“’Twas startling at first,” Jamie said with a smile. “But I’ve accustomed myself far too quickly to its wonders. I’m equally curious how you have found watching the events of history parade before you in all their glory.”
“Startling at first,” Connor repeated easily. “I wished I could have done more than terrify the occasional Englishman. I was there at the ’45, but the Highlanders were so overwhelmed, there was little I could do. For the most part, I have stayed at Thorpewold.” He paused. “I wish I had traveled more. I could have been more use to my country thusly.”
“We all have regrets,” Jamie agreed. “You were of great service to Victoria just recently. That counts for much.”
Connor nodded, and supposed there was truth to that.
It was cold comfort, though.
“I would trade it all,” he said, half to himself, “for an hour, nay, but a handful of moments . . .”
“I’m sorry for that,” Jamie said quietly.
Connor nodded in acknowledgment of the understanding, then blew out his breath. There was no sense in thinking on it. He was what he was and could not change it, no matter how much he might have wanted to. He continued down the road with Jamie, glad for the companionship and the silence.
It was quite some time later that Thomas and Jamie both managed to get Fellini to the front door. Mrs. Pruitt met them there but refused to allow him inside.
“I will not allow something that smells thus into me fresh-smelling entryway. Take him away and hose him off.” She looked at Jennifer. “Ye don’t smell very nice, either. Nor,” she said, sniffing in Victoria’s direction, “do ye.”
“We could use showers,” Victoria conceded. “Can we come in if we promise not to touch anything and swear to put our clothes into the dustbin after we’ve changed?”
Mrs. Pruitt considered. “I’ll find plastic bags for ye to lay your gear on. Don’t lay anything on the carpets.” She looked at Mary. “Dear Mary, ye look a sight. You may come into the kitchen and I’ll be about fixing ye a lovely tea. How is it ye’re so clean?”
“I stayed with nobility,” Mary said easily, going inside the inn. “Knitting is a passport to all sorts of things, apparently. Do you knit, dear?”
“I tat,” Mrs. Pruitt said. “So easy to tuck into a pocket and work on when time permits. So, they were kind to ye?”
“Young William was wonderful,” Mary said as she disappeared into the dining room with Mrs. Pruitt. “Shakespeare, you know . . .”
Connor watched them go, then looked at the rest of the Renaissance contingent standing stranded in the doorway. “I say we heave Fellini into the bushes and be about our business.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Victoria said. “Thomas, what time is it?”
“A little after noon.”
“I need to shower and get with Fred and see how things have gone.”
“The play’s been fabulous,” Thomas said. “I’ve watched every night while you were gone—just to make certain no one flubbed their lines.”
“Or stuck their fingers up their noses,” Victoria said pointedly.
Connor clasped his hands behind his back. Fingers up noses? Embarrassing and likely career-ending. He wondered which actor in Victoria’s past had made such a grievous faux pas and ruined his chances to be her star.
“I don’t suppose you would deal with Michael,” Victoria said with a frown.
“Is he going to be angry he was fetched from Renaissance England?”
“Enormously.”
Thomas smiled. “I’ll take care of him, then. He won’t dare say anything nasty to me and it will be fun watching his head explode from the effort.”
Victoria looked at him closely. “Do you know something I don’t?”
“I think he harbors a secret desire to direct.”
She rolled her eyes. “Heaven help us. Connor?”
Connor found that she was looking at him. “Aye?”
“I’m going to get cleaned up, then head up to the castle. Do you want to come with me?”
Connor realized with a start that everyone was looking at him to see what he would say. Well, everyone except James MacLeod, who was allowing him some lairdly privacy.
He frowned. “I should go up to the castle myself,” he blustered. “To see how my garrison fares.”
“Great,” Victoria said with a yawn. “See you in a few.”
Thomas’s sense of decency apparently was only within reach until his sister disappeared inside. Then he turned to Connor and smiled pleasantly.
“She needs an escort. Apparently, you’re it.”
