by Lynn Kurland
It was then she began to see that things were perhaps a bit different in Jamie's keep.
There were no rushes on the floor. The stone was flat and well-laid, but there was nothing covering it to soak up the refuse of living. That was another strange thing. There were no remains from any meals littering the floor that she could see. No well-gnawed bones. No puddles of ale and other unmentionable substances.
Margaret sniffed. No stench of living either, if her nose told the tale true. Indeed, the place smelled very pleasant. Perhaps Alex's world was a cleaner place.
She sniffed again. "Ah," she said, her nose finding this new fragrance very much to its liking. "Jamie's cook has been at the fire."
"I smell brownies," Alex said, his own nose quivering in the air. "With any luck it'll be Joshua who's been cooking and not Zachary."
"Joshua?"
"Jamie's minstrel. He's very good at desserts."
"Jamie has a minstrel here in your world?"
"He came from the 1300s, like Jamie. He's English. You'll probably like him."
More traveling through blades of grass, she surmised. She shook her head. Either she had died and gone to a very earthy heaven, she had lost her mind completely, or she had indeed traveled to the future.
She wasn't sure which of the alternatives frightened her more.
She followed Alex across the great hall to what she assumed were the kitchens. She could hear the babble of voices, hearty laughter, and the sounds of cooking trappings banging together. It was the most reassuring thing she'd heard all day.
She paused before she reached the kitchen. The torches on the wall weren't torches. The fire was smooth, as if it were frozen in time. Indeed, she could almost fancy she saw fire flickering within the frozen fire.
''What... ?" she stammered.
"Lightbulb," Alex said. "It takes the place of candles. I'll tell you all about it later. Let's go eat first. We'll both feel better after a good snack."
Margaret nodded and let him pull her along, but she could hardly tear her gaze from those strange fires. Light-bulbs. 'Twas an odd term.
She stopped dead in her tracks at the entrance to the kitchens.
It was a large chamber, indeed a bit larger than her own humble place of cookery. There was a table in the midst of the room and benches set close for comfortable seating. But there was no hearth set into the wall, no fire with pots set to boiling over it, no barrels with grains and salted meat. The walls were lined with odd looking trunks set in at impossible angles and a pair of the very large boxes were covered with the same shiny substance that covered Alex's rovering baggage wain.
Margaret thought to ask where they kept the food, then she saw that there were dark brown items piled high on a plate.
"Brownies," Alex announced with satisfaction.
"Chocolate?" she asked.
"Oh, yeah." He nodded, dragging her forward.
As sinful as the Godiva balls, but chewier. Margaret worked her way through four or five, and found her nerves to be quite calmed by the aftereffects.
"Introduce me before my heart blows up," a voice said from across the room.
Margaret looked up in mid-brownie bite to find a younger version of Alex standing across the table from her.
"My wife," Alex said, throwing a very proprietary arm around her shoulders, "Margaret. Margaret, that's Zachary, my younger brother."
"Wife?" Zachary choked, his eyes bugging out.
"You snooze, you lose," Alex said, sounding exceptionally smug.
"She's wearing mail," Zachary said, with undisguised admiration. "And a sword. Wow."
Well, she knew that word and it was a sure sign of a compliment. Margaret smiled, feeling better than she had all morning.
"And she knows how to use it," Alex warned, "so don't cross her. Or me, for that matter."
"Maybe she'd like to go sight-seeing," Zachary said, seemingly oblivious to the tightening of Alex's arm around her.
Margaret felt Alex shift, then heard the unmistakable sound of sword coming from scabbard. She watched in amazement as her husband brandished his sword at his brother.
"Don't even think about it."
"I'm sure Margaret can make up her own mind," Zachary insisted.
Alex turned his sword on her. "Don't you even think about it," he warned.
"I could take her sight-seeing," another man offered. Margaret looked at the man standing next to Jamie. He resembled Jamie so strongly, she had to assume he was Jamie's brother. "Patrick MacLeod," he said, with a low bow, "at your service, my lady."
