Knights

by Linda Lael Miller

  The manuscript had been written by one of Dane’s direct descendants. She put her right hand to her abdomen as she pondered this, wondering again if she would yet find her way home to the thirteenth century and if the child within her would form a link between Kenbrook himself and the author of the history unfolding before her.

  Throughout the night, Gloriana read, pausing at intervals to turn the tapes over or to replace them, or the batteries, as Lyn had instructed her. Later, when she heard her recorded voice, she would be surprised at the steadiness of it, for while she was deciphering that ornate script, she ofttimes wept or laughed, or both together.

  She reached the account of her disappearance and held her emotions in check as she read it, and she was not surprised to find herself named a sorceress and thereafter referred to as the Kenbrook Witch. But as the events that followed her departure played themselves out before her, as vividly as if she were watching them occur in a scrying glass, Gloriana became distraught. She had to force herself to read on as she learned how Edward provoked Dane, time after time, accusing him of murdering the lady Gloriana, that he might have Mariette de Troyes after all. Finally, Edward had attacked Dane, and thinking he’d been set upon by an outlaw, Dane had killed the youth with a blade.

  Gloriana clicked off the recorder at that point and hurried, sobbing, into the bathroom, where she fell to her knees before the commode and was violently ill.

  She could bear no more, she told herself, and yet she could not stay away from Professor Steinbeth’s damnable, cursed manuscript. She brushed her teeth, splashed her face with cold water, and went back to Janet’s kitchen table. There, she settled herself on the same hard chair, dutifully switched on the recorder, and began to read again.

  Following that tragic incident, though no one else found cause to blame him for what had happened, Dane had gone half mad with remorse and grief, and he’d been heard to shout blasphemies at God and seen shaking his fist at the heavens.

  Kenbrook had, thereafter, apparently divided his time between swilling endless mugs of grog at the village tavern and harrying Merrymont, a neighboring baron, long past the time when the man and all his soldiers had been brought to heel. When Edward had been but a year in the grave, both the lady Elaina and Gareth, her husband, had fallen prey to a vile fever and perished.

  Again, at this news, Gloria paused to deal with an overwhelming sense of loss. She had passed the night reading; her exhaustion was bone-deep, her emotions stretched taut, her eyes heavy and hot from crying. She had no choice but to switch off the little machine, stagger into the bedroom, and collapse on top of the covers.

  She did not open the shop that day or answer the telephone when it rang.

  Twilight had turned the world to pale purple before she awakened, roused at last by an insistent pounding at the door of the flat.

  Dazed, Gloriana thrust herself off the bed and made her way through the dim, chilly rooms to the entrance.

  “Who goes there?” she asked rummily, her hand on the doorknob.

  The reply was a masculine chuckle. “Lyn Kirkwood here. Who’s that?”

  She opened the door and stared at her friend, sleepfuddled and confused.

  He laughed, but there was a caress in his eyes. “You’re all right after all. Thank God for that, then.

  I’ve been ringing you all day, both here and in the shop.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gloriana said, stepping back to admit him. “I was very tired—”

  Lyn went past her to the table, where the tape player and manuscript waited, removing a packet of fresh tapes from his overcoat pocket. “You didn’t have to do it all at once,” he said, tossing his coat over the back of a chair and moving to the stove, there to collect the teakettle. He was filling it at the sink a moment later, voice raised to be heard over the rush of running water. “Though I must say old Steinbeth’s as anxious as a cat in a room full of mousetraps.”

  Gloriana looked with sorrow toward the manuscript. She was half finished with it, and there had been no mention of her return. Which probably meant, of course, that she would never manage to escape the twentieth century, “I’m not sure I understand why he wants a recording made,” she confessed. “But I can tell you this much—it is a genuine artifact.”

  “The logic behind the tapes is simply this: you, presumably being a thirteenth-century person, will give the words their proper meter. Who else could do that?”

  As he spoke, he sat her down at the table, then carefully moved the manuscript and other things to a safe surface on Janet’s writing desk. After that, he took pots and pans from the cupboards with a great and comforting clatter. Soon, there was tea to drink and bacon sizzled in a skillet.

