by Amanda Paris
“I’m guessing you thought better of it?” I asked.
“I did at first, not knowing the man, but then I thought it might help. I didn’t think that the world had changed so much that England no longer respected a knight of the realm,” he said.
In a way, he was right. The Queen did still bestow knighthoods, but men no longer earned them the way Damien had. I didn’t have the heart to tell him. There would be time for that later.
“I told him I was Sir Damien, the Black Knight of Montavere, and he looked suitably impressed, despite my shabby appearance,” Damien continued.
I smiled, wondering what they must have thought of his thirteenth-century title.“Another man came up to me at the station. ‘You are Sir Damien?’ he asked. ‘I am,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said. I had no idea who he was or where he came from, but the man seemed to know me. ‘Can I be of service to you?’ I asked him. ‘No, but I think I can be of service to you. I’d begun to think you were a missing person and came to file a report,’ he told me. How could this be so, I thought? I’d only just arrived.”
“No, indeed,” I agreed. “So who was this man?”
“A solicitor. That’s a man of law.”
“Yes, I know, dear,” I said, hiding my smile. “What did he want?”
“It seems that I inherited a chateau in the Loire valley and a townhome in London.”
My jaw dropped. My spell had worked wonders I hadn’t even imagined; this magic was more powerful than I’d thought possible.
“Who left it to you? Did you visit it?” I asked eagerly.
“Not yet. I wanted to find you first. Madame Rose de Lioncoeur, English wife to a French ambassador. She died leaving no children, spouse, or other relatives but me. I had only to claim it.”
I wondered who Rose de Lioncoeur was, but I’d shelve that question for now.
“But how could you prove your identity with no license or photo ID?” I asked.
“That’s the strange part,” he answered.
Really? That was the strange part of the story?
“I put my hands in my pocket and pulled out a small book. Here it is,” he said.
He handed me what looked like his passport, complete with his picture, birth date, and country of origin. It seemed that Damien de Lioncoeur had been born in Salisbury, England on December 8, 1993. It had been stamped by customs officials in Philadelphia.
I smiled.
“I’m older than you,” I teased.
My birthday was November 5, 1993. It was ludicrous, really, I thought. He’s nearly eight hundred years old, yet I was older than he was.
“Now, Emmeline, let’s not go into that again,” he said, putting his passport away.
I stopped short, realizing that I must have been older than him in my past life, too. Did that make me nearly eight hundred years old also?
“It seems that Madame de Lioncoeur died several months before,” Damien explained. “Once I’d proven my identity, it was only a matter of retrieving the keys to the townhome. Rose and her husband, Armand, stayed there when they weren’t at Lion-sur-Loire, their chateau near Tours. I haven’t traveled there yet, but from what they showed me, it looks like a large, grand home, Emmeline, with pepper-pot turrets, gardens, and a flowing fountain. I hope to take you there someday,” he said, full of pride.
“Me too,” I thought, completely overwhelmed. Did Damien have some other past, some family I didn’t know about? I’d certainly never thought about any of this.
We had had a definite role reversal. Now he was the wealthy noble, while I was, well, just plain old Emily St. Clair. I understood what he must have felt in my past life—or was it my present?
“The solicitor called a taxi to take me to Belgravia, near Hyde Park. Here, I have a painting,” he said, taking out a photograph from his pocket.
The size of the home astounded me. The manicured lawn and roses looked like a brochure. We’d been to London, but beyond watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, I hadn’t seen anything of this upscale part of London. Damien must be worth a fortune.
The townhome stood three stories high, or was it four? Large Corinthian columns lined the front door, which overlooked a courtyard and rose garden, enclosed by a black, wrought-iron fence.
“So what happened next?” I wondered, nearly speechless with all of this. Who was Damien?
“I rang the front doorbell, and we were greeted by another man in a uniform,” Damien continued.
The butler, I presumed.
“Conrad was most helpful, filling in the information I needed, helping me to find appropriate clothes and make travel plans once we’d found you.”
“How did you know where to look?” I asked.
“Conrad helped me to hire a private investigator who looked for every Emmeline de Vere in England, Scotland, and Wales. There aren’t any.”
“So how did you find me?”
“I contacted the man who found me in the woods again. He thought he remembered that the red-haired girl’s name was Emily St. Clair. ”
I felt an eerie chill. How did this man know me? I was sure I hadn’t told him anything about myself.
“Once we had your name, it was relatively simple to locate you here in Florida.” He drew out Flo-ri-da.I remembered that in 1216 America hadn’t yet been discovered. Florida wasn’t even an idea yet to Europeans then.
“You must have done this all in just a matter of days,” I said, amazed at the speed with which he had found me.
“I must give Conrad the credit. He arranged the details for me, and I came over immediately.”
“Where did you get the car?”
“Conrad purchased it for me in London, then had it shipped here and ready for me at the airport.”
“But how did you know how to drive?” I wondered.
“It isn’t all that hard, you know,” he said. “Not nearly as hard as learning to handle a horse.”
I laughed.
“I guess not,” I said.
