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

A Knight in Shining Armor (Montgomery/Taggart #15) Page 40

This thought made her forgive him for his hostility. What if she’d had an ulterior motive for wanting to be near his family? It wasn’t good to be as trusting as the family was. Nicholas was the one who was right. He should mistrust her. Since he consciously remembered nothing of her from before, he had no reason to trust her. And what with the bond between them and the way he “heard” her calling him at times, he had every reason to believe her to be a witch.

But he did remember, she thought. He said he remembered nothing, but he’d remembered the calculator enough to use it correctly. She wondered if there were other things he remembered and she began to think of the contents of her tote bag. What else could she show him that might further jog his memory?

In the Presence Chamber everyone was in a flurry. It seemed that the caterer’s goods had arrived. Dougless learned that this was a man who traveled all over England to buy special foods for the Stafford family, then sent them back once a month. This month he’d sent back pineapples and cocoa powder that had been imported from Mexico to Spain, then into England. There was also sugar from Brazil.

Standing back and watching as the women exclaimed over these delicacies, Dougless couldn’t help but think how the twentieth century took food for granted. Americans could have any food at any time of the year.

As Dougless looked at the chocolate powder, carefully wrapped in cloth, she thought of the American picnic she’d cooked for Nicholas: fried chicken, potato salad, deviled eggs, and chocolate brownies.

Suddenly an idea hit her. She’d heard that smells and flavors were some of the strongest memory generators. She knew that certain foods reminded her of her grandmother, Amanda, for there was always an astonishing variety of food in her grandmother’s house. And the smell of jasmine always reminded Dougless of her mother. If Nicholas was served the same meal he’d eaten in the twentieth century, would it help him remember more of the time he’d spent with her?

Dougless went to Lady Margaret and asked permission to be allowed to prepare the evening meal. Lady Margaret was pleased with the idea, but horrified that Dougless wanted to work in the kitchen herself. She proposed that Dougless tell the Groom of the Pantry what she wanted and that she talk to the Groom of the Kitchen (the one “for the mouth”) and not go to the kitchen herself.

Dougless did her best to insist; besides, Lady Margaret had piqued her curiosity about the kitchen. And what in the world was a Groom of the Kitchen “for the mouth”?

After the long, sumptuous dinner, Dougless went downstairs to the kitchen and was awed at what she saw: room after room with enormous fireplaces, huge tables, and many, many people scurrying about. But she soon discovered that each person had a job. There were two slaughtermen, two bakers, two brewers, a maltmaker, a couple of hop men, laundresses, children to do odd jobs, and even a man called a roughcaster whose job it was to patch the plaster when it fell down. There were also clerks to record every penny of expense. And all of these people had helpers.

Huge carcasses of beef and pork were delivered into the kitchen in wagons, then passed through to the slaughtering room. Storage rooms, bigger than houses, were filled with barrels. Sausages as big as an arm and several feet long hung from the tall ceilings. In two rooms, set back in the wall high above the double fireplaces, were tiers of beds with straw mattresses where many of the kitchen workers slept.

The head groom took her through the rooms, and after Dougless was able to close her mouth in awe at the size of the place and at the vast quantity of food prepared in the kitchen room, she began to tell the man what she wanted to do.

Swallowing, she saw crates of chickens brought in; then a large woman began wringing necks. Cauldrons of water were put on to boil to scald the chickens so their feathers could be plucked, and she was told that the softest of these chicken feathers were saved to be used for pillows for the servants.

She was surprised that potatoes were found in a sixteenth-century household but not eaten often. But under Dougless’s directions, women were soon set to peeling potatoes, and others to boiling eggs that were much smaller than twentieth-century eggs.

To get the flour for the batter for the chicken and for the brownies, Dougless was taken to the bolting room. Here flour was repeatedly sifted through fabric sieves, each one of increasing fineness. Dougless began to understand why pure white bread, called manchet, was so prized. The lower the status of the person in the household, the coarser his bread. Bread that had been bolted only once still had lots of bran—and sand and dirt—in it. Only the family and their immediate retainers got bread that had been bolted until it was perfectly clean.

