A Knight in Shining Armor Read online

  “Now, madam, you must tell me what plagues you so that tears pour forth from your eyes as from a waterfall.”

  Dougless didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened to her. But her need to share was greater than her pride, and within minutes, she was pouring out her story to him.

  “This man left you alone? Unattended?” Nicholas asked, aghast. “He left you at the mercy of ruffians and thieves?”

  Nodding, Dougless blew her nose on a paper napkin. “And at the mercy of men who believe they’re from the sixteenth century, too. Oh, sorry,” she added.

  But Nicholas didn’t seem to hear her. He got up and began pacing the garden. There were four other tables but no other customers. “You but knelt by the tomb—my tomb—and asked for a . . .” He looked at her.

  “A Knight in Shining Armor. It’s an American saying. All women want a gorgeous . . . I mean, a . . . Well, a man to rescue her.”

  Smiling a bit, his lips hidden in his beard and mustache, he said, “I was not wearing armor when you called me forth.”

  “I didn’t call you,” she said fiercely. “It’s customary to cry when you get left in a church. Especially when a fat brat of a girl steals your handbag. I don’t even have a passport. Even if my family wired me money for a ticket home, I couldn’t leave immediately. I’d have to apply for another passport.”

  “Nor can I get home,” he said, beginning to pace again. “That we have in common. But if you brought me forth, you can send me back.”

  “I am not a witch,” she practically shouted at him. “I do not practice black magic, and I certainly don’t know how to send people back and forth in time. You’ve imagined all of this.”

  He raised an eyebrow at her. “No doubt your lover was justified in leaving you. With your vile temper, he would not want to remain with you.”

  “I was never ‘vile-tempered’ as you call it, with Robert. Maybe a little-short-tempered now and then, but only normally so, because I loved him. Love him. And I shouldn’t have complained so much about Gloria. It was just that her lying was beginning to get on my nerves.”

  “And you love this man who abandoned you, this man who allowed his daughter to steal from you?”

  “I doubt if Robert knows Gloria took my bag and, besides, Gloria is just a kid. She probably doesn’t even realize what she did. I just wish I could find them and get my passport back so I could go home.”

  “It seems we have kindred goals,” he said, his eyes boring into hers.

  Suddenly, she knew where he was leading. He wanted her to help him on a permanent basis. But she was not going to saddle herself with a man with amnesia.

  She set her empty cup down. “Our goals aren’t alike enough that we should spend the next few months together until you remember that you live in New Jersey with your wife and three kids, and that every summer you come to England, put on fancy armor, and play some little sex game with an unsuspecting tourist. No, thank you. Now, if you don’t mind, I believe we have an agreement. I’ll find you a hotel room, then I’m free to leave.”

  When she finished speaking, she could see the flush of anger through his beard. “Are all the women of this century as you are?”

  “No, just the ones who have been hurt over and over again,” she shot back at him. “If you really have lost your memory, you should go to a doctor, not pick up a woman in a church. And if this is all an act, then you should definitely go to a doctor. Either way, you don’t need me.” She put the tea things on the tray to carry them back into the shop, but he stood between her and the door.

  “What recourse have I if I tell the truth? Have you no belief that your tears could have called me from another time, another place?”

  “Of course I don’t believe that,” she said. “There are a thousand explanations as to why you think you’re from the sixteenth century, but not one of them has to do with my being a witch. Now, will you excuse me? I need to put these down so I can find you a hotel room.”

  He stepped aside so she could enter the tea room, then followed her to the street. All the while, he kept his head down as though he were considering some great problem.

  Dougless had asked the woman in the tea shop where the nearest bed-and-breakfast was, and as she and Nicholas walked quietly along the street, it bothered her that he didn’t speak. Nor did he look about him with the intense interest he’d shown earlier.

  “Do you like your clothes?” she asked, trying to make conversation. He was carrying the shopping bags full of armor and his old clothes.

