A Knight in Shining Armor Read online

  For a moment he looked into the distance, his eyes angry and hard. “The queen was told by someone . . .” Pausing, he took a breath. “She was told that the army I was gathering was to join forces with the young Scots queen.”

  “Mary Queen of Scots,” Dougless said, and he nodded.

  “I was given a hasty trial and condemned to be beheaded. I had but three days left before I was to be executed when you . . . when you called me here.”

  “Then you’re lucky!” Dougless said. “Beheading. Disgusting. We don’t do that now.”

  “You have no treason that you do not need to behead people?” Nicholas asked. “Or perhaps you punish the nobility in another way.” He put up his hand when she started to answer. “Nay, we will discuss this later. My mother is a powerful woman and she has friends. From the moment I was taken, she has worked without rest to prove my innocence—and she has made progress. She believes she is close to finding who betrayed me. I must return and prove that I am not guilty. If I do not, she will lose all. She will be a pauper.”

  “The queen would take everything you own?”

  “All. It would be as though I truly were a traitor.”

  Dougless thought about what he’d told her. Of course none of what he was saying was real, but if it were, perhaps there was something to be learned today from the history books. “Do you have any idea who told the queen your army was going to be used to take her throne?”

  “I am not sure, but when I came forward, I was writing a letter to my mother. At last I had remembered a man from some ten years ago who may have had a grudge against me. I had been told that he was now at court. Perhaps he . . .” Trailing off, Nicholas put his head in his hands in despair.

  Dougless almost reached out to him to touch his hair, perhaps to rub his neck, but she withdrew. She reminded herself that this man’s problems were not her own, and there was no reason on earth she should spend her time trying to help him find out why he—or maybe one of his ancestors—had been unjustly accused of treason.

  On the other hand, the idea of injustice made Dougless’s skin crawl. Maybe it was in her blood. Her grandfather, Hank Montgomery, had been a union organizer before he returned home to Maine to run the family business, Warbrooke Shipping. To this day, her grandfather hated any type of injustice and would risk his life to stop it.

  “As I told you, my father is a professor of medieval history,” Dougless said softly, “and I’ve helped him do some research. Maybe I could help you find what you’re looking for. And, besides, how many people are you going to find who are in such a situation that they’d even consider helping a man wearing a sword and balloon shorts?”

  Nicholas stood up. “You refer to my slops? You jest at my clothing? These . . . these . . .”

  “Trousers.”

  “Aye, these trousers. They bind a man’s legs so that I cannot bend. And these,” he said as he put his hands in his pockets. “They are so small that I can carry nothing. And last night I was cold in the rain and—”

  “But you’re cool today,” she said, smiling.

  “And this.” He pulled back the fly to show the zipper. “This can hurt a man.”

  Dougless began to laugh. “If you wore your underwear instead of leaving it on the bed, maybe the zipper wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Underwear? What is that?”

  “Elastic, remember?”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, and began to smile.

  Dougless suddenly thought, What else do I have to do? Cry some more? Six of her women friends had taken her out to dinner before she left for England to wish her bon voyage. There had been a lot of laughter about her romantic holiday. Yet here she was wanting to go home after just five days.

  Looking up at this smiling man, Dougless wondered, if she were honest with herself, would she rather spend four and a half weeks with Robert and Gloria, or would she rather help this man research what may or may not be his previous life? Smiling back at Nicholas, she thought that the whole thing reminded her of a ghost story where the heroine goes to the library and reads about the curse on the house she’s rented for the summer.

  “Yes,” she heard herself say. “I will help you.”

  Nicholas sat down by her, took her hand in his, and fervently kissed the back of it. “You are a lady at heart.”

  She was smiling at the top of his head, but his words made her smile disappear. “At heart? Are you saying that I’m not a lady elsewhere?”

  He gave a little shrug. “Who can fathom why God has joined me with a commoner?”

  “Why you—” she began. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that her uncle was the king of Lanconia and she often spent summers playing with her six cousins, the princes and princesses. But something stopped her. Let him think what he wanted. “Should I address you as ‘your lordship’?” she asked archly.

  Nicholas frowned thoughtfully. “I have considered that question. Now, when no one knows of my titles, I can move about unharmed. And these clothes, they are the clothes of all the people. I cannot understand your sumptuary laws. I am sure I should hire retainers, yet in this time a shirt costs a man’s yearly wage. Try as I might, I cannot understand your ways. Often I . . .” He looked away. “Often, I make a fool of myself.”

  “Oh, well, I do that and I’ve grown up in this century,” Dougless said lightly.

  “But you are a woman,” he said, looking back at her.

  “First of all, let’s get one thing straight: in this century women aren’t men’s slaves. We women today say what we want to say and do what we want to do. We know we weren’t put on this earth only to entertain men.”

  Nicholas’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. “Is this what is believed today of women of my time? You believe that our women were for pleasure only?”

  “Obedient, docile, locked away in a castle somewhere, kept pregnant, and never allowed to go to school.”

  Emotions ran across Nicholas’s face: astonishment, anger, disbelief. At last, his face relaxed and he smiled, his eyes full of merriment. “When I return, I will tell my mother what is believed about her. My mother has buried three husbands.” Laughter made his lips twitch. “King Henry said my mother’s husbands wished themselves into the grave because they weren’t half the man she is. Docile? Nay, lady, not docile. No schooling? My mother speaks four languages and argues philosophy.”

  “Then your mother is an exception. I’m sure most women are—were—downtrodden and brutalized. They had to be. They were the property of the men. Chattel.”

  He gave her a piercing stare. “And in your day men are noble? They do not abandon women? They do not leave them to the mercy of the elements, with no means of support, no protection, no funds to so much as find a night’s lodging?”

  Dougless turned away, blushing. So maybe she wasn’t in a good position to argue about this. “Okay, you’ve made your point.” She looked back at him. “All right, let’s get down to business. First we go to a drugstore, or chemist, as it’s called here in England, and we buy toiletries.” She sighed. “I need eyeshadow, base, blush, and I’d kill for a tube of lipstick right now. And we need toothbrushes, toothpaste, and floss.” Halting, she looked at him. “Let me see your teeth.”

  “Madam!”

  “Let me see your teeth,” she repeated in a no-nonsense voice. If he were an overworked graduate student, he’d have fillings, but if he were from the sixteenth century no dentist would have touched his mouth.

  After a moment, Nicholas obediently opened his mouth, and Dougless moved his head this way and that to look inside. He had three molars missing and there looked to be a cavity in another tooth, but there was no sign of modern dental work. “We need to get you to a dentist and take care of that cavity.”

  Instantly, Nicholas pulled away from her. “The tooth does not pain me enough to have it pulled,” he said stiffly.

  “Is that why you have three teeth missing? They were pulled?”

  He seemed to think this was obvious, so Dougless