Knights (30 page)

“But someone must take care of you—”

“Someone is doing that, Lyn,” Gloriana interrupted. “
I
am.”

He turned his back on her to stare into the fire, hands plunged into the pockets of his trousers, but not before Gloriana saw the flush of annoyed conviction rise along his jawline. “And you’re having one hell of
a go at it, aren’t you?” he retorted. “Wandering among the stones of an ancient ruin, in the rain—”

Gloriana closed her eyes for a moment and drew a deep breath. She resolved, once again, to hold her temper, for misguided as his efforts were, Lyn was only trying to help. “I admit that was a blunder,” she said. “A very serious one. That doesn’t mean I need—or want—a keeper.”

Lyn’s shoulders sagged slightly as her words, however gently aimed, struck him with an obvious impact. “Gloriana,” he said raggedly, after a very long time, “the past is dead. Please—let me give you a future.”

Tears brimmed along Gloriana’s lashes, but she dashed them away with the back of one hand before Lyn could turn and see them. “I have a future,” she said. “What I need, ever so badly, is a friend.”

He was looking at her then, his face hidden in shadow. “I shall always be that,” he vowed hoarsely.

“I hope so,” Gloriana replied. “For I don’t know what I should have done without your help.”

With that, there seemed a new, if tentative, understanding between the two of them. Lyn did not mention his personal feelings again, but instead served up some of Mrs. Bond’s succulent mutton stew, brought from his cottage and reheated on Janet’s stove.

As Gloriana ate, still ensconced in the chair in front of the fire, Lyn began gathering up Professor Steinbeth’s manuscript.

“I’ll send word to Arthur that you’re not up to finishing this,” he said.

Gloriana was exasperated. “You’re taking charge again,” she warned. “It just so happens, Mr. Kirkwood, that I wish to finish the task set before me. For reasons of my own.”

Lyn left off what he’d been doing, holding both
hands up high for a moment in comical acquiescence. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll tell Arthur you’re progressing nicely.”

“Thank you,” Gloriana replied, and smiled.

Lyn glanced at his watch. “I’d better be getting along,” he said. “Rounds, you know.” He bent to kiss the top of Gloriana’s head. “Good night, love.”

She answered by squeezing his hand, and he put on his coat and left.

Strengthened by the medicine, several hours of rest, and a hearty meal, Gloriana found herself inexorably drawn toward Professor Steinbeth’s manuscript. Setting aside her supper tray and the soft blanket Marge had tucked around her earlier, Gloriana rose and walked steadily to the table.

Within minutes, the small tape player was whirring again and she was completely absorbed in the words penned so long ago by one of Dane’s own progeny. The account had moved past Kenbrook’s life and death into the tempestuous generations to follow, and Gloriana was better able to detach from the details—which were sometimes dull, sometimes fascinating, and very often tragic.

She finished reading in the early morning and, still feeling uncommonly vigorous, made herself breakfast, took a shower, and went downstairs to work in the shop. She was eager to redeem herself as an employee and prove that Janet had not misplaced the confidence and trust she had put in her.

Several customers came in, breaking the usual monotony, and Gloriana even made a sizable sale to an American tourist.

She was alone in the shop, perched high on the sliding shelf-ladder, replacing a rejected volume, when another headache careened into her, like a runaway
bus, and slammed her hard against a wall of darkness. A cold sweat sprang out all over her body, and Gloriana clung to the rungs of her ladder, afraid to let go or even attempt descent.

Her vision was naught but an ebony fog, peppered with bursts of light, and she felt her consciousness seeping down some inner drain, disappearing into nowhere.

And then she was falling.

She fell and fell, end over end, like the fair-haired Alice she’d heard of long ago, when she was still called Megan, tumbling down the rabbit hole. She braced herself to strike the hardwood floor, but the dreaded moment of impact never came….

Someone was poking her with a stick or a broom handle.

“Get yourself up from there, boy,” a male voice commanded roughly, “and be on your way. This is no almshouse, nor no tavern, neither.”

Gloriana opened her eyes to see a man in a shoddy woolen tunic and leggings standing over her, grasping a shepherd’s staff—the object he’d jabbed her with, no doubt. She was leaning against the outer wall of a crude daub-and-wattle hut, and an upward glance showed a thatched roof overhead.

