Timeless

by Amanda Paris

  “Emmeline, I can’t believe I found you,” he said, his eyes staring wonderingly at me.

  “You can’t believe it? I can’t believe it,” I replied.

  I wanted to drink in his presence with my eyes. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.I understood for the first time the ancient words from the Song of Solomon. I knew what it meant to belong to another person. We had defeated time and death.

  “Damien,” I whispered, unable to finish any coherent thought. I put my arms around him. Several moments passed before either of us could speak.

  “You’re safe,” I said, still not quite believing that my spell had worked.

  “I thought she’d killed you,” he began, sounding as relieved as I felt.

  “She did,” I said, laughing. Somehow, my earlier death didn’t signify.

  He visibly started.

  “Then how are you here?” he asked, not comprehending.

  “I brought you forward. Surely you must have noticed. We’re not in the thirteenth century,” I interrupted, laughing.

  He looked at me wonderingly, touching my hair and face to validate that I was real.

  “I thought we’d escaped, that we’d been part of some enchantment. I awoke and found myself in a different time and place,” he said slowly.

  It was too much to absorb all at once. For now, it was enough just to be near him, to know that he was safe, to know that he was mine. I hadn’t failed, after all. I’d saved him, bringing him to me, nearly eight hundred years into the future.

  “I want to know how you found me,” I said.“Tell me everything.”

  Chapter Twelve

  "Voyagers"

  Here the impossible union

  Of spheres of existence is actual,

  Here the past and future

  Are conquered, and reconciled

  T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”

  Aunt Jo put the kettle on for us and told me she’d be going out. Tonight was her monthly bridge meeting across town, and she didn’t want to miss it. She put hot cocoa in two mugs, her remedy for any emotional trauma, and asked me point blank if I was okay before leaving.

  “I’m fine,” I replied, a goofy grin still on my face.

  “Hmph,” she muttered, letting the screen door slam on the way out.

  The Duchess had a much different response to Damien than her normal one to strangers. I’d never seen her behave with anyone the way she did with Damien, including Ben. She’d taken to Damien immediately, rubbing herself against his legs and jumping up in his lap. She began licking her paws before settling down, firmly ensconced in his arms. It seemed he charmed all females, even feline ones.

  “I still can’t believe you’re real,” I whispered, letting both of my hands glide over his face to memorize every line. It was perfect, as though sculpted from stone by one of the Italian Renaissance masters. His face could have been the model for many of the statues I’d seen in Europe. I wished I’d paid more attention to them now.

  “Start from the time when Lamia took you away from me,” I began, reluctant to take my hands from him or to utter the name of the witch who had kept us apart for hundreds of years.

  “It took all of the guards to keep me from you,” he started, gently stroking my hair as he described events that took place both hundreds of years ago and only last week. I must have timed my arrival to the chapel correctly, knowing I was lucky that we’d had spring break during the window of time I needed to find him.

  “Could you see where they took you?” I asked.

  “Yes, they took my blindfold off after we left the woods, much good that it did since we went back to the dungeon, where it was pitch black. We didn’t enter through the secret passage. Instead, they lowered the drawbridge, taking me by force through the gate. When we crossed, I tried to distract the guards and jump into the moat, thinking I’d swim to the other side. There’s another point of entry into the castle from the moat that I’d discovered about a year after your father brought me to Montavere. I knew we couldn’t use it to leave the castle together because you couldn’t swim, but it would be perfect for the plan I’d devised. I thought I could double back out when it was safer and rescue you. I should say, rather, that there used to be an entry and moat. Both, it seems, are gone now,” he said quietly.

  A sad look came over his face. I supposed the pile of stones, only an outline of the grandeur of what the castle had been, was an even greater shock for him than it had been for me since I had the benefit of knowing that it likely had changed over so many years. I still had not discovered the exact fate of the castle from of the cryptic entry I’d found under Damien’s name in the registry of knights.

  “So did you find this entrance?” I prodded.

  “No. Before I could jump, one of the guards hit me from behind, and I lost consciousness.”

  I couldn’t imagine any of them actually being able to overcome Damien alone, and I looked at him questioningly.

  “They used the handle of a sword to swipe me over the head, I think,” he finished grimly.

  I shuddered at the pain this must have caused him.

  I ran my hand along the back of his head. Sure enough, I felt a swollen lump rising under his hair—a wound hundreds of years old, I mused. No, that was wrong. It was only last week. I had to keep reminding myself of this.

  “When I awoke,” he continued, “I found myself in the dungeon, but not in the cell with the secret passage. I waited, losing track of time, and wondering every second what Lamia had done to you,” he said.

  He stopped then, a look of awe coming into his face.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” he murmured, kissing my forehead, my eyes, and finally my lips.

  I didn’t want it to end. I could die happily now, I thought, and then shuddered as I realized I had died before.

  He finally released me, but we still held each other. I leaned against him, enjoying the sound of his voice as he told me the hardest part.