"Nay, let it be me," another man said, leaping up from the table. He went down on bended knee. ''Joshua MacLeod, minstrel to the Laird James MacLeod."
"Well," Margaret said, quite overcome.
"By the very saints in heaven," Joshua said, beating his breast with his fist, "I daresay I never thought to see another rival my lady Elizabeth for beauty, but I thought awrong! She, with the glory of the sun, and you, my lady Margaret, with the glory of the moon! Oh, blessed saints, my poor eyes are overcome with the beauty that surrounds me on all sides! Indeed, I should be the one to take you and show you the sights, lady, that I might gaze upon your loveliness and compose lays worthy of your beauty."
Margaret could only gape at him in astonishment.
"I made the brownies, too," Joshua added.
Margaret factored that bit of news into her thinking. A minstrel who could also make concoctions worthy of a king's palate. Perhaps the twentieth century would be more to her liking than she thought. She opened her mouth to bargain away her presence for another plate of the foodstuffs only to find herself being pulled toward the door.
''I'll take her," Alex bellowed as he dragged her along behind him. "We're going to go get settled in."
Margaret smiled to herself as she followed her grumbling husband up the stairs. She counted on her free hand three men who had vied for her attentions, and that didn't include the snarling man who was cursing all three heartily as he made his way up the stairs.
The future was shaping up to be a very nice place indeed.
Thirty - one
Alex woke to complete darkness. Well, it was obviously too early to get up. He wondered if opening his eyes might shed more light on the time, then realized his eyes were open. Definitely too early to get up.
He rolled toward Margaret only to flop his arm over an empty bed. He squinted at the numbers on his alarm clock, half surprised at how easy it had been to reaccustom himself to looking for it. 4:30. So Margaret had finally eluded him long enough to go exploring. Alex shuddered to think about what she'd gotten into already while he'd been sleeping so peacefully. Hopefully she wasn't wandering around outside the keep, tripping over gates in the grass.
He sat up with a jerk, then fumbled for the bedside lamp. Margaret's sword was still propped up against the chair where she'd left it the night before. He lay back with a sigh of relief. One, she was still there. Two, she'd obviously given up on poking things with her blade to test their mettle before she touched them.
He crawled from the bed and managed to find rumpled sweats to put on. His search for slippers was futile, so he settled for socks. Ah, the comforts of modern life.
He almost took the socks back off again. No sense in spoiling himself.
He shut his bedroom door and looked down the hallway. Jamie's study door was open. Alex knew what trouble he'd gotten himself into by loitering there, so he quickly walked down the hall to save his wife from the same. He stopped at the doorway. He couldn't help but just stand there and smile at what he saw.
Margaret was sitting in Jamie's chair with a dagger in one hand and a book in the other. She was wearing a heavy sweater, boxer shorts, wool socks, and Snoopy slippers— all things filched from his armoire. Alex sighed. He was doomed to live with women who found his clothes much more interesting than their own. Margaret had a blanket draped over one leg, but the other was bare and hooked over the arm of the chair. Snoopy's ears flopped as she swung
her leg back and forth. She read with complete concentration, absently reaching up to scratch the side of her head with the hilt of her dagger.
At least she'd pared down her arsenal to just a dagger. Alex had wondered there for a while if Jamie's hall would survive what Margaret was packing. This was the first time in two days he hadn't seen her roaming the hall with her sword bared and ready.
After brownies that first day, he'd managed to get her upstairs and down for a little nap. He'd figured she needed it and he'd known he needed it. He'd fallen asleep in spite of his intentions to watch over her, then woken only to find her in the bathroom, poking her sword down the toilet.
Things hadn't improved much from there.