  He didn’t answer, but kept walking, his brow furrowed.

  There was only one room available at the bed-and-breakfast, and Dougless started to sign the register. “Do you still insist that you’re Nicholas Stafford?” she asked him.

  The woman behind the little desk smiled. “Oh, like in the church.” She took a postcard of the tomb in the church from a rack and looked at it. “You do look like him, only a bit more alive,” she said, then laughed at her own joke. “First door on the right. Bath’s down the hall.” Smiling, she left them alone in the entrance hall.

  When Dougless turned to look at the man, she suddenly felt as though she were a mother abandoning her child. “You’ll remember soon,” she said soothingly. “And this lady can tell you where to get dinner.”

  “Lady?” he asked. “And dinner at this hour?”

  “All right,” she said, frustrated. “She’s a woman and a meal this late is supper. I’ll bet that after a good night’s sleep you’ll remember everything.”

  “I have forgot naught, madam,” he said stiffly, then seemed to relent. “And you cannot leave. Only you know how to return me to my own time.”

  “Cut me some slack, will you?” she snapped at him. Didn’t he understand that she, too, had needs? She couldn’t give up all that she needed to help this stranger, could she? “If you’ll just give me the fifty dollars we agreed on, I’ll leave. In pounds, that’s . . .” To her horror, she realized that was only about thirty pounds. A room in this bed-and-breakfast had cost forty pounds. But a deal was a deal. “If you’ll give me thirty pounds, I’ll be on my way.”

  When he just stood there, she rummaged in the shopping bags until she found his paper money; then she removed thirty pounds and gave him the rest of it. “Tomorrow you can take your coins to the dealer and he’ll give you more modern money,” she said as she turned to go. “Good luck.” She gave one last look to his blue eyes that looked so sorrowful, then turned and left.

  But once she left the house, she didn’t feel jubilant at finally having rid herself of the man. Instead, she felt as though she were missing something. But Dougless forced herself to put her shoulders back and her head up. It was getting late and she had to find a place to spend the night—a cheap place—and she had to decide where to go from here.

  FIVE

  When Nicholas found the upstairs room where he was to spend the night, he was appalled. The room was small, with two tiny, hard-looking beds with no cloth hangings enclosing them, and the walls were very bare. But upon closer examination he saw that the walls were painted with thousands of tiny blue flowers. On second thought, he decided that with a few borders and some order to the paintings they might look all right.

  There was a window with that marvelous glass in it, and it had fabric side hangings of painted cloth. There were framed pictures on the walls, and when he touched one, he felt the glass—so clear he could hardly see it. One of the pictures was quite lewd, showing two naked women sitting on a cloth near two fully dressed men. It was not that Nicholas didn’t like the picture, but he couldn’t bear to see such a shameful thing displayed so openly. He turned it to face the wall.

  There was a door that led to a press, but there were no shelves in it. There was only a round stick going from one side to the other, with the same steel shapes that he had seen in the clothes shop hanging from the stick. There was a cabinet in the room, but such as he’d never seen before. It was entirely full of drawers! He tried, but the to
p of the cabinet did not lift up. He pulled the drawers out one by one and they worked marvelously well.

  After a while, Nicholas began to look for a chamber pot, but one was not to be found anywhere in the room. Finally, he went downstairs and out to the back garden to find a privy, but there was none.

  “Have things changed that much in four hundred years?” he mumbled as he relieved himself in the rosebushes. He fumbled with the zipper and snaps, but managed rather well, he thought.

  “I will do well without the witch,” he said to himself as he went back into the house. Perhaps tomorrow he would wake and find this all to be a dream, a long, bad dream.

  No one was about downstairs, so Nicholas looked into a room with an open door. There was furniture in the room that was fully covered with fine, woven fabric. There was a chair with not one inch of wood showing. When he sat on the chair, the softness enveloped him. For a moment he closed his eyes and thought of his mother and her old, frail bones. How she’d like a chair like this, covered in softness and fabric, he thought.

