during sword practice.” Dougless saw him rubbing his left forearm. “I still bear the scar.” After a moment Nicholas turned to her, and she could see the pain in his eyes. Whatever she thought of Nicholas Stafford, she had no doubt of his love for his brother. “He drowned. I was not the only brother who liked women. Kit saw a pretty girl swimming in a lake, and he told his men to leave him alone with her. After a few hours the men returned to find my brother floating in the lake.”

“And no one saw what happened?”

“Nay. Perhaps the girl did, but we never found her.”

Dougless was thoughtful for a moment. “How odd that your brother drowned with no witnesses to attest to what happened; then a few years later you were tried for treason. It’s almost as though someone planned to take the Stafford estates.”

Nicholas’s face changed. He looked at her with that expression men have when a woman says something they’ve not thought of—as though the impossible has happened.

“Who stood to inherit? Your dear, darling Lettice?” Dougless snapped her lips together, wishing she’d kept the jealousy out of her voice.

Nicholas didn’t seem to notice. “Lettice had her marriage property, but she lost all at my death. I inherited from Kit, but I can assure you I did not wish for his death.”

“Too much responsibility?” Dougless asked. “Being the boss carries a burden to it.”

He gave her a look of anger. “You believe your history books. Come,” he said, “you must read more. You must discover who betrayed me.”

Dougless read all afternoon while Nicholas laughed over The Merchant of Venice, but she could find out nothing more.

In the evening Nicholas wanted her to dine with him, but she refused. She knew she had to spend less time with him. Her heart was too newly broken and she had come too close to caring more for him than was good for her. Looking like a sad little boy, he stuck his hands in his pockets and went downstairs to dinner, while Dougless asked for a bowl of soup and some bread to be brought up to her room. As she ate, she went over her notes, but could come up with no new ideas. No one seemed to gain anything by the deaths of Christopher and Nicholas.

About ten P.M., Nicholas had still not returned from dinner so, curious, she went downstairs to look for him. He was in the beautiful stone-walled drawing room laughing with half a dozen guests. Dougless stood in the shadow of the doorway and watched—and anger, unreasonable, unjust anger, flooded her body. She had called him forward, but now two other women were drooling over him.

Turning away, she left the hallway. He was exactly as the books said, she thought. No wonder someone had so easily betrayed him. When he should have been taking care of business, he was probably in bed with some woman.

She went upstairs, put on her nightgown, and got into the little bed the hotel had brought up for her. But she didn’t sleep. Instead, she lay there feeling angry and foolish. Maybe she should have left with Robert. Robert had a bit of a problem about sharing money and he did love his daughter excessively, but he’d always been faithful to her.

At about eleven she heard Nicholas open the bedroom door, and she saw light under the door between their rooms. When she heard him open her door, she tightly closed her eyes.

“Dougless,” he whispered, but she didn’t answer. “I know you do not sleep, so answer me.”

She opened her eyes. “Should I get my pad and paper? I’m afraid I don’t take shorthand.”

Sighing, Nicholas took a step toward her. “I felt something from you tonight. Anger? Dougless, I do not want us to be enemies.”

“We’re not enemies,” she said sternly. “We are employer and employee. You are an earl and I am a commoner.”

“Dougless,” he said, his voice pleading and all too seductive. “You are not common. I meant . . .”

“Yes?”

He backed away. “Forgive me. I have had too much to drink, and my tongue runs away from me. I meant what I said. On the morrow you must discover more about my family. Good night, Miss Montgomery.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” she said mockingly.

In the morning, she refused to eat breakfast with him. This is better, she told herself. Do not relax for even a moment. Remind yourself that he is as much a scoundrel now as he was then. She walked to the library alone, and when she looked out its windows, she saw Nicholas laughing with a pretty young woman. Dougless buried her nose in the book.

Nicholas was still smiling when he came to sit across from her. “A new friend?” she asked, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

“She is an American and she was telling me about baseball. And football.”

“You told her that you’ve never heard of those sports because last week you were in Elizabethan England?” Dougless was aghast.

