King Arthur's Last Knight

by D. P. Hewitt

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  King Arthur’s Last Knight

  Copyright

  Story

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  That same day I met Louie, her pet hamster. He hadn’t been there before because he’d been staying with her best friend in New York until she’d gotten settled in her new home. Louie condescended to take a small bit of dried papaya from my fingers before he returned to racing in his wheel. I reached in to pet him, but he abandoned his wheel for the safety of an empty toilet paper roll. He fit cozily inside, and scrutinized me from the end.

  “Don’t take it personally,” Jill said. “He’s always shy around strangers. Once you’ve given him a few more bits of papaya, he’ll think you’re the best thing on two legs.”

  I bribed Louie with another bit of fruit. He took it as his due, and then resumed his exercise program.

  “I could use something like that,” I remarked, looking from Louie, running in his wheel, to my not-exactly-flat stomach. No point in trying to suck it in to impress the young ladies; all I’d do is turn purple from lack of oxygen.

  Jill eyed me critically. “You need more exercise. Are you in a hurry?”

  “What?” I was startled.

  “To finish this project, I mean. Do you have other things to do when you’re finished?”

  “Nothing in particular. Just smaller pieces to sell at next year’s crafts shows.”

  She nodded, satisfied. “Then after lunch we can take a walk. The fresh air and exercise will do us both good.”

  This sounded a lot like gym class in high school.

  King Arthur’s

  Last Knight

  by

  D.P. Hewitt

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  King Arthur’s Last Knight

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 by Diane Pommeranz Hewitt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

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  Publishing History

  First Last Rose of Summer Edition, 2015

  Digital ISBN 978-1-62830-741-2

  Published in the United States of America

  My name is Jim Dunn—James Bedford Dunn, but of course nobody calls me that—and when I was sixty-nine years old, I fell completely, helplessly, hopelessly in love, long after I thought I was over such things.

  I had managed to avoid the cliché of the mid-life crisis male, and so had neither bought a red convertible; nor divorced Abby, my wife of forty years, in favor of a blonde less than half my age; nor taken to doing my hair in an elaborate comb-over to try to camouflage the bald spot. I congratulated myself on my maturity and good sense, and if life wasn’t terribly exciting, well, nothing in my life had led me to expect it would be.

  I’d spent forty-one years teaching high school English and had retired four years before. Abby, a teacher of algebra, still had a couple years to go before retirement. So I took over the household duties—except for laundry, which I wasn’t allowed to do after all the sheets came out pink, and loading the dishwasher. Abby said the way I did it, the water didn’t reach all the surfaces, and the dishes didn’t get clean.

  When I had time, I worked on my favorite hobby, carpentry. I’d always liked making things, and now I finally had the time to make more. Not just the usual tables, chairs, and bookcases, but lamps with elaborately carved bases, and bedsteads, and wooden puzzles. From April through September there were, at least once a month, crafts shows in the area, and I packed up my wares and took them to sell. Rarely did I bring anything home again. I made almost as much money as I’d earned as a teacher, but of course it wasn’t regular income, so I was glad of my pension, and for the fact that Abby was still working.

  My second hobby was King Arthur. I’d been entranced by the tales as a boy, and teaching English had only increased my interest. I read everything even remotely connected to King Arthur, from the tales of the Mabinogion to the screenplay for the musical Camelot. My big dream was to go to England to visit all the sites I’d read about.

  Unfortunately, Abby had no interest in King Arthur. “Why don’t you want to visit actual historic sites, like Hastings or the Tower of London? There’s lots of history in London. Real history.” Of course, Harrod’s and Selfridge’s were also in London, but in the interests of marital harmony, I refrained from pointing this out.

  I didn’t want to travel as part of a tour group. I’d done that a couple times and had quickly come to the conclusion that I was not a tour group person. But as it was pretty obvious Abby had no interest in a King Arthur pilgrimage, I figured I’d have to travel on my own, which I really didn’t want to do. So, at least for the time being, King Arthur remained a dream.

  And then we come to Saturday, September twenty-seventh. It was the last crafts show of the season, and the weather was a perfect Indian summer day. Warm without being hot or humid, a light breeze, not a cloud in the azure sky. A few squirrels rustled through the fallen leaves, looking for lost acorns or whatever it is squirrels look for. The leaves themselves smelled slightly sweet, a scent I always associated with fall without having the faintest idea why they smelled that way. In short, it was already a perfect day, and it was about to get better.

  The day was less than half over, and I’d already sold more than two-thirds of what I’d brought. I could keep busy during the winter replenishing my stock and be ready with new ideas and new stock when the shows started up again next spring. I reached under the table to get the ham sandwich I’d brought for lunch. I felt more than a little bit guilty about it. I’d been to the doctor a couple days before and gotten a lecture on being overweight, out of shape, pre-diabetic, and hypertensive. Sitting at a table under a tree eating a ham sandwich liberally slathered with mayonnaise, plus a side of tortilla chips, was definitely not on the doc’s list of recommendations. I pulled it out of the cooler anyway.

