Love Came Just in Time

  And now that darned movie had just made matters worse. She had watched George Bailey lose it all, then regain it in the most Christmassy, heartfelt of ways. It certainly had been a wonderful life for him. All watching it had done for her was make her realize just exactly what she didn’t have. Good grief, she didn’t even have a Social Security number anymore!

  She stepped up on the first rung of the railing and stared down into the placid waters. All right, now was the time to get ahold of herself and make a few decisions. She had no intentions of jumping—not that she would have done herself much harm anyway. Well, short of getting strangled in Mr. Murphy’s weeds, that is. No, she had come to face death and figure out just what it was she had to live for.

  She threw out her hands as a gust of wind unbalanced her. Okay, so maybe this was a little drastic, but she was a Garrett and Garretts never did things by halves. That’s what her father had always told her and she had taken it to heart. Her dad ought to have known. He’d fallen off Mt. Everest at age seventy.

  She stared out over the placid pond and contemplated her situation. So, she’d lost her job. She didn’t like typing for a living and she hated fetching her boss coffee. She would find something else. And her apartment was hazardous to her sense of smell. She could do better.

  Her fiancé Brett could be replaced as well. What did she need with a perpetual Peter Pan who had three times as many clothes as she did, wore gallons of cologne, and deep down in his boyish heart of hearts was certain she should be supporting him while he found himself? Maybe she’d look for a different kind of guy this time, one who didn’t mind working and wouldn’t hog all her closet space. She crossed her heart as she made her vow. No one who dresses better, smells nicer, or works less than I do.

  So maybe her life was in the toilet. At least she was still in the bowl, not flushed out on her way to the sewer. She could go on for another few days.

  Oh, but Sir Sweetums. Abby swayed on the railing, shivering. He was irreplaceable. Even after two years, she still felt his loss. Who was she supposed to talk to now while she gardened in that little plot downstairs? Who would greet her at the end of each day with a meow that said, “and just where have you been, Miss? I positively demand your attention!” Who would wake her up in the morning with dignified pats on her cheek with his soft paw?

  Meow!

  Abby gasped as she saw something take a swan dive into the pond. She climbed up to the top of the railing for a better look. That had to have been a cat. It had definitely meowed and those headlights had most certainly highlighted a tail.

  Headlights? A very large truck traveling at an unsafe speed rumbled over the one-lane bridge, leaving behind a hefty gust of wind. Abby made windmill-like motions with her arms as she fought to keep herself balanced on that skinny railing.

  “Hey, I wasn’t through sorting out my life!” she exclaimed, fighting the air.

  It was no use.

  Darkness engulfed her. She didn’t see the pond coming, but she certainly felt it. Her breath departed with a rush as she plunged down into the water. She sank like a rock. Her chest burned with the effort of holding what little breath she still possessed.

  Time stopped and she lost all sense of direction. It occurred to her, fleetingly, that Murphy’s Pond wasn’t that deep. Maybe she had bonked her head on a stiff bit of pond scum and was now hallucinating. Or worse.

  An eternity later, her feet touched solid, though squishy, ground. With strength born of pure panic, she pushed off from the gooey pond bottom and clawed her way to the surface. She started to lose consciousness and she fought it with all her strength. No halves for this Garrett.

  She burst through the surface and gulped in great lungfuls of air. She flailed about in the water to keep afloat, grateful she was breathing air and not water. Finally, she managed to stop coughing long enough to catch her breath.

  And then she wished she hadn’t.

  The smell was blinding. Her teeth started to chatter. Maybe she had died and been sent straight along to hell. Was this what hell smelled like?

  Well, at least there was dry land in sight. It was possible she had just drifted to a different part of Mr. Murphy’s pond. Things floated by her, but she didn’t stick around to investigate. Pond scum was better left unexamined at close range. She swam to the bank and heaved herself out of the water. She rolled over onto her back and closed her eyes, content to be on terra firma, still breathing, still conscious.