Nicholas smiled. “She believes me to be a man of learning, so I have had not time for such tilly-fally.”

“Learning, ha!” Dougless muttered.

Nicholas continued to smile. “You are jealous?”

“Jealous? Most certainly not. I am your employee. I have no right to be jealous. Did you tell her about your wife?”

Nicholas picked up one of the books of Shakespeare’s plays the librarian had left out for him. “You are frampold this morning,” he said, but he was smiling as though he was pleased.

Dougless had no idea what he meant, so she wrote the word down and looked it up later. Disagreeable. So, he thought she was disagreeable, did he? She went back to her research.

At three o’clock she nearly jumped out of her chair. “Look! It’s here.” Excitedly, she went around the table to take the chair next to Nicholas. “This paragraph, see?” He did, but he could read only phrases of it. She was holding a two-month-old copy of a magazine on English history.

“This article is on Goshawk Hall that we heard about at Bellwood. It says that there’s been a recent find at Goshawk of papers of the Stafford family—and the papers date from the sixteenth century. The papers are now being studied by Dr. Hamilton J. Nolman, a young man with . . . There’s an impressive list of his credentials, then . . . it says that Dr. Nolman ‘hopes to prove that Nicholas Stafford, who was accused of treason at the beginning of Elizabeth the First’s reign, was actually innocent.’”

When Dougless looked at Nicholas, the expression in his eyes was almost embarrassing.

“This is why I have been sent here,” he said softly. “Nothing could be proved until these papers were found. We must go to Goshawk.”

“We can’t just go. First, we’ll have to petition the owners to look at the papers.” She closed the magazine. “What size of house must it be to have misplaced a trunkload of papers for four hundred years?”

“Goshawk Hall is not so large as four of my houses,” Nicholas said as though he were offended.

Dougless leaned back in the chair and felt that at last they were getting somewhere. She had no doubt that these papers had belonged to Nicholas’s mother, and they contained the information Nicholas needed to prove himself innocent.

“Well, hello.”

They looked up to see the pretty young woman who had explained baseball to Nicholas. “I thought that was you,” she said, then gave Dougless the once-over. “Is this your friend?”

“I’m merely his secretary,” Dougless said, rising. “Will there be anything else, my lord?”

“Lord?!” the young woman gasped. “You’re a lord?”

Nicholas started to leave with Dougless, but the overexcited American, thrilled at meeting a lord, would not allow him to go.

As Dougless went back to the hotel, she was trying her best to think of her letter to Goshawk Hall, but, actually, she was thinking mostly of Nicholas flirting with the pretty American. It didn’t matter to her, of course. This was just a job. Soon she’d be home, teaching her fifth graders, dating now and then, visiting her family and telling them all about England—and explaining how she was ditched by one man and half fell in love with a man who was married and about four hundred and fifty-one years old.

The best Dougless-story yet, she thought.

By the time she got to the hotel, she was slamming things about. Damn all men, she thought. Damn the good ones as well as the bad. They broke your heart over and over again.

“I see your temper has not improved,” Nicholas said from behind her.

“My temper is not your concern,” she snapped. “I was hired to do a job, and I’m doing it. I’m going to write Goshawk Hall and see when we can look at the papers.”

Nicholas was beginning to get angry himself. “The animosity you be-mete to me has not foundation.”

“I have no animosity toward you,” she said with fury. “I’m doing my best to help you so you can get back to your loving wife and to your own time.” Her head came up. “I just realized that there’s no need for you to be here. I can do the research alone. You can’t read modern books anyway. Why don’t you go to . . . to the French Riviera or somewhere? I can do this by myself.”

“You would that I leave?” he asked softly.

“Sure, why not? You could go to London and party. You could meet all the beautiful women of this century. We have lots of tables nowadays.”

