A Knight in Shining Armor Read online

  When the door of the church opened and the vicar came in, Dougless sat where she was.

  “Are you all right?” the vicar asked.

  At first Dougless couldn’t understand him. His accent and his pronunciation were foreign sounding. “How long have I been here?” she asked.

  The vicar frowned. This young woman was so very strange. She walked in front of speeding vehicles, she insisted she was with a man when she was alone, and now she had just walked into the church and was asking how long she had been here. “A few minutes, no more,” he answered.

  Dougless gave a weak smile. A few minutes. A lifetime in the sixteenth century and she had been away only a few minutes. When she tried to stand, her legs were weak and the vicar helped her rise.

  “Perhaps you should see a doctor,” the vicar said.

  A psychiatrist perhaps, Dougless almost answered. If she told her story to a psychiatrist, would he write a book and make what happened to Dougless into a Movie-of-the-Week? “No, I’m fine, really,” she whispered. “I just need to get back to my hotel and—” And what? What was there for her to do now that Nicholas was gone? She took a step forward.

  “Don’t forget your bag.”

  Dougless turned to see her old tote bag on the floor by the tomb. The contents of that bag had helped her throughout her time in the Elizabethan age. Looking at it, she felt a closeness to the bag. It had been where she had been. She went to it and on impulse unzipped the top of it. She didn’t have to inspect the contents to know that everything was there. The bottle of aspirin was full; none of the pills she had given away were missing. Her toothpaste tube was full, not flat. No cold tablets were missing, no pages gone from her notebook. Everything was as it had been.

  She lifted the tote bag, slung the strap onto her shoulder, then turned away. But abruptly, she halted; then she turned and glanced back at the base of the tomb. Something was different. She wasn’t at first sure what it was, but something had changed.

  Careful not to look at the sculpture of Nicholas, she stared at the base.

  “Is something wrong?” the vicar asked.

  Dougless read the inscription twice before she realized what was different. “The date,” she whispered.

  “The date? Ah, yes, the tomb is quite old.”

  Nicholas’s death date was 1599. Not 1564. Bending, she touched the numbers, trying to make sure she was seeing correctly. Thirty-five years. He had lived thirty-five years past when he was supposed to have been executed.

  It was only after she had touched the date that she looked up at the tomb. The sculpture was of Nicholas, but it was very different now. It was not a portrait of a young man, dead in his prime, but of an older man, a man who had been able to live out his life. She looked down the length of him, saw that his clothes were different. He wore the longer knee breeches of 1599, instead of the short slops of thirty years earlier.

  She caressed his cold cheek, traced the lines the sculptor had put at the corners of his eyes. “We did it,” she whispered. “Nicholas, my love, we did it.”

  “I beg your pardon,” the vicar said.

  When Dougless looked at him, she gave him a dazzling smile. “We changed history,” she said; then, still smiling, she walked outside into the sunshine.

  She stood in the graveyard for a moment, feeling disoriented. The gravestones were so old, yet an hour before stones with these dates had been new. Dougless gasped in horror at the first sight of a car. And as she gasped, she felt her lungs expand; no steel corset confined her ribcage. For a moment she had a deep sense of everything being wrong. She felt naked and drab in her plain clothes. She looked down at her boring skirt and blouse with distaste. And her back felt as though it had nothing to support it now that her corset was gone, and her leather boots pinched her feet.

  Another car went by, and the speed of it made Dougless feel dizzy. She walked to the gate, opened it, then stepped onto the sidewalk. How odd to have concrete under her feet. As she walked, she looked with awe at the buildings about her. There were huge expanses of glass; the shop signs had writing on them. Who can read them? she thought, remembering that where she had been few people could read, so signs were painted with pictures of what was sold in the shops.

  How clean everything was, she thought. No mud, no chamber pot emptyings, no kitchen slops, no pigs foraging. The people in the street were odd-looking too. They all wore the same drab clothes as she did. And they all seemed to be equal, no beggars dressed in filthy rags, no ladies with pearls on their skirts.

  Dougless slowly walked down the street, staring wide-eyed, as though she’d never seen the twentieth century before. The smell of food made her turn and enter a pub. For a moment she stood in the doorway and looked about. Obviously, the place was supposed to be a facsimile of an Elizabethan tavern, but it missed by a long way. It was too clean, too quiet, too . . . lonely, she thought. The people sitting at the tables were isolated from one another. Not at all like the gregarious, nosy Elizabethans.

  At the back of the pub was a chalkboard with the menu on it. Dougless ordered six courses, taking no notice of the waitress’s raised eyebrows; then she went to a table to sit down and sip her beer. The thick glass mug felt odd and the beer tasted as though it were half water.

  On the bar was a rack of guidebooks to the historic houses of Great Britain. Dougless handed the barman a ten-pound note, then took the book back to her booth and began to read it. Bellwood was open to the public, just as it had been before. She looked for Nicholas’s other houses and found that they were no longer listed as being ruins. All eleven of the houses Nicholas had once owned were still standing. And three of them were owned by the Stafford family.

  Dougless blinked hard as she reread the passage. The guidebook said that the Stafford family was one of the oldest and wealthiest in England, that in the seventeenth century they had married into the royal family, and that the present duke was a cousin to the queen.

  “Duke,” Dougless whispered. “Nicholas, your descendants are dukes.”

  When the food came, Dougless was a bit startled at the way it was served, without ceremony, all the dishes being put on the table at once.

  As she ate, she kept reading the guidebook. Except for Bellwood, all Nicholas’s houses were private residences and not open to the public. She turned to Thornwyck Castle. It too was a private residence, but a small section of it was open to the public on Thursdays. “The current duke feels that the beauty of Thornwyck, designed by his ancestor, the brilliant scholar Nicholas Stafford, must be shared with the world,” she read.

  “‘Brilliant scholar,’” she whispered. Not the ladies’ man he had once been called. Not a rogue, not a wastrel, but a “brilliant scholar.”

  She closed the guidebook and looked up. The waitress was hovering over her with an odd expression on her face.

  “Something wrong with your fork?” she asked.

  “Fork?” Dougless couldn’t think what the woman was talking about. The waitress continued to stare at Dougless until she looked down at her empty plate. There beside it lay an unused fork. Dougless had eaten her meal with a spoon and a knife. “It’s all right. I just—” She couldn’t think of what to say, so she gave the woman a weak smile and looked at the bill. The amount—enough to buy a hundred medieval dinners—made her blanch, but she paid it.

  And before she left, she asked the waitress what day of the week it was—something she couldn’t remember—and was pleased to find out that it was Wednesday.

  Outside again, she didn’t allow herself to stand still. If she stayed in one place too long, she knew that she’d start to think; she’d think about Nicholas, about losing him, and about never seeing him again.

  She practically ran to the train station to catch the first train to Bellwood. She had to see what had changed. On the train ride she made herself read the guidebook, anything to fill her mind.

  By now she knew the way to Bellwood from the train station very well. According to twentieth-century time, she