A Knight in Shining Armour (17 page)

The doctor turned off the light. “Of course he
had
to have been put under. In this day and age we can’t imagine the pain that extractions such as these must have caused him.”

“This day and age,” Dougless said softly. “But four hundred years ago teeth were, as you said, ‘torn’ from a person’s mouth?”

The doctor smiled. “Four hundred years ago I imagine that everyone had extractions like his—but without anesthetic or painkillers afterward. And, yes, I imagine a lot of people went away with cracked jawbones.”

Dougless took a deep breath. “How were his teeth otherwise? How was he as a patient?”

“Excellent on both counts. He was very relaxed in the chair, and laughed when the hygienist asked if she’d hurt him when she’d cleaned his teeth. I filled one cavity and checked his other teeth.” The doctor looked puzzled for a moment. “He has some slight ridging on his teeth. I’ve only seen that in school textbooks, and it usually means hunger for a year or so as a child. I wonder what could have caused such ridging in him? He doesn’t strike me as a man whose family couldn’t afford food.”

Drought, Dougless almost said. Or flooding. Something to make the crops fail in a time of no refrigeration or frozen food or fresh food flown in from around the world.

“I didn’t mean to keep you,” the doctor said when Dougless said nothing. “It was just that I was concerned about his previous dental work. He . . .” The doctor chuckled. “He certainly asked a lot of questions. He isn’t by chance thinking of going to dental school?”

Dougless smiled. “He’s just curious. Thank you so much for your time and your concern.”

“I’m glad I had the cancellations. He has a most interesting set of teeth.”

Dougless thanked him again, then went into the reception room to see Nicholas leaning across the counter flirting with the pretty receptionist.

“Come on,” she snapped at him after she’d paid the bill. She hadn’t meant to be so short-tempered, but it seemed that circumstances were trying to force her to believe that this man actually was from the sixteenth century.

“That is not the barber I have been to,” Nicholas said, smiling, rubbing his still-numb lip. “I should like to take that man and his machines back with me.”

“All the machines are electric,” Dougless said gloomily. “I doubt that Elizabethan houses were wired for the two-twenty they have in this country.”

Catching her arm, Nicholas turned her to face him. “What ails you?”

“Who are you?” she cried, looking up at him. “Why do you have ridges on your teeth? How did your jawbone get cracked when your other teeth were pulled?”

Nicholas smiled at her because he could see that, at last, she was truly beginning to believe him. “I am Nicholas Stafford, earl of Thornwyck, Buckshire, and Southeaton. Two days ago I was in a cell awaiting my execution and the year was 1564.”

“I cannot believe it,” Dougless said, looking away from his face. “I will not believe it. Time travel cannot happen.”

“What would make you believe?” he asked softly.

A
s Dougless walked with him
toward the ice cream shop, she pondered the question. What
would
make her believe? she asked herself. But she could think of nothing. There seemed to be explanations for everything. He could be a fabulous actor and merely pretending that everything was new to him. His teeth could have been wrenched out while playing rugby in school. Since she could verify nearly everything he’d told her, that meant he could have found the information previously, then used it in his charade.

Was there anything he could do to prove to her that he was from the past?

In the ice cream parlor she absently ordered herself a single cone of mocha ice cream, but for Nicholas, she ordered a double cone of French vanilla and chocolate fudge. She was considering her question so hard that she didn’t see his face when he took his first licks, so she was startled when he leaned over and kissed her quickly, but firmly, on the mouth.

Blinking, she looked up at him and saw the sublime happiness on his face as he ate his ice cream. Dougless couldn’t help laughing.

“Buried treasure,” she said, and startled herself with the words.

“Mmm?”
Nicholas asked, his attention one hundred percent on his ice cream.

“To prove to me that you’re from the past, you have to know something no one else does. You have to show me something that isn’t in a book.”

“Such as who the father of Lady Arabella Sydney’s last child was?” He was down to the chocolate scoop and looked as though he might melt from happiness. Placing her hand under his elbow, she ushered him to a table.

Sitting across from him, looking at those blue eyes and thick lashes as he licked his cone, she wondered if he looked at a woman like that when he made love to her.

“You gaze at me most hard,” he said, then looked at her through his lashes.

Turning away, Dougless cleared her throat. “I do not want to know who fathered Lady Arabella’s kid.” She didn’t look back when she heard Nicholas’s laugh.

“‘Buried treasure,’” he said as he crunched the cone. “Some valuable trinket that was hidden, but is still there after four hundred and twenty-four years?”

He can add and subtract, Dougless thought as she looked back at him. “Forget about it. It was just an idea.” She opened her notebook. “Let me tell you what I found out at the library,” she said as she began to read her notes about the houses.

When she looked up, Nicholas was wiping his hands on a paper napkin and frowning. “A man builds so that something of himself lives on. It pleases me not to hear that what was mine is gone.”