Nicholas stiffened. “You want away from me?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” she said. “My research would go much better without you. You’re . . . you’re just getting in my way. You know nothing about my world, so you can’t help me. You can barely dress yourself, you still eat with your hands half the time, you can’t read or write our language, and I have to explain the simplest things to you. It would be a thousand times better if you left me alone.” Her hands were gripping the chair back so hard her knuckles appeared to be about to come through the skin.

When she glanced up at him, the na**d pain on his face was more than she could bear. He had to leave, she thought. He had to let her piece her mind and body back together. Before she yet again humiliated herself with tears, she turned and left the room. Once she was in her own sleeping alcove, she leaned against the door and cried deeply.

Just to get this over, she thought, to send him away, to go back home and never even look at another man again, that’s what she needed.

She fell down on her bed, buried her face in her pillow, and cried silently. She cried for a long time, until the worst of it was over and she began to feel better. And once her tears were shed, she began to think more clearly.

How stupid she’d been acting! What had Nicholas done wrong? She visualized him sitting in a dungeon awaiting execution for a crime he didn’t commit, then the next minute he’s floating through the air and he’s in the twentieth century.

She sat up and blew her nose. And how well he’d handled everything! He’d adjusted to automobiles, paper money, a strange language, strange food, and . . . And a weepy woman suffering from the rejection of another man. Yet, through it all, Nicholas had been generous with his money, his laughter, and his knowledge.

And what had Dougless done? She’d been furious with him because he’d dared marry another woman some four hundred years ago.

When she looked at it that way, it was almost humorous. She glanced up at the door. Her room was dark, but there was light coming under the door. The things she’d said to him! Awful, terrible things.

She practically ran to the door and flung it open. “Nicholas, I—” The room was empty. She opened the door into the hall and looked out, but the hallway was also empty. When she turned back into the room, she saw the note on the floor, where he must have slipped it under her door. Quickly she looked at the note.

Dougless had no idea what the words said, but to her eyes the paper looked like an Elizabethan runaway note. His clothes were still in the closet and so were his capcases—suitcases, she corrected herself.

She had to find him and apologize, tell him he shouldn’t leave, tell him that she did need his help. Her head seemed to ring with all the rotten, terrible things she’d said to him in the last two days. He could read. And he had lovely table manners. He— Damn, damn, damn, she thought as she tore down the stairs and ran out of the hotel into the rain.

She clasped her hands about her upper arms, put her head down, and started running. She had to find him. He probably had no idea what an umbrella was or a raincoat. He’d catch his death. Or he’d be fighting the rain so hard he’d walk in front of a bus—or a train. Would he know a train track from a sidewalk? What if he got on a train by himself? He wouldn’t know where to get off—or how to get back to her if he did get off.

She ran to the train station, but it was closed. Good, she thought, pushing cold, wet hair out of her face so she could see. She tried to read the dial on her watch, but the rain was hitting her in the face too hard to see clearly. It looked to be after eleven, so she must have been crying for hours. She shivered, thinking what could have happened to him in all those hours.

There was a shadow in a gutter, and Dougless ran to it, knowing it was Nicholas lying dead in a heap. But it was only a shadow. Blinking, trying to keep her eyes open against the rain, sneezing twice, she looked at the dark windows of the village.

Maybe he had just started walking. How far could a person walk in . . . ? She didn’t even know how long he’d been gone. Which direction had he gone?

She started running toward the end of the street, cold water splashing up the back of her legs and under her skirt. There seemed to be no lights on anywhere; then, as she rounded a corner, she saw a light in a window. A pub, she thought. She’d ask there and see if anyone had seen him.

When she walked in, the warmth and light of the pub hit her so strongly that for a moment she couldn’t see.

Freezing, shivering, dripping, she stood still to allow her eyes to adjust to the light; then she heard a laugh that had become familiar to her. Nicholas! she thought, as she ran through the smoke-filled room.

What she saw was like a painting advertising the seven sins. Nicholas, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist, a cigar clamped between his strong teeth, sat behind a table that looked as though it might break under the weight of the food on it. There was a pretty woman on either side of him, and there was lipstick on his cheeks and his shirt.