Cautious joy flooded her soul. Was she dreaming?

Or was she back in her own corner of history, and Dane’s?

Gloriana scrambled to her feet. “What year is this, pray, and what realm?”

The man simply stared at her, as if dumbfounded.

His gaze moved over her twentieth-century clothes with mingled wonder and disapproval, and he took a step backward, as though expecting fire to shoot from her fingertips.

Gloriana held her tongue a moment and concentrated, hoping thereby to make the inner shift back to the manner of speaking proper to the thirteenth century. If indeed that was where she was.

She repeated her question, slowly and carefully.

“Why, ’tis the year of our Lord twelve hundred and fifty-six,” the man said. “And this be Britain. Seems you ought to know such things as those, lad. Where do you come from?”

Two years, she thought, stricken. Two years had passed since she’d vanished from the Kenbrook Hall she knew, while hardly more than a month had gone by for her in the twentieth century.

A great deal might have happened in so much time, and Gloriana’s soaring gladness was suddenly tempered by dread. Professor Steinbeth’s manuscript had not been specific enough for her to know whether she’d arrived in time to avert certain tragedies, but if she hadn’t, unbearable sorrow might well await her.

Her next thought was that the man was mistaking her for a male—probably because of her slacks and shorter hair.

He took her arm in a bruising grip. “I asked where you hail from, boy, and you’ll tell or feel my boot amongst your ribs.”

Gloriana thought quickly and was still not sure, even after the fact, that she’d spoken wisely. “Kenbrook Hall,” she said.

The fellow squinted into her face. His breath was foul, and the smell of his unwashed body worse still. “Kenbrook Hall, you say? That be a lie, for certain—for no one lives in that place now but for ghosts. It’s but a shell.”

Gloriana’s heart sank. “How can that be?”

“The master’s at Hadleigh Castle these days.” He
paused to spit, showing his contempt, and Gloriana felt her stomach roll ominously. “That way, he’s closer to the tavern.”

She wrenched free of the peasant’s grasp and rather handily evaded his attempts to get hold of her again. Looking frantically around, she recognized the landscape, knew she was near one of Hadleigh’s neighboring villages. It was a distance of several difficult miles to Gareth’s castle from there.

Purposefully, ignoring the impatient inquiries and imprecations that were flung after her like stones, Gloriana set out at a fast pace for the cluster of huts round the next bend, hoping to beg, borrow, or, if necessary, steal a gown of some sort. Her latter-day garments would attract too much attention, and questions might be put to her that she dared not answer.

She passed hay-laden carts on the path to Calway and drew her share of stares, but when she reached the village, she was pleased to see a mummers’ troupe at its center. There were acrobats and jesters and dancing women, along with a small menagerie of tattered animals in rickety wheeled cages.

Giving a mangy bear on a leash a wide berth, Gloriana approached a gray-haired man, mostly because he was the tallest of the band of players and thus projected a certain air of authority. He was clad in a grand, flowing cloak of azure silk, patterned with shimmering golden stars.

“Excuse me,” she said, coming near to touching one of the cloak’s great, loose sleeves, but stopping just short.

He turned to look down into her eyes, and a smile touched his lips, as though he found her familiar. Perhaps he and the others had performed at Hadleigh Castle before, while she yet lived there as Gareth’s
ward. Or mayhap they had been part of the celebration when Edward was knighted.

Gloriana had just concluded that the tall man was a magician when he uttered three unsettling words.

“
There
you are,” the merlin said, in the tones of a man finding something that has long been lost and most anxiously and vigorously sought in the interim.

Gloriana blinked, taken aback by his words and mien, but in the end she was so wholly focused on reaching Dane that she did not pursue an explanation of either his remark or his manner. “Where are you bound?” she asked.

“Hadleigh Castle,” was the reply, and it was accompanied by a deep and somber sigh. “Spirits are sore sorrowing in that place, and happiness is not found within those walls.”

The knowledge that there was such suffering in the midst of her family pierced Gloriana’s heart like an icy lance, but she would not give in to emotion again. She had made that mistake before in Lyn’s world, wandering in the rain among the ruins of Kenbrook Hall, and she would not willingly repeat it.