  “Do you build bookcases, too?”

  I put the sandwich back and looked across the table. A woman stood there, about average height, her blonde hair blowing away from her face in the breeze. The sun was behind me. She shaded her eyes from it as she asked her question.

  I gestured to the wares arranged behind me. “I’ve got that one there, two shelves, it’s poplar.”

  “No, no, I don’t mean that. I mean bookcases with a capital B. Built-in ones. I just bought a house, and I want to turn one of the rooms into a library.”

  The idea intrigued me. I’d never done a project that big before, and told her so. “But I could. It just requires careful measurements, and making sure the shelves are anchored to the wall.” I gestured again to the items behind me. “I’m sorry I don’t have more to show you as examples of what I can do, but I’ve sold a lot today.”

  “I don’t think I need to see any more. I like what you’ve got here,” she said, and I smiled, pleased at the spontaneous compliment. “Can I come around and take a closer look?”

  I waved her around the table. Over in the shade, she took her hand away from her eyes and offered it to me. “Jill Francent.”

  “Jim Dunn,” I replied, looking into the most be
autiful eyes I’d ever seen. They were green, but not emerald green, or bluish green, or even sea green. They were exactly the same shade of green as sunlight shining through maple leaves in mid-summer. I’d never seen such eyes before.

  She moved over to the small two-shelf bookcase and ran her hand across it. “Poplar, you said this was? I’m afraid I’m not very good at identifying wood once it’s no longer in tree form.” She smiled, and I noticed a sprinkle of freckles across her nose. “I’m not sure this would look right with the floor, which I think is some other kind of wood. What other kinds could you use?”

  “Pretty much anything,” I managed to reply, still mesmerized by those green eyes. “Maple makes a beautiful bookcase. Oak is nice, too. Pine is cheap and sturdy, but not very decorative.”

  She turned her head to look at the nightstand and clothes rack next to the bookcase, releasing her eyes’ hold on me. “Could you stop by my house and take a look to see what you think? I don’t live far from here. In Norwich.”

  “I only live one town over. No problem. I can come on Monday if you want.”

  “After work, you mean?”

  “I’m retired, I can come anytime.”

  She looked at me appraisingly. “Really? You don’t look old enough to be retired.”

  Absurdly pleased, I grinned. “Thank you. How about ten o’clock?”

  ****

  On Monday I dressed in khakis and an Oxford shirt left from my teaching days. Deciding it looked too formal for giving an estimate on bookcases, I changed into a red polo shirt. Still not satisfied, I changed into a yellow one. I gave myself the once-over in the hall mirror and changed again, into a plain cotton shirt with an open collar. Telling myself I was acting as giddy as a teenage girl on her first date, I finally left the house and got to Jill’s five minutes late. I hate being late and apologized profusely.

  “Five minutes is nothing.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Come see my hope-to-be library.”

  Her house was beautiful, a Queen Anne style that was definitely a fixer-upper, but not discouragingly so. Jill told me the previous owners had replaced the roof and re-pointed the foundation, then run out of money before they’d had a chance to renovate the bathroom or kitchen or paint more than a couple of rooms. Jill had lost her job as a writer with a travel magazine that had folded, and then gotten divorced. She hadn’t wanted alimony from her ex-husband, a successful New York plastic surgeon. Instead, they had agreed he’d buy her a place to live, and she’d support herself by freelancing, and never bother him again. I wasn’t sure that that was the most intelligent decision on her part, but as we’d just met, it wasn’t my place to say so. In any case, she seemed adamant about not wanting to see him again.

  “He’s a plastic surgeon, and I preferred to keep my graying hair and wrinkles. I was not a good advertisement for his skills,” she said in a carefully neutral voice. I didn’t think she looked gray or wrinkled, but then I was nineteen years older than she was.

  “I don’t have to pay the mortgage, so if I’m careful I’ll do all right,” Jill asserted. “I’ve got some savings from when I was still working, and I should be able to make enough freelancing to pay for the phone and electric and food and all that. So you don’t have to worry I won’t be able to pay you.”

  With the pride of a new owner, she’d given me a tour of the whole house, from the basement to the third floor tower room. “I thought about putting the library up here, because it would be such a great place to read, but then I decided I’d rather have it downstairs instead. I think I’d rather make the tower into my writing room, like Victor Hugo’s house on the isle of Guernsey. Have you ever been there?” I hadn’t. “In the tower, way on the top of his house, he wrote standing at a podium. Not very practical for typing on a computer keyboard, but I like the idea of it anyway. His house was on a hill, so he could look out over the island and out to the English Channel. I guess all I’ve got is a view of downtown Norwich, but I still want to do it.”