  “She came into the cell much later. They’d left me there in the dark, and I didn’t know what had happened to you. I knew they’d come to kill me, but I had no idea…Emmeline, I didn’t know they’d harm you. I thought your father would protect you. It was me they were after because I wasn’t good enough for you, because they thought I’d kidnapped you.”

  “Oh, Damien! You were always good enough for me,” I assured him, rushing to take his face in my hands.

  “Am I? I doubt it,” he mused.

  “No, Damien. Never say that again. Whatever anyone else tells you, you have always been perfect for me, the only one. How could you think otherwise?”

  “Emmeline, a week ago you didn’t want to leave with me, to marry me,” he said quietly.

  I felt terrible. He was right. I hadn’t wanted to marry him when he’d asked, at least not immediately. I’d made us wait, wanting to seek my father’s permission. Vainly, I’d hoped we could live together in the castle, not like fugitives on the run. But I was wrong, and I said so.

  “Damien, I’m sorry. I never realized how far she’d go in her hatred of me. I didn’t know the strength of her power over my father.”

  “When she told me you were dead, I almost lost my mind. She told me what they’d done to you, accusing you of witchcraft,” he said.

  His voice began to break. I had to remember that, for him, this had happened last week.

  “Darling, I’m here,” I murmured in his ear, pulling him close and holding him.

  “I knew then that I didn’t care what she did to me, and she knew it to.”

  He stopped for a moment, and I was afraid to ask what happened next. Had I been too late? Had she tortured him, playing with his mind and tormenting his body before she’d started to carry out some hideous plan for his death?

  “And then?” I gently asked.

  “And then…then she began,” he said, looking away. Comprehension dawned on me.

  I slowly unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a magnificent, muscled chest hardened from
years of practice on the field. Knights were, by far, superior in size and strength to most modern athletes, having to carry most of their own weight in hauberk, mail, and armor while wielding a heavy sword and shield and controlling their horse. And that was before they fought other equally well-trained knights coming at them full force.

  By the time Damien reached the last button, I saw what he meant. The red welts and lines crisscrossed his abdomen, and his stomach was up bound in bandages, the wounds still fresh.

  I gasped at the cruelty of it, not daring to touch him lest I cause further pain. When he turned, however, I saw the evidence of her vengeance. It was not enough that she’d killed me; she had left his back a bloody nightmare, the slashes marring the beauty of his shoulder blades and lower back. I didn’t ask how she’d done it. I remembered seeing the instruments of torture for myself, and it wasn’t too hard to guess what she’d done to him.

  “Oh my dearest love,” I whispered, afraid to hug him. It must have been ten thousand agonies for him to have carried me inside and hold me against him. But he hadn’t cried, complained, or even winced at the pain.

  He shrugged back into his shirt and smiled at me.

  “It’s over,” he said simply, not wanting to speak of it again.

  I swallowed, wanting to cry out for him.

  “About the time I thought she was getting ready to kill me,” he continued, “I hit the ground and must have passed out. I thought, when I awoke, that I felt weak from the loss of blood. Then I thought they’d either mercifully knocked me unconscious or already killed me. I heard your voice calling me, and the sun shone down on me. I was in a place I didn’t recognize, with stones scattered in piles all around. It took several minutes for me to understand that I was exactly where I was before, only it was a different time.”

  “How did you know it was different?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I just did. One minute, I was lying tied up on a table, her disgusting face laughing above me. The next, I was lying on the ground staring at the sky.”

  I thought for a moment. Perhaps he had come back when I’d been in the chapel, only he was in the castle, while I was…

  “No!” I shrieked, realizing what had happened. If I’d just returned to the castle, I would have found him. We could have been together! He had only been a mile or so from me. How could I have been so stupid? Of course that’s where he came through. It made perfect sense since that’s where he’d been when I brought him over.

  He looked at me, puzzled.

  “Sorry,” I said, “it’s just that I realized that I should have gone back for you. I brought you here but didn’t think it had worked. It didn’t occur to me to go back to the castle for you. I thought it would have been a waste of time. How did you get out?”

  “I walked,” he said and smiled.

  I punched him lightly on the arm, careful not to harm his midsection.

  He looked at me strangely, and I realized that we interacted in a much different way together in the thirteenth century. Girls were probably a lot less assertive and certainly never hit anyone, even playfully. There was much I would have to explain to Damien about modern life and male-female relationships. I wondered if I’d had a sense of humor in my past life.

  “I did walk,” he continued, undaunted by my less-than-maidenly antics, “and a long way too. The world has changed so much, Emmeline,” he finished, becoming more serious now.

  “Yes, we’ll get to that later,” I assured him. I was amazed that we’d been speaking to each other in English—modern English—the entire time. I’d mentioned nothing about this in my spell. Perhaps I’d mentally channeled it to him?

  “What happened after you woke up? Where did you go?” I asked him.

  “I walked for awhile, and I met a large man in the woods,” he explained.

  “Yes, I know him. He found me too. Did he tell you what year it was?” I asked. “Yes. But he looked at me strangely,” he answered.

  “I’ll bet,” I said, laughing as I thought about the strange morning he’d likely had coming across both of us.