“I should like to join your mummers’ band,” she announced. In this way, she would be given a costume to cover her odd, modern clothes, and perhaps even a mask to hide her face. As eager as Gloriana was to see Dane again, she remembered from Arthur Steinbeth’s manuscript that from the day of her disappearance hence, she had been known as the Kenbrook Witch. Presenting herself openly, without assessing the situation first, might bring her to the stake.

“What can you do?” asked the master of the troupe. There was a smile in his eyes. “Be you a dancer—a magician—a fire-eater, mayhap?”

Gloriana swallowed. “I suppose I could dance,” she
said doubtfully. Then she brightened, recalling all she had seen and heard during her sojourn in the twentieth century, “And I have tales to tell.”

“A storyteller, then.” He touched her hair, curiously, but not in an objectionable manner. “Be you lad or lady?” he asked.

Gloriana looked down at the very loose sweater she was wearing over her slacks. Her bustline, never very robust in the first place, was modestly disguised. “Which is it more fortuitous to be?” she countered, upon meeting the merlin’s twinkling gaze again.

The master threw back his bushy head and let out a great bellow of laughter. “You are privileged to choose? God’s breath, but you are a mummer’s mummer, if you can be either!”

“I am a lady,” Gloriana said quietly, hoping she would not be called upon to explain her sheared hair. Brushing her shoulders, it was still quite long by twentieth-century standards, but this was the thirteenth, where women let their tresses grow throughout their lives.

“Ah” was the gentle reply. A hand of greeting and agreement was extended. “And I am called Romulus. You shall journey with our troupe to Hadleigh Castle, milady, and thereafter—who knows?”

Gloriana narrowed her eyes a moment, wondering. It almost seemed that Romulus knew who she was and that, indeed, he had been expecting her. But when a bright red robe, hooded and embroidered with golden thread, was thrust at her by one of the other players, Gloriana did not hesitate to accept it.

She donned the gown over her clothes and raised the hood. When no one was watching, she scooped up a handful of dirt and applied it liberally to her face
and hands, thus assuring a greater resemblance to the other members of the group.

After Romulus had made a few ringing announcements and the single cart had been loaded with various props and hitched to a small gray donkey—which obviously served also as a menagerie attraction—they set out along the rutted, winding road to Hadleigh.

Gloriana did not try to strike up a conversation with any of her fellow travelers, for she was lost in her own thoughts. Part of her wanted to bolt ahead at a dead run and reach Dane as soon as possible. Another part counseled immediate flight in the opposite direction.

She simply walked, hands loosely clasped in front of her, head down, face hidden by the generous hood.

A slender girl in a tawdry brown kirtle, her hair hidden beneath a dingy wimple, fell into step beside her. Like the others, except for Romulus, she was unwashed and seemed blissfully unaware of the fact.

Gloriana, though ever inclined toward cleanliness herself, might not have noticed the contrast if it hadn’t been for her recent visit to a later and far more hygienic point in time. She resisted an urge to wrinkle her nose and looked at her companion out of the corner of her eye.

“I am called Corliss,” the girl imparted, with such a mingling of reticence and eager affability that Gloriana hadn’t the heart to rebuff her. “I dance and cast runes.”

Gloriana knew her own smile was probably a trifle sad, but there was no help for it. Corliss couldn’t have lived more than two and ten summers, yet she was clearly on her own, dancing for strangers and making up stories about an uncertain future. Heaven only knew what else the child had to do to survive in that harsh world. “Mayhap I shall ask you to tell my fortune,”
Gloriana said, before offering her name. She made no mention of the St. Gregorys, of course, or her connection to Dane.

Corliss turned wide, guileless eyes on Gloriana’s face. “But I know your future, milady, even without the help of the runes.”

Gloriana felt a chill of fear. She was not sure she truly wanted to hear what lay ahead, for it might be terrible indeed. And Corliss was the second person to address her as a woman of noble birth since her return. “Why do you call me by such a title?” she asked, in a hushed voice, drawing a little nearer to the girl as they walked, that they might not be overheard. “I am but a poor player, and a wanderer, like you.”

Corliss’s smile was indulgent. “There is only one in all the kingdom called by the wondrous name of Gloriana. You are the Kenbrook Witch, are you not?”