Knights (37 page)

He turned then and gazed into her face, his mouth curved into a sad smile. “What shall I give them?” he asked.

“A brave and just liege lord, to begin with,” Gloriana replied without hesitation. She rested one hand on her abdomen, while the other gripped the mare’s
bridle reins. “And stalwart sons and daughters to follow when you and I are gone.”

Dane came and stood looking up at Gloriana, with one hand resting lightly on her thigh. “I pray you, my lady—never leave me. I am naught without your counsel and your love.”

Gloriana leaned down and rested her hands on his shoulders, but before she could speak, a terrible blackness rose up from the earth, swamping and smothering her. Her head ached as though pressed between two great, shifting timbers, and although she heard Dane call out to her, felt him lift her down from the horse’s back, she could not answer him.

In the next moments, east and west, north and south, up and down, and left and right seemed to compress, then converge into a meaningless, throbbing void. There was no light, and the pain was everything, reaching into every corner of the universe, permeating Gloriana’s marrow and flowing in her blood.

Gloriana struggled to resist the phenomenon, for even in her almost unbearable suffering she knew what was happening, but it was all for naught. Her fate had been decided; she was being wrenched yet again from Dane’s side, and that knowledge was the worst anguish of all.

She was kneeling on soft, moist ground when the horrific inner tempest subsided at last, her fingers digging deep into sweet meadow grass. As her vision cleared, she saw a man crouched beside her, and for a moment, she knew a wild and desperate hope that she had not been taken from the thirteenth century after all. He wore leggings and a tunic, soft boots, and a sword belt, and his hair was overlong, even by latterday standards.

Then, with crushing disappointment, Gloriana realized
that the garments were not authentic, but merely a clever costume. The way he framed his words, in the twentieth-century fashion, confirmed her suspicions.

“Are you all right, then?” he asked, in the quick, lilting tones of modern English.

Gloriana managed a nod, not caring that the gesture was an untruth in and of itself, and looked warily about. Brightly colored silk pavilions were scattered over the long meadow like exotic flowers, and crowds of people in medieval costume moved between them, talking and smiling and generally making merry together.

“That’s a splendid outfit you’ve got on,” the man said, taking Gloriana’s elbow and raising her carefully to her feet. She was briefly, insanely, grateful that she had not been sick on the ground—or her gown.

“Th-thank you,” Gloriana said, after shifting mental gears from the old way of speaking to the new. “I-I’m fine—just a little tired, I think.”

He brought her to the stump of a tree and seated her there. “I could ring someone, if you’d like.”

Gloriana ran her tongue over her lips, wondering what year it was, exactly, but unable to make herself ask. She recognized the meadow, at least, and the grim, looming profile of Kenbrook Hall, but she could not be sure what part of the twentieth century she was in. She was not about to confide her dilemma to a stranger, however kind he might seem. “If you would ring Lyn Kirkwood, please—in Hadleigh Village?”

She held her breath while her young knight received her question. Judging by his calm and jovial manner, he had not seen her appear out of the past.

“Oh, there’s no need for that,” he said, with a delighted
grin. “Lyn’s here at the fair somewhere—sit tight, and I’ll bring him to you straightaway.”

Gloriana was half sick with relief—until it occurred to her that she might have arrived
before
her last visit to modern times, in which case Lyn would not recognize her. If there were rules governing these shifts between one century and the other, she had not been able to guess what they were.

“Yes,” she said. “Please get Mr. Kirkwood.”

When Lyn came rushing out of the milling crowd, clad in the grander garb of a duke or an earl, Gloriana saw in his eyes that he knew her. He looked no older or younger than before and clasped both her hands in his as he knelt to gaze up into her face. “God in heaven, Gloriana,” he whispered, “I thought I’d never see you again.”

Gloriana did not speak until the man who had brought Lyn to her returned to the merriment surrounding them.

“What is this place?” she whispered.

Lyn summoned up a smile. “This is a medieval fair, Gloriana. There are those of us who like to pretend, for a little while at least, that we live in your time instead of our own.”

Gloriana buried her face in both hands, trembling and overwhelmed. The words of Job echoed in her mind …
the thing I have most feared has come upon me
….

