A Knight in Shining Armor

  Nicholas didn’t move closer to her, and he couldn’t understand why he stopped. But he could feel the urgency in her. Never before had a woman’s “no” stopped him, because he soon found the women hadn’t really meant no. But now, on the bed with this most desirable woman, he found himself listening to her words.

  Leaning back against the pillows, he sighed. “I am too weak to accomplish much,” he said heavily.

  Dougless laughed. “Sure, and if you believe that, I have some land in Florida to sell you.”

  Nicholas grinned, understanding her meaning. “Come, then, sit close by me and tell me more of your time and of what we did there.” He held up his uninjured arm, and Dougless, against her better judgment, moved near him.

  Pulling her very close to the side of him, he wrapped his strong right arm about her. She pushed at him for a moment, then sighed and snuggled against his bare chest. “We bought you some clothes,” she said, smiling in memory. “And you attacked the poor clerk because the prices were so high. Afterward we went to tea. You loved tea. Then we found you a bed-and-breakfast.” She paused. “That was the night you found me in the rain.”

  Nicholas was listening to her with half an ear. He wasn’t yet sure he believed her story of past and future, but he was sure of how she felt in his arms. Her body next to his was something he remembered very well.

  She was explaining that he’d seemed able to “hear” her. She said she wasn’t quite sure how it worked, but she’d used it the first day she’d come to the sixteenth century. She had “called” to him in the rain, and he had come to her. She chided him for his rudeness on that day and for making her ride on the back of the horse. Later, when she was in the room in the attic, she had again “called” him.

  Nicholas didn’t need further explanation of this, for he seemed to always feel what she felt. Now, as she lay in his arms, her head on his chest, he could feel her sense of comfort, but at the same time he felt her sexual excitement. He’d never wanted to make love to a woman as much as he wanted to make love to her, but something stopped him.

  She was telling of going to Bellwood and how he had shown her the secret door.

  “I believed you after that,” she said. “Not because you knew of the door, but because you were so hurt that the world remembered your misdeeds instead of all the good you had done. No one in the twentieth century knew for sure that you had designed Thornwyck Castle. There was nothing left behind to prove that you were the designer.”

  “I am not a tradesman. I will not—”

  She looked up at him. “I told you that in our world it’s different. Talent is appreciated.”

  He looked down at her, her face close to his, and put his fingertips under her chin. Ever so slowly he brought his lips to hers and kissed her gently.

  Then he pulled back, startled. Her eyes were closed and her body was soft and pliant against his. He could take her, he knew that, but, still, something was stopping him. When he moved his hand from her chin, he found that it was trembling. He felt like a boy with his first woman. Except that the first time Nicholas had bedded a woman, he had been eager and enthusiastic, not trembling as he was now.

  “What do you to me?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Dougless said, her voice husky. “I think maybe we were meant to be together. Even though we were born four hundred years apart, we were meant for each other.”

  He ran his hand down her face, then her neck, shoulder, and arm. “Yet I am not to bed you? I cannot take the clothes from your body and kiss your breasts, kiss your legs, kiss—”

  “Nicholas, please,” she said, pushing out of his arms. “This is difficult enough as it is. All I know is that when we were together in the twentieth century, after we made love, you disappeared. I was holding you and you slipped right out of my grasp. I have you again now, so I don’t want to lose you a second time. We can spend time together, we can talk, and we can be together in every way except physically.” She paused. “That is, if you want me to stay with you.”

  As Nicholas looked at her, he felt the pain she’d felt at their separation, but at the moment, he wanted to make love to her more than he wanted to understand anything.

  Dougless saw what he was thinking, so when he lunged at her, she rolled off the bed. “One of us has to keep his wits. I want you to get some rest. Tomorrow we can talk more.”

  “I do not want to talk to you,” he said sullenly.

  Laughing, Dougless remembered all the things she’d once done to entice him. She didn’t need high heels now! “Tomorrow, my love. I must go now. It’s almost dawn, and I must meet Lucy and—”

  “Who is Lucy?”

