A Knight in Shining Armor (Montgomery/Taggart #15)

A Knight in Shining Armor (Montgomery/Taggart #15) Page 4

Standing before her was a man, a man who appeared to be wearing. . . armor.

He was standing so still, and glaring down at Dougless so fiercely, that at first she thought he wasn’t real. She couldn’t help staring up at him in openmouthed astonishment. He was an extraordinarily good looking man, and he was wearing the most authentic-looking stage costume she’d ever seen. There was a small ruff about his neck, then armor to his waist. But what armor! The shiny metal looked almost as though it was silver. Down the front of the armor were many rows of etched flower designs, each design filled with a gold-colored metal. From his waist to mid-thigh he wore a type of shorts that ballooned out about his body. Below the shorts, his legs—his big, muscular legs—were clad in stockings that looked to be knitted of . . . there was only one fiber on earth that reflected light in just that way: silk. Tied above his left knee was a garter made of blue silk and beautifully embroidered. His feet sported odd, soft shoes that had little cut-outs across the toes.

“Well, witch,” the man said in a deep baritone, “you have conjured me, so what now do you ask of me?”

“Witch?” Dougless asked, sniffing and wiping away tears.

From inside his ballooned shorts, the man pulled out a white linen handkerchief and handed it to her. Dougless blew her nose noisily.

“Have my enemies hired you?” the man asked. “Do they plot against me more? Is not my head enough for them? Stand, madam, and explain yourself.”

Gorgeous, but off his rocker, Dougless thought. “Listen, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Slowly, she stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

She didn’t say any more because he drew a thin-bladed sword that had to be a yard long, then held the sharp point against her throat. “Reverse your spell, witch. I would return!”

It was all too much for Dougless. First Robert and his lying daughter, and now this mad Hamlet. She burst into tears again and slumped against the cold stone wall.

“Damnation!” the man muttered, and the next thing Dougless knew he had picked her up and was carrying her to a church pew.

He put her down to sit on the hard pew, then stood over her, still glaring. Dougless couldn’t seem to stop crying. “This has been the worst day of my life,” she wailed. The man was scowling down at her like an actor out of an old Bette Davis movie. “I’m sorry,” she managed to say. “I don’t usually cry so much, but to be abandoned by the man I love and attacked—at sword point, no less—all in the same day, sets me off.” As she wiped her eyes, she glanced down at the handkerchief. It was a large linen square, and around the border was an inch and a half band of intricate silk embroidery of what looked to be flowers and dragons. “How pretty,” she choked out.

“There is no time for trivialities. My soul is at stake—as is yours. I tell you again: Reverse your spell.”

Dougless was recovering herself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was having a good cry all alone, and you, wearing that absurd outfit, came in here and started yelling at me. I’ve a good mind to call the police—or the bobbies, or whatever they have in rural England. Is it legal for you to carry a sword like that?”

“Legal?” the man asked. He was looking at her arm. “Is that a clock on your arm? And what manner of dress is it that you wear?”

“Of course it’s a clock, and these are my traveling-to-England clothes. Conservative. No jeans or T-shirts. Nice blouse, nice skirt. You know, Miss Marple–type clothes.”

He was frowning at her, but there seemed to be less anger about him. “You talk uncommonly strangely. What manner of witch are you?”

Throwing up her hands in despair, Dougless stood up and faced him. He was quite a bit taller than she was, so she had to look up. His black, curling hair just reached the stiff little ruff he wore, and he had a black mustache above a trim, pointed, short beard. “I am not a witch, and I am not part of your Elizabethan drama,” she said firmly. “And now I’m going to leave this church, and I can promise you that if you try anything fancy with that sword of yours, I’ll scream the windows out. Here’s your handkerchief. I’m sorry it’s so wet, but I thank you for lending it to me. Good-bye, and I hope your play gets great reviews.” Turning sharply, she walked out of the church.

“At least nothing more horrible than what I’ve already been through can happen to me today,” Dougless murmured as she left the churchyard. There was a telephone booth beyond the gate, within sight of the church door, and Dougless used it to make a collect call to her parents’ home in the U.S. It was early in the morning in Maine, and a sleepy Elizabeth answered the phone.