  She had to get hold of herself. Life just wasn’t that bad. Lots of people had it worse. She could have had it worse. She could have married Brett and watched her closet space dwindle to nothing. She could have been fetching Mr. Schlessinger coffee until she was as personable as the cactus plants he kept on his windowsill. Life had given her the chance to start over. It would be very un-Garrett-like not to take the do-over and run like hell with it.

  She took a last deep breath. She needed to get up, find her car and go home. Maybe she’d stop at the Mini Mart and get a small snack. Something chocolate. Something very bad for her. Yes, that was the ticket. She sat up, pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked back over the pond, wondering just where she’d wound up.

  She froze.

  Then her jaw went slack.

  It seemed that the moon had come out. How nice. It illuminated the countryside quite well. She blinked. Then she rubbed her eyes.

  She wasn’t sitting on the bank of Murphy’s Pond. She was sitting on the bank of a moat.

  She looked to her left. What should have been the bridge over the narrow end of the pond, wasn’t. It looked like a drawbridge. She followed it across the water, then looked up. She blinked some more, but it didn’t help.

  All right, so maybe she had died and gone to hell. But she’d always assumed hell was very warm, what with all that fire and brimstone dotting the landscape. She definitely wasn’t warm and she definitely wasn’t looking at brimstone. She was looking at a castle.

  She groaned and flopped back onto the grass. Faint, damn it! she commanded herself.

  Shoot. It was that blasted Garrett constitution coming to the fore. Garretts never fainted. But did they lose their minds? Abby turned that thought over in her head for a few minutes. She didn’t know of anyone in the family having lost it. Lots of deaths of Garretts of grandparent vintage driving at unsafe speeds, skiing down unsafe hills, climbing up things better admired from a distance. But no incontinence, incapacity, or insanity.

  Meow.

  Abby sat up so fast, she saw stars. She put her hand to her head. Once the world had settled back down to normal rotation, she looked around frantically.

  “Sir Sweetums?” Abby called.

  Meow, came the answer, to her left.

  Abby looked, then did a double take. “Sir Sweetums!” She jumped to her feet. “It’s you!”

  There, not twenty feet from her, sat her beloved Sir Maximillian Sweetums, staring at her with what could only be described as his dignified kitty look. He flicked his ears at her.

  Abby took a step forward, then froze. What did this mean? Surely Sir Sweetums hadn’t been packed off to hell. But she had the feeling he just couldn’t be alive. Did that mean she was dead, too?

  Without further ado, she pulled back and slapped herself smartly across the face.

  “Yeouch!” she exclaimed, rubbing her cheek. Well, that answered a few questions. Though Sir Sweetums might have left his corporeal self behind, she certainly hadn’t.

  But, whatever his status, His Maximillianness was obviously in a hurry to be off somewhere. He gave her another meow, then hopped up on all fours, did a graceful leap to change his direction, and headed toward the drawbridge.

  “Hey,” Abby said, “wait!”

  And Sir Sweetums, being himself, ignored her. That was the thing about cats; they had minds of their own.

  “Sir Sweetums, wait!”

  The blasted cat was now on the drawbridge and heading straight for the castle.

  The castle?

 
“I’ll deal with that later,” Abby promised herself.

  Later—when she figured out why the moonlight was shining down on walls topped with towers and those little slits that looked just about big enough for a man to squeeze through and either shoot something at you, or fling boiling oil at you. Later—when she’d decided just what she was: dead or alive, in heaven or hell. Later—when she’d had a bath to remove the lovely fragrance of eau de sewer from her hair and clothes.

  “Hey, stop!” Abby exclaimed, thumping across the drawbridge. She pulled up short at the sight of the gate. It looked suspiciously like something she’d seen in a documentary on medieval castles. Abby took a deep breath and added that little detail to her list of things to worry about later. Now she had to catch her fleeing feline before he slipped through the gate grates.

  She made a diving leap for Sir Sweetums’s tail. She wound up flat on her face in a puddle of mud, clutching a fistful of what should have been cat hair.