“I thought children were supposed to carry on a person’s name.”

“I left no children,” he said. “I had a son, but he died in a fall the week after my brother drowned. First his mother, then the child.”

Dougless watched pain shoot across his face and suddenly felt how easy and safe the twentieth century was. Sure, America had rapists and mass murderers and drunk drivers, but Elizabethans had plague and leprosy and smallpox. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry both for you and for them.” She paused a moment. “Have you had smallpox?” she asked softly.

“Neither small nor large,” he said with some pride.

“Large
pox?”

He glanced about the room, then whispered, “The French disease.”

“Oh,” she said, understanding. Venereal disease. For some reason she was glad to hear that he’d never had “large pox”—not that it mattered, but they did share a bathroom.

“What is this ‘open to the public’?” he asked.

“Usually the owners couldn’t afford the houses, so they gave them to the National Trust, so now you pay money and a guide takes you through the house. They’re great tours. This particular house has a tea shop and a gift shop and—”

Nicholas suddenly sat up straight. “It is Bellwood that is open?”

She checked her notes. “Yes, Bellwood. Just south of Bath.”

Nicholas seemed to be calculating. “With fast horses we can be to Bath in about seven hours.”

“With a good English train we could make it in two hours. Would you like to see your house again?”

“See my house sold to a company, with tallow-faced apron-men marching through it?”

Dougless smiled. “If you put it like that . . .”

“Can we go on this . . .”

“Train.”

“Train to Bellwood now?”

Dougless looked at her watch. “Sure. If we leave right now, we can have tea there and see Bellwood. But if you don’t want to see the tallow-faced . . .”

“Apron-men,” he said, smiling.

“Marching through the house, then why go?”

“There is a chance, a small chance, that I could, mayhap, find your buried treasure. When my estates were confiscated by your”—he looked at her mockingly—“your Virgin Queen”—he let Dougless know what he thought of the absurdity of that idea—“I do not know if my family was given permission to clear the estates. Perhaps there is a chance . . .”

The idea of an afternoon spent looking for buried treasure excited Dougless. “What are we waiting for?” she asked as she picked up her new handbag. This time, she’d packed it full of travel-size toiletries, and she wasn’t going anywhere without it.

The train system was another thing Dougless loved about England. Nearly every village had a station, and, unlike American trains, they were clean, with no graffiti, and well kept. When Dougless bought their tickets, she was told that a connecting train to Bath was just about to leave the station, which was not an unusual occurrence since the English trains were wonderfully frequent.

Once seated on the train and it started to move, Nicholas’s eyes bulged at the speed. But, after a few nervous moments, like a true Englishman, he adjusted to the speed and began to walk around. He studied the ads high up on the walls, smiling in delight at one for Colgate, recognizing the toothpaste she’d purchased. If he could recognize words, perhaps it wouldn’t be so difficult to teach him to read, she thought.

In Bristol, they changed trains. Nicholas was aghast at the number of hurrying people in the station, and he was fascinated with the ornate Victorian ironwork. She purchased a fat guidebook to the great houses of southern England at the newsstand, and on the ride to Bath, she started to read to Nicholas about his houses that were now in ruins. But when she saw that hearing of such waste and destruction made him sad, she stopped reading.

He looked out the big windows and now and then would say, “There’s William’s house,” or “Robin lives there,” when he saw one of the enormous houses that dotted the English countryside almost as frequently as did the cows and sheep.

Bath, beautiful, beautiful Bath, was a wonder to Nicholas. To Dougless it was old, since the architecture was all eighteenth century, but to him it was very modern. Dougless thought that New York or Dallas with its steel and glass buildings would look like outer space to him. He would
act
as though they looked weird, she corrected herself, then noticed that she was correcting herself less often with each hour she spent with him.

They had lunch at an American-type sandwich shop, and Dougless ordered club sandwiches, potato salad, and iced tea for both of them. He thought the meal was tasty but lacking in quantity. It took some fast talking, but Dougless managed to drag him out of the restaurant before he started demanding a boar’s head or whatever.

He was so fascinated with the crescent-shaped rows of houses in Bath that Dougless hated to get a taxi and take him out of town. But getting into an automobile took Nicholas’s mind off the buildings. The taxi drivers in England are a different breed from those in America. English drivers don’t yell when someone takes “too long” to get into a car, so Nicholas was given time to look at the vehicle. He examined the door and the door lock, opening and closing it three times before getting in, and once in, after examining the backseat, he leaned forward and watched the driver steer and shift gears.

When they arrived at Bellwood, the next tour didn’t start for half an hour, so they had time to walk around the gardens. Dougless thought they were beautiful, but Nicholas curled his lip and barely looked at the flowering plants and the ancient shade trees. When he walked around the big, sprawling house, he told her what had been added to the house and what had been changed. He thought the additions were architecturally dreadful and minced no words in telling her so.