A Knight in Shining Armour (24 page)

One of the first things she did was look for the name Nicholas had given her of the man he said had had a grudge against him. It was the name he had been writing to his mother when he’d heard Dougless crying. “Land disputes,” Nicholas had said, by way of explaning the grudge. But after only ten minutes of searching, Dougless had found the man’s name. He had died six months before Nicholas had been arrested, so he couldn’t have been the one who told the queen Nicholas was raising an army.

What little she could find on Nicholas was told in a derogatory way.

His older brother, Christopher, had been made earl when he was twenty-two, and the books raved about how Christopher had taken the failing Stafford fortunes and rebuilt them. Nicholas, only a year younger, was portrayed as frivolous, spending vast amounts on horses and women. He had been the earl for only four years before he was tried for treason.

“He hasn’t changed,” Dougless said aloud, opening another book. This one was even more unflattering. It told at length the story of Lady Arabella and the table. It seems that two servants were in the room when Nicholas and Arabella entered, and they ducked into a closet when they heard the lord and lady. Later the servants told everyone what they’d seen, and a clerk by the name of John Wilfred had put the whole story down in his diary—a diary that had survived until the present.

The third book was more serious. It told of Christopher’s great accomplishments, then added that his wastrel of a younger brother had squandered everything on a foolhardy attempt to put Mary Queen of Scots on Elizabeth’s throne.

Dougless slammed the book shut and looked at her watch. It was time for tea. She left the library and made her way to a pretty little tea shop. After she had been served tea and a plate of scones, she began reading her notes.

“I have sought you most earnestly.”

She looked up to see Nicholas standing over her. “Should I rise until you are seated, my lord?”

“No, Miss Montgomery, a mere kiss of my toes will be sufficient.”

Dougless almost smiled, but she didn’t. He got himself a tray of tea, but Dougless had to pay for it, as he still carried no money.

“What is it you read?”

Coolly, she told him what she had found out, sparing him no details of what history had recorded about him. Except for a slight flush around his collar, he didn’t seem to react.

“There is no mention in your history books that I was chamberlain to my brother?”

“None. It says you bought horses and fooled around with women.” And she’d thought she could love such a man! But then, it seemed that a lot of women had thought so.

Nicholas ate a scone and drank his tea. “When I return, I will change your history books.”

“You can’t change history. History is fact; it’s already made. And you certainly can’t change what the history books say. They’re already printed.”

He didn’t answer her. “What did your book say of my family after my death?”

“I didn’t look that far. I only read about your brother and you.”

He gave her a cool look. “You read only of the bad about me?”

“That’s all there
was.”

“What of my design of Thornwyck? When the queen saw my plan, she hailed it as a monument of greatness.”

“There is no record that you designed it. The librarian said some people believed you did, but there was no proof.”

Nicholas put down his half-eaten scone. “Come,” he said angrily. “I will show you what I did. I will show you the great work I left behind me.”

As he strode out of the tea room, the unfinished scone was testimony to how upset he was. He walked ahead of her with long, angry strides, and Dougless had difficulty keeping up with him as they went back to the hotel.

To Dougless the hotel was beautiful, but to Nicholas it was mostly ruins. To the left of the entrance were what she’d assumed were stone fences, but he showed her that they were walls to what would have been nearly half of the house. Now there was grass underfoot and vines growing down the walls. He told her of the beauty of these rooms if they had been built as he designed them: paneling, stained glass, carved marble fireplaces. He pointed high on one wall to a stone face, worn by rain and time. “My brother,” he said. “I had the likeness carved of him.”

As they walked down long avenues of roofless rooms and Nicholas talked, Dougless began to see what he had planned. She could almost hear the lutes in the music room.

“And now it is this,” he said at last. “A place for cows and goats and . . . yeomen.”

“And their daughters,” Dougless said, including herself in his derogatory description.

Turning, he looked at her with cool contempt. “You believe what these fools have written about me,” he said. “You believe my life was naught but horses and women.”

“I didn’t say that, the books did, my lord,” she answered him in the same tone.

“On the morrow we will begin to find what the books do
not
say.”

I
n the morning they were both
at the library when the door was unlocked. After spending twenty minutes explaining the free library system to Nicholas, Dougless got five of the books on the Staffords from the shelves and began to read. Nicholas sat across from her, staring at the pages of a book, and frowning in consternation. After thirty minutes of watching him struggle, Dougless took pity on him.

“Perhaps, sir,” she said softly, “in the evenings I might teach you to read.”

“Teach me to read?” he asked.

“In America I teach school, and I’ve had quite a bit of experience teaching children to read. I’m sure you could learn,” she said gently.