  She jumped to her feet and took hold of the gate, peering through the grates. They were about ten inches square—big enough for her to see through, but definitely not big enough to squeeze through.

  “Sir Sweetums,” she crooned, in her best come-here-I-have-some-half-and-half-in-your-favorite-china-bowl voice.

  Nothing. Drat.

  “Come on, Max,” she tried, in her best aw-shucks-cut-me-some-slack voice.

  Not even a swish of a tail to let her know she’d been heard.

  “Get back over here, you stupid cat!” she hollered.

  That wasn’t working either. No cat. No castle owners either. Well, maybe they were asleep.

  She thought about waiting for morning to call for help but all it took was one good whiff of herself to decide that that wasn’t an option. Maybe that was all part of hell, too. Phantom cats, sewer-like stench clinging to one’s clothes, delusional surroundings.

  She rubbed her muddy cheek thoughtfully. It was still sore. She felt far too corporeal for the afterlife. Nope, she wasn’t dead. Totally in control of her faculties was debatable, but she’d give that more thought later.

  What she wanted now was a hot bath and a mug of Swiss Miss with mini marshmallows. She was a damsel in definite distress. Maybe there was a handsome knight inside ready to rescue her from her less than best-dressed self.

  She started to yell.

  Chapter Two

  MILES DE PIAGET shifted in his chair, shoved his feet closer to the fire blazing in the middle of the great hall, and tried to fall asleep. He had a bed, but he’d shunned it in favor of the hard chair. He likely could have contented himself with merely choking on the abundance of smoke in his hall, but somehow this dual torture had suited him better. Of course had he remained at his sire’s keep, he could have been sitting in a more comfortable chair, enjoying the festivities of the season in a smokeless hall. Artane was a thoroughly modern place, with hearths set into the walls and flues to carry the smoke outside.

  But Miles had sought discomfort and Speningethorpe certainly provided him with that. It was, politely, a bloody sty. Miles knew he was fortunate to have arrived and found the place possessing a roof. But he’d wanted it. He’d all but demanded it. He’d wanted a place of refuge. What with the pair of years he’d just survived, peace and quiet was what he’d needed, no matter the condition of the surroundings.

  He never should have made the journey to the Holy Land. Aye, that was the start to all his troubles. Now, staring back on the ruins of his life, he wondered why his reasons had seemed so compelling at the time. It wasn’t as if he’d had to prove himself to his sire, or to the rest of the countryside, for that matter. He vaguely remembered a desire to see what his father and brothers had seen on their travels.

  Perhaps the tale would have finished peaceably if he’d been able to keep his bloody mouth shut on his way home. Soured and disillusioned after returning from Jerusalem, he’d let his tongue run free at the expense of a former French Crusader. If he’d but known whom he’d been insulting!

  He shook aside his thoughts. It did no good to dwell on the past. He’d escaped France with his flesh unscorched and he had his grandfather to thank for that. He’d been home for four months already; it was past time he sent word and thanked the man for the timely rescue. He would, just as soon as he’d brooded enough to suit himself. That time surely wouldn’t come before the celebrations were over. Had he ever possessed any desire to celebrate the birth of the Lord, he had it no longer. He’d seen too many atrocities committed for the sake of preserving holy relics. Nay, what he wanted was silence, far away from his family, far away from their joy and laughter. He had no heart for such things.

  His father hadn’t argued with him. But then, Rhys of Artane had had his own taste of war and such, and he understood. He’d asked no questions, simply given into Miles’s demand for the desolate bit of soil without comment. His only action had been to see stores sent along after the fact by a generously-manned garrison. Miles had kept the foodstuffs, but sent the men back. He would hear about that soon enough. He smiled grimly. His father would be provoked mightily by the act. Hopefully his mother had the furnishings secured well.

  The wood popped, startling him. He shifted in his chair, then paused. Was that a voice?

  Surely his father wouldn’t have ridden from Artane so soon. Miles frowned. He would have to investigate, obviously. He pushed himself to his feet, feeling far older than his score and four years. The saints pity him if he ever reached his sire’s age. He was exhausted already by living.

