A Knight in Shining Armor

  For a moment he looked into the distance, his eyes angry and hard. “The queen was told by someone . . .” Pausing, he took a breath. “She was told that the army I was gathering was to join forces with the young Scots queen.”

  “Mary Queen of Scots,” Dougless said, and he nodded.

  “I was given a hasty trial and condemned to be beheaded. I had but three days left before I was to be executed when you . . . when you called me here.”

  “Then you’re lucky!” Dougless said. “Beheading. Disgusting. We don’t do that now.”

  “You have no treason that you do not need to behead people?” Nicholas asked. “Or perhaps you punish the nobility in another way.” He put up his hand when she started to answer. “Nay, we will discuss this later. My mother is a powerful woman and she has friends. From the moment I was taken, she has worked without rest to prove my innocence—and she has made progress. She believes she is close to finding who betrayed me. I must return and prove that I am not guilty. If I do not, she will lose all. She will be a pauper.”

  “The queen would take everything you own?”

  “All. It would be as though I truly were a traitor.”

  Dougless thought about what he’d told her. Of course none of what he was saying was real, but if it were, perhaps there was something to be learned today from the history books. “Do you have any idea who told the queen your army was going to be used to take her throne?”

  “I am not sure, but when I came forward, I was writing a letter to my mother. At last I had remembered a man from some ten years ago who may have had a grudge against me. I had been told that he was now at court. Perhaps he . . .” Trailing off, Nicholas put his head in his hands in despair.

  Dougless almost reached out to him to touch his hair, perhaps to rub his neck, but she withdrew. She reminded herself that this man’s problems were not her own, and there was no reason on earth she should spend her time trying to help him find out why he—or maybe one of his ancestors—had been unjustly accused of treason.

  On the other hand, the idea of injustice made Dougless’s skin crawl. Maybe it was in her blood. Her grandfather, Hank Montgomery, had been a union organizer before he returned home to Maine to run the family business, Warbrooke Shipping. To this day, her grandfather hated any type of injustice and would risk his life to stop it.

  “As I told you, my father is a professor of medieval history,” Dougless said softly, “and I’ve helped him do some research. Maybe I could help you find what you’re looking for. And, besides, how many people are you going to find who are in such a situation that they’d even consider helping a man wearing a sword and balloon shorts?”

  Nicholas stood up. “You refer to my slops? You jest at my clothing? These . . . these . . .”

  “Trousers.”

  “Aye, these trousers. They bind a man’s legs so that I cannot bend. And these,” he said as he put his hands in his pockets. “They are so small that I can carry nothing. And last night I was cold in the rain and—”

  “But you’re cool today,” she said, smiling.

  “And this.” He pulled back the fly to show the zipper. “This can hurt a man.”

  Dougless began to laugh. “If you wore your underwear instead of leaving it on the bed, maybe the zipper wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Underwear? What is that?”

  “Elastic, remember?”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, and began to smile.

  Dougless suddenly thought, What else do I have to do? Cry some more? Six of her women friends had taken her out to dinner before she left for England to wish her bon voyage. There had been a lot of laughter about her romantic holiday. Yet here she was wanting to go home after just five days.

  Looking up at this smiling man, Dougless wondered, if she were honest with herself, would she rather spend four and a half weeks with Robert and Gloria, or would she rather help this man research what may or may not be his previous life? Smiling back at Nicholas, she thought that the whole thing reminded her of a ghost story where the heroine goes to the library and reads about the curse on the house she’s rented for the summer.

  “Yes,” she heard herself say. “I will help you.”

  Nicholas sat down by her, took her hand in his, and fervently kissed the back of it. “You are a lady at heart.”

  She was smiling at the top of his head, but his words made her smile disappear. “At heart? Are you saying that I’m not a lady elsewhere?”

  He gave a little shrug. “Who can fathom why God has joined me with a commoner?”