“I also have a driver. I’m still learning, but I did drive over here myself,” he told me proudly. My jaw dropped. A driver?
I got up and stared out of the window.
“Is he waiting inside the car?”
“No. Not exactly.”
“Then where is he?”
“At the house,” he said quietly. “I’m still learning, but I felt sure enough to drive these smaller roads. And I wanted to come alone.”
“The house? What house?”
“The one I had Conrad purchase for me.”
“You bought a house?”
I realized I was repeating everything he said. But it was too much to comprehend all at once. He’d traveled through time, discovered that he’d inherited what appeared to be a fortune, found me halfway across a world that he hadn’t known existed, traveled in an airplane, bought the nicest car I’d ever seen, and now he was telling me he’d bought a house—all in the space of a week. Was there anything he couldn’t do?
“Where is it?” I asked.
“About twenty minutes from here. It’s large, white—quite lovely—and very private. It’s surrounded by blooming gardens.”
Sugar Hill. Set on an incline on the banks of the St. Johns River, it had become a tourist spot in DeLand, and as far as I knew, still belonged to old Mr. Ramsey, who hired high school students every spring and summer to work in the gardens during peak tourist season. The plantation dated back to the eighteenth century and had, at one time, produced sugar cane, though it had long ceased to exist as a working plantation.
The house itself was white and featured a two-story, wrap-around porch. Every girl in DeLand dreamed of getting married there. I’d been several times on class trips over the years, and Ben had taken me once to see the azaleas in bloom. The plantation was vastly reduced in size from its early days, but it was still a considerable estate.
“I didn’t know it was for sale,” I said, puzzled by what he’d told me.
“It wasn’t. Conrad can be very persuasive.”
I couldn’t imagine how much money Damien had spent to buy it, and I was afraid to ask. Wealth had been a sore spot in our relationship before; I didn’t want it ever to be again.
I could hear Aunt Jo drive up in the Saratoga. We were running out of time.
“I should go,” he said, but we were both reluctant to part.
“What if you leave out the front and then come back once we turn off the lights? Or better yet, come back in about fifteen minutes. I’ll sneak out and meet you down the road,” I suggested.
He looked at me, more than a little surprised.
“Emmeline, anything could happen to you out there,” he said, waving his hand in the general direction of the night.
I looked at him skeptically. I guess he had a point, but really, this was DeLand.
“We’re not finished, Damien. There are things that I need to tell you,” I said.
“I know,” he replied quietly.
“Damien,” I gulped, suddenly nervous. This was going to be hard. “I’m a witch.”
“I know,” he said.
That surprised me.
“You do?”
I heard Aunt Jo’s keys turning the lock at the front door. I quickly kissed Damien, knowing I wouldn’t be able to once she walked inside.
She came in and looked at us, but she wasn’t surprised. The Audi was still parked out front.
“Emily, it’s after eleven. Your…friend…will have to leave,” she began in a no-nonsense tone.
She saw my crestfallen face.
“He can come back tomorrow,” she assured me.
Damien stood up, helping me to rise as well. He kissed my hand.
“Ladies,” he began, “I bid you goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” we said in unison, our eyes following him to the door. Before he left, he’d taken both of my Aunt’s hands into his and kissed them as well. He was, by far, the most charming person I’d ever met. There was something wonderfully old-fashioned about his manners. Then again, old-fashioned was an understatement considering our past.
I could tell that Aunt Jo was remembering boys, specifically one boy, from a different time. She had never married—her fiancé had tragically died before their wedding some fifty years before. I’d never understood why she didn’t show any interest in other boys. Now I knew. If I lost Damien, I wouldn’t want anyone else either.
I put my hand on her shoulder and squeezed. I knew what it was to lose the person closest to you. Time didn’t heal all wounds.
Chapter Thirteen
"The New World"
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”
I decided to ditch school the next week. Even if I had been able to concentrate on what we were covering in classes, Damien needed my help. The butler he’d inherited in London had gotten him this far, but Damien needed a crash course in modern life. Even Conrad wouldn’t have understood how, as a modern teenager, he didn’t know about televisions, radios, computers, or cell phones.
And there were also things about me that Damien needed to know first. First, he thought I’d actually escaped somehow, like him, from the thirteenth century and Lamia. I supposed he’d drawn his own conclusions once the shock of finding himself alone in the ruins of the castle had worn off. Evidently, those conclusions involved regarding me as a witch. I was more than a little upset by this, even though it was true. While someone today might laugh—I know I had when I’d first entered Ramona’s store—a thirteenth-century knight would have regarded a witch as a perilous creature of the night, the next thing to Satan himself. True, it hadn’t affected his feelings for me; he’d located me within the inside of a week, an impressive feat given that he’d just arrived, bruised, beaten, and otherwise tortured, from another century. But it was something we had to talk about.
Not surprisingly, I decided against telling Aunt Jo I was skipping school. I got up at my usual time and drove the Saratoga down to the outskirts of town. Sugar Hill wasn’t a long ride out, but it also wasn’t just around the corner. I enjoyed the scenery as I entered the estate grounds. The drive wended through woods that gave way to the more formal gardens I’d remembered visiting several years before. I couldn’t believe Damien actually lived here.