“You know,” Connor said conversationally, “I can wield a knife from your world. It would make quite a large hole in your chest.”
“Then you’d have to deal with Iolanthe, Victoria, and Fellini. I’d go wait for Vic and stay out of harm’s way if I were you.”
Connor snorted. “You have a reprieve, not a stay.”
Thomas made him a little bow. “Good of you. Now, I’ll go find a doctor. Let’s leave the heap out here until we absolutely can’t any longer. I don’t think he’ll get too sunburned. It is England, after all.”
Connor left him to it. He made Jennifer a low bow, thanked her for her company, thanked Jamie for his kind words, bestowed a hearty glare on Thomas, then walked around the side of the inn, where he could wait for Victoria in peace.
The saints preserve him.
He could attempt to fool her kin, but there was no fooling his heart.
He was lost . . .
Chapter 22
What a difference a day made.
Or two, or maybe three. Victoria yawned as she opened the library door and peered into the darkened entryway. She was having the same feeling of jet lag she’d had on her initial arrival in England. Maybe time-traveling was harder on a person than advertised. Jamie never looked anything but perky and well-rested, but she suspected that there wasn’t much that slowed him down. And he probably had spent his time in Elizabethan England frowning away bad guys instead of trying to corral a feverish, whining nutcase. And a bombastic, feverish nutcase at that.
And speaking of that nutcase, Michael Fellini was upstairs recuperating. Bombastically, if anyone cared.
It was enough to drive all sensible guests from the inn. The exodus had already begun the day before. Jamie had left for Scotland, no doubt anxious to be back home amid the heather instead of on the border amid the chaos. Victoria’s parents and her grandmother had gone with him to take in the sights.
Thomas and Iolanthe hadn’t ventured that far. They’d gone on a little sightseeing trip to Artane, a castle on the coast. They seemed to have been unusually eager to see it—and for Iolanthe and her pregnant self, that was saying something. Victoria had wanted to get to the bottom of it, but she’d had her hands so full keeping Michael under control that she hadn’t been able to investigate as she would have liked.
Jennifer had taken a train south to London, no doubt to regale Megan with all sorts of tales Megan would immediately and completely believe without question.
That those tales might be true was really beyond the scope of the argument at present.
Whatever the case, it left Victoria all alone in the inn, and for the first time in her life she wished she weren’t. Alone, that is. Alone with ghosts. Alone with ghosts that were most definitely not going to become anything but ghosts in the foreseeable future.
She paused. Perhaps she wasn’t as alone as she thought. Yes, there he went again. The lunatic upstairs to whom someone had mistakenly given a little servants’ bell.
“Doesn’t anyone down there hear me?” a faint, though surprisingly strong voice called plaintively.
Victoria jumped at a movement to her left. There, in the gloom, hovered Mrs. Pruitt’s face, lit from below by a single weak light, like something out of a spooky movie.
“I think,” Mrs. Pruitt said in a low voice, “that I might have to stab meself an actor.”
“I didn’t give him th
e bloody bell,” Victoria pointed out.
“Dr. Morris told me to,” Mrs. Pruitt said. She paused. “I’m finding the good doctor less attractive by the ring.” She considered that for a moment or two longer. “Distressing, as I found him quite to me taste a few days ago.”
“I thought you were sweet on Ambrose,” Victoria said.
“I’m hedging me bets,” Mrs. Pruitt said.
Then she smiled.
It wasn’t a pretty sight in the glow of the flashlight.
“I might,” she continued, “just have to call the good doctor and have him sedate the patient. For his own good.” She patted her hair self-consciously. “How do I look?”
“Ravishing,” Victoria said promptly. “Even better if you can get Michael to shut up. He’s ruining everyone’s sleep.”
“I’ll call the doctor,” Mrs. Pruitt said, pulling a mobile phone out of her pocket and heading upstairs with it.
Victoria wondered briefly if she intended to bean Michael with the phone, or phone the good doctor and let him do the honors. She stood in the middle of the entryway and listened closely.