  “Why you—” she began. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that her uncle was the king of Lanconia and she often spent summers playing with her six cousins, the princes and princesses. But something stopped her. Let him think what he wanted. “Should I address you as ‘your lordship’?” she asked archly.

  Nicholas frowned thoughtfully. “I have considered that question. Now, when no one knows of my titles, I can move about unharmed. And these clothes, they are the clothes of all the people. I cannot understand your sumptuary laws. I am sure I should hire retainers, yet in this time a shirt costs a man’s yearly wage. Try as I might, I cannot understand your ways. Often I . . .” He looked away. “Often, I make a fool of myself.”

  “Oh, well, I do that and I’ve grown up in this century,” Dougless said lightly.

  “But you are a woman,” he said, looking back at her.

  “First of all, let’s get one thing straight: in this century women aren’t men’s slaves. We women today say what we want to say and do what we want to do. We know we weren’t put on this earth only to entertain men.”

  Nicholas’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. “Is this what is believed today of women of my time? You believe that our women were for pleasure only?”

  “Obedient, docile, locked away in a castle somewhere, kept pregnant, and never allowed to go to school.”

  Emotions ran across Nicholas’s face: astonishment, anger, disbelief. At last, his face relaxed and he smiled, his eyes full of merriment. “When I return, I will tell my mother what is believed about her. My mother has buried three husbands.” Laughter made his lips twitch. “King Henry said my mother’s husbands wished themselves into the grave because they weren’t half the man she is. Docile? Nay, lady, not docile. No schooling? My mother speaks four languages and argues philosophy.”

  “Then your mother is an exception. I’m sure most women are—were—downtrodden and brutalized. They had to be. They were the property of the men. Chattel.”

  He gave her a piercing stare. “And in your day men are noble? They do not abandon women? They do not leave them to the mercy of the elements, with no means of support, no protection, no funds to so much as find a night’s lodging?”

  Dougless turned away, blushing. So maybe she wasn’t in a good position to argue about this. “Okay, you’ve made your point.” She looked back at him. “All right, let’s get down to business. First we go to a drugstore, or chemist, as it’s called here in England, and we buy toiletries.” She sighed. “I need eyeshadow, base, blush, and I’d kill for a tube of lipstick right now. And we need toothbrushes, toothpaste, and floss.” Halting, she looked at him. “Let me see your teeth.”

  “Madam!”

  “Let me see your teeth,” she repeated in a no-nonsense voice. If he were an overworked graduate student, he’d have fillings, but if he were from the sixteenth century no dentist would have touched his mouth.

  After a moment, Nicholas obediently opened his mouth, and Dougless moved his head this way and that to look inside. He had three molars missing and there looked to be a cavity in another tooth, but there was no sign of modern dental work. “We need to get you to a dentist and take care of that cavity.”

  Instantly, Nicholas pulled away from her. “The tooth does not pain me enough to have it pulled,” he said stiffly.

  “Is that why you have three teeth missing? They were pulled?”

  He seemed to think this was obvious, so Dougless
opened her mouth, showed him her fillings, and tried to explain what a dentist was.

  “Ah, there you are,” said the vicar from the back of the church. “So you two have become friends.” His eyes were twinkling.

  “We haven’t . . .” Dougless began, intending to explain that they hadn’t become the friends that the vicar’s tone was implying. But she stopped. The truth would take too much explanation. She stood up. “We have to go, as we have a great deal to do. Nicholas, are you ready?”

  Smiling at her, Nicholas offered her his arm, and they left the church together. Outside, Dougless paused for a moment and looked at the enclosed graveyard. It had been just yesterday that Robert had left her here.

  “What shines there?” Nicholas asked, looking at one of the grave markers.

  It was the gravestone Gloria had fallen against, then lied to Robert about her scrapes, saying Dougless had hurt her. Curious, Dougless went to the stone. At the bottom, hidden by grass and dirt, was Gloria’s five-thousand-dollar diamond and emerald bracelet. Picking it up, Douglass held it up to the sunlight.

