A Midsummer's Day (22 page)

If only the plan didn’t include
Sam
getting the shit kicked out of her…

“Let’s get you out of here.”  Vaughn unlocked her left hand.

She’d forgotten about the pain in her arm.  Almost.  White hot pain swept from her wrist up to her shoulder.  She cradled her arm to her and bit her lip against the screams threatening to spill from her lips.

Vaughn unlocked her other arm and put the key back in the pomander.  “Let me see.”

She held out her hand slowly.  She closed her eyes and tried to breathe away the pain.  She didn’t want to see what her arm looked like.

His fingers were gentle on her screaming skin.  He whistled through his teeth.  “You’re lucky your wrist wasn’t slit, babe.”  He pulled her mask free from her belt, where she’d stuffed it during her mad trek here, and wrapped it around her wrist.  Tightly.

She opened her eyes.  Her wrist was really chewed up.  How close had those blasted shackles come to killing her?

“Hopefully this will be enough to stop the bleeding.”

She nodded, though her wrist was the last thing on her mind.

Their kiss was slower this time.  Sammie let her lips linger slowly over his.  She let her hands play with the back of his neck.  She pulled him closer to her until their bodies were pressed against each other.

A bang shook the room.  The heavy iron board Vaughn put in front of the door bounced as if it was made out of cardboard.  Somebody, a lot of somebodies, were trying to break down the door.

“What do we do?” Sammie asked.

Vaughn looked around.  He saw the gap in the wall, and knelt to look through it.

“This leads to the area behind the Boleyn Stage.”  He stood and kicked backwards at the boards.  “If we can get outside, we can run up the hill to the tents.  We can lose them there.”

“After that?”

A board broke at the bottom.  The hole might just be big enough to squeeze through.  “I don’t know,” he said.  “Come on.”

She crawled through the hole, wincing as the broken wood scratched her.  Vaughn slithered out after her.

They ran up the hill.

And stopped.

They were surrounded.

Chapter 22

He could see everything from where he stood. 

Puck had gotten into the dungeon with little trouble.  But he wouldn’t be getting out so easily.

They’d have little choice.  That wall wouldn’t hold against an escape attempt. 

They would run straight towards him.  It would be any minute now.

His incompetent constables finally made it to the dungeon door.  They pounded on it.  They threw their shoulders into it.  But it didn’t budge.  The clever beggar must have put something heavy in front of it.  The iron board, perhaps.  Jameson’s personal favorite torture device.

Whatever it was, it didn’t matter.  The constables would get in.  The door would collapse before too awfully long. 

The dungeon’s outer wall shook.  The gap in the wall heaved and wavered.  A board burst outward, leaving a large, gaping hole.  The hole gave birth to Anne.  The hole spawned forth the devilish Puck, cleverly disguised as a pirate.  Anne grabbed his hand, and they ran.

Straight towards him.

A smile played on his lips.  His happiness grew by leagues.

Nothing suited him better than to collect the both of them at once.

<>

He waited for them at the top of the hill with twenty men behind him.

Rough hands pulled her away from Vaughn.  Sheer panic tore through her skin.  They had thought they were running from capture… 

Not into certain death.

Something had gone wrong.  Something in T’s well thought out plans had gone wrong.  Maybe they’d missed a step.  Maybe T had forgotten to tell them something.  There was no hope here.

Sammie looked around her.  Vaughn was held by two brutes some twenty feet away from her.  Something burned in his eyes.  Something she’d never seen before. 

Vaughn was scared.

And that scared her.

“Be this not a most prettily painted portrait?” Jameson asked snidely.  He walked between Sammie and Vaughn, looking them over with an evil smile and a sociopathic glint in his icy eyes.  “It doth give to me the most great pleasure to find thee both together.  Thou hath made the festival mightily more special, to see thee both die together.”  He stopped in front of Sammie, and ran a finger over her cheek.  “‘Twill be a shame, e’en now, to put to waste such a beauteous personage, witch or no.”

His very words turned the bile in her stomach.

“You stay the fuck away from her.”  Vaughn struggled against the two men holding him. 

Jameson turned slowly and slinked towards Vaughn.  “What speakest thou to me, thou low born piece of filth?” he growled.

Sammie held her breath. 

Vaughn stood tall.  He glared at Jameson.  “I told you to stay the fuck away from her before I personally rip off your limbs and stuff them one by one down your female beating throat!”

The hill echoed with a collective gasp.

Jameson stood there in frightening silence.  He stared at Vaughn.  He didn’t move.  He barely breathed.  Then, as quick as lightning…

The fury he unleashed on Vaughn with his fists was greater than the fury he’d unleashed on Sammie down in the dungeon.

Angry tears fell down her face.  “Leave him alone!”

Her words stayed Jameson’s hands.  He turned on her.  “What sayest thou, my Lady?  Mayhap thou wouldst like to join thy lover in his most just punishment?”  He pulled back his fist.

Sammie stood her ground.  She didn’t shrink away.  Let him hit her again.  She would take it.  Let the men around see what kind of monster they followed blindly.  A true and noble man never struck a woman in public. 

A true and noble man would never seek to punch a woman square in the face.

“Enough!”

The crowds parted.  The men, Jameson included, fell to one knee.  Those holding Sammie and Vaughn bowed their heads.

Queen Elizabeth marched up the hill.  “Your Grace,” Jameson simpered, suddenly full of respect.  “We have caught us those who have disrupted the festival.  Those who hast spoken of witchcraft and against the Crown.”

Every time the Lord High Sheriff opened his mouth, Sammie and Vaughn had committed more and more crimes. It was true that she herself had told the Queen face to face that she was an imposter.  And it was true that Jameson had threatened her with charges of witchcraft every time she brought up the true year. 