  Against one wall was a tall wooden desk with a stool beneath it. Here was something that looked somewhat familiar. When he examined the cabinet, he saw the hinge and lifted the top. It was not a desk but a type of harpsichord, and when he touched the keys, the sound was different. There was written music in front of him and for once something looked familiar.

  Nicholas sat down on the stool, ran his fingers over the keys to hear the tone of them, then, awkwardly at first, began to play the music before him.

  “That was beautiful.”

  Turning, he saw the landlady standing behind him.

  “‘Moon River’ always was one of my favorites. How do you do with ragtime?” She searched inside a drawer in a little table that had an extraordinary plant on top of it and withdrew another piece of music. “They’re all American tunes,” she said. “My husband was an American.”

  The most extraordinary piece of music, called “The Sting,” was put before Nicholas. It took him some time before he played it to the woman’s satisfaction, but once he understood the rhythm of the music, he played it with enjoyment.

  “Oh, my, you are good,” she said. “You could get a job in any pub.”

  “Ah, yes, a public house. I will consider the possibility,” Nicholas said, smiling as he stood up. “The need of employment might yet arise.” Suddenly, he felt dizzy and reached out to catch himself on a chair.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Merely tired,” Nicholas murmured.

  “Traveling always wears me out. Been far today?”

  “Hundreds of years.”

  The woman smiled. “I feel that way too when I travel. You should go up to your room and have a bit of a lie-down before supper.”

  “Yes,” Nicholas said softly as he started for the stairs. Perhaps tomorrow he would be able to think more clearly about how to get himself back to his own time. Or perhaps tomorrow he’d wake up in his own bed and find that all of it was over, not just this twentieth-century nightmare, but also the nightmare he’d been in when last he was home.

  In his room he undressed slowly, and hung his clothes up as he had seen done in the clothes shop. Where was the witch now? he wondered. Was she back in the arms of her lover? She was powerful enough to have called him forward over four hundred years, so he had no doubt that she could conjure an errant lover back across mere miles.

  Nude, Nicholas climbed into bed. The sheets were smooth beyond believing and they smelled clean and fresh. Over him, instead of multiple, heavy coverlets, was a fat, soft, light blanket.

  Tomorrow, he thought as he closed his eyes in weariness. Tomorrow he would be home.

  Instantly, he fell into a sleep that was deeper than any he’d ever experienced before, and he heard nothing when the sky opened and it began to rain.

  Hours after he went to bed, reluctantly, he was awakened by his own thrashing about. Groggily, Nicholas sat up. The room was so dark that at first he didn’t know where he was. As he listened to the rain pounding on the roof, his memory gradually returned. He fumbled at the table beside the bed for flint and candle so he could make a light, but there were none.

  “What manner of place is this?” he exclaimed. “There are no chamber pots, no privies, and no lights.”

  As he was grumbling, his head turned sharply as he listened. Someone was calling him. The voice was not in words. He couldn’t hear the actual sound of his name, but he could feel the urgency and the desperate need of a voice that was reaching out to him.

  No doubt it was the witch-woman, he thought with a grimace. Was she bent over a cauldron of snakes’ eyes, stirring and cackling and whispering his name?

  As Nicholas felt the pull of the call, he knew there was no use fighting her. As he lived and breathed, he knew he had to go to her.

  With great reluctance, he left the warm bed, then began the arduous task of trying to dress himself in the strange modern clothes. It was when he pulled up the zipper that he discovered the parts of his body that were most susceptible to being caught in the tiny metal teeth. Cursing, he put on the flimsy shirt and felt his way out of the dark room.

  He was glad to see that there was light in the hall. On the wall was a glass-enclosed torch, but the flame was not fire, and whatever it was, it was encased in a round glass sphere. He wanted to examine this miracle further, but through a window came a flash of lightning, and a crack of thunder rattled the house—and the call came to him more forcefully.