  Gloriana had sat in something of a stupor the whole tune, just watching him. “Time traveling,” she sighed. “It is certainly impossible, and yet here I am. Mayhap, what we perceive as magic is really just a natural law we have yet to understand.”

  “That is a remarkably un-medieval way to think,” Lyn commented, cracking eggs into a bowl and beating them to a foam with a wire whisk. “But I believe you are right. Which means that traveling from one century to another, as you apparently have done, may simply be an undiscovered faculty of the human mind.”

  Gloriana bit her lower up for a moment, frowning as she considered the theory Lyn had just advanced. “It did seem to begin within, rather than without—the transition, I mean. There was a peculiar sense that here was somethingI had done myself, however inadvertently, instead of something that simply happened on its own.”

  “Fascinating,” Lyn said, putting two slices of bread into a shiny metal box to toast. “Do you mean to say that you willed yourself from there to here—or more properly from then to now?”

  “Yes,” Gloriana replied, marveling that she had not been aware of this before.

  “Any other symptoms?” asked Lyn, ever the physician.

  “There was a headache,” Gloriana recalled. Just the memory of that terrible, ferocious anguish caused her to put the fingers of her right hand to her temple. “It was awful—I thought I would die of the pain.”

  Lyn turned back to his cooking. His mood was thoughtful as he scrambled the eggs with a little milk and forked the bacon onto a napkin-covered plate. Gloriana reflected that if she ever went back to the thirteenth century, she would sorely miss the wholesome, savory, and very plentiful food of the twentieth. “Some involuntary shift of consciousness, then,” he mused, speaking more to himself, it seemed, than his companion. “How extraordinary a thing is the human mind.”

  Gloriana could not disagree. She shoved the fingers of her right hand through her rumpled hair, then braced her elbow on the table edge and cupped her chin in her palm. “If I did this deliberately, why can’t I go back? I want to more than anything else in the world.”

  As he set a plate of toasted bread on the table, Lyn made a visible effort to hide his sadness and failed miserably. “Is it so wonderful, that turbulent century? I should think it a grim place, rife with disease, full of war and hunger and crime.”

  Gloriana regarded him steadily. She had watched a lot of television news programs since Lyn had taken her under his wing some three weeks before and read her share of newspapers and magazines as well. “I might say the same of your time, mightn’t I? You have plagues, too, and all the rest.”

  Lyn’s shoulders sagged a little as he served the eggs and bacon, got himself a plate and utensils, and sat down to join her at the meal. “Can’t argue that. But it’s cleaner here, at least, and people have more rights under the law.”

  “Yes,” Gloriana allowed, somewhat uncertainly, taking generous portions of eggs and bacon. She especially enjoyed the latter, not only for its crispiness and flavor, but because she could eat it with her fingers, a method that was very familiar. “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “I hear an unspoken ’but’ at the end of that sentence.”

  Gloriana smiled. “What good ears you have,” she said, recalling a children’s story
read to her by a nanny long before her first sojourn through time, when she was only five.

  Lyn regarded her solemnly. “It’s Kenbrook,” he guessed aloud.

  “My husband,” Gloriana reminded him gently. They had discussed Dane on several occasions, and she had always made it clear that she regarded him as her mate, now and forever.

  “Yes,” Lyn said, at length. “Your husband.”

  They did not speak of Kenbrook again.

  Lyn departed soon after they’d washed the supper dishes, leaving Gloriana to her manuscript. She faced the remaining pages with mingled eagerness and trepidation. Before tackling what remained of the task, she took a bracing shower, put on fresh clothes, and brushed her hair.

  Then, when all that was done, Gloriana arranged the fragile parchments upon the table once again, with a clean cloth beneath, to protect them. She put a fresh tape in the recorder—Lyn had taken the ones she’d already made—and began to read aloud. Her voice was low and hoarse with both emotion and overuse as she continued.

