Heroes Live Forever (Knights in Time) (4 page)

“You said Lucy wasn’t involved.”

“She isn’t.”

Elinor racked her brain and couldn’t think of an explanation for the second knight’s materializing out of midair. Professional magicians make things appear and disappear all the time. This was no rigged stage. This was her drawing room. No way could Lucy arrange such a sophisticated trick.

Elinor closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips against the lids. “Maybe this is a dream. When I open my eyes they’ll be gone. I’ll find that I fell asleep on the sofa.” She opened her eyes a crack and peeked out through the narrow slits. “You’re still here. Great, I’ve lost my mind.”

The back of her neck started to ache with the beginnings of a migraine. Migraine: an innocuous word that lacked the intensity to describe the giant Japanese drums pounding in her brain.

“You’d rather condemn yourself as crazy than accept we are ghosts? Yet, you were willing to believe when you visited all those supposedly haunted places? Why?” The first knight asked, “Why is it more plausible to see a ghost in someone else’s house?”

“For one thing, they were seen by a number of people at different times. Not by me. Never by me,” she told him. “They were also brief sightings. Not up close and personal encounters, like this. If you really were ghosts.”

Enough talk. Elinor walked to the door. “The point’s moot. We’re done here. Time for you two nutballs in tin cans to leave.”

The knights didn’t move.

Guy leaned close to Basil and whispered, “What did she call us?”

Elinor heard him. “I called you nutballs in tin cans. You’re done up in chain mail, and whoever, or whatever you are, you sound like nutters to me.” She glared at Basil.

Basil approached the door. “Would you at least let us try and prove ourselves? Mayhaps, if I walked through the door, you would believe?”

“Good idea. I’d like that very much, Lancelot. Mayhaps you could walk through the door and straight to the road. And take,” Elinor jerked her chin in Guy’s direction, “Galahad with you.”

Guy’s mouth fell open and he shot an incredulous glance at Basil. “No woman has ever spoken to me so disrespectfully. Women like me,” he said, challenging Elinor with a harsh look.

She returned it, hands on hips, in battle-ready pose. Widening his stance, Guy crossed his arms over his chest. Basil stepped between them and turned to her.

“Watch me.” He passed through the door and immediately came back, holding his helm and banner. The banner mimicked the emblem on his surcoat. At his side he wore his sword with a leopard claw pommel. “This is my family’s heraldic symbol.”

At a loss for words, Elinor retreated a few feet, unsure if her eyes deceived her.

“I can remove my mail and sword if it puts you more at ease.”

Instantly, he appeared in a hunter’s green velvet tunic and hose. Close fitting black leather boots came to mid-thigh, and his sword vanished. His legs looked large and strong in the mail. The boots and hose revealed how well-defined his thighs and calves actually were. Impressed more with that than the door trick, she was tempted to find out if he was as rock solid as he seemed.

The one she called Galahad stepped forward. Guarded, she followed his every move. Those Japanese drums thundered in her ears. With an abbreviated flick of his wrist, a lit torch appeared on the wall.

Elinor gasped. Grinning with self-satisfaction, the man changed and outfitted himself in similar fashion as Lancelot. In the crook of his elbow a helm materialized. In his hand, he held a banner. The standard copied his surcoat.

His powerful build was also evident through the rich clothing. On one hand, he wore a large gold ring with a red cabochon, which she supposed was a ruby. Inlaid in the stone was a carved swan.

Fascinated, she hesitantly reached to touch his helm and then swiftly withdrew her hand. She stared, torn between denial and serious consideration of their claim. Between the torches, the walking through doors, and the clothing change, Elinor had to believe the men.

The black-haired knight stepped towards her. “Ghost or not, stay right where you are, Lancelot.” She tightened her grip on the hammer still in her hand and gave it a menacing little shake. “You too, Galahad,” she ordered.

“We’re not here to hurt you and we’re not Arthurian knights,” Lancelot said, with a small head shake. “Those are foolish romantic tales sung by bards.”

“Why would you think us such?” Galahad asked. “It’s silly.”

“How dare you question me? My house. I get to ask the questions.”

She shifted her attention to the impudent knight. She appraised him with a superior and critical eye, up and down.

He responded but not the way she expected. His exploration of her was bold and brazen. Scrutiny she met with bored disdain, refusing to feed the ego of any smoothie from any century.

Lancelot mimicked her. His unhurried perusal lingered on her lips, her collarbone, and the hollow of her throat.

She’d been ogled before by men, but this was no street corner ogling. This was different. A slow caress. No warm hand touched her, but it couldn’t have been more real. Elinor enjoyed it. A lot. He cut a dashing figure, better than the fairy tale Lancelot. To her chagrin, the more he looked, the more she smiled. Time for a reality check.
This is bad, very bad. I’m flirting with a ghost.

“Please, Elinor. We mean you no harm.” Lancelot said and lifted a hand palm up in a sign of peace. “I’m Basil Manneville.” He turned toward the other knight, “This is Guy Guiscard. I was liege lord here and the Earl of Ashenwyck. In my time, this land your house is on belonged to my family.” Gesturing to a chair, he suggested. “Would you like to sit and we can talk?”

“I’m not sure I believe any of this,” she said and dropped onto an overstuffed chair.