But Vaughn…  He had done none of that.  His crimes were nothing more than holding Sammie up and running from certain death.

Queen Elizabeth stood between Sammie and Vaughn.  “This doth end now.  Lady Anne Halloway, thee and thy motley beggar shalt see thy deaths within the hour.”  She turned to leave.

There had to be a way to stop this.  There had to be a way to keep the Queen from killing them.  A light bulb went off in Sammie’s head.

“My Grace!  My good Queen Elizabeth,” she called after the Queen.  “Wouldst you seek to further mar the festival with murder?  Hast your Grace forgotten of your mother, the good Queen Anne?”

The Queen turned.  “What sayest thee of my Lady mother?” she asked.  Her eyes were hard.  There was no sign of any emotion.  Of any softening towards Sammie at the mention of her mother.  Yet. 

Sammie bowed her head in humility.  Now was the time to act her ass off.  “You must beg my pardon, your Grace.  But I am remembered of tales of your Lady mother, the most gracious and beautiful Queen Anne Boleyn.  I am remembered of tales…  Was she not taken from a festival such as this one?  Was she not accused of the most horrible crimes to be fabricated by her enemies, such as the Lord High Sheriff doth fabricate crimes upon my head?  Was she not most unjustly put to her death?  In the end, your Grace, what kindness did your kingly father give your mother in a swordsman from Calais to remove her head for such untrue crimes?”

“Thou art believed of my Lady mother’s innocence?”

Sammie dared to peak up.  The Queen’s eyes were not so hard.  Her scowl was not so fixed.  She was softening.  She lowered her head again.  “Verily, your Grace.  ‘Tis the reason I am named Anne.  My Lord father and Lady mother believed them always in the purity of your mother’s soul.”

<>

By God.  It was working.

The Queen was falling for it.

Vaughn smiled at Sam.  His clever, clever girl.  No longer would he pick on her for her obsessive compulsion for English history.  Her knowledge of it might just have saved their lives.

“So be it,” Queen Elizabeth said after a moment of silence.  “We shalt not see us death this day.  But thy crimes, Lady Anne, and the crimes of yon beggar cannot go unpunished.  Thou both shalt see the depths of the dunking pond.  Then thou both art to be banished from the festival.  But heed thee our words, Lady Anne.  Shouldst thou behavior continue when the Court returns to Whitehall
,
thou shalt be punished most severely.”

Sammie bowed her head.  The Queen turned.  Vaughn bowed her head as she walked down the hill.

Jameson stood.  “Keep them apart until the dunke.”  He walked away without another word.

Vaughn smirked.  Poor guy would just have to live without his deaths today.  He winked at Sammie and they were pulled in different directions.

Things were going to be okay now.  He could feel it.  Everything that had happened, everything that had led them here at the will of T…

It was Sammie who, in the end, had saved their skins.

Chapter 23
 

The entire population of Nottinghamshire and the Royal Court gathered around the pond.  The beggars, once Vaughn’s friends, sat at the edge of the pond with the peasant children and swung their feet through the water.  Ladies Catherine and Jayne, once Sammie’s friends, stood with a group of gossiping courtiers in the center of the clearing.

Even Queen Elizabeth was there.  She sat behind a rarely used Judge’s bench on the upper level of the stage.

Everybody stared into the cage.  Everybody stared at Sammie and Vaughn, huddled together.  Everybody had the same look on their eyes.

They all wanted blood.

A tear fell from Sammie’s bruised eye.  They wouldn’t get blood.  But they would get death.  It didn’t matter what the Queen said.  It didn’t matter that the Queen promised that there would be no death today.  Once Sammie went below the water…

She’d never see daylight again.  She’d never see 2012 again.

What about Vaughn?  Would they kill him after they killed her?  He hadn’t done the things that she had.  He hadn’t spoken treason and witchcraft.  He hadn’t sullied the name and reputation of a sadistic Lord High Sheriff. 

Vaughn ran his fingers over her back.  “Did the board in the dungeon scratch you this bad?”

Pain radiated though the innumerable marks he talked about.  “The board.  The dungeon wall.  The nails of the constables as they stripped me of my pirate dress.”  She clamped her eyes shut against the memories, not twenty minutes old.  She wanted to forget the presence of the five men in the bedroom with her.  She wanted to forget their watery eyes as they glared at her naked body before she was given a replica of her dunking dress to throw over her head.

Vaughn himself had been stripped of his pirate’s costume, and was back in his mud beggar breeches.  Somebody must have found them behind the tents in Gypsy Way.  His momentary raise in status was over.  He turned her so they were face to face.  “His men helped you get dressed?”

“Well… they helped me get undressed.”

“Did they…”

“No.”  She shook her head.  “That bastard Jameson actually saved me from that.  Apparently he didn’t want his men to damage my virtue any more than you supposedly did.  Not that it stopped their eyes and their minds from doing that same exact thing.”

“I’ll kill them,” Vaughn growled.

She shook her head.  “They’re not worth the effort.”  She turned and leaned her head against the bars of the cell.  People shot daggers at her from all angles.  Fresh tears filled her eyes.  “Besides…”  Her voice cracked.  “I think today I die.”

His arms wrapped around her.  He rested his head on her shoulder.  He shuddered. 

For all of his confidence…  For all of his unending optimism…  He thought the same thing.

Something fluttered before them.  Sammie looked up.

It was the moth.

“Vaughn,” she whispered.  “It’s back.”

It fluttered off slowly, turning every so often as if to make sure they were still watching it.  It did that all the way to the center of the Dead Road.

“Sam, look.”  Vaughn pointed to the end of the road.

She had the same blond hair.  She had the same purple skirt.  It was the gypsy who’d given Sammie her reading.

It was T.  It just had to be.