  The report of Dane’s death, when Gloriana reached it, was so brief as to seem almost cursory. He had left his wife, Mariette, and their two young sons to return to the Continent as a mercenary and perished in a shipwreck off the coast of Normandy. According to the author, Kenbrook’s family did not miss him overmuch, for he had been a bitter and unhappy man this long while and thought to be under an enchantment cast by the Kenbrook Witch.

  Gloriana was not surprised that Dane’s life had turned out so, nor did she mind the fact that history blamed her for his suffering. Still, she’d hoped Kenbrook would find peace and solace, if not love, in the arms of his second wife, and it was a fierce disappointment to learn that he had not.

  The image of Dane drowning in a frigid and unmerciful sea was so vivid, so shattering, that Gloriana could not go on reading—could barely breathe, in fact.

  She switched off the recording machine with a groping gesture of one hand, and went off to bed.

  She slept soundly, despite the fact that she’d spent much of that day lost in slumber. It was nearly dawn when, at last, Gloriana dreamt.

  She stood on the broken tiles of the Roman bath, there in the depths of Kenbrook Hall, felt their roughness against the soles of her bare feet. Two candles burned, blobs of smelly tallow set in scarred wooden bowls, casting their uncertain glow over the sulfurous waters. Dane sat in the steaming pool, his eyes closed, his face bleak and gaunt in the fragile light.

  He was full of sorrow.

  Gloriana said his name clearly, but if he heard, he did not respond.

  She saw gray in his fair hair and fresh scars on the flesh of his chest, the marks of a dagger or sword. He was still soldiering, then, still making war.

  Alarmed, she took a step toward him, but her feet carried her no closer than she had been before. She saw Kenbrook now as if through a shifting curtain of fog and called to him again, more desperately than before.

  He turned his head toward her, and she saw a terrible solitude in his eyes and disbelief, as though he were looking upon a specter or an illusion. In the last moment before she was wrenched into wakefulness, leaving Dane behind again, Gloriana suffered a shattering realization.

  Dane had been much older in this vision. And that might mean that time was not passing at the same rate on his side of the veil as it was on hers. If somehow she managed to return, she might find that Dane was already dead or a mere babe in arms.

  She did not eat breakfast that morning or go near the manuscript and tape recorder, both of which taunted her silently from the dining table. Instead, Gloriana showered and dressed and went downstairs to the shop, where she passed the morning dusting, peering through the rainspeckled windows overlooking the empty street, and praying for a customer.

  Janet rang her up in the middle of the afternoon to ask how things were going. Gloriana, glad to hear a familiar voice, confessed that she hadn’t opened the shop at all the day before. She said that Lyn had visited, bearing fish-and-chips, but did not mention that he’d brought along Professor Steinbeth and a medieval manuscript.

  She feared she could not broach the subject without breaking down.

  “I’ve cut my hair,” she said, instead. It was an inane statement, but Gloriana didn’t care. She was still very shaken, and even making simple conversation was difficult.

  “Have you?” Janet replied, sounding pleased. “I’ll bet you look wonderful. But you do sound a bit weary yet, dear. Why don’t you close up the shop and go to the cinema or something? I’m sure Lyn would be happy to escort you if he hasn’t got any emergencies on his hands.”

  Gloriana rested her forehead against her palm. Sometimes it was very hard work just comprehending what Janet said, and she was not at her best. She should know what a “cinema” was, for instance, but she couldn’t quite recall. “I wouldn’t want to trouble Lyn,” she said. “He’s done enough for me as it is.”

  Janet sighed. “I feel so wicked—here I am, having a good time, absolutely saturated with sunshine, while all my friends and relations are stuck in that endless drizzle.” She paused, very briefly, to take a breath. “Well,” she went on, in a philosophical tone, “it’s not as if you can’t get out if you want. There are still coaches—you Americans call them ’buses,’ don’t you—not to mention trains and taxis.”

  Gloriana agreed hastily, searching her memory for buses, trains, and taxis. She had just located the correct images when Janet wished her a good night and rang off.

  No more than five minutes after she’d hung up the shop telephone, as if directed by the hand of Providence, a bus splashed to a stop outside, emitting a flock of passengers huddled into coats, their umbrellas unfurling in brisk bursts of color as they stepped down onto the sidewalk.