The door opened.
Complaints wafted downward.
There was a screech cut artistically short.
Apparently Mrs. Pruitt was wielding her cell phone with great success. Victoria had no complaints. In fact, she was sick of complaints, and considering that’s all she’d had from Michael for the last indeterminate amount of time, she was happy to have him silenced for a bit. Ignoring the fact that a Kathy Bates Misery moment might be taking place upstairs, she moved toward the kitchen for a little something to help her sleep.
She walked through the dining room and paused at the sound of low voices coming from the kitchen. She didn’t hear any cursing or the loud, declarative type of thing that bespoke insults being delivered between Highlanders or between Highlander and late medieval Englishman, so she assumed it was safe to enter.
But as she stood at the door, she heard the strains of something far more interesting than threats of bodily harm.
“ ‘My hour is almost come, when I to sulphurous and tormenting flames must render up myself’,” Ambrose quoted.
“ ‘Alas! poor ghost,’ ” said Connor sympathetically.
Victoria felt her jaw slide a little south. Ambrose and Connor, reading lines?
“ ‘Pity me not,’ ” Ambrose said, “ ‘but lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold.’ ”
“ ‘Speak, I am bound to hear.’ ” Connor snorted. “And that, my laird, is the first and last time you shall hear me beg to hear you blather on at length without interruption.”
“My good Connor,” said Ambrose, “I am only repeating the lines of the play.”
“At least you are not bleating them like that pitiful excuse for a ghost Victoria finds herself saddled with. I vow, if he bellows adieu once more in that groaning fashion, I will clout him over the head with a dirk myself!”
“Then I thank you, lad, for the compliment on my acting. Let us continue, shall we?”
“Aye,” Connor said, “but let us make haste in this run-through. The night will not last forever and I wish Victoria to have no idea that I waste my time thusly.”
There was silence for quite a lengthy period of time. Victoria wondered if she’d made a noise to alert them to her presence, or if Connor was pausing to count all the reasons why spending his night practicing Shakespeare was less useful than grinding guardsmen into the dust.
“Connor, my lad,” Ambrose said slowly, “this is not a waste of time. You’ve learned a goodly number of Hamlet’s lines—a not unworthy accomplishment. You’ll find that it will aid you in learning to read them. And there is more to a full, rich life than the ability to best any soul on the field.”
“I daresay,” Connor said with a snort.
“I daresay,” Ambrose countered. “Young William Shakespeare was full of large, profound thoughts.”
“And many bawdy ones.”
“A happy marriage of both. Soon, you will be able to read all his plays yourself. Time spent with great thinkers is never wasted. Consider what a connoisseur of human nature he was. How much time you will save when you can label a man a Rosencrantz, or an Iago, or a MacBeth and be done with them.” Then Ambrose made a dismissive noise. “But what am I lecturing you for? You have a keen eye and a mighty intellect, else you would not have learned so many lines already. Victoria will be impressed.”
There was another pregnant pause.
“Think you?”
“A man who can quote Shakespeare is always in fashion.”
“In court circles, perhaps, but not on a windswept moor. But I am not above learning a thing or two if it will aid me in my reading. Let us continue.”
Victoria backed away, then backed into something solid. She turned around and screamed.
Mrs. Pruitt stood there, flashlight under her chin again.
“Only me,” she whispered.
The lights went on in the dining room and Victoria whirled around to find Connor, Ambrose, Hugh, and Fulbert in a little cluster at the kitchen door.
“Oh,” Mrs. Pruitt purred.
Ambrose disappeared.
“Why does he do that?” Mrs. Pruitt asked.
Victoria turned around and gave her a fake smile. “Maybe he thinks you’ve transferred your affections to Dr. Morris. You know those Highland lairds.”
“I would certainly be happy to.” She sighed and clicked off her flashlight. “And now look; there go the other ones. Perhaps they’ve not the spine to face a mature woman with a mind of her own.”