Anybody but her, Dougless thought, rolling her eyes skyward. She’d rather talk to anyone on earth than her perfect older sister.

“Dougless, is that you?” Elizabeth asked, waking up. “Are you all right? You’re not in trouble again, are you?”

Dougless grit her teeth. “Of course I’m not in trouble. Is Dad there? Or Mom?” Or a stranger off the street, she thought. Anybody but Elizabeth.

Elizabeth yawned. “No, they went up to the mountains. I’m here house-sitting and working on a paper.”

“Think it’ll win a Nobel prize?” Dougless asked, trying to make a joke and sound carefree.

Elizabeth wasn’t fooled. “All right, Dougless, what’s wrong? Has that surgeon of yours stranded you somewhere?”

Dougless gave a little laugh. “Elizabeth, you do say the funniest things. Robert and Gloria and I are having a wonderful time. There are so many fantastic things to see and do here. Why, just this morning we saw a medieval play. The actors were so good. And you wouldn’t believe how good the costumes are!”

Elizabeth paused. “Dougless, you’re lying. I can hear it over the phone. What’s wrong? Do you need money?”

Try as she might, Dougless could not make her lips form the word “yes.” Her family loved to tell what they called Dougless-stories. They loved the one about the time Dougless got locked out of her hotel room when she was wearing only a towel. Then there was the time Dougless went to the bank to deposit a check and walked into a bank robbery. What they especially loved about this story was that when the police arrived, they discovered that the robbers were carrying toy guns.

Now she could imagine Elizabeth’s laughter when she told all the Montgomery cousins how funny little Dougless had gone to England and been left at a church with no money, no passport, nothing. “And, oh, yes,” Elizabeth would say over the howls of laughter, “she was attacked by a crazed Shakespearean actor.”

“No, I don’t need money,” Dougless said at last. “I just wanted to say hello. I hope you get your paper done. See ya.” She heard Elizabeth say, “Dougless” as she dropped the receiver into the cradle.

For a moment Dougless leaned back against the booth and closed her eyes. She could feel the tears starting again. She had the Montgomery pride, but she’d never done anything to be proud of. She had three older sisters who were paragons of success: Elizabeth was a research chemist, Catherine was a professor of physics, and Anne was a criminal attorney. Dougless, with her lowly elementary school teaching job and her disastrous history with men, was the family jester. She was an endless source of material for laughter among the relatives.

As she was leaning against the telephone booth, her eyes blurred with tears, she saw the man in the armor leave the church and walk down the path. He glanced quickly at the ancient gravestones, but didn’t seem to have much interest in them as he headed past the gate.

Coming down the lane was one of the little English buses, as usual doing about fifty miles an hour on the narrow street.

Suddenly, Dougless stood up straight. The bus was coming, the man was walking very fast, and, somehow, she instinctively knew he was going to walk in front of the bus. Without another thought, Dougless started to run. Just as she took flight, the vicar walked from behind the church in time to see the man and the fast-moving vehicle. He too started running.

Dougless reached the man first. She made her best flying tackle, the one she’d learned from playing football with her Colorado cousins, and landed on top of him. The two of them skidded across the graveled path on his armor as though it were a little rowboat as the bus flew past them. If Dougless had been only one second later, the man would have been hit by the bus.

“Are you all right?” the vicar asked, offering his hand to help Dougless up.

“I . . . I think so,” she said as she stood up and dusted herself off. “You okay?” she asked the man on the ground.

“What manner of chariot was that?” he asked, sitting up, but not attempting to stand. He looked dazed. “I did not hear it coming.” His voice lowered. “And there were no horses.”

Dougless exchanged looks with the vicar.

“I’ll get him a glass of water,” the vicar said, giving a little smile to Dougless as though to say, You saved him, so he’s yours.

“Wait!” the man said. “What year is this?”

“Nineteen eighty-eight,” the vicar answered, and when the man lay back on the ground as if exhausted, the vicar looked at Dougless. “I’ll get the water,” he said, then went hurrying off, leaving them alone.

Dougless offered her hand to the man on the ground, but he refused it and stood up on his own.