  He walked to the hall door, then unbolted it by heaving a wooden beam from its iron brackets. He set the beam aside and pulled the heavy door back.

  There was most definitely someone at the gates. Miles sighed heavily and returned to his chair for his sword. It would have been wise to don at least a mail shirt, but he had no squire to aid him, nor any energy to arm himself by himself. A sword and a frown would have to suffice. He snatched a torch from a sconce on the wall and left the great hall. Perhaps he’d been too hasty in his decision to leave the servants behind. It was much easier to ask who was at the gates than to discover the truth of the matter for oneself.

  Miles walked toward the lone gatehouse in the bailey wall. There were times he wondered why anyone had bothered with even the one wall surrounding the keep. Speningethorpe was very assailable, a fact he didn’t think on overmuch. Who would want the place?

  “Open up, damn it!”

  Miles stopped in the gatehouse tunnel, too surprised to do anything else but stare. There was some sort of creature pounding on his portcullis, babbling things in a rapid, obviously irritated manner.

  The creature stopped its tirade and then hopped up and down.

  “Oh, someone’s home! Great. Can you open this gate? I lost my cat inside. At least I think it’s my cat. He looks like Sir Sweetums, but I don’t know how that can be.” The being stopped speaking suddenly and looked at him.

  Miles looked back. He took another step closer, holding out the torch.

  “Am I in hell?” the creature asked, uncertainly.

  Miles almost smiled. “Near to it, certainly.”

  “Really?” This was said with a gasp.

  Miles took another step forward. The being before him was covered with muck. He frowned. Perhaps it was a demon come to torment him. The saints knew he deserved it. He’d committed enough sins in his youth to warrant a legion of demons haunting him for the rest of his days.

  But did demons smell so foul? That was a point he wasn’t sure on. He considered it as he gave the mud-covered harpy before him another look. It had to be a harpy. He’d heard of such creatures roaming about in Greece. They were part woman, part bird. This being certainly chirped like the latter. She spoke the peasant’s tongue, poorly, and her accent was passing strange. Miles frowned. Had she truly come from Greece? Then how had she come to be standing outside his gates?

  “Look, can’t you at least open up? I’m freezing and I stink.”

  Miles consid
ered. “Indeed, there is a most foul odor that attends you.”

  “I went for a swim in your moat.”

  “Ah,” he said. “That explains much.”

  The harpy frowned at him. Miles took a step closer to her. She was a very plump harpy, indeed. Her arms were excessively puffy, as was her middle. She had scrawny legs, though. No doubt in keeping with her bird-like half. He stared at her legs thoughtfully. She wore very strange hose. Even stranger shoes. He leaned closer. Her foot coverings might have been white at one time. It was hard to tell their present color by torchlight, but he had little trouble identifying the stench.

  “Hey,” the being chirped at him, “would you just let me in already?”

  He hesitated. “Are you truly a harpy?”

  The creature scowled at him. “Of course not. Who are you? The gatekeeper of hell?”

  Miles laughed, in spite of himself. “You insult both me and my fine hall, and now I am to let you inside?”

  The woman, who claimed not to be a harpy, looked at him with a frown. “Hall?”

  “Speningethorpe,” he clarified.

  “And just where is that?” she demanded.

  He shrugged. “It depends on the year, and who is king. ’Tis nearer Hadrian’s wall. Some years it finds itself in England, some years in Scotland. A lovely place, really, if you’ve no use for creature comforts.”

  The woman swayed. “England? Scotland?”

  “Aye,” Miles said.

  The woman sat down with a thump. “I’m dreaming.”

  Miles wrinkled his nose. “Nay, I think you aren’t. I know I’m not.”

  The woman looked up at him. He thought she might be on the verge of tears. It was hard to tell with all that mud on her face.

  “I’m having a very bad day,” she whispered.

  “Demoiselle, your wits are most definitely addled. ‘Tis no longer daytime.’Tis well past midnight.”