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

A Knight in Shining Armor (Montgomery/Taggart #15) Page 50

They made love again, as they had done before, in the water. For Nicholas it was a discovery of her body, but for Dougless, she had had weeks of remembering and wanting. Her hands were all over him, memorizing, remembering, finding new places she had not touched or tasted before.

By the time they finished, it was hours later. The water had stopped flowing, and Dougless guessed that whoever was turning the wheel was too tired to continue. She and Nicholas lay in each other’s arms on the sweet grass.

“We have to talk,” she said at last.

“Nay, do not.”

She snuggled closer to him. “I must. I wish with all my heart that I didn’t have to speak, but I must.”

“On the morrow, when the sun touches your hair, you will laugh at this. You are no woman from the future. You are here with me now. You will remain with me for all time.”

“I wish . . .” Her voice grew hoarse and she swallowed. Her hand was roaming over his body, touching him. The last time. The last time. “Nicholas, please,” she said. “Listen to me.”

“Aye, I will listen, then I will love you again.”

“When you left before, no one remembered you. It was as though you hadn’t existed. It was so horrible for me.” She buried her face in his shoulder. “You had come and gone, but no one remembered. It was as though I’d made you up.”

“I am most forgettable.”

She raised on her elbow to look at him, to touch his beard, his cheek, to caress his eyebrows, to kiss his eyelids. “I will never forget you.”

“Nor I, you.” He lifted a bit to kiss her lips, but when he wanted more, Dougless pulled away.

“The same may happen when I leave. I want you to be prepared if no one remembers me. Don’t . . . I don’t know what to say . . . Don’t make yourself crazy trying to make them remember.”

“No one will forget.”

“They probably will. What if the songs I taught you were remembered? It could ruin some very good Broadway shows in the twentieth century.” She tried to smile but didn’t quite make it. “I want you to swear some things to me.”

“I will not marry Lettice. I doubt now I will be asked again,” he said sarcastically.

“Good. Oh, very, very good. Now I won’t have to read about your execution.” She ran her fingertips over his neck. “Promise me you’ll take care of James. No more swaddling, and play with him sometimes.”

He kissed her fingertips and nodded.

“Take care of Honoria; she’s been so good to me.”

“I will find her the best of husbands.”

“Not the richest, the best. Promise?” When he nodded, she went on. “And anyone who’s delivering a baby has to wash his or her hands first. And you have to build Thornwyck Castle and leave records behind that show that you designed it. I want history to know.”

He was smiling at her. “Naught else? You will have to remain by my side to remind me of all this.”

“I would,” she whispered. “I would, but I cannot. May I have the miniature of you?”

“You may have my heart, my soul, my life.”

She clasped his head in her arms. “Nicholas, I can’t bear it.”

“There is naught bad to bear,” he said, kissing her arm, her shoulder, his lips traveling downward. “Perhaps Kit will give me a small estate, and we—”

She pulled away to look at him. “Wrap the miniature of you in oiled cloth, something that will protect it over the next four hundred years, and put it behind the . . . What’s the stone thing that holds up the beams?”

“A corbel.”

“At Thornwyck Castle you’ll make a corbel that’s a portrait of Kit. Wrap the miniature and put it behind the corbel. When I . . . when I return, I’ll go get it.”

He was kissing her breast.

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard all. James. Honoria. Midwives. Thornwyck. Kit’s face.” With each word, he punctuated it with a little sucking-kiss on her breast. “Now, my love,” he whispered, “come to me.”

He lifted her body and set her down on top of him, and Dougless forgot everything on earth except the touch of this man she loved so much. He stroked her hips, her br**sts as they moved together. Up and down. Slowly at first, then building faster.

Nicholas rolled with her until she was on her back, and his passion rose as he entered her deeply, her body rising to meet his. They arched together, both with their heads back, then they collapsed, Nicholas on top of her, holding her very tightly.

“I love you,” he whispered. “I will love you for all time.”

Dougless clung to him, holding him as tightly as she could. “You will remember me? You won’t forget me?”

“Never,” he said. “Never will I forget you. Were I to die tomorrow, my soul would remember you.”