“I think you ought to sit down,” she said kindly as she motioned to an iron bench inside the low stone wall. He wouldn’t go first but followed her through the open gate, then wouldn’t sit until she had. But Dougless pushed him to sit down. He looked too pale and too bewildered to pay attention to courtesy.

“You’re dangerous, you know that? Listen, you sit right here and

I’m going to call a doctor. You are not well.”

She turned away, but his words halted her. “I think perhaps I am dead,” he said softly. She looked back at him in speculation. If he was suicidal, then she couldn’t leave him alone. “Why don’t you come with me?” she said quietly. “We’ll go together to find you some help.”

He didn’t move from the bench. “What manner of conveyance was it that nearly struck me down?”

Dougless moved to sit beside him. If he was suicidal, maybe what he needed most was someone to talk to. “Where are you from? You sound English, but you have an accent I’ve never heard before.”

“I am English. What was the chariot?”

“All right,” she said with a sigh. She could play along with him. “That was what the English call a coach. In America, it’s called a minibus. It was going entirely too fast, but it’s my opinion that the only thing of the twentieth century the English have really accepted is the speed of the motor vehicle.” She grimaced. “So what else don’t you know about? Airplanes? Trains?”

It was one thing to offer help, but she had important things of her own to take care of. “Look, I really need to go. Let’s go to the rectory and have the vicar call a doctor.” She paused. “Or maybe we should call your mother.” Surely the people of this village knew of this crazy man who ran about in armor and pretended he’d never seen a wristwatch or a bus.

“My mother,” the man said, his lips forming a little smile. “I would imagine my mother is dead now.”

Maybe grief had made him lose his memory. Dougless softened. “I’m sorry. Did she die recently?”

He looked up at the sky for a moment before answering. “About four hundred years ago.”

At that Dougless started to rise. “I’m calling someone.”

But he caught her hand and wouldn’t let her leave. “I was sitting . . . in a room writing my mother a letter when I heard a woman weeping. The room darkened, my head swam; then I was standing over a woman—you.” He looked up at her with pleading eyes.

Dougless thought that leaving this man alone would be so much easier if he weren’t so utterly divine looking. “Maybe you blacked out and don’t remember dressing up and going to the church. Why don’t you tell me where you live so I can walk you home?”

“When I was in the room, it was the year of our Lord 1564.”

Delusional, Dougless thought. Beautiful but crazy. My luck.

“Come with me,” she said softly, as though speaking to a child about to step over a cliff. “We’ll find someone to help you.”

The man came off the bench quickly, his blue eyes blazing. The size of him, the anger of him, not to mention that he was steel-covered and carried a sword that looked to be razor sharp, made Dougless step back.

“I am not yet ready for Bedlam, mistress. I know not why I am here or how I came to be here, but I know who I am and from whence I came.”

Suddenly, laughter began to rumble deep inside Dougless. “And you came from the sixteenth century. Queen Elizabeth’s time, right? The first Elizabeth, of course. Oh, boy! This is going to be the best Dougless-story ever. I’m jilted in the morning and an hour later a ghost holds a sword to my throat.” She stood up. “Thanks a lot, mister. You’ve cheered me up immensely. I am now going to call my sister and ask her to wire me ten pounds—no more, no less—then I’m catching a train to the hotel where Robert and I are staying. I’ll get my plane ticket, then I’m going home. I’m sure that after today the rest of my life is going to be uneventful.”

She turned away from him, but he blocked her path. From inside his balloon shorts he withdrew a leather pouch, looked in it, took out a few coins, and pressed them into Dougless’s hand, closing her fingers over them.

“Take the ten pounds, woman, and be gone. It is worth that and more to be rid of your spiteful tongue. I will beseech God to reverse your wickedness.”

She was tempted to throw the money at him, but her alternative was to call her sister again. “That’s me, Wicked Witch Dougless. I don’t know why I want a train when I have a perfectly good broomstick. I’ll send your money back in care of the vicar. So long, and I hope we never meet again.”

She turned and left the churchyard just as the vicar returned with the man’s water. Let someone else deal with his fantasies, she thought. The man probably had a whole trunk full of costumes. Today he’s an Elizabethan knight, tomorrow he’s Abraham Lincoln—or Horatio Nelson, since he’s English.

It was easy to find the train station in the little village, and she went to the window to purchase her ticket.