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

A Knight in Shining Armor (Montgomery/Taggart #15) Page 32

She paused. “Why are you looking at me like that? Where are you going?”

“I make for my home, away from your Colley-westonward talk.” He stood up, then began to tuck his shirt into his balloon shorts.

Dougless rose too. “‘Colley-westonward.’ That’s a new one on me. Nicholas, wait, you can’t leave.”

He turned back to face her. “If you desire to finish what you began”—he nodded toward the ground—“I will remain and I will pay you well, but I cannot abide this deboshed manner of speaking.”

Dougless stood there blinking at him, trying to understand what he was saying. “Pay me?” she whispered. “Nicholas, what’s wrong with you? You act as though you’ve never seen me before.”

“Nay, madam, I have not,” he said, then turned his back to her and left the clearing.

Dougless was too stunned to move. Never seen her before? What was he talking about? She pushed through the bushes. Nicholas was dressed in the most extraordinary clothes. His black satin jacket seemed to be decorated with . . .

“Are those diamonds?” she gasped.

Nicholas narrowed his eyes at her. “I do not deal kindly with thieves.”

“I wasn’t planning to rob you; it’s just that I’ve never seen anyone who had diamonds on his clothes before.” Stepping back, she looked at him, really looked at him, and she saw that he was different. It wasn’t just the clothes or that he was again wearing his beard and mustache, but there was a seriousness missing from his face. This was Nicholas, but he somehow seemed younger.

How could he have grown his beard back so soon?

“Nicholas?” she asked. “When you were last home, not the first time you came to me, but this time, what year was it?”

Nicholas slipped a short cloak of black satin that was trimmed in ermine about his shoulders, and from behind the bushes he pulled a horse, an animal as wild-looking as the rented Sugar had been. Easily, he vaulted into a saddle that was as big as an American cowboy’s saddle, but it had tall wooden uprights in front of and in back of the seat. “When last I was home this morn, it was the year of our Lord 1560. Now, you, witch, get from my sight.”

Dougless had to step back against the bushes to keep from being run down by the horse. “Nicholas, wait!” she called, but he was gone.

Disbelieving, Dougless stared after him until he was little more than a speck on the horizon; then she sat down on a big rock, her head in her hands. Now what? she thought. Did she have to start all over again and explain to him yet again all about the twentieth century? The last time she’d seen him, he’d come from 1564, but this time it was four years earlier. What had happened hadn’t happened yet.

Her head came up. Of course! That was it. When he’d found out about Robert Sydney, he’d been in jail—or the medieval equivalent thereof—and he couldn’t do much about saving himself. But this time he’d come forward four years earlier. Now there was time to prevent what had caused his execution.

Feeling a great deal more cheerful, she stood up. She had to go find him before he did something dumb, like walk in front of a bus again. Picking up her heavy tote bag from the ground, she slung it over her shoulder, then started walking in the direction Nicholas had gone.

The road was the worst she’d ever seen: deep ruts, rocks sticking up, narrow and weed-choked. The roads in rural America weren’t this bad, and she’d never seen anything like this before in England.

She stepped to the side of the road when she heard a vehicle coming around a corner. A tired-looking donkey was pulling a cart that had two big wooden wheels. Beside the cart walked a man wearing a short dress that looked as though it’d been made from a burlap bag. His legs, bare from mid-calf down, had great ugly sores on them. Dougless stared at him in openmouthed astonishment, and the man turned and gaped at her in the same way. His face was like leather, and when he opened his mouth, Dougless could see rotten teeth. He looked her up and down, his eyes fastening on her stocking-clad legs; then he leered at her, grinning and showing off his hideous teeth.

Quickly, Dougless turned away and started walking rapidly. The road got worse, the ruts deeper, and there was manure everywhere. “England’s using manure to fill the ruts now?” she muttered.

At the top of a little hill she stopped and looked down. Below her were three little houses, tiny places with thatched roofs and bare ground in front of them where chickens and ducks and children scratched about. A woman wearing a long skirt came out the front door of one hut and emptied a round container beside the door.

Dougless started down the hill. Perhaps she could ask directions of the woman. But as she neared the houses, she slowed. She could smell the place. Animals, people, rotting food, piles of manure, all of it reeked. Dougless put her hand to her nose and breathed through her mouth. Really! she thought, the English government should do something about this place. People shouldn’t live like this.