Margaret had eaten lunch with one hand while investigating—at sword's length of course—everything in Jamie's kitchen. Alex had barely stopped her from sticking the blade into an electrical outlet. After that narrow brush with death, she'd herded Frances, Amery, Joel, and Baldric into a little group with the efficiency of a sheepdog and tried to keep them behind her as she scoped out the rest of the hall. It hadn't lasted long. Amery had escaped up to young Ian's room to fall into raptures over the best FAO Schwartz had to offer. Frances had begun trailing Elizabeth like a shadow and was soon seen to be up to her elbows in cookie dough. Baldric had sized up Joshua, then challenged him to a contest of verses. Joshua had opened with a Beatles' lyric and Baldric had countered with "Two, Four, Six, Eight, Who do we all love to hate? Brackwald, Brackwald, Yeech!"
Alex had quickly left them to it. Joel had remained by his side like the dutiful squire he was, clutching Alex's folded surcoat and taking in everything he saw with wide eyes.
So had passed Day One in the future. Day Two had begun promptly at dawn, and only that late because Alex had spent most of the night making love to his wife to keep her in bed. Where she came by her energy he didn't know, but she was up with the sun, preparing another assault on the twentieth century. The only difference was, she left behind her mail and her sword. But the dagger had been used liberally, followed by her fingers. And followed then by her questions, which were endless.
Alex had hardly known what to expect of his wife when he'd decided to return for a visit. Uncertainty? Unease?
As he stood and watched her devour a book and a movie at the same time, he realized he had misjudged her. She was fearless. He'd known that, but he hadn't known just how deep the trait ran. She assaulted his world with the same force she did her own. How he could have expected anything less, he didn't know.
She jumped in her chair, startling him. He looked at the TV screen and saw The Blob about to overtake and consume yet another victim.
"Yikes," Alex said, with a shiver. Faster than he could follow, she had her dagger by the tip of the blade and her arm poised to fling it at him. He held up his hands in surrender.
"Just me," he said, ready to duck.
She looked at him narrowly. "Come to drag me back to bed?"
"You didn't complain last night."
She flipped her dagger up and caught it by the hilt on the way down, then laid it on the arm of the chair. "Indeed, I didn't. 'Twas a most pleasant way to pass the time. Then again," she added, with another glance at the TV, "I knew not what I was missing here."
"I've been replaced by a B movie," Alex said, walking over to her. "I'm insulted." He bent and kissed the top of her head. "What else have you watched?"
"The Wizard of Oz, though I tell you, Alex, I cared not a whit for that one witch. A most unpleasant creature. But," she said, brightening, "the next play is one called Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They have claimed it to be most entertaining."
Right, and if she saw that, she'd never look at any of them the same way again. He knew he'd never looked at Donald Sutherland the same way afterward.
"Why don't we go back to bed?" Alex suggested, reaching for the remote.
"Oh, nay," she said, batting his hand away, "The Blob has yet things to ingest, no doubt. And I haven't finished this manuscript yet. 'Tis most interesting, though I surely don't believe some of the things I've seen."
Alex glanced at the book now in her lap. She was halfway through A Pictorial History of the Twentieth Century.
"This business of the atomic bomb," she said with a shake of her head. "It seems most unsporting." She flipped back through pages until she found one showing the destruction of Hiroshima. "And to think there are so many of them just waiting to be exploded on unsuspecting folk."
"Not all man's inventions have been good ones."
"I can see that. Now," she said, turning back to the page she'd been studying, "who decided what the moon looked like up close?"
He smiled. "No one decided. Man flew up there and took a picture."
She frowned at him. ''Impossible. Who has that kind of strength?"
''They blasted the men off the Earth with a rocket with enough fuel to get them there and back." He smiled at her look of skepticism. "They landed on the moon, took a few pictures, picked up a few rocks, and flew home."
She snorted. " 'Tis a tale only Baldric could imagine up in his twisted mind."
"No, it's really true. In fact, that's how my parents are going to get here."
"By flying?"
"Exactly."
"Impossible."
"It's true."
She paused and considered. "Can I see inside one of the beasts?"