  He went down the stairs, across lush carpets, and out into the pouring rain. Shielding his face with his hands, Nicholas looked up to see that high above his head were more flames set on top of poles, yet the blowing rain did not extinguish their fire. Shivering, already wet through, Nicholas put his head down into his collar. These modern clothes had no substance! The modern people must be strong! he thought. How did they survive with no capes, or jerkins to protect them from the driving rain?

  Struggling against the force of the rain, he went down streets that were unfamiliar to him. Several times he heard strange noises and reached for his sword, then cursed when he found that the weapon was not there. Tomorrow, he thought, he would sell more coins and hire guards to accompany him. And tomorrow he would force the woman to tell him the truth of what she had done to bring him to this strange land.

  He struggled down street after street, making several wrong turns, but then he’d stop and listen until the call came again. After a while of following what he was hearing inside his mind, he left the streets that had the torches on poles and entered the darkness of the countryside. For several minutes, he walked along a road, then stopped and listened as he wiped rain from his face. Finally, he turned right and started across a field, and when he reached a fence, he climbed over it, then kept walking. At long last, he reached a small shed, and he knew that, at last, he had found her.

  As he flung open the door, a flash of lightning showed her inside the shed. She was drenched and shivering, and curled into a ball on some dirty straw, trying her best to get warm. And, once again, she was weeping.

  “Well, madam,” he said, his teeth clenched in anger, “you have called me from a warm bed. What is it you want of me now?”

  “Go away,” she sobbed. “Leave me alone.”

  As he looked down at her, he had to admire her fortitude—as well as her pride. Her teeth were chattering so hard he could hear them over the rain; she was obviously freezing. With a sigh, he released his anger. If she were such a powerful witch, why had she not conjured herself a dry place for the night? Nicholas stepped into the leaking shed, bent, and lifted her into his arms. “I do not know who is the more helpless,” he said, “you or I.”

  “Let me go,” she said, as he picked her up, but she made no real struggle to get away from him. Instead, she put her head against his shoulder and began to sob harder. “I couldn’t find any place to stay. Everything in England costs so much and I don’t know where Robert is and I’ll have to call Elizabeth and she
’ll laugh at me,” she said all in one almost unintelligible sentence.

  Nicholas had to adjust her in his arms as he swung over the fence, but he kept walking, and Dougless continued crying as her arms slipped around his neck. “I don’t belong anywhere,” she said. “My family is perfect, but I’m not. All the women in my family marry wonderful men, but I can’t even meet any wonderful men. Robert was a great catch but I couldn’t hold on to him. Oh, Nick, what am I going to do?”

  They were out of the fields and back onto a paved road. “First, madam,” he said, “you may not call me Nick. Nicholas, yes, Colin, perhaps, but not Nick. Now, since we seem destined to know one another, what is your name?”

  “Dougless,” she said, clinging to him. “It’s Dougless Montgomery.”

  “Ah, a good, sensible name.”

  Dougless sniffed, her tears slowing down. “My father teaches medieval history so he named me after Dougless Sheffield. You know, the woman who bore the earl of Leicester’s illegitimate child.”

  Nicholas halted. “She what?”

  Dougless pulled away to look up at him in surprise. The rain was now just a soft drizzle and there was enough moonlight so she could see his expression. “She bore the earl of Leicester’s child,” she said in surprise.

  Immediately, Nicholas set her on the ground and glared at her. The rain was dripping off both their faces. “And, pray tell, who is the earl of Leicester?”

  His disguise is slipping, Dougless thought as she smiled up at him. “Shouldn’t you pretend to know this?” When Nicholas didn’t answer, Dougless said, “The earl of Leicester was Robert Dudley, the man who loved Queen Elizabeth so much.”

  At that, rage filled Nicholas’s face; then he turned and stomped away. “The Dudleys are traitors, executed every one of them,” he said over his shoulder. “And Queen Elizabeth is to marry the king of Spain. She will not marry a Dudley, I can assure you of that!”