Dougless knew there would be enough chicken, eggs, and potatoes for the whole household, but the brownies with the precious, expensive chocolate would be for the family only. One of the cooks helped her decide how much chicken got coated with rough flour and how much got flour from the next bolting, how much from the next, and so on. Dougless wasn’t about to give a lecture on equality, especially since she knew the finest flour had no bran in it and many of the vitamins were missing, and therefore was not as nutritious as the flour that had been bolted fewer times. Dougless just concentrated on preparing a meal that could feed an army.

The meal, which had been so easy when prepared in a modern English kitchen and done on a small scale, was not easy in the sixteenth century. Everything had to be made in vats and from scratch. There was no mustard or mayonnaise from the grocery for the eggs and potatoes. All the pepper, kept under lock and key, was whole and someone had to pick out the stones; then the peppercorns had to be crushed in a mortar the size of a bathtub. The nuts for the brownies didn’t come in a plastic bag but had to be shelled.

As Dougless supervised, she watched and learned. Her only moment of panic came when she saw that the cake pans were lined with paper that had been written on. She watched in horror when she saw chocolate batter being poured over a deed that she was sure had been signed by Henry the Seventh.

By the time the meal was nearly ready to be served, Dougless knew that the meal had to be a picnic. As though she’d always ruled an army, she sent men into the orchard to spread cloths on the ground, then had pillows brought down from upstairs.

Supper was late that evening, not served until six P.M., but from the looks on people’s faces as they began to taste everything, they thought the wait was worth it. They ate their potato salad with spoons and devoured platefuls of deviled eggs. They loved the high seasoning of the chicken.

Dougless sat across from Nicholas and watched him so closely she hardly ate. But as far as she could see, nothing sparked a memory.

At the end of the meal, the servants triumphantly carried out silver platters heaped high with nut-filled chewy brownies. At the first bite there were tears of gratitude in the eyes of some of the diners.

But Dougless looked only at Nicholas. He bit; he chewed. Then slowly, he looked at Dougless, and her heart leaped to her throat. He does remember, she thought. He remembers something.

Nicholas put down the brownie; then, not knowing why he did it, he removed the ring from his left hand and handed it to her.

Dougless put out a shaking hand and took the ring. It was an emerald ring, the same ring he’d given her on that day at Arabella’s house when she’d first made brownies for him. She could see by his expression that he was puzzled by his action.

“You gave me this ring before,” she said softly. “When I cooked this meal for you the first time, you gave me this same ring.”

Nicholas could only stare at her. He started to ask her to explain, but Kit’s laughter broke the spell of the moment.

“I do not blame you.” Kit laughed. “These cakes are worth gold. Here,” he said as he pulled off a simple gold ring and gave it to Dougless.

Smiling and frowning at the same time, she took the ring Kit offered. The ring was worth nothing compared to Nicholas’s emerald, but had the values been reversed, Nicholas’s ring would have been worth much more to Dougless. “Thank you,” she murmured, then looked back at Nicholas. But he was looking away now and she knew that what he had remembered was gone.

TWENTY - FIVE

You are too silent, brother,” Kit said, smiling at Nicholas. “You should come and make merry. Dougless is to teach us a card game called poker this night.”

Nicholas looked away from his brother. Something had happened tonight, he thought, something he couldn’t understand. At supper he had bitten into one of the chocolate cakes the woman had prepared and he’d known, quite suddenly, without words, that she was not his enemy.

Even as he handed her his ring, he told himself he was being a fool. Often, when it came to this woman, he was sure he was the one sane person in his household. He was the only person who did not believe her to be a gift from God. And if her good works did turn out to be treachery, he would be the only one who was able to see her as she truly was.

But this evening, as he’d eaten that wonderful cake, images had flashed across his mind. He saw her with her hair loose, her legs bare, and sitting on an odd two-wheeled metal frame of sorts. He saw her with water pouring down over her beautiful, nude body. And he saw her clutching his emerald ring to her breast and looking at him with love. Without a thought, he had slipped the ring from his finger and given it to her, because, somehow, the ring seemed to belong to her.

“Nicholas?” Kit was saying. “Are you well?”

“Yes,” Nicholas said absently. “I am well.”

“Do you join us in this new game?”

“Nay,” Nicholas murmured. He didn’t want to be near the woman, didn’t want her to cause him to see images of something he knew had not happened. It was better for him to stay away from her. If he spent time with her, perhaps he would begin to listen to her, even begin to believe her absurd stories of past and future.