“Could I?” he asked, one eyebrow raised. He didn’t say any more, but got up, went to the librarian, and asked her a few questions, which Dougless couldn’t hear. Smiling, the librarian nodded, left the desk for a moment, then returned and handed him several books.

Nicholas put the books on the table in front of Dougless and opened the top one. “There, Miss Montgomery, read that to me.”

On the page was an incomprehensible type-face of oddly-shaped letters and strangely-spelled words. She looked up at him.

“This
is my printing.” Picking the book up, he looked at the title page. “It is a play by a man named William Shakespeare.”

“You haven’t heard of him? I thought Shakespeare was as Elizabethan as any man ever was.”

Nicholas, starting to read, took a seat across from her. “Nay, I have no knowledge of him.” Quickly, he became absorbed in his reading as Dougless dug more into the history books.

She could find very little about what happened after Nicholas’s death. The estates had been taken over by the queen. Neither Christopher nor Nicholas had children, so the Stafford title and line had died with them. Again and again, she read of what a wastrel Nicholas had been and how he’d betrayed his entire family.

At noon they went to a pub for lunch. After their first visit, Nicholas had not insisted upon a heavy midday meal. He was beginning to get used to the light lunches, but he continued to grumble.

“Foolish children,” he said, moving his food about on his plate. “If they had listened to their parents, they would have lived. Your world fosters such disobedience.”

“What children?”

“In the play. Juliet and . . .” He paused, trying to remember.

“Romeo and Juliet?
You’ve been reading
Romeo and Juliet?”

“Aye, and a more disobedient lot I have never seen. That play is a good lesson to children everywhere. I hope children today read it and learn from it.”

Dougless nearly screeched at him.
“Romeo and Juliet
is about
romance,
and if the parents hadn’t been so narrow-minded and uptight, they—”

“Narrow-minded? They were good parents. They knew such a liaison could only end in tragedy—and it
did!”
he said fiercely.

Dougless’s ideas of being cool fled her mind. “The tragedy came because the parents—” They argued throughout the meal.

Later, as they walked back to the library, Dougless asked him how his brother Christopher had died.

Nicholas stopped walking and looked away. “I was to go hunting with him that day, but I had cut my arm during sword practice.” Dougless saw him rubbing his left forearm. “I still bear the scar.” After a moment Nicholas turned to her, and she could see the pain in his eyes. Whatever she thought of Nicholas Stafford, she had no doubt of his love for his brother. “He drowned. I was not the only brother who liked women. Kit saw a pretty girl swimming in a lake, and he told his men to leave him alone with her. After a few hours the men returned to find my brother floating in the lake.”

“And no one saw what happened?”

“Nay. Perhaps the girl did, but we never found her.”

Dougless was thoughtful for a moment. “How odd that your brother drowned with no witnesses to attest to what happened; then a few years later you were tried for treason. It’s almost as though someone planned to take the Stafford estates.”

Nicholas’s face changed. He looked at her with that expression men have when a woman says something they’ve not thought of—as though the impossible has happened.

“Who stood to inherit? Your dear, darling Lettice?” Dougless snapped her lips together, wishing she’d kept the jealousy out of her voice.

Nicholas didn’t seem to notice. “Lettice had her marriage property, but she lost all at my death. I inherited from Kit, but I can assure you I did not wish for his death.”

“Too much responsibility?” Dougless asked. “Being the boss carries a burden to it.”

He gave her a look of anger. “You believe your history books. Come,” he said, “you must read more. You must discover who betrayed me.”

Dougless read all afternoon while Nicholas laughed over
The Merchant of Venice,
but she could find out nothing more.

In the evening Nicholas wanted her to dine with him, but she refused. She knew she had to spend less time with him. Her heart was too newly broken and she had come too close to caring more for him than was good for her. Looking like a sad little boy, he stuck his hands in his pockets and went downstairs to dinner, while Dougless asked for a bowl of soup and some bread to be brought up to her room. As she ate, she went over her notes, but could come up with no new ideas. No one seemed to gain anything by the deaths of Christopher and Nicholas.

About ten
P.M.,
Nicholas had still not returned from dinner so, curious, she went downstairs to look for him. He was in the beautiful stone-walled drawing room laughing with half a dozen guests. Dougless stood in the shadow of the doorway and watched—and anger, unreasonable, unjust anger, flooded her body.
She
had called him forward, but now two other women were drooling over him.

Turning away, she left the hallway. He was exactly as the books said, she thought. No wonder someone had so easily betrayed him. When he should have been taking care of business, he was probably in bed with some woman.

She went upstairs, put on her nightgown, and got into the little bed the hotel had brought up for her. But she didn’t sleep. Instead, she lay there feeling angry and foolish. Maybe she should have left with Robert. Robert had a bit of a problem about sharing money and he did love his daughter excessively, but he’d always been faithful to her.