"Maybe. I'll see what I can arrange. If" he added, "you come back to bed with me now."
She was torn, he could see that. Then she looked up at him. "May I read now in bed?"
"We'll see how long you manage to concentrate," he promised.
"I am always in control of myself," she said primly, closing the book around her finger to keep her place and rising with dignity.
"Ha," he said, remembering all too well just how undone she'd been the night before—before she'd managed to sneak from his bed to watch TV.
"I allowed you to distract me."
"Lying isn't nice, Meg."
She stuck her nose in the air and took her Snoopy-covered feet down the hallway. "Try as you will, my lord, I'll not be bested by you."
Well, that sounded like a challenge, and one he wasn't going to pass up.
Several hours, and a distraction or two later, Alex stood next to his Range Rover with keys in hand and questioned the wisdom of what he currently contemplated. Margaret was staring at his vehicle with the same expression she used while sizing up an unsavory bug in her flour barrels. He walked over to her and began to frisk her again. She scowled at him.
"I've brought nothing with me."
"I'm just groping you for the fun of it," he lied, bending to peer into her boots. Finding them comfortingly empty, he straightened and smiled at her. "Let's check under that tunic one more time—"
"Enough," she said crossly. "I gave you my word I would not stick anything into this beast of yours."
"It's not that I don't trust you. It's just that you haven't heard the noise it makes."
Alex looked behind his wife to find the rest of the household gathered on the steps watching with great interest. Alex was hoping to slip away before Amery noticed anything besides that Tonka truck he was fondling. Leaving the rest of them behind didn't look to be a problem. Baldric was busily unraveling a thrift-store sweater, probably gearing up for another round with Joshua. Elizabeth had Frances under control, and Jamie was trying to lure Joel away by promising a lesson in swordplay. Joel had remained unimpressed until Jamie had brought out a six-foot Claymore he'd unearthed during the reconstruction of the hall. There had been lots of little goodies like that, and Jamie had tried to distract Joel with them one by one. Alex watched as his squire promptly turned from him and followed the Claymore into the garden like a charmed snake.
"I'll pop the hood and turn it on," Alex said, dragging his attention back to the problem at hand. "Just don't, and I mean do not, stick anything—fingers or blades—into the engine when it's running."
Margaret looked re
ady to protest, so Alex gave it to her straight.
"The engine will grab your hand, pull it in, and chew it off."
She tucked her hands under her arms.
"Or your hair," he added, hoping to impress upon her just how dangerous it was. "Suck your head right off before you knew what was happening."
She took a pace back and looked at the Range Rover with new respect.
Alex started the engine up, then popped the hood. He held out his hand to her.
"Come look. The noise is just a lot of metal and things grinding."
"And the horses?"
"It's how they used to measure the power of the car. Horsepower. How many horses it would take to power the car. Get it?"
She nodded, then pulled her hand from his and tucked it back under her arm. "Fascinating."
"Wanna go for a ride?"
She looked at him with wide eyes. "Get inside it?"
"The passenger part is perfectly safe."
"As you say, husband."
Alex shut the hood and put her into the passenger seat. He hoped he'd removed all her hardware. The first time Jamie had gotten into a car, he'd cut his way out of the seat belt to escape. Alex hoped to avoid that, though he wondered why he bothered. It wasn't as if he'd be needing the car in the past.
"Okay," he said, getting in and shutting the door. "Now all we do is put it in gear and it goes."
"Without horses," she said, sounding awestruck.
Alex almost said "it sure beats a saddle," but he stopped himself just in time. There was something to be said for riding a horse. It certainly could be a more scenic way to travel.
Margaret seemed to take the whole thing fairly well. And when it started to rain, she put her hand under the windshield to feel it, then blinked in surprise when the rain hit the glass. Alex watched her consider that, then sit back and digest.
"It has its advantages," he conceded.
"So I see," she murmured.
It was a short trip to the village. Alex parked, then opened Margaret's door for her. She looked past him to a little antique shop.