Lyn left her for a few moments and returned with a cup of cold water, which she accepted with unsteady hands and swallowed in hasty gulps.

“You are not well, Gloriana,” he said kindly, when she had finished.

She shook her head, her vision blurred by the tears
of panic and sorrow she could not restrain. “Take me away from here—please.”

Lyn put an arm around her waist and gently helped her to her feet. “My car is close by,” he said. “I’ll drive you to the cottage and ring Janet and Marge from there.”

“How much time has passed since I left?” Gloriana asked, keeping her voice low as they made their way slowly through the costumed revelers toward a parking area. Now that her mind had cleared a little, she could tell that these leggings and tunics, kirtles and wimples and cloaks, were all much too fine to be real.

Lyn looked at her in surprise, but did not slow his pace as he ushered her along. “It’s been four months, Gloriana—and in all that time, I was never quite sure what had happened. I thought perhaps you’d had some sort of spell and wandered away from Janet’s shop, perhaps gotten into a passing car with some maniac—Glonana, I was frantic!”

Gloriana glared at her friend as he opened the passenger door of his vintage automobile and waited for her to get in. “You think me so moonstruck as to trust myself to a villain?”

“Never mind,” he said, giving her a gentle shove into the seat. As soon as she was settled, he closed the door and came round to get behind the wheel. “Tell me what happened—
exactly
.” He started the engine and shifted the gears. “Don’t leave anything out.”

Gloriana meant to leave plenty out, since a good bit of her time in the thirteenth century had been spent making love with her husband. “I was working in Janet’s shop when it happened,” she murmured miserably, squinting in the glare of a midsummer sun. She touched the skirts of her gown and found that it was still moist with rain that had fallen seven hundred
years before. “I’d climbed one of the ladders, to place a volume on a high shelf, and suddenly I had this terrible headache, as if someone had struck me with a cudgel. I was blinded, and I fell. When I came round again, I was on the ground, leaning against some crofter’s hut.”

Lyn muttered an exclamation, then waited for her to go on.

As they drove, Gloriana related those parts of her story that were fitting for another person to hear.

Dane stood with his forehead resting on the shuddering withers of Gloriana’s mare, one hand grasping the pommel of her empty saddle, the fingers of the other entangled in the coarse hair of the horse’s mane. He wept silently for a long time before drawing back and dragging one arm across his face in an effort to recover his dignity.

Gloriana was gone.

One moment, she had been fine, seated on her mare’s back, chiding him for feeling sorry for himself, reminding him of his responsibilities, as he looked up at her. Then she had cried out, as if in pain, and he had been terrified by the sudden waxen color of her flesh. Her head had lolled back, and she had slipped into his arms, unconscious.

He shouted her name, in his fear, but she did not hear him.

She lay convulsing on the ground for a few moments, but then, in a trice, she’d vanished, leaving no trace besides her spicy scent and the imprint of her slender body in the soft, dew-beaded grass. Dane had thrust back his head then and given a piercing, anguished shriek of protest and fury, like a wild creature snared in some cruel trap.

The mare had been startled by his cry and began prancing and nickering and tossing her head. He’d gotten hold of her just when she would have bolted, but then he’d thought again of Gloriana, mayhap gone from him forever, and lost control.

When he’d done with weeping and searched the whole of the meadow and much of the surrounding woods, hoping in vain to find her, he mounted Peleus at last, and rode back to Hadleigh Castle in a state of mute despair.

Gloriana was not ill, nor was she injured, but she was overwrought. For that reason, she allowed Marge and Mrs. Bond to strip away her gown and tuck her into her familiar bed in the spare room. Lyn gave her a superficial examination and ordered complete rest, then went out, taking the others with him.

Elaina had warned Gloriana that this would happen, that she would be taken from Dane and brought back to her own century, and so, in his cryptic way, had Romulus, the magician. Still, she had hoped not to drink from this cup, and now she was fair crushed by heartache. Had it not been for the babe, she might not even have wanted to survive, but with that little life growing inside her, giving up was not a possibility.

All the same, Gloriana ached with despondent yearning, and she curled into a tight ball in the middle of the bed, sheltering her babe and the broken heart that sustained them both. She was too stricken to weep, too angry and afraid to pray, so she just lay there, groping her way from one breath to the next, awaiting the return of reason.

