A Knight in Shining Armour (5 page)

No, it would be better if Dougless made some plans about how to get herself out of this mess. She’d have to call her father, collect, and have him send her money. And again she would have to tell him that his youngest daughter had failed at something. She’d have to tell him that his daughter couldn’t so much as go on a holiday without getting herself into trouble.

Tears started in her eyes as she imagined hearing her oldest sister, Elizabeth, say, “What has our little scatterbrained Dougless done now?” Robert had been Dougless’s attempt at making her family proud of her. Robert wasn’t like the other stray-cat men Dougless had fallen for. Robert was
so
respectable, so very suitable, but she’d lost him. Maybe if she’d just held her temper with Gloria . . . Maybe . . .

Tears blurred Dougless’s eyes as she looked around the church. Sun was streaming through the old windows high above her head, and sharp, clear rays lit the white marble tomb in the archway to the left. Dougless walked forward. Lying on top of the tomb was a full-length, white marble sculpture of a man wearing the top half of a suit of armor and an odd-looking pair of shorts, his ankles crossed, a helmet tucked under his arm. “ ‘Nicholas Stafford,’” she read aloud, “‘Earl of Thornwyck.’ ”

Dougless was congratulating herself for holding up so well under her current circumstances when, suddenly, everything that had happened hit her, and her knees collapsed. She fell to the floor, her hands on the tomb, her forehead resting against the cold marble.

She began to cry in earnest, to cry deeply from far down inside herself. She felt as though she were a failure, a complete and absolute failure.Her tears were not just for today, but it seemed that everything she’d ever touched in her life had failed. Since she’d reached puberty, her father had had to bail her out of what had to be hundreds of scrapes.

There was the “boy” she’d fallen madly in love with when she was sixteen. She had defied her entire family because they hadn’t liked him. But her sister Elizabeth—wise, never-made-a-mistake-in-her-life Elizabeth—showed Dougless some papers. The boy she loved was twenty-five years old and had a prison record. Defiantly, Dougless declared that she loved him no matter what flaws he had. They broke up when he was arrested for grand theft.

Then there was the minister she’d fallen for when she was nineteen. A minister had seemed a safe person for her to love. She ended their relationship when his pictur(9_@_9_ed on the front page of the newspapers. He was already married to three other women.

And then there was . . . Dougless was crying so hard that she couldn’t remember all the others. But she knew that the list was endless. Robert had seemed so different, so ordinary, so respectable—but she hadn’t been able to hold on to him.

“What is wrong with me?” she cried.

Through her tears, she looked at the marble face of the man on the tomb. In the Middle Ages they had arranged marriages. When she was twenty-two and had just found out that her latest love, a stockbroker, had been arrested for insider trading, she’d crawled onto her father’s lap and asked him if he’d choose a man for her.

Adam Montgomery had laughed. “Your problem, sweetheart, is that you fall in love with men who need you too much. You ought to find a man who doesn’t need you, but just wants you.”

Dougless had sniffed. “That’s exactly what I want: a Knight in Shining Armor to swoop down off his white horse and want me so much that he carries me back to his castle, where we live happily ever after.”

“Something like that,” her father had said, smiling. “Armor’s okay but, Dougless, sweetheart, if he gets mysterious phone calls in the night, then jumps on his Harley and doesn’t return for days at a time, get out, okay?”

Dougless cried harder as she remembered the many times she’d had to go to her family for help. And now she was going to have to ask for their help again. Once again she was going to have to admit that she’d made a fool of herself over a man. But this time was worse, because this man had been someone who had her family’s approval. But somehow Dougless had lost him.

“Help me,” she whispered, her hand on the marble hand of the sculpture. “Help me find my Knight in Shining Armor. Help me find a man who wants me.”

Sitting back on her heels, with her hands covering her face, Dougless began to cry harder.

After a long while, she slowly came to realize that someone was near her. When she turned her head, a stream of sunlight coming from a high window hit metal and so blinded her that she sat back on the stone floor with a thud. She put her hand up to shield her eyes.

Standing before her was a man, a man who appeared to be wearing. . . armor.

He was standing so still, and glaring down at Dougless so fiercely, that at first she thought he wasn’t real. She couldn’t help staring up at him in openmouthed astonishment. He was an extraordinarily good looking man, and he was wearing the most authentic-looking stage costume she’d ever seen. There was a small ruff about his neck, then armor to his waist. But what armor! The shiny metal looked almost as though it was silver. Down the front of the armor were many rows of etched flower designs, each design filled with a gold-colored metal. From his waist to mid-thigh he wore a type of shorts that ballooned out about his body. Below the shorts, his legs—his big, muscular legs—were clad in stockings that looked to be knitted of . . . there was only one fiber on earth that reflected light in just that way: silk. Tied above his left knee was a garter made of blue silk and beautifully embroidered. His feet sported odd, soft shoes that had little cut-outs across the toes.

“Well, witch,” the man said in a deep baritone, “you have conjured me, so what now do you ask of me?”

“Witch?” Dougless asked, sniffing and wiping away tears.

From inside his ballooned shorts, the man pulled out a white linen handkerchief and handed it to her. Dougless blew her nose noisily.

“Have my enemies hired you?” the man asked. “Do they plot against me more? Is not my head enough for them? Stand, madam, and explain yourself.”

Gorgeous, but off his rocker, Dougless thought. “Listen, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Slowly, she stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

She didn’t say any more because he drew a thin-bladed sword that had to be a yard long, then held the sharp point against her throat. “Reverse your spell, witch. I would return!”

It was all too much for Dougless. First Robert and his lying daughter, and now this mad Hamlet. She burst into tears again and slumped against the cold stone wall.

