A Knight in Shining Armor Read online

  She moved away from his outstretched hand. “Nicholas. The man who prayed here every morning and every afternoon for the last four days. He was the man in the Elizabethan armor. Remember? He nearly walked in front of a bus.”

  “More than a week ago I saw you nearly step in front of a coach. Later, you asked me the date.”

  “I . . . ?” Dougless asked. “But that was Nicholas. You told me this week you were amazed at how devout he was. I waited for him outside while he prayed. Remember?” Her voice was urgent as she stepped toward him. “Remember? Nicholas! You waved to us as we rode by on bicycles.”

  The vicar backed away from her. “I saw you on a bicycle but no man.”

  “No . . .” Dougless whispered, then stepped back from him, her eyes wide with horror.

  Turning, she ran out of the church, through the churchyard, down three streets, to the left, then the right, and into the hotel. Ignoring the greeting of the woman at the desk, she ran up the stairs.

  “Nicholas,” she cried as she looked about the empty room. The bathroom door was closed, and she ran to it, flung it open. Empty. She turned back to the room, but stopped in the doorway, then looked back into the bathroom. She stared at the shelf below the mirror. Her toiletries were there, but his were gone. She touched the empty half of the shelf. No razor, no shaving cream, no aftershave lotion. In the shower, his shampoo was gone.

  In their room, she flung open the closet door. Nicholas’s clothes were gone. Only hers hung there, her suitcases and her carry-on below on the floor. In the dresser his socks and handkerchiefs were missing.

  “No,” she whispered, then sat down on the side of the bed. It almost made sense that Nicholas was gone, but not his clothes, not the things he had given her. For a moment she put her hand to her heart, then snatched open her blouse. The pin, the beautiful gold pin with the pearl hanging from it, was gone.

  Dougless didn’t try to think after that. She tore the room apart looking for something, anything, of his that had been left behind. The emerald ring he’d given her was gone; the note he’d left under her door was gone. She opened her notebooks. Nicholas had written in them in his bizarre handwriting, but now the pages were blank.

  “Think, Dougless, think,” she said. There had to be some mark left by him. In the closet were the books they’d purchased; Nicholas had written his name inside them. They were blank now.

  There was nothing, nothing of him. She even looked on her clothes for any dark hairs. Clean.

  It was when she saw her red silk nightgown that Nicholas had torn from her body and saw that it was now whole that she became angry. “No!” she said, teeth clenched. “You can’t take him away from me so completely. You cannot!”

  People, she thought. Even if there was no physical evidence of him there were an awful lot of people who would remember him. Just because a daffy old vicar couldn’t remember him didn’t mean other people didn’t.

  Grabbing her handbag, she left the hotel.

  NINETEEN

  Dougless opened the door to the hotel room slowly, dreading the empty room. Her body was exhausted, but unfortunately, her mind was still working.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, then wearily turned and lay down. It was late and her body was empty of food, but she didn’t consider eating. Her eyes were wide open, sandy-feeling, dry, as she stared up at the underside of the bed canopy.

  No one remembered Nicholas.

  The coin merchant had no medieval coins, and he didn’t remember seeing Nicholas. Vaguely, he remembered that Dougless had come into his shop to browse. He didn’t remember examining Nicholas’s clothes, and he said he’d never seen silver and gold armor outside a museum. The clerk in the clothing store didn’t remember Nicholas pulling a sword on him. The librarian said Dougless had checked out books, but she’d always been alone. The dentist said he’d never seen a man with ridges on his teeth and a cracked jaw. He had no X-rays for a Nicholas Stafford. No one at the pubs remembered him or at the tea shops. They all remembered Dougless coming in alone. The bicycle shop showed her the receipt, which indicated she’d rented only one bike. Their sweet landlady at the bed-and-breakfast didn’t remember Nicholas, and she said no one had played her piano since her husband had died.

  Like a woman possessed, Dougless went wherever she and Nicholas had been and asked anyone who might have seen him. She asked tourists in tea shops, residents on the street, clerks in stores.

  Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Weary, numb with the dawning realization of what had happened, she went back to the hotel and now lay on the bed. She didn’t dare go to sleep. Last night she’d awakened from a dream that Nicholas was lost to her. Nicholas had cradled her in his arms, gently laughed at her, and told her she was dreaming, that he was with her and always would be.

  Last night, last night, she thought. He had touched her and loved her, and today he was gone. More than gone. His body, his clothes, even other people’s memory of him was gone.

  And it was her fault. He had stayed as long as they hadn’t made love, but once he’d touched her, he’d been taken away. It didn’t help to know she’d been right. He’d come to her for love, not for righting a wrong. He’d stayed when he’d found out who had betrayed him, but he’d slipped away through her arms once he’d admitted he loved her.

  She clasped her arms about her chest. He was gone as irreversibly as death. Only she had no comfort of other people who remembered and loved him.

  When the telephone on the bedside table rang, she didn’t at first hear it. On the fifth ring, dully, she picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Dougless,” said Robert’s voice, stern and angry. “Are you over your hysterics yet?”

  She felt too numb, too empty to fight. “What do you want?”

  “The bracelet, of course. If you aren’t too wrapped up in Lover-boy to find it.”

  “What?” Dougless said, slowly at first, then, “What! Did you see him? Did you see Nicholas? Of course you did. He pushed you out the door.”

  “Dougless, are you out of your mind? No one has ever pushed me through any door, and they better not try it either.” He sighed. “Now you’ve got me acting crazy. I want that bracelet.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said hurriedly, “but what did you mean when you referred to ‘Lover-boy’?”

  “I don’t have time to repeat every—”

  “Robert,” Dougless said calmly, “you either tell me, or I flush the bracelet down the toilet, and I don’t believe you have insurance on it yet.”

  There was a pause on the other end. “I was right to ditch you. You’re crazy. No wonder your family won’t let you have the dough until you’re thirty-five. I can’t put up with you that long.”

  “I’m on my way to the bathroom now.”

  “All right! But it’s hard to remember what you said that night. You were hysterical. You said something about having a job helping some guy rewrite history. That’s all I remember.”

  “Rewrite history,” Dougless said under her breath. Yes, that’s what Nicholas had wanted to do in this century: change history.

  “Dougless! Dougless!” Robert was shouting, but she had put down the telephone.

  When Nicholas had come to her, he had been facing an execution. But what they had found out had saved him from that. Grabbing her big carry-on satchel from the closet, she stuffed some clothing and toiletries into it. As she closed a drawer, she glanced into the mirror and put her hand to her throat. Beheading. Today, she thought, we read about it, read that some person walked up a platform and another person struck them with an ax. But we don’t think of what it really means.

  “We saved you from that,” she whispered.

  Once she was packed, she sat down on a chair to wait for morning. Tomorrow she’d go to Nicholas’s houses and hear how they had changed history. Perhaps hearing that Nicholas had lived to be an old man and had accomplished great things would help her feel better. She leaned back on the chair and stared at the bed. She didn’t dare