Lyn came first, bringing a syringe and a cotton ball soaked in alcohol.

“Just a little something to make you sleep,” he said
with tears in his voice, if not his eyes, as he gave Gloriana an injection in the fleshy part of her arm. “Nothing that will harm you or the child, so don’t resist it, love. Just let go and try to rest.”

“Oh, please, Lyn,” Gloriana whispered brokenly, “you must help me—say you’ll help me—”

He bent and kissed her temple. “You know you can depend on me, sweetheart.”

She nodded. She
did
know that. Lyn was her friend, the only person in the modern world who really understood her plight, and he would never leave her. She gave herself up to sleep and tumbled into the deepest recesses of her mind, where half-formed dreams swam to and fro like blind fish.

When Gloriana was awakened, many hours later, by the grinding hunger in her belly and the taxing of her bladder, Professor Steinbeth was sitting in her room, next to the fire, an open book on his lap.

Gloriana dashed to the bathroom to relieve herself, returning, still bundled in Lyn’s toweling-cloth robe, in which she’d slept, to collapse onto the bed again and draw the covers up. She hoped she would not be required to enter into conversation, for her emotional state was still very fragile indeed.

Steinbeth was having none of that. With a benign smile, he drew his chair close to the bed and settled himself in it. “Open your eyes, Gloriana. I know full well that you haven’t drifted off—for one thing, you are ravenous. I can hear your stomach rumbling from here.”

Having no choice, Gloriana obeyed his injunction and looked at him.

“Mrs. Bond left a plate warming for you in the oven,” the old man said. “I’ll get it for you, if you like.”

Gloriana shook her head. She was as starved as a wild creature foraging in winter, but she feared she wouldn’t be able to keep anything down. “Why are you here?” she asked.

“Because of you,” the professor answered kindly. “I believe I’ve found something that might be of help.”

She felt her heartbeat quicken with a hope that was probably unfounded. “What?” she asked.

Arthur Steinbeth produced a small, tattered book from the pocket of his suit coat and extended it to her. “Herein,” he said gravely, “is an account of another’s experience—one much like your own. I suspect.”

Gloriana turned the volume in her hands and peered at the title, which was pressed in golden letters all but worn away by time, but she could still read it: TALES OF A WITCH’S TRAVELS THROUGH TIME.

G
loriana’s heartbeat tripped into a peculiar, lopsided rhythm as she held the old book close against her chest and stared at the professor in perplexity. “What is this?” she finally managed to ask in the most tremulous of voices.

Arthur Steinbeth smiled in a fatherly way. “I believe, my dear, that it might be your ticket back to that beloved husband of yours, and that bloody century you seem to hold so dear.” He paused, while Gloriana squirmed to sit further up on the bed, still clutching the witch’s memoirs. “That isn’t the original volume, of course—I found that particular copy in 1929, I believe it was. Fascinating stuff, though difficult for most people to grasp.”

Gloriana looked at the title again—she had read it easily—but on a second examination she saw that the spellings were archaic by twentieth-century standards. With her mouth dry and her heart thundering in her ears, she turned to the first page, but the words blurred so that she could not make them out.

“This is a book of spells?” she asked with what she hoped was a subtle sniffle.

“It is the story of one woman, who lived in the latter part of the fourteenth century, as nearly as I can tell.” The old man expelled a heavy sigh and slapped his hands to his thighs in a gesture of resolution, “Read the tale for yourself, Gloriana—it is beyond my powers to explain.”

“But I am no witch,” Gloriana said, in case such things mattered as much in this time as they had in her own.

Steinbeth stood, making ready to take his leave. “No, my dear, but you are quite the enchantress.” He sighed, adjusting the lapels of his tweed suit coat. “Be careful of Lyn’s feelings, will you please? He’s a good sort, and he’s met a woman. They’re just beginning to find their way.”

Gloriana was heartened by this news, for she wanted Lyn to be happy and to find the love he deserved, but she was a little fearful too. Though she was an independent woman and planned to remain so, whether in that century or any other, she was in the twentieth now, perhaps for the remainder of her life, and she needed Kirkwood’s friendship.