  “The quality of the diamonds is good, not excellent,” Nicholas said as he peered over her shoulder. “The emeralds are but cheap.”

  Smiling, Dougless clasped the bracelet tightly in her hand. “I’ll find him now,” she said. “Now he’ll come back for sure.” Quickly, she went into the church and told the vicar that should Robert Whitley call and ask about a lost bracelet, he was to say that Dougless had it; then she gave him the name of the bed-and-breakfast where she and Nicholas were staying.

  As Dougless left the church, she felt jubilant. Everything was going to work out now. Robert would be so grateful that she’d found the bracelet that . . . Her mind flooded with visions of Robert’s protestations of undying love and endless apologies. “I didn’t know I could miss anyone as much as I missed you,” ran through her head in Robert’s tearful voice. “How can you forgive me?” and “I wanted to teach you a lesson, but I was the one who learned from you. Oh, Dougless, can you—?”

  “What?” she asked, looking up at Nicholas blankly.

  He was frowning. “You said we must see an alchemist. Do you prepare new spells?”

  She didn’t bother to defend herself; she was too happy to allow anything he said to bother her. “Not ‘alchemist,’ a chemist’s,” she said happily. “Let’s go shopping.”

  As they walked, she made a mental list of the things she’d need to be looking her best when she saw Robert again. She needed products for her face and hair, and she’d need a new blouse that didn’t have a cut sleeve.

  First they went to the coin dealer and sold another coin, this one for fifteen hundred pounds. There Dougless called the B and B to reserve their room for three more nights because the dealer had said he needed time to find a buyer for Nicholas’s rarer coins. And to give Robert time to find me, Dougless thought.

  Then they went to a chemist’s shop. As the doors to a magnificent English drugstore, a Boots, opened, even Dougless looked about in awe. The English didn’t fill their shelves with gaudily packaged over-the-counter medicines—even cough syrup was kept behind the counter—but, instead, the shelves were full of products that smelled good. Within minutes, Dougless, a canvas shopping basket at her feet, was trying to decide between mango shampoo or jasmine. And should she get the aloe face pack or the cucumber? she wondered as she tossed a bottle of lavender-scented conditioner into the basket.

  “What is this?” Nicholas whispered, looking at the many rows of gaily wrapped packages.

  “Shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste, all the usual stuff,” Dougless said distractedly. She had lemon verbena body lotion in one hand and evening primrose in the other. Which?

  “I know not those words.”

  Dougless’s head was full of the decisions she was trying to make, but then she looked at the products as an Elizabethan man must see them—if Nicholas were from the past, which of course he wasn’t, she reminded herself. Her father had said that until recently, people had made all their toiletries at home.

  “This is shampoo to wash your hair,” she said as she opened a bottle of papaya-scented shampoo. “Smell.”

  At first whiff, Nicholas smiled at her in delight, then he nodded toward the other bottles, and Douglass began opening them. With each product, Nicholas’s face showed his wonder. “This is marvelous. These are heaven. How I’d like to send one of these to my queen.”

  She recapped a bottle of hyacinth-scented conditioner. “Is this the same queen who cut off your head?”

  “She had been lied to,” Nicholas said stiffly, making Dougless shake her head. An American had a difficult time understanding such loyalty to the monarchy.

  “I have heard that she is especially fond of what smells good,” Nicholas said, picking up a bottle of men’s aftershave. “Mayhap they have washed gloves here,” he said, looking about.

  “Washed? You mean clean gloves?”

  “Scented.”

  “Scented skin but no scented gloves,” Dougless said, smiling.

  “Ah, well,” he said slowly, then looked at her in a way that threatened to make her blush. “I needs must make do with scented skin.”

  Quickly, Dougless looked down at the rows of shaving products. “You wouldn’t consider shaving that beard of yours, would you?”

  Nicholas ran his hand over his beard, seeming to consider her words. “I have seen no man with a beard now.”

