A Knight in Shining Armour (48 page)

“Gloria!” she said before she realized it was the French heiress. “I mean,” she said, stumbling, “I guess you’re not Gloria, are you? Where’s the lioness?” Dougless gasped at what she’d said. She’d rarely seen this girl, but when she had, she’d always been accompanied by her tall, overbearing guardian of a nurse. “I didn’t mean—” Dougless began, apologizing.

The heiress didn’t reply but sailed past Dougless with her nose in the air. “I am of an age to care for myself. I need no nurse.”

Dougless smiled at the girl’s plump back. She sounded just like Dougless’s fifth graders. They, too, thought they were old enough to take care of themselves. “Sneaked out, did you?” Dougless said, smiling.

The girl turned quickly and glared at Dougless, then her face softened. “She does snore,” she said with a bit of a smile; then she looked back at the fountain. “What do you here?”

When Dougless looked at the fountain, to her horror, she saw that the little pool was full of soap bubbles. To Dougless, the bubbles were pollution, but the heiress seemed to think they were wonderful. The girl lifted a handful of suds.

“I took a bath,” Dougless said. “Want one?”

The girl gave a delicate shudder. “Nay, my health is most delicate.”

“Bathing won’t hurt—” Dougless began but stopped. No missionary work, remember? she reminded herself. Moving to stand by the girl, Dougless looked at her closely in the early light. “Who told you you were delicate?”

“Lady Hallet.” She looked at Dougless. “My lioness.” There were tiny dimples in her cheeks.

Dougless considered what she was about to say, and she knew she was taking a chance, but the child looked as though she needed a friend. “Lady Hallet says you’re delicate so she gets to tell you what to eat, and where you can and cannot go, and who may be your friend and who not. In fact, she gets to keep you under her thumb so much that you have to sneak out before daylight just to see the gardens. Is that about right?”

For a moment, the girl’s mouth dropped open, but then she stiffened and gave Dougless a haughty look. “Lady Hallet guards me from the lower classes.” She looked Dougless up and down.

“Such as me?” Dougless asked, suppressing a smile.

“You are not a princess. Lady Hallet says a princess would not make a spectacle of herself as you do. She says you are not educated. You do not even speak French.”

“That’s what Lady Hallet says. But what do
you
think of me?”

“That you are not a princess or you would not—”

“No.” Dougless cut her off. “Not what Lady Hallet says, what do
you
think?”

The girl gaped at Dougless, obviously not knowing what to say.

Dougless smiled at her. “Do you like Kit?”

The girl looked down at her hands, and Dougless thought her face turned red. “As bad as that?”

“He does not notice me,” the girl whispered, tears in her voice. When her head came up and she glared in hate at Dougless, at that moment she looked so much like Gloria that it was eerie. “He looks at you.”

“Me?” Dougless gasped. “Kit isn’t interested in me.”

“All the men like you. Lady Hallet says you are close to being a . . . a . . .”

Dougless grimaced. “Don’t tell me. I’ve already been called that. Look . . . What’s your name?”

“Lady Allegra Lucinda Nicolletta de Couret,” she said proudly.

“But what do your friends call you?”

The girl looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled. “My first nurse called me Lucy.”

“Lucy,” Dougless said, smiling, but then she looked at the lightening sky. “I guess we better get back. People will be searching for . . . us.”

Lucy looked startled, then gathered her heavy, expensive skirt and started to run. She was obviously terrified of being found missing.

“Tomorrow morning,” Dougless called after her. “Same time.” She wasn’t sure Lucy heard or not.

Dougless went back to the house, ignoring the servants’ looks at her wet hair and her robe. When she opened the door to Honoria’s bedroom, she sighed. Now began the long, painful process of dressing, and she wished just now for the ease and comfort of jeans and a sweatshirt.

After breakfast she sneaked away from the other women to look for Nicholas. The women were demanding new songs, and already Dougless’s small store was depleted. She was down to humming tunes and persuading the women to make up their own words. But today she had to talk to Nicholas. Nothing was going to be changed about his execution if she didn’t talk to him.

She found him in a room that could only be an office, sitting at a table surrounded by papers. He appeared to be adding a column of figures.

He looked up at her, raised one eyebrow, then looked back down at his paper.

“Nicholas, you can’t ignore me. We must talk. Sometime you’re going to
have
to listen to me.”

“I am occupied. Do not plague me with your nonsensical chatter.”

“Chatter! Nonsense!” she said in anger. “What I need to say means more than that.”

He gave her another look to be quiet, then returned to his column of numbers.

Dougless glanced at the paper, but the numbers made no sense to her. Some were Roman numerals, some written with a
j
instead of an
i,
and some numbers were Arabic. No wonder he had a difficult time adding them, she thought. Opening the little embroidered pouch that hung at her waist, she took out her solar calculator. She carried it with her because Honoria and the other ladies were always counting stitches in their embroidery, so Dougless often added and subtracted for them so their patterns would be accurate. But she had more important things to do than help him add, she thought as she set the calculator down beside Nicholas’s hand.

“You and Kit were gone for a few days. Did you go to Bellwood? Did he show you the secret door?” she asked.

“Lord
Kit,” he said emphatically, “is not your concern. Nor am I. Nor, for that matter, is my mother’s household. Madam, you are not wanted here.”