  Gloriana was possessed of a sudden and irresistible yearning to ride a bus and dashed upstairs for her money, a jacket, and one of three shabby umbrellas Janet kept in a big urn next to the door. Then she stood peering out of the shopwindow until the big vehicle appeared again, almost an hour later. Quickly, before she could lose her courage, Gloriana locked up the store and sped across the flooded sidewalk to get on board.

  The driver took the pound coin she offered and made change, while two women squeezed past to make their way down the steps to the street. Gloriana took an empty seat and gazed out the window, wondering where the great, lumbering coach would take her. They stopped often, with a great screeching sound, to take on new passengers and let off old ones, and Gloriana listened to the conversations around her with interest, though she pretended not to hear.

  The bus traveled from one village to another, and the late afternoon gave way to twilight and then to evening. Only when Kenbrook Hall loomed up ahead did Gloriana realize how far she had traveled and that she had intended to go there all along.

  “Place is closed for the day, love,” the driver said when Gloriana came down the aisle and stood waiting for the doors to open with the now-familiar whooshing sound, as she had seen a dozen other people do. He shivered, squinting through the broad windscreen at the front of the bus. “Nothing but a gloomy pile of rocks, if you ask me. Even on a sunny day.”

  Gloriana refrained from pointing out that she had not asked him and simply waited on the lowest step.

  With a muttered imprecation, the driver pulled on a lever, and the doors folded back, letting in the wet, icy wind.

  “The last coach leaves Hadleigh in an hour, from just there, in front of the chemist’s shop,” the man warned, as Gloriana stood on the road, gazing resolutely toward the ruins of her home and her most cherished dreams, “Mind you don’t miss it, or you might be in for a cold night.”

  Gloriana raised a hand to indicate that she’d heard, but then launched herself toward the ancient keep, and her steps didn’t slow as she wended her way between puddles. A metal fence surrounded the property now, for the stone walls had long since fallen of course, and the gate was locked.

  Gloriana was undaunted. Clad in blue jeans, one of the twe
ntieth century’s better inventions, by her standards, Gloriana climbed over the barrier and landed on both feet in the old graveyard.

  There were lights on in the tower itself, and one burned in the tiny gatehouse too. Gloriana paid no attention whatsoever to either place, but instead moved between the ancient markers like a ghost, heedless of the cold and the incessant, misty rain. Perhaps if she simply sat down in the exact place where she’d been when the transition occurred, she would be taken back.

  The mist turned to a downpour, by degrees, but Gloriana barely noticed. At the foot of Aurelia St. Gregory’s crumbling crypt, she sank into the wet grass, her legs crossed, and raised the collar of her jacket against the cold. She had only to wait, that was all. Just wait.

  The air turned colder and the night darker, and Gloriana retreated further and further into her own thoughts. After a long time, she heard voices around her, but none of them were Dane’s, so she shut them out.

  Gradually, the cold turned in upon itself and became warmth, soothing at first, but then oppressive and smothering. The texture of the darkness changed too, exploding in bright crimson flashes that hurt her eyes, and there were more voices and hands touching her.

  “Leave her alone.” That was Lyn speaking. Even in her distraught state, Gloriana recognized his firm, kindly tones.

  How had he found her?

  He scooped her up into his arms, and she felt a jostling motion as he carried her through the night. There were people around, but they were only shapes in the hot, blood-colored light, and Gloriana turned her face into Lyn’s shoulder.

  “You’re safe now,” he said. “I’ve got you.”

  Gloriana might have wept, but the fever burning within her had dried up all her tears. She did not wish to be saved, wanted only the refuge of her dreams, where Dane still lived and laughed.

  She drifted in and out of consciousness after that, finding herself in Lyn’s car, then in a building of some sort. The dazzle of the place blinded her, and she shrank from the glare. There was pain in her chest; her clothes were removed, and needles pricked her flesh. She was too cold and then too warm, and through it all, she heard Lyn’s voice, comforting, cajoling, pleading, commanding.