  “Lady Lucinda something or other. The girl Kit’s to marry.”

  Nicholas snorted. “A fat lump that.”

  Dougless’s anger flared. “Not beautiful like the woman you’re to marry, is she?”

  Nicholas smiled. “Jealousy becomes you.”

  “I’m not jealous; I’m—” She turned away. Jealousy didn’t begin to describe what she felt for Lettice, but she said nothing. Nicholas had already made it clear that he loved the woman he was to marry, so she was sure he wouldn’t listen to anything Dougless said against her. “I have to go,” she said at last. “And I want you to sleep.”

  “I would sleep well if you would but stay with me.”

  “Liar,” she said, smiling. She didn’t dare go too near him again. She was tired from the excitement of the day and from a night without sleep. Lifting her tote bag, she stepped to the door, gave one last look at his bare chest, his skin dark against the white of the pillows; then hurriedly, before she changed her mind, she left the room.

  Lucy was waiting for her by the fountain, and after Dougless had showered, they rehearsed their vaudeville act. Dougless was going to play the straight man, the dummy who asked the questions, so Lucy would get all the laughs.

  At daybreak, Dougless made her way back to the house, and Honoria was waiting for her, holding up the purple velvet dress.

  “I thought I might take a nap,” Dougless said, yawning.

  “Lady Margaret and Lord Christopher await you. You are to be rewarded.”

  “I don’t want any reward. I just want to help.” Even as she said it, she knew her words were a lie. She wanted to live with Nicholas for the rest of her life. Sixteenth century, twentieth century, she didn’t care which if she could just stay with him.

  “You must come. You may ask for whatever you wish. A house. An income. A husband. A—”

  “Think they’d let me have Nicholas?”

  “He is pledged,” Honoria said softly.

  “I know that only too well. Shall we start getting me harnessed?”

  After Dougless was dressed, Honoria led her to the Presence Chamber, where Lady Margaret and her oldest son were playing a game of chess.

  “Ah,” Kit said when Dougless entered; then he lifted her hand and kissed it. “The angel of life who gave me back mine.”

  Smiling, Dougless blushed.

  “Come, sit,” Lady Margaret said, pointing to a chair. A chair, not a stool, so Dougless knew she was being greatly honored.

  Kit stood behind his mother’s chair. “I wish to thank you for my life, and I wish to give you a gift, but I know not what you would wish. Name what you would have of me. And think high,” he said, eyes twinkling, “my life is worth much to me.”

  “There is nothing I want,” Dougless said. “You have given me kindness. You have fed and clothed me most sumptuously. There is nothing more I could want.” Except Nicholas, she thought. Could you gift wrap him and send him to my apartment in Maine?

  “Come,” Kit said, laughing. “There is something you must want. A chest of jewels perhaps. I have a house in Wales that—”

  “A house,” Dougless said. “Yes, a house. I’d like you to build a house in Thornwyck, and Nicholas is to draw the plans for it.”

  “My son?” Lady Margaret asked, aghast.

  “Yes, Nicholas. He’s made
some sketches for a house, and it will be beautiful. But he must have Kit’s . . . I mean, Lord Christopher’s backing.”

  “And you would live in this house?” Kit asked.

  “Oh, no. I mean, I don’t want to own it. I just want Nicholas to be allowed to design it.”

  Both Kit and Lady Margaret stared at her. Dougless looked at the women around them, sitting at their embroidery frames. They were gaping.

  Kit recovered first. “You may have your wish. My brother will get his house.”

  “Thank you. Thank you so very much.”

  No one in the room spoke again, so Dougless stood up. “I believe I owe you a game of charades,” she said to Lady Margaret.

  Lady Margaret smiled. “You no longer need to earn your keep. My son’s life has paid for you. Go and do what you wish.”