“Nay, I do not go,” he said to Kit. “I work this night.”

“Work?” Kit asked, his voice teasing. “No women? When I think on it, have you had a woman to your bed since Lady Dougless arrived?”

“She is no—” Nicholas began. He suddenly had another image of her smiling down at him, of her hair soft and full about her shoulders.

Kit laughed knowingly. “It goes that way, does it? I cannot blame you; the woman is beautiful. Do you mean to make her your mistress after your marriage?”

“Nay!” Nicholas said forcibly. “The woman is naught to me. Take her away with you. I wish never to see her again, never to hear her voice. I wish she had never come into my life.”

Kit stepped back, still smiling. “So the thunderbolt has hit,” he said, obviously enjoying Nicholas’s agony.

Nicholas came out of his chair, ready to do battle over his brother’s smirking, knowing tone. But Kit backed toward the door, and when Nicholas came close, Kit left the room, laughing loudly as he shut the door in his brother’s face.

Nicholas sat down at the table again and tried to give his attention to the accounts before him, but all he could think of was the red-haired woman. He knew that she was laughing now, amused at what she was doing. He knew that, somehow, he’d feel it if she wasn’t happy.

He walked toward the window, turned its latch, opened it, then looked down into the garden. Unwanted, an image came to him. In his mind’s eye, he saw another garden. It was night, and it was raining, and the woman was calling to him. He saw lights, strange, purple-blue lights on poles, and he saw himself in the rain, clean-shaven and wearing strange clothes.

Pulling away from the window, Nicholas slammed it shut, then rubbed his hands over his eyes as though to clear the vision. He would not let this woman ensorcell him. He must not let her control his mind!

Leaving the office, he went to his bedchamber, poured himself a tall goblet of sack, then downed it. Only after he’d downed a second and third helping as quickly as possible, did he feel the warmth of the wine coursing through his veins. He would drown his images of her. He would drink until he couldn’t hear her, see her, smell her . . . or remember her.

For a while the wine worked and he was able to still the images in his head. Content, feeling calm, Nicholas stretched out on his bed and was asleep instantly.

But then the images came again, this time in the form of dreams.

“You must tell me if Kit has shown you the door,” he heard the woman saying. “Tell me if you cut your arm.” “Kit died and you caused it.” “What if you are wrong?” The woman’s voice grew louder, urgent. “What if you are wrong and Kit dies because you won’t listen?”

Nicholas awoke sweating, and the rest of the night he lay with his eyes open, afraid to go back to sleep. Something had to be done about the woman if she wouldn’t let him sleep. Something had to be done.

TWENTY - SIX

At four A.M. Dougless crept out of the house to go to the fountain to take a shower. Yesterday a couple of the ladies had been talking about the suds in the fountain and Lady Margaret had looked at Dougless knowingly. Flushing, Dougless looked away, wondering if there was anything that went on in the Stafford household that Lady Margaret didn’t know about.

Now Dougless smiled in memory. If it weren’t all right for her to use the fountain for a shower, no doubt Lady Margaret would have told her so.

Even in the faint light, Dougless could see Lucy waiting for her. Poor lonely kid, she thought. Since yesterday, Dougless had asked questions and found out that Lucy and her guardian had been brought to England to the Stafford household when Lucy was just three years old. It was believed that she’d make a better wife for Kit if she knew English ways and got to know her husband’s family before marriage.

But from the moment Lucy had arrived, Lady Hallet had denied anyone access to the child, who had been very ill from the voyage across the Channel and the rough road journey across England. By the time Lucy was well, no one seemed to remember she was living with them.

Something Dougless had noticed about the sixteenth century was that the adults didn’t idolize children the way twentieth-century Americans did. It had surprised Dougless to find out that most of Lady Margaret’s ladies were married, and two of them had young children at their homes, which were often a hundred miles away. The women didn’t seem to be in any throes of agony over whether or not they were spending “quality time” with their children. Dougless once, over embroidery—which they did very well and at which Dougless was hopelessly clumsy—mentioned that in her country women spent whole days with their children, entertaining them, teaching them, and trying never to be bored by them. The women had been horrified by this idea. They believed you should ignore children until they were of marriageable age. After all, they said, children died easily and their souls weren’t formed until they were of age.