  We went back downstairs so I could take a closer look at the future library. Quite frankly, I could hardly wait to get started. Separated from the living room by pocket doors, the library—which probably was the back parlor, originally—had a wood-burning fireplace, a stained glass window in a fleur-de-lis pattern, and carved wood details in walnut that managed to gleam with promise even after years of neglect. The oak hardwood floors showed wear, but I thought they looked pretty good considering they were over a hundred years old. The wallpaper was the most spectacularly ugly I’d ever seen. I couldn’t conceive of anyone even designing purple cabbage rose wallpaper, let alone buying it.

  “It cries out to be covered with bookcases,” commented Jill. I could only agree.

  I measured all the walls, and re-measured, and measured once again just to make sure I got it all right. I’d never done a job this big before, and I didn’t want to mess it up. I identified the location of all the wall studs, so I could securely anchor the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, watched all the time by those luminous green eyes.

  “Can you do it?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I replied, not having the slightest idea if it was true or not. “If you’ll be home tomorrow, I can bring over some wood samples so you can decide what you want, and I’ll give you an estimate.” Of course I should have brought them with me in the first place, but I’d spent so long changing clothes there was no time left to gather samples out of my workshop.

  “I’m always home,” Jill laughed. “I’m a freelance writer. That’s practically a synonym for ‘unemployed’.”

  And so the next morning, again at ten o’clock, I was at Jill’s door with a boxful of wood samples. I managed to be on time by telling myself I would just decide what to wear, and leave it on. I only changed clothes once.

  Jill wore a sleeveless polo shirt exactly the same color as her eyes. I almost forgot why I was there.

  We sat on the floor in her empty future library—I was hoping I’d be able to get up again without assistance—and looked at large blocks of wood.

  “This is what the carved wood bits are.” I pointed at the molding with a hunk of walnut. “It would look beautiful to have the bookcases done all in the same thing, but it’s an expensive wood.” I quoted her the price per square foot. Her jaw dropped open. “Cherry would look good, and it’s a bit cheaper.” I quoted another price. Her mouth closed, but her eyes widened. Obviously she hadn’t expected her dream library to cost quite so much.

  “I could also just build regular bookcases,” I added. “It would be considerably less expensive than wall-to-wall bookshelves.”

  Jill swallowed. “No. I’ve always wanted an old house with a library, and if I don’t do it now, I might never get another shot. I’ll do without somewhere else, as long as I get a real library. But,” she hesitated, looking down and fidgeting with her hands, “is there anything else that looks good with walnut?”

  We discussed it some more over glasses of orange juice she’d fresh squeezed, and pastries she’d bought at the vegan bakery—a business that I previously had no idea even existed. We came to an agreement on a wood that would harmonize nicely with the rest of the wood in the library at a much lower price, and I drew up the contract and drove home, the memory of the smiling green eyes hiding their disappointment over not being able to afford their heart’s desire.

  I didn’t hesitate for a moment before I ordered the requisite amount of walnut.

  ****

  In a couple of weeks, I showed up again at Jill’s doorstep at ten o’clock, the back of my car filled with walnut wrapped in old blankets. I didn’t want her to know I was giving her walnut at a pine price, so I greeted her with what I hoped was an impish smile.

  “I have a proposition for you,” I said.

  Her eyebrows rose, and I realized that was the wrong word to use. She’d probably been propositioned way too often, and by men far younger and better looking than I was.

  “A proposal, I mean,” I amended, and her eyebrows rose eve
n farther. I blushed, incandescent with mortification. So much for Mr. Suave and Debonair. “What I mean is, I’d like you to humor me on one thing,” I managed to utter. She looked skeptical, but at least her eyebrows remained stationary. Or maybe they just couldn’t go any higher. “Your library is at the back of the house, and while I’m building your bookshelves, I’d like you to stay out of there. Keep the door closed, don’t peek through the windows. Just let me work and allow yourself to be surprised by the result. Will you do that?”

  She thought a moment, biting her lip, and belatedly I reflected on what I was asking her to do. She barely knew me, and I was asking her to give me free rein in her house based on a couple of items she’d seen at a crafts show. And pay for the privilege. I decided it was too much to ask, and I’d just let her know I was using the walnut. I’d say I’d gotten a big discount for some reason. “Never mind,” I said.

  “Okay, it’s a deal,” she said. “But in return I want to treat you to lunch every day.”

  Now it was my turn for raised eyebrows. “You’re already paying me to work on your house, and you want to make me lunch, too?”

  “Sure, why not? I like to cook, but I don’t like to bother for just myself.”

  “It doesn’t seem right for me to be only on the receiving end.”

  She folded her arms and leveled her gaze at me; I felt I was being impaled by twin green lasers. “Those are my conditions. If you want me to stay out of my own library, you have to eat lunch with me. Or no deal.”

  I allowed myself a smile. “Well, when you put it that way...”

  That same day I met Louie, her pet hamster. He hadn’t been there before because he’d been staying with her best friend in New York until she’d gotten settled in her new home. Louie condescended to take a small bit of dried papaya from my fingers before he returned to racing in his wheel. I reached in to pet him, but he abandoned his wheel for the safety of an empty toilet paper roll. He fit cozily inside, and scrutinized me from the end.