  Dougless at first started to protest that she didn’t know what to do with herself, but then she figured she’d think of something. “Thank you, my lady,” she said, and bobbed a curtsy before leaving the room. Freedom, she thought, as she went back to Honoria’s bedroom. No more having to entertain people. Good thing, since her store of songs was down to the McDonald’s jingle.

  Honoria’s maid helped Dougless remove her new dress and corset (her old corset that was beginning to rust through its silk covering), and she went to bed smiling. She had prevented Nicholas from impregnating Arabella, and she’d saved Kit. All that was left was to get rid of Lettice. If she could do that, she would change history. She fell asleep smiling.

  TWENTY - NINE

  What followed was, for Dougless, the happiest week of her life. Everyone in the Stafford household was pleased with her, and it seemed that she could do no wrong. She figured it would wear off in a few days, so she planned to enjoy it while it lasted.

  She spent every minute she could with Nicholas. He wanted to know all about her twentieth century world, and he never tired of asking questions. He had difficulty believing her talk of automobiles, and airplanes he didn’t believe at all. He went through everything in her tote bag. In the bottom were a couple of foil-wrapped tea bags, and Dougless made him a cup of tea with milk. As he’d done the first time, he kissed her soundly in pleasure at the taste.

  In return for telling him of the twentieth century, he told her of his life. He showed her dances, took her hawking one day, then laughed at her when she refused to allow the lovely bird on her arm to fly away so it could kill its prey. He showed her buzzards in pens that were fed nothing but white bread for days to clean the carrion from their craws before they were butchered and eaten.

  They argued about educating the “lower classes.” And that led to a squabble about equality. When Nicholas said her America sounded violent and lonely, Dougless wished she hadn’t told him so much.

  He asked her hundreds of questions about the immediate future of England and especially about Queen Elizabeth. Dougless so wished she remembered more of what her father had told her so she could tell Nicholas.

  He seemed fascinated with the idea of sea travel and with exploring her new country.

  “But you’ll be here married to Lettice. You won’t be able to go anywhere if you’re executed.”

  As she’d already found out, Nicholas would not listen to her when she spoke of his execution. He had a young man’s belief that he was invincible and that nothing could hurt him. “I will not raise an army to protect my lands in Wales because they are not my lands. They are Kit’s, and if he is alive, then the future I once had will not be.”

  She had no argument for him. When she asked him who he thought had tried to kill Kit, Nicholas merely shrugged and said it was no doubt some ruffian. Dougless still couldn’t get used to the idea of a land where there was no federal government and no police force. The nobility, besides having all the money, had all the power. They judged disputes, hanged people when they wanted to, and answered only to the queen. If the peasants had a good family to rule them, they were lucky, but many were not so fortunate.

  One day Dougless asked Nicholas to take her to see a town. He raised an eyebrow at her and told her she would not like it, but he agreed to take her.

  He was right. The peace and relative cleanliness of the Stafford household had not prepared her for the filth of a medieval town. Eight of Nicholas’s men accompanied them to protect them from highwaymen. As they rode along the rutted road, Dougless looked at every shadow behind every tree. Being attacked by a dashing highwayman in a romantic novel was one thing, but she knew that, in reality, highwaymen were dangerous.

  The town was dirty beyond anything Dougless had ever imagined. People emptied kitchen slops and chamber pots into the streets. She saw adults who she was sure had never had a bath in their lives. At the corner of a bridge over a little river were tall pikes with rotting human heads on them.

  She tried to look at all of it and see only the good. She tried to memorize what houses looked like and what the streets were like. If she did return to her time, she wanted to tell her father everything she’d seen. But try as she might, she was so overwhelmed by the bad that it was all she could see. The houses were so close together that women passed things from the windows to each other. People shouted, animals screamed, and someone was beating on metal with a hammer. Filthy, diseased children ran up to them, clutching their legs and begging. Nicholas’s men kicked them away, and Dougless, instead of feeling sympathy, felt herself recoiling from their touch.

  When Nicholas turned and saw her pale face, he ordered his men to start for home. Once they were again in the open air, Dougless could breathe.