“Damnation!” the man muttered, and the next thing Dougless knew he had picked her up and was carrying her to a church pew.

He put her down to sit on the hard pew, then stood over her, still glaring. Dougless couldn’t seem to stop crying. “This has been the worst day of my life,” she wailed. The man was scowling down at her like an actor out of an old Bette Davis movie. “I’m sorry,” she managed to say. “I don’t usually cry so much, but to be abandoned by the man I love and attacked—at sword point, no less—all in the same day, sets me off.” As she wiped her eyes, she glanced down at the handkerchief. It was a large linen square, and around the border was an inch and a half band of intricate silk embroidery of what looked to be flowers and dragons. “How pretty,” she choked out.

“There is no time for trivialities. My soul is at stake—as is yours. I tell you again: Reverse your spell.”

Dougless was recovering herself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was having a good cry all alone, and you, wearing that absurd outfit, came in here and started yelling at me. I’ve a good mind to call the police—or the bobbies, or whatever they have in rural England. Is it legal for you to carry a sword like that?”

“Legal?” the man asked. He was looking at her arm. “Is that a clock on your arm? And what manner of dress is it that you wear?”

“Of course it’s a clock, and these are my traveling-to-England clothes. Conservative. No jeans or T-shirts. Nice blouse, nice skirt. You know, Miss Marple–type clothes.”

He was frowning at her, but there seemed to be less anger about him. “You talk uncommonly strangely. What manner of witch are you?”

Throwing up her hands in despair, Dougless stood up and faced him. He was quite a bit taller than she was, so she had to look up. His black, curling hair just reached the stiff little ruff he wore, and he had a black mustache above a trim, pointed, short beard. “I am not a witch, and I am not part of your Elizabethan drama,” she said firmly. “And now I’m going to leave this church, and I can promise you that if you try anything fancy with that sword of yours, I’ll scream the windows out. Here’s your handkerchief. I’m sorry it’s so wet, but I thank you for lending it to me. Good-bye, and I hope your play gets great reviews.” Turning sharply, she walked out of the church.

“At least nothing more horrible than what I’ve already been through can happen to me today,” Dougless murmured as she left the churchyard. There was a telephone booth beyond the gate, within sight of the church door, and Dougless used it to make a collect call to her parents’ home in the U.S. It was early in the morning in Maine, and a sleepy Elizabeth answered the phone.

Anybody but her, Dougless thought, rolling her eyes skyward. She’d rather talk to anyone on earth than her perfect older sister.

“Dougless, is that you?” Elizabeth asked, waking up. “Are you all right? You’re not in trouble again, are you?”

Dougless grit her teeth. “Of course I’m not in trouble. Is Dad there? Or Mom?” Or a stranger off the street, she thought. Anybody but Elizabeth.

Elizabeth yawned. “No, they went up to the mountains. I’m here house-sitting and working on a paper.”

“Think it’ll win a Nobel prize?” Dougless asked, trying to make a joke and sound carefree.

Elizabeth wasn’t fooled. “All right, Dougless, what’s wrong? Has that surgeon of yours stranded you somewhere?”

Dougless gave a little laugh. “Elizabeth, you do say the funniest things. Robert and Gloria and I are having a wonderful time. There are so many fantastic things to see and do here. Why, just this morning we saw a medieval play. The actors were so good. And you wouldn’t believe how good the costumes are!”

Elizabeth paused. “Dougless, you’re lying. I can hear it over the phone. What’s wrong? Do you need money?”

Try as she might, Dougless could not make her lips form the word “yes.” Her family loved to tell what they called Dougless-stories. They loved the one about the time Dougless got locked out of her hotel room when she was wearing only a towel. Then there was the time Dougless went to the bank to deposit a check and walked into a bank robbery. What they especially loved about this story was that when the police arrived, they discovered that the robbers were carrying toy guns.

Now she could imagine Elizabeth’s laughter when she told all the Montgomery cousins how funny little Dougless had gone to England and been left at a church with no money, no passport, nothing. “And, oh, yes,” Elizabeth would say over the howls of laughter, “she was attacked by a crazed Shakespearean actor.”

“No, I don’t need money,” Dougless said at last. “I just wanted to say hello. I hope you get your paper done. See ya.” She heard Elizabeth say, “Dougless” as she dropped the receiver into the cradle.

For a moment Dougless leaned back against the booth and closed her eyes. She could feel the tears starting again. She had the Montgomery pride, but she’d never done anything to be proud of. She had three older sisters who were paragons of success: Elizabeth was a research chemist, Catherine was a professor of physics, and Anne was a criminal attorney. Dougless, with her lowly elementary school teaching job and her disastrous history with men, was the family jester. She was an endless source of material for laughter among the relatives.

As she was leaning against the telephone booth, her eyes blurred with tears, she saw the man in the armor leave the church and walk down the path. He glanced quickly at the ancient gravestones, but didn’t seem to have much interest in them as he headed past the gate.

Coming down the lane was one of the little English buses, as usual doing about fifty miles an hour on the narrow street.

Suddenly, Dougless stood up straight. The bus was coming, the man was walking very fast, and, somehow, she instinctively knew he was going to walk in front of the bus. Without another thought, Dougless started to run. Just as she took flight, the vicar walked from behind the church in time to see the man and the fast-moving vehicle. He too started running.

Dougless reached the man first. She made her best flying tackle, the one she’d learned from playing football with her Colorado cousins, and landed on top of him. The two of them skidded across the graveled path on his armor as though it were a little rowboat as the bus flew past them. If Dougless had been only one second later, the man would have been hit by the bus.