She went to the first house, trying to keep her shoes clean but not succeeding very well. A child, about three, wearing a filthy nightgown, looked up at her. The poor thing looked as though it hadn’t been washed in a year, and it obviously wasn’t wearing a diaper. Dougless vowed that when she got Nicholas straightened out, she was going to complain about this place to the English government. It was a health hazard.

“Excuse me,” she called into the dark interior of the house. It didn’t seem to smell much better inside than out. “Hello? Is anybody home?”

No one answered, but Dougless felt as though she were being watched. When she turned, she saw three women and a couple of children behind her. The women weren’t any cleaner than the child she’d seen, their long dresses encrusted with food and no telling what else.

Dougless tried smiling. “Excuse me, but I’m looking for the Ashburton church. I seem to have lost my way.”

The women didn’t speak, but one woman stepped toward Dougless. It was difficult to keep smiling, for the woman reeked of body odor.

“Do you know the way to Ashburton?” Dougless repeated.

The woman just walked around Dougless, staring at her, looking at her clothes, her hair, her face.

“A bunch of looney tunes,” Dougless muttered. Living in filth as they did, they probably weren’t too bright. She stepped away from the stinking woman and unzipped her tote bag. The woman jumped back at the sound. Dougless took out her map of southern England and looked at it, but it didn’t help any because she didn’t know where she was, so she couldn’t figure out how to get where she was going.

She lowered the map when she realized one of the women was very near, her head almost inside Dougless’s bag. “I beg your pardon,” she said sharply. The woman’s head was covered with a cloth that was caked with dirt and grease.

The woman jumped away but not before she’d snatched Dougless’s sunglasses from her bag. She ran back to the other women, and the three of them examined the glasses.

“This is too much.” Dougless strode toward the women, her foot slipping in something, but she didn’t look down. “May I have those back?”

The women looked at her with hard faces. One of them had deep, pitted scars on her neck, and she held the sunglasses behind her back.

Dougless put her hands to her sides. “Would you please return my property?”

“Be gone with you,” one of the women said, and Dougless saw that three upper teeth were missing and two others were rotten.

It was then that she began to understand. She looked at the house before her, saw the firewood stacked outside, saw the onions hanging from the roof. The dirt, the carts, the people who had never heard of a dentist.

“Who is your queen?” she whispered.

“Elizabeth,” one woman said in an odd accent.

“Right,” Dougless whispered, “and who was her mother?”

“The witch Anne Bullen.”

The women were gathering around her now, but Dougless was too stunned to notice. Nicholas had said that this morning it had been 1560; then he’d ridden off on a horse with a funny saddle. He hadn’t seemed disoriented or unsure of where he was going. He hadn’t acted as he had when he’d first arrived in the twentieth century. Instead, he’d acted as though he were right at home.

“Ow!” Dougless said, for one of the women had pulled her hair.

“Be ye a witch?” one of the women asked, standing very close to Dougless.

Suddenly, Dougless was afraid. It was one thing to laugh at a man in the twentieth century for calling someone a witch, but in the sixteenth century people were burned for being witches.

“Of course I’m not a witch,” Dougless said, backing away, but there was a woman behind her.

A woman pulled on Dougless’s sleeve. “Witch’s clothes.”

“No, of course they aren’t. I live . . . ah, in another village, that’s all. Next year you’ll all be wearing this.” She couldn’t go back or forward, for the surrounding women were blocking her. You’d better think fast, Dougless, she thought, or you just might be this evening’s barbecue. While keeping an eye on the women, she put her hand into her tote bag, digging for she knew not what. Her hand lit on a book of matches she’d taken from a hotel somewhere.

She pulled out the matches, tore off one, and struck it. With a gasp the women moved back. “In the house,” she said, holding the lit match at arm’s length. “Go on, get in the house.”

The women backed up and stepped inside the doorway just as the match burned down to Dougless’s fingertips. She dropped the match and began to run.

Leaving the stinking houses and the rutted road behind, she ran into the woods. When she was out of breath, she sat down on the ground and leaned back against a tree.