“I’m sure that’s probably it. What did Dr. Morris say?”
“He’s on his way.” Mrs. Pruitt patted her hair. “I’m off to do me curls.”
“Still hedging your bets?” Victoria asked.
“Och, aye, lass.”
Victoria watched her turn and make tracks out of the dining room. Then she went back to see if anyone was left in the kitchen. The stove was lit, the lights were on, and the four ghosts in question sat around the table, playing cards.
Interesting.
“A good game?” she asked.
“Quite,” Ambrose said. “It passes the time pleasantly between sword fights.”
Victoria looked at Connor. “You’re chummy with these three.”
“I’m regaling them with tales of Elizabeth’s London,” Connor said, stroking his throat gingerly as if he feared his lie might get stuck there. “Quite interesting.”
“I’ll bet. Mrs. Pruitt’s off to wait for the doctor to come and sedate Michael.”
“How lovely,” Ambrose said. “He is rather ruining our game with his endless complaining.”
“Well, you boys don’t lose your shirts gambling here,” Victoria said, backing out of the kitchen. “Good night.”
“Good night,” came the rather casual chorus.
Victoria hadn’t been a damned good actress herself without good reason. She made noises as if she walked across the room when in reality she remained by the door.
“Lose our shirts?” Fulbert huffed. “What the devil does that mean?”
“Nothing personal,” Ambrose said. “A term from the Old West. Apparently Victoria doesn’t want us gaming overmuch. Now, let us put away our ruse and be about our true work. Connor, where were we?”
“The ghost was on the verge of describing his own murder. I do not like this part, by the way.”
“You’re not reciting the lines,” Ambrose said pointedly, “you’re just listening.”
“I’m not all that fond of listening to this part,” Connor grumbled.
“Make do,” Ambrose suggested. “Think on why you’re doing this and let us be about it.”
Victoria snuck away before she could hear any more of Connor’s grumbles. She walked back to the library without encountering either Mrs. Pruitt or Dr. Morris. She sat down in one of the chairs in front of the fire and closed her eyes briefly.
Was it possible that three days
ago she had been in another world with no running water and no toilets but really great theater? And now, there she was, in her sister’s comfortable inn, safe and well-fed.
With theater going on in the kitchen.
Amazing.
Now, if she could just assure herself of good theater at Thorpewold. Michael’s understudy was doing a great job, but Victoria couldn’t help but chafe at the fact that Michael was lying uselessly upstairs, when he should have been doing his job up at the castle. She had contracted to pay him for a certain number of performances. If he couldn’t be bothered to show up, she wouldn’t be bothered to pay him.
Or, at least she thought she wouldn’t be bothered. She could hardly bear to think about what Bernie the Bardmaker would do if she dared.
She contemplated this for several more minutes until she heard a discreet knock on the front door. Well, at least she would have one distraction removed for a while. What would happen when Michael was more himself was another thing to worry about, but later, when she had to.
She sighed. Michael would need hand-holding, and though she was tempted to relegate that job to Mrs. Pruitt, she was half afraid to do so, lest Michael find himself with more injuries than he’d started with.
She rose and went to make certain her star would survive his medical attention.
Chapter 23
In my heart there was a kind of fighting that would not let me sleep . . .
Connor had finished the rest of his lines in the last scene, but those were the words that haunted him as he listened to the rest of his little band of players do their final bits. There was truth in what Shakespeare had written, just as Ambrose had said. But of late, in his heart, there was very little fighting indeed.
Longing was what had taken the fighting’s place.
He sat down at the table and conjured up the final page of Shakespeare’s play of life and death. He was, quite frankly, surprised by how many of the words he could read. Apparently his time in the inn’s kitchen with Ambrose hadn’t been time wasted. If nothing else, he was beginning to read things that pleased him.
It did little to assuage the sorry condition of his poor heart, but perhaps he should have been grateful for what he did have instead of longing for what he didn’t.