The black Audi was nowhere in sight. I remembered that there were stables that Mr. Ramsey had converted into a garage, so I assumed Damien parked his car there—or had his driver park it for him. I shook my head in disbelief at the abundance of his wealth. I had been concentrating pretty hard that day, I thought. While I hadn’t consciously thought to make him wealthy, I did want him to have everything he hadn’t had in his past life.
He was out the front door and down the steps before I could get out of the car, opening the door for me and helping me up. He looked down at me, a frown on his face.
“Emmeline, do you always walk around half naked?” he asked, a stern look in his eyes.
I looked down at my shorts. The weatherman had forecasted eighty-eight degrees as the high, and my shorts weren’t that short. All in all, I thought my sleeveless white top, khaki shorts, and sandals were entirely respectable unless you were very old fashioned. And besides, it was the only clean outfit I had. In all the excitement of his return, I’d forgotten the more mundane parts of my life, like laundry.
I looked at him, amused. Hadn’t I found his old-fashioned ways charming last night?
“Surely you’ve seen other girls in the last week, Damien…This can’t be that much of a surprise to you,” I said.
“Yes, but Emmeline, I’m not going to marry any of those girls,” he explained. “It isn’t…” He searched for a word that wouldn’t hurt my feelings.
“Let’s go in,” I answered, halting the flow of his thoughts. “There’s a lot we need to talk about.”
He followed me up the stairs, and we entered the front door, which opened to a spectacular cathedral ceiling and a large, central winding staircase. I’d remembered how it looked, of course, but I still stood in awe, gazing up at the massive chandelier’s rows of iridescent, cascading crystals.
“It’s rather small,” he apologized. Was he serious?
“Small?” I asked. It was huge. On the other hand, he’d been used to living in a castle, so I guess, compared to that, it was small.
I laughed again, giddy just to be with him. He took my hand and led me from the main entrance to a smaller, more intimate sitting room. On the opposite side of the room, French doors led off to the veranda, and light filled every space. We sat down beside each other on a settee adjacent to the fireplace. The room was filled with antiques, some of them rare and priceless. Mr. Ramsey had been known for his antiques almost as well as he had for the miles of landscaped gardens surrounding the estate. I wondered where he was now.
“How did you manage to have him sell the house with all the furniture?” I asked.
“As I said before, Conrad can be very persuasive. I left everything to him,” Damien said, seemingly unfazed by all that surrounded him. I wondered how it looked to his eyes. These pieces were old, but not eight hundred years old. And décor had definitely changed over the centuries.
I was interested to meet this Conrad, grateful he’d taken such good care of Damien, but I knew it would have to wait.
I knew we needed to get started learning about each other in this new life we’d found together—Damien’s comments about my dress, or lack of it, was just a small sign of how far we had to go. But where should we start? There was so much for him to learn. I looked down at my hands, not knowing where to begin.
Damien started.
“Emmeline, you said before that you’d died. So how are you here? Were you able to work an enchant
ment before she killed you?” he asked.
“Not exactly. Damien, I’m a different person. Well no, that’s not entirely true, I am the same person you knew, but I was reborn in a different time and place. Here I am Emily St. Clair—the girl you found—but that’s not a fake name. I am Emily St. Clair.”
“No, you’re Emmeline de Vere,” he protested, not understanding.
“Yes, I know who I was. But I died, Damien. Lamia threw me into the water, and I drowned. There was no magic then, no spells. Emmeline de Vere died that day.”
I could tell it was taking a moment for this to sink in.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
This was going to be the tricky part.
“Damien, you know that I’m a witch.”
He looked stern at this but didn’t let go of holding my hand.
“So what you are saying is that you were…reincarnated?” he asked slowly, not quite taking my meaning.
“Yes. I started having dreams several months ago, nightmares about what had happened but also happy visions of us, of you. That’s what began this. I thought you were contacting me.”
I gave him the basic outline of what had happened, watching his expressions carefully. When I’d finished, he stared off into the distance, not speaking.
“What are you thinking?” I asked nervously.
He remained quiet for awhile, and I didn’t push him. It would be hard for anyone to take in.
“I’m thinking,” he began, “that I don’t know who Emily St. Clair is, but I want to get to know her,” he said, smiling.
He took me in his arms, and I felt intense relief that he hadn’t rejected me outright. I was not the Emmeline he’d loved before, not exactly, but the essence of that girl was still with me. Even if he hadn’t consciously called to Emily, he’d called out my name under torture, and it had been enough to reach across time.
****
We spent the rest of the day discussing my life. He wanted to know everything about me—my childhood, my likes and dislikes, my experiences. One question he did not ask me was whether or not I’d had a boyfriend. Girls in the thirteenth century didn’t have them since their parents arranged their marriages. Damien and I had been unique. I didn’t want to ruin our perfect day by bringing up Ben. We would have time for that later, and I knew it would be difficult to explain it to him.