A Knight in Shining Armour (11 page)

W
hen 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 top 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!”

“You’re right, she won’t marry a Dudley, but she won’t marry the king of Spain, either,” Dougless shouted as she ran after him. But she let out a yelp of pain when she twisted her ankle and fell onto the asphalt, scraping her hands and knees.

Angrily, Nicholas turned back to her. “Woman, you are a bloody great trouble,” he said as he again lifted her into his arms.

Dougless started to speak, but when he told her to be quiet, she put her head back against his shoulder and said nothing.

He carried her all the way back to the B and B where he was staying, and when he pushed open the door, he found the landlady sitting on a chair and waiting for him.

“There you are,” the landlady said, relief in her voice. “I heard you leave, and I knew in my heart that something was wrong. Oh, you poor dears, you both look done in. Why don’t you take her upstairs and while she’s having a nice, hot soak I’ll make you both some tea and sandwiches.” She looked at Nicholas. “I took your dinner up earlier, but you didn’t answer my knock. You must have been asleep.”

Nicholas nodded at the woman, then followed her up the stairs, still carrying Dougless, but also managing to ignore her. The landlady led them to a room Nicholas had not seen before. It had strange, large pottery vessels in it, one of which he recognized as a bathtub. But he saw no buckets of water, and he’d seen no maids about. Who filled this large tub?