  “The man who found me answered most of my questions,” Damien said.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “The truth, or what I could make of it.”

  I remembered how virtuous Damien was. He would consider lying to be dishonorable; even if the world thought he was crazy, he wouldn’t stoop to telling a false story.

  “I told him I’d awoken in the ruins just beyond the forest and that I didn’t know where I was. I was looking for you, and he said he’d already seen a young woman with long red hair. He gave me food to eat, and then we were on our way,” he explained.

  “So he took you to the train station?”

  “Yes. I had no idea, Emmeline, how fast mankind can go…And they need no horses!” he finished, still amazed, I could tell, by everything he’d seen in this new world.I realized just how long eight hundred years really was.

  “What time did you catch the train?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It was midday,” he answered.

  I guessed that he’d probably taken the 12:00 train to London.

  I had just missed him by one train since I had taken the 10:30. I couldn’t believe my bad luck. If I’d just waited, we could have been together.

  “So you arrived in London. It was a little different than you’d remembered?” I asked, thinking of the thirteenth-century map I’d found online before the trip. I couldn’t help but smile.

  He looked at me, grinning.

  “Yes,” he said. “I didn’t know where anything was, so I stopped a man on the street and asked him if he knew you.”

  I could just imagine the reaction that Damien, with his strange, beautiful accent and even stranger clothes, would have made. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have had the armor to contend with since he’d been under torture in the castle. I wondered if he’d had anything on at all, but I was too shy to ask.

  “So where did you go?”

  “I wandered around the city for awhile and then made my way to Westminster Abbey.”

  I imagined it looked a lot different than it had in the thirteenth century. I thought I’d remembered the tour guide telling us that most of the church had been pulled down in 1245, so Damien likely wouldn’t have recognized it except, perhaps, for the name.

  “Did someone help you there?” I asked.

  “Yes. A kind woman asked me to wait and then said I could take a taxi to the police station when I told her I was searching for you. I was beginning to understand that London was not only completely different but also a much bigger city, much larger than any I’d ever seen before. The buildings, all of them, rise like cathedrals in the sky. And yet, they are not so beautiful,” he finished, looking somewhat melancholy.

  I thought that he likely meant skyscrapers, which had a certain grace all their own, but not, of course, the haunting beauty of a cathedral spire or castle tower.

  “Everything moves so quickly, Emmeline, even the people. They talk rapidly, sometimes to no one at all. It’s difficult for me to catch everything they say. Many times, I thought they were addressing me,” he said. Cell phones, I thought.

  I mentally kicked myself. I’d not anticipated any of this when I cast the spell. Yes, he could speak modern English, but that didn’t mean that he could process the speed with which the modern world moved. Thirteenth-century England was a vastly different age. I thought of the absolute quiet of the chapel by the woods and of the merriment of the castle inhabitants in my dream. With all the noise, cars, and people talking to the air on their cell phones, it likely was a louder, more obnoxious, and more quickly paced world than Damien could have ever imagined.

  “How did you afford your taxi?” I asked, guilty that I hadn’t thought ahead to the practical details. I’d had months to prepare, and what did I do? Moon around the place, worried I couldn’t bring him here. If I’d just known how successful I would be, I could have planned better. As it was, Damien had had to fe
nd for himself. By the looks of things, though, it seemed like he had done alright.

  “I honestly don’t know,” he answered. “I looked in my pocket, and there were strange coins and papers. I recognized the coins for money, but I didn’t know the purpose of the paper. The kind lady from the Abbey explained it to me, welcoming me to the city and asking me where I was from. She was quite surprised when I said England. ‘Country folk,’ she’d said in a huff. ‘You couldn’t pay me to leave London.’ I think she thought perhaps that I actually wasn’t from England.”

  I could easily see that. His accent wasn’t British, but it wasn’t anything else I recognized either. And then I realized it sounded most like the recording Ms. May had played once for us of someone reading Middle English when we’d studied Chaucer. Except that he spoke modern words. He’d retained the sounds of his dialect, just not the linguistic pattern. I was fascinated. He rolled his “R’s” and put emphasis on the last syllable of my name so that it sounded a little like Emily with an “n” on the end. There was also something slightly French in the way he spoke, and I remembered that all of the knights could speak French and some of them, including Damien, had been trained in Latin.

  French, I’d read online, was still a primary language spoken by the king, his nobles, and many of their knights during the early thirteenth century. But I couldn’t say that Damien’s accent was French precisely. It had the musicality of a Romance language, but it reminded me also of Ireland—even though I’d never visited. It was as though he’d combined the accents of several languages, taking the best of them all for his speech. The effect produced a slightly exotic, entirely erotic sound.

  “When the taxi arrived,” he continued, “I climbed in, not understanding what I was supposed to do. The driver became a little frustrated but took me to the police station when I told him I was looking for you.

  “What happened then?”

  “I entered the building, and a man in a uniform approached me, relief on his face. He asked my name, and I reluctantly gave it.”

  “What did you say?” I asked. Damien had had no surname in our past life. Was it Montavere?