She was standing over him, looking down at him and trying to think of what to say to make him listen to her. Then, as she watched, in his anger Nicholas snatched up the calculator and began punching the buttons. He punched in the numbers, hit the plus key between them, then the equal at the end. Still speaking, obviously not even noticing what he’d done, he wrote down the total on his piece of paper.

“And furthermore—” he said as he started to add the second column.

“Nicholas,” she whispered, “you remember.” She drew in her breath; then louder, she said, “You remember.”

“I remember naught,” he said angrily, but even as he spoke, he stared down at the calculator in his hands. He realized he’d been using it, but now the knowledge of what it was and how it was used fled him. He dropped the thing as though it were evil.

Seeing him use the calculator was a revelation to Dougless. Somehow, what he’d experienced in the twentieth century was buried in his memory. It was four years before it happened, but now also happened to be four hundred years before Dougless’s birth. So many strange experiences were happening to her that she couldn’t question his knowledge of a calculator. But if he remembered that little machine, then he remembered
her.

She went to her knees beside him and put her hands on his arm. “Nicholas, you do remember.”

Nicholas wanted to pull away from her, but he couldn’t. What was it about the woman? he asked himself. She was pretty, yes, but he’d seen women more beautiful. He’d certainly been around women more pleasing than she was. But this woman . . . this woman never left his mind.

“Please,” she whispered, “don’t close your mind to me. Don’t fight me. You might remember more if you’d allow yourself.”

“I remember naught,” he said firmly, looking down into her eyes. He’d like to take her hair out of the little cap, out of its braid.

“You
do
remember. How else would you know how to use the calculator?”

“I did not—” he began, then glanced at the thing sitting on top of the papers. But he knew that, somehow, he had known how to use it; he’d known how to add the numbers with it. He jerked his arm from under her hands. “Leave me.”

“Nicholas, please listen to me,” she pleaded. “You must tell me if Kit has shown you the door at Bellwood or not. That information will give us an idea of how long we have until he’s . . . he’s drowned.” Until Lettice orders him killed, she thought. “It may be weeks yet or even months, but if he’s shown you the door, his . . . accident is a matter of days from now. Please, Nicholas, don’t fight me on this.”

He was not going to allow her to control him. He was not going to be like the rest of the household and follow her about begging for her favors. Any day now he expected her to ask for a purse of gold in exchange for another song. And his mother was so enamored of her that she’d no doubt give the gold. As it was, Lady Margaret showered this woman with dresses and fans, and dug into the Stafford jewel chests to lend her all sorts of riches.

“I know of no door,” Nicholas said, lying. It had been but days since Kit had shown him the door at Bellwood. That this witch-woman knew of it was further proof that she was not what she seemed.

Dougless sat back on her heels, her green satin skirt billowing about her, and sighed in relief. “Good,” she whispered. “Good.” She didn’t want to think that Kit was close to death. If Kit didn’t die, then perhaps Lettice wouldn’t have a chance to get her hooks into Nicholas, and the great injustice would be prevented. And, besides, perhaps after Kit was saved, she would be sent back to the twentieth century.

“You care for my brother?” Nicholas asked, looking down at her.

She smiled. “He seems like a nice guy, but he’ll never be . . .” She trailed off. The love of my life, she’d almost said. Looking into Nicholas’s blue eyes, she remembered the night they’d made love. She remembered his laughter and his interest in the modern world. Without thinking, she reached her hand out toward him. He didn’t seem to think either as he took her hand and raised her fingertips to his lips.

“Colin,” she whispered.

“Sir,” came a voice from the doorway. “My pardon.”

Nicholas dropped her hand, and Dougless, knowing the moment was lost, rose and smoothed her skirts. “You’ll tell me about the door, won’t you? We’ll have to keep watch over Kit,” she said softly.

Nicholas didn’t look at her. All the woman spoke of was his brother. She haunted his mind, yet she seemed to feel no such pull toward him. Her thoughts were of Kit alone. “Go,” he murmured, then louder, “Go and sing your songs to the others. It will take more than a song to enchant me. And take that.” He looked at the calculator as though it were something from the devil.

“You can keep it and use it if you want.”

He turned hard eyes toward her. “I know not how.”

With a sigh, Dougless took the calculator, then left the room. So far, every attempt she’d made to talk to Nicholas had failed. But at least now she was beginning to understand that he thought he was protecting his family from her. She couldn’t help smiling at that thought. The Nicholas she’d loved so much had also put his family first. In the twentieth century, he’d wanted to return to a possible execution in order to save his family’s honor.

This man
was
the Nicholas she’d come to love, she thought, smiling. On the surface, what with the women on the table and in the arbor, he had seemed like the rake the history books had portrayed him to be. And of course she’d hated his anger and animosity toward her. And it didn’t help any that the rest of his family couldn’t be nicer to her, with only Nicholas being hostile. But, under it all, she knew that he was the man she’d come to love, the man who put others before himself.

This thought made her forgive him for his hostility. What if she’d had an ulterior motive for wanting to be near his family? It wasn’t good to be as trusting as the family was. Nicholas was the one who was right. He should mistrust her. Since he consciously remembered nothing of her from before, he had no reason to trust her. And what with the bond between them and the way he “heard” her calling him at times, he had every reason to believe her to be a witch.