“Don’t speak of death. Speak only of life. With you I am alive. With you I am whole.”

“And I with you.” He rolled to one side and pulled her close to him. “Look, you. The sun comes up.”

“Nicholas, I’m afraid.”

He stroked her damp hair. “Afraid of being seen unclad? It is not something we have not seen before.”

“You!” she said, laughing. “I’ll never forgive you for not telling me.”

“I will have a lifetime in which to make you forgive me.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes. It will take a lifetime.”

He glanced at the lightening sky. “We must go. I must tell my mother what I have done. Kit will no doubt be here soon.”

“They will be very angry. And my part in this won’t help matters any.”

“You must go to Kit with me. I will be shameless. I will tell my brother he must give us a place to live in memory of your saving him.”

Dougless looked up at the sky, saw it was growing lighter by the minute. She could almost believe she was going to be able to stay with him. “We’ll live in a pretty little house somewhere,” she said, her words beginning to gain speed. “We’ll have only a few servants, fifty or so,” she said, smiling. “And we’ll have a dozen kids. I like kids. And we’ll educate them properly and teach them how to wash. Maybe we can invent a flush toilet.”

Nicholas chuckled. “You wash too much. My sons will not—”

“Our sons. I’m going to have to explain to you about women’s equality.”

He stood up, then pulled her into his arms. “Will this explaining take long?”

“About four hundred years,” she whispered.

“Then I will give you the time.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “Time. We will have all the time we need.”

He kissed her then, kissed her long and hard and deeply; then his kiss lightened. “Forever,” he whispered. “I will love you throughout time.”

One moment Dougless was in his arms, his lips on hers, and the next she was in the church at Ashburton, and outside a jet flew overhead.

THIRTY - THREE

Dougless didn’t cry. What she was feeling was too deep, too profound for her to cry. She was sitting on the floor in the little church in Ashburton, and she knew that behind her was Nicholas’s marble tomb. She couldn’t bear to look at it, couldn’t bear to see the warm flesh of Nicholas translated into cold marble.

She sat where she was for a while and looked at the church. It looked so old and so plain. There was no color on the beams or on the walls, and the stone floors looked bare with no rushes on them. In the first pews were some needlepointed pillows, and now they looked crude. She was used to seeing Lady Margaret’s women’s exquisite needlework.

When the door of the church opened and the vicar came in, Dougless sat where she was.

“Are you all right?” the vicar asked.

At first Dougless couldn’t understand him. His accent and his pronunciation were foreign sounding. “How long have I been here?” she asked.

The vicar frowned. This young woman was so very strange. She walked in front of speeding vehicles, she insisted she was with a man when she was alone, and now she had just walked into the church and was asking how long she had been here. “A few minutes, no more,” he answered.

Dougless gave a weak smile. A few minutes. A lifetime in the sixteenth century and she had been away only a few minutes. When she tried to stand, her legs were weak and the vicar helped her rise.

“Perhaps you should see a doctor,” the vicar said.

A psychiatrist perhaps, Dougless almost answered. If she told her story to a psychiatrist, would he write a book and make what happened to Dougless into a Movie-of-the-Week? “No, I’m fine, really,” she whispered. “I just need to get back to my hotel and—” And what? What was there for her to do now that Nicholas was gone? She took a step forward.

“Don’t forget your bag.”

Dougless turned to see her old tote bag on the floor by the tomb. The contents of that bag had helped her throughout her time in the Elizabethan age. Looking at it, she felt a closeness to the bag. It had been where she had been. She went to it and on impulse unzipped the top of it. She didn’t have to inspect the contents to know that everything was there. The bottle of aspirin was full; none of the pills she had given away were missing. Her toothpaste tube was full, not flat. No cold tablets were missing, no pages gone from her notebook. Everything was as it had been.

She lifted the tote bag, slung the strap onto her shoulder, then turned away. But abruptly, she halted; then she turned and glanced back at the base of the tomb. Something was different. She wasn’t at first sure what it was, but something had changed.

Careful not to look at the sculpture of Nicholas, she stared at the base.

“Is something wrong?” the vicar asked.