  When Nicholas called a halt, tablecloths were spread under some trees and food was brought out. Nicholas handed her a goblet full of strong wine. With trembling hands, Dougless took the wine and drank deeply.

  “Our world is not like yours,” Nicholas said. In the past days he had questioned her on every aspect of modern society, and his questions had included bathing and sewage drains.

  “No,” she said, trying not to remember what that town had looked and smelled like. America had many homeless, but they did not live like these people did. Of course she had seen some well-dressed people in the town, but the sight of them could not take away from the stench. “No, a modern town is not like that.”

  He stretched out beside her while she drank her wine. “Do you still wish to remain in my time?”

  She was looking at him, but between them were the images of what she had just seen. If she stayed with Nicholas, that town would be part of her life. Whenever she left the safety of the Stafford house, she would see rotting heads on pikes and streets filled with the contents of chamber pots.

  “Yes,” she said, looking into his eyes. “I would stay if I could.”

  He lifted her hand and kissed it.

  “But I’d make the midwives wash their hands.”

  “Midwives? Ah, then you plan to have my children?”

  The thought of bearing a child without a proper doctor and hospital terrified her, but she didn’t tell him that. “A dozen at least,” she said.

  Her sleeve was too tight to push up, but she could feel his hot lips through her clothing. “When shall we begin making them? I should like more children.”

  Her eyes were closed, her head back. “More?” Suddenly, something that Nicholas said came back to her. A son. He’d said he had no children but he’d once had a son. What exactly had he said?

  She pulled her arm from him. “Nicholas, do you have a son?”

  “Aye, an infant. But you need not worry, his mother died long ago.”

  She was concentrating hard. A son. What had Nicholas said? I had a son, but he died in a fall the week after my brother drowned. “We have to return,” she said.

  “But we will eat first.”

  “No.” She stood up. “We have to see about your son. You said he died a week after Kit drowned. Tomorrow will be a week. We must go to him now.”

  Nicholas didn’t hesitate. He left a man to pack the food and dishes, while he and the o
ther men and Dougless tore back to the Stafford house. They jumped off their horses at the front gate. Lifting her skirts, Dougless ran after Nicholas.

  He led her to a wing of the house she’d never been in before, then threw open a door. What Dougless saw horrified her more than anything she’d yet seen in the sixteenth century. A little boy, barely over a year old, was wrapped from his neck to his feet in tight bindings of linen—and he was hanging from a peg on the wall. His arms and legs were pinned to him exactly like a mummy. The bottom half of the bindings were filthy where he’d relieved himself but not been changed. Below him on the floor was a wooden bucket to catch excess “drippings.”

  Dougless could not move as she stared in horror at the child, whose eyes were half open, half closed.

  “The child is fine,” Nicholas said. “No harm has come to him.”

  “No harm?” Dougless said under her breath. If a child in the twentieth century were treated like this, it would be taken from its parents, but Nicholas was saying the child was fine. “Take him down,” she said.

  “Down? But he is safe. There is no reason to—”

  Dougless glared at him. “Down!”

  With a look of resignation, Nicholas took the boy by the shoulders and, holding him at arms’ length so he’d drip onto the floor and not on his father, he turned to Dougless. “And what am I to do with him?”

  “We are going to bathe him and dress him properly. Can he walk? Talk?”

  Nicholas looked astonished. “How am I to know this?”

  Dougless blinked. There was more than mere time between their two worlds. It took Dougless a while, but she got a big wooden bucket brought to the room and filled with hot water. Nicholas complained and cursed, but he unwrapped his smelly, dirty son and plunked him into the warm water. The poor child was covered with diaper rash from the waist down. Dougless used some of her precious soft soap to gently wash him.

  At one point the boy’s nurse came in and was very upset, saying Dougless was going to kill the child. At first Nicholas wouldn’t get involved—probably because he agreed with the nurse, Dougless thought—but when Dougless glared at him, he made the woman leave.