It appeared that when she’d passed out in the church, she’d awakened in the sixteenth century. So here she was, alone—Nicholas didn’t know her—in a time before soap was invented—or at least before it was used much—and the people seemed to regard her as something evil.

“So how am I to tell Nicholas all he needs to know if I don’t even see him?” she whispered.

The first drops of rain were cold on Dougless. She pulled an umbrella from her travel bag and opened it. It was at that moment that she really looked at her beat-up old carry-on. She’d had the thing for years. It had traveled with her wherever she’d gone, and she’d gradually filled it with everything anyone could need while traveling. Inside were cosmetics, medicines, toiletries, a sewing kit, an office kit, magazines, a nightgown, airline nut packages, felt-tip pens, and there was no telling what was in the very bottom.

She pulled the bag under the umbrella with her, feeling as though the bag were her only friend. Think, Dougless, think, she told herself. She had to tell Nicholas what he must know; then she had to get back to her own time. Already she knew that she didn’t want to stay in this backward place with its filthy, ignorant people. In just this short time she was already missing hot showers and electric blankets.

She huddled under the umbrella as the rain started coming down harder. The ground under her was getting wet, and she thought of sitting on a magazine, but who knows? She might end up selling the magazines in order to live.

She put her head down on her knees. “Oh, Nicholas, where are you?” she whispered.

Then she remembered the evening of the first day she’d met him and how she’d been in that toolshed crying. He’d come to her then, and later he’d said he’d heard her “calling.” If it worked then, maybe it would work now.

With her head down, she concentrated on asking Nicholas to come to her. She visualized his riding up to her; then she thought of all their time together. She smiled, remembering a dinner, chosen by her, that their landlady had cooked for them: corn-on-the-cob, avocados, barbecued spareribs, and a mango for dessert. Nicholas had laughed like a small boy. She remembered the music he’d played, his delight over the books, how critical he had been of modern clothes.

“Come to me, Nicholas,” she whispered. “Come to me.”

It was dusk and the rain was coming down hard and cold when Nicholas appeared, sitting atop his big black horse.

She grinned up at him. “I knew you’d come.”

He did not smile but instead glared down at her in anger. “Lady Margaret would see you,” he said.

“Your mother? Your mother wants to see me?” She couldn’t be sure because of the rain, but he seemed to be momentarily shocked at her words. “All right,” Dougless said, rising, then handing him her umbrella and raising her hand for him to help her onto his horse.

To her disbelief, he took the umbrella, examined it with interest, then held it over his own head and rode off, leaving Dougless standing with rain pelting down on her. “Of all the—” she began. Was she supposed to walk while he rode?

She moved back to the relative dryness under the tree, and after a while Nicholas returned, the umbrella held over him.

“You are to come with me,” he said.

“Am I supposed to go on foot?” she yelled up at him. “You ride while I slog along in the mud and muck behind you? And you use my umbrella? Is that what you had in mind?”

He seemed confused for a moment. “Your speech is most strange.”

“Not as strange as your outdated ideas. Nicholas, I am cold and hungry and getting wetter by the minute. Help me on your horse and let’s go see your mother.”

Nicholas gave a bit of a smile at her insolent attitude, then held down his hand for her. Dougless took it, put her foot on his, and swung onto the back of the horse—not into the saddle with him but onto the hard, unsteady rump of the horse. Dougless put her arms around Nicholas’s waist, but he pried her loose and pushed her hands down to the high back of the saddle, then handed her the umbrella.

“Hold this over me,” he said, and kicked the horse forward.

Dougless wanted to make a retort, but all her attention was on holding on to the horse. She had to use two hands to hold on, so the umbrella hung uselessly to the side as they sped along. Through the rain she saw more hovels, more people working in the rain, apparently oblivious of it. “Maybe it’ll wash them,” she muttered, hanging on as best she could.

Because she was behind Nicholas and he was too tall to see over, she didn’t see the house until they were in front of it. There was a tall stone wall before them, and behind it stood a three-story stone house.

A man wearing clothes somewhat like Nicholas’s—no burlap dress but no diamonds either—came running to take the horse’s reins. Nicholas dismounted, then stood impatiently by, slapping his gloves against his palm, while Dougless struggled down by herself, lugging her heavy bag and the umbrella.