Dougless read the inscription twice before she realized what was different. “The date,” she whispered.

“The date? Ah, yes, the tomb is quite old.”

Nicholas’s death date was 1599. Not 1564. Bending, she touched the numbers, trying to make sure she was seeing correctly. Thirty-five years. He had lived thirty-five years past when he was supposed to have been executed.

It was only after she had touched the date that she looked up at the tomb. The sculpture was of Nicholas, but it was very different now. It was not a portrait of a young man, dead in his prime, but of an older man, a man who had been able to live out his life. She looked down the length of him, saw that his clothes were different. He wore the longer knee breeches of 1599, instead of the short slops of thirty years earlier.

She caressed his cold cheek, traced the lines the sculptor had put at the corners of his eyes. “We did it,” she whispered. “Nicholas, my love, we did it.”

“I beg your pardon,” the vicar said.

When Dougless looked at him, she gave him a dazzling smile. “We changed history,” she said; then, still smiling, she walked outside into the sunshine.

She stood in the graveyard for a moment, feeling disoriented. The gravestones were so old, yet an hour before stones with these dates had been new. Dougless gasped in horror at the first sight of a car. And as she gasped, she felt her lungs expand; no steel corset confined her ribcage. For a moment she had a deep sense of everything being wrong. She felt na**d and drab in her plain clothes. She looked down at her boring skirt and blouse with distaste. And her back felt as though it had nothing to support it now that her corset was gone, and her leather boots pinched her feet.

Another car went by, and the speed of it made Dougless feel dizzy. She walked to the gate, opened it, then stepped onto the sidewalk. How odd to have concrete under her feet. As she walked, she looked with awe at the buildings about her. There were huge expanses of glass; the shop signs had writing on them. Who can read them? she thought, remembering that where she had been few people could read, so signs were painted with pictures of what was sold in the shops.

How clean everything was, she thought. No mud, no chamber pot emptyings, no kitchen slops, no pigs foraging. The people in the street were odd-looking too. They all wore the same drab clothes as she did. And they all seemed to be equal, no beggars dressed in filthy rags, no ladies with pearls on their skirts.

Dougless slowly walked down the street, staring wide-eyed, as though she’d never seen the twentieth century before. The smell of food made her turn and enter a pub. For a moment she stood in the doorway and looked about. Obviously, the place was supposed to be a facsimile of an Elizabethan tavern, but it missed by a long way. It was too clean, too quiet, too . . . lonely, she thought. The people sitting at the tables were isolated from one another. Not at all like the gregarious, nosy Elizabethans.

At the back of the pub was a chalkboard with the menu on it. Dougless ordered six courses, taking no notice of the waitress’s raised eyebrows; then she went to a table to sit down and sip her beer. The thick glass mug felt odd and the beer tasted as though it were half water.

On the bar was a rack of guidebooks to the historic houses of Great Britain. Dougless handed the barman a ten-pound note, then took the book back to her booth and began to read it. Bellwood was open to the public, just as it had been before. She looked for Nicholas’s other houses and found that they were no longer listed as being ruins. All eleven of the houses Nicholas had once owned were still standing. And three of them were owned by the Stafford family.

Dougless blinked hard as she reread the passage. The guidebook said that the Stafford family was one of the oldest and wealthiest in England, that in the seventeenth century they had married into the royal family, and that the present duke was a cousin to the queen.

“Duke,” Dougless whispered. “Nicholas, your descendants are dukes.”

When the food came, Dougless was a bit startled at the way it was served, without ceremony, all the dishes being put on the table at once.

As she ate, she kept reading the guidebook. Except for Bellwood, all Nicholas’s houses were private residences and not open to the public. She turned to Thornwyck Castle. It too was a private residence, but a small section of it was open to the public on Thursdays. “The current duke feels that the beauty of Thornwyck, designed by his ancestor, the brilliant scholar Nicholas Stafford, must be shared with the world,” she read.

“‘Brilliant scholar,’” she whispered. Not the ladies’ man he had once been called. Not a rogue, not a wastrel, but a “brilliant scholar.”

She closed the guidebook and looked up. The waitress was hovering over her with an odd expression on her face.