  “Some men still wear beards, but, on the whole, they’re not fashionable.”

  “Then I will find a barber and shave it,” he said finally, then paused. “You have barbers now?”

  “We still have barbers.”

  “And this barber is the one you will have put silver in my sore tooth?”

  Dougless laughed. “Not quite. Barbers and dentists are separate professions now. Why don’t you pick out a shaving lotion while I get foam and razors?” Picking up the portable shopping basket, she saw that she had nearly filled it with shampoo, cream rinse, combs, toothbrushes, toothpaste, floss, and a small electric travel set of hair rollers. Minutes later, she was happily looking over the makeup when she heard a noise from the other side of the shelves. Nicholas was trying to get her attention.

  When she went around the corner, she saw that he’d opened a tube of toothpaste and the white cream had squirted down the front of the racks.

  “I but meant to smell it,” he said rigidly, and Dougless could feel his deep embarrassment.

  Grabbing a box of tissues from a shelf, she opened it, took out a handful, and began to clean the counter.

  At the wonder of the tissues, Nicholas lost his embarrassment. “This is paper,” he said, feeling the soft tissues, wonder in his voice. “Here, stop that!” he said. “You cannot waste paper. It is too valuable, and this paper has not been used before.”

  Dougless didn’t understand what he was talking about. “You use a tissue once, then throw it away.”

  “Is your century so rich as this?” he asked, then ran his hand over his face as though to clear his mind. “I do not understand this. Paper is so valuable it is used in place of gold, yet paper is so worthless, it can be used for cleaning, then thrown away.”

  Smiling, Dougless thought of how all paper in the sixteenth century was handmade. “I guess we are rich in goods,” she said. “Maybe richer than we should be.” She put the opened tissue box in her basket, then continued choosing items they needed. She bought shaving cream, razors, and deodorant, washcloths for both of them (because the English hotels didn’t supply them), and a full set of cosmetics for herself.

  When she went to checkout, once again, she took charge of Nicholas’s modern money. And once again he was nearly sick when he heard the total. “I can buy a horse for what this bottle costs,” he mumbled when she read a price to him. After she paid, she lugged the two shopping bags full of goods out of the store. Nicholas did not offer to take the bags from her, so she guessed that only bags full of armor were masculine enough for him
to carry.

  “Let’s take these back to the hotel,” she said. “Then we can—” She broke off because Nicholas had stopped in front of a shop window. Yesterday he’d had eyes only for the street, for gaping at cars, for feeling the surface of the pavement, and for staring at the people. Today he was more interested in the other side of the street, as he kept noticing the shops, marveling at the plate-glass windows, and frequently touching the lettering of the signs.

  He had halted in front of a bookstore window. On prominent display was a big, beautiful coffee table edition of a book on medieval armor. Beside it were books on Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth the First. Nicholas’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates. Turning, he pointed at the books, then opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.

  “Come on,” she said, smiling, as she pulled him inside. Whatever troubles of her own that Dougless had, she soon forgot them when she saw the wonder and joy on Nicholas’s face as he reverently touched the books. After dropping off the shopping bags at the counter, she walked about the store with Nicholas. Some big, expensive books were lying faceup on a table just inside the door, and he ran his fingertips slowly over the glossy photos.

  “They are magnificent,” he whispered. “I have never imagined such as these could exist.”

  “Here’s your Queen Elizabeth,” Dougless said, lifting a large color volume.

  As though he were almost afraid to touch it, Nicholas gingerly took the book from Dougless.

  Watching him, Dougless could almost believe that he’d never seen a modern color photo before. She knew that in Elizabethan times books were precious and rare, prized possessions owned by only the richest of people. If the books had pictures, they were woodcuts or hand-colored illuminations.

  She watched as Nicholas reverently opened the book he held and ran his hand over the glossy photos. “Who has painted these? Do you have so many painters now?”

  “All the books were printed by a machine.”