Basil sat across from her. “The circumstances of our introduction didn’t proceed as I had planned. It was never our intention to scare you.”

Elinor choked out a half-laugh. How ironic. She’d spent hundreds of pounds staying at allegedly haunted inns. Only to find out there are two living...she shook her head at that misnomer, two, what? Two ghosts residing in her house. Who would’ve guessed?

“I’m still not sure this isn’t a dream...a very realistic dream.” She took a deep breath and told the one called Basil, “Let’s talk. You first.”

Elinor perched on the edge of the chair, not ready to relax yet.

“We were friends of your grandmother,” Basil said with a smile.

She’d heard enough. He was talking nonsense. Her grandmother didn’t have ghost friends. They were playing her for a fool.

Elinor waved a dismissive hand in his general direction. “If you’re going to stick to that story, then we’ve nothing more to discuss and you can leave. Because,
if
you’re ghosts, and
if
my grandmother knew about you, why wouldn’t she tell me?”

“I can’t speak for Theresa. I know she was lonely,” Basil told her.

The hint of his Middle English inflection came through in the words as he spoke, articulating each, enriching them. It explained why she hadn’t been able to put a region to his accent. The inference her grandmother was neglected stung to hear, in spite of his pretty manner of speech.

Before Elinor could protest, Guy added, “Maybe, she was afraid you’d think her dotty. We’re right in front of you and yet you doubt what you see, what we are. Why would she assume you’d believe her?”

“If she was worried about that, why didn’t she tell you to appear for me? Why isn’t she here?” Elinor challenged back, irritated by the logic of his observation.

“I don’t know why some are compelled to remain here and others are not.”

There was a brief bitterness in Basil’s tone before he continued in a gentler voice. Elinor found the change curious.

“With your grandfather and her son long dead and most of her friends gone too, maybe she wanted friends of her own again.”

“You’re wrong. Oh, maybe she wanted friends again, but she’d have told me about you. I loved her. She would’ve trusted me with the truth,” she said, defensively.

Guilt knotted in Elinor’s chest as she remembered the days she promised to visit and didn’t. All the time, her grandmother suggested she come by for tea and Elinor begged off, saying she was too busy. Maybe if she’d come more often, her gran would’ve shared her secret.

Their story had the ring of truth and she chose to believe them, at least temporarily. Not to mention, this was the experience of a lifetime. For the moment, she’d take advantage of the situation. She’d finally encountered ghosts and had a bazillion questions on the tip of her tongue.

“Go on,” she said.

Basil began his story. “My family’s been on this land since William the Conqueror. Originally the area given them was much larger than the ruin of Ashenwyck you see at present. The castle stood for five hundred years before Cromwell ordered it destroyed. His cannons fired in waves. They brought down the towers, then the curtain walls, and finally the great Keep.”

She envisioned the ruin that fueled so many childhood fantasies. As he spoke, in her imagination, she saw the castle as it once was, grand and full of life. The home Basil had grown up in and loved.

Nothing in his matter-of-fact description of Ashenwyck’s destruction betrayed anger or sorrow, but she felt it. She felt his loss.

“How devastating to watch your heritage ravaged stone by stone. Does one ever get over something like that?”

“You don’t, but you learn to go on.”

Elinor nodded in understanding. The early summer nights still held some chill. She shivered and shifted, curling up with her legs underneath her for added body heat. “Please continue.”

“I inherited the holding and the Earldom in 1354.”

She relaxed and studied Basil more. She’d never met anyone with such dark eyes. Black pupils melded with black irises giving them a mysterious quality. He hadn’t formed laugh lines or crow’s feet, and his forehead wasn’t wrinkled. She wondered if he died young, or if those imperfections disappear at death. Was it rude to ask?

When he moved a certain way, the tip of a horizontal disfigurement at the base of his throat showed. She couldn’t ascertain what exactly since his tunic collar covered most of it.

Her gaze slid over to Guy. He had warm, brown eyes that sparkled in a way Basil’s didn’t. Few creases etched his face and he looked the same age as Basil. Scars marred both of Guy’s hands. An especially vicious one ran from the base of the thumb to the wrist. He moved, and the sleeve of his tunic edged away and exposed another ugly scar. On his other hand, a wide, jagged line from the wrist ran up to what was visible of his forearm. Deep and violent, they were the wounds from warding off heavy blows. Someone had hacked at him. She realized they were the killing blows. Basil’s tunic collar hid the same.

She wanted to ask but was embarrassed by her own morbid curiosity. Inquisitiveness won out over propriety. “How old were you when...” she hesitated over the right words. Were there any right words? Is there a socially acceptable way to remind someone of their death? Elinor couched the question as best she could. “Neither of you look old. I mean, minus the last six centuries, you don’t seem much older than me.”

“I was a score and six at the time of my death,” Basil said. “So was Guy.”

Even more curious, she asked, “What happened? Were you executed or something?” Neither knight struck her as a traitor, Basil in particular. It was his nature more than his status as a nobleman which made her feel that. He’d seen the loneliness in an old widow her family missed, including herself, and didn’t ignore it.

“No, nothing so dastardly,” Basil said, answering the impolitic question. “We fell in battle, at Poitiers, serving the Black Prince.”