The pain was bad but I sucked in great breaths and tried to smile. The doctor and nurses surrounding me nodded and looked at each other, smiling, as if I had done something remarkable.
“Amazing,” one nurse said quietly to another. “I counted fifteen minutes – it’s impossible.”
“She’s here with us, isn’t she?” Harry was at the bedside, his face blotched with tears. He took my hand and leaned closer, whispering, “He arrived a few minutes ago. I’ll go get him…”
No!!
The last person I wanted at my death bed was Donovan Trist.
“How…can you do this to me?” I sobbed with ragged, gasps for breath. “Haven’t I been through enough?”
Harry looked above me and to my left at a cardiac monitor. “It’s jumping around again, Doctor – can we get something for her?”
“Why are you doing this? Harry, Dennis was right! Please, no more!”
“There’s my faery princess!”
Quinn’s voice was like an electric shock.
I turned and succumbed to his awkward embrace necessitated by the tubes and IV units, the machines that apparently had and were keeping me alive.
How good of him to come, I thought. Donovan hadn’t made the effort. But then, he had never been one to deal with others’ pain.
Quinn brushed the hair out of my eyes and it was then I noticed the gold wedding band on his ring finger. So he had married after all, I thought mournfully – then I saw the matching band on my left ring finger and I gasped and started to laugh. “What’s so funny?” Quinn wiped my face gently with a rosemary-scented wash cloth. “You look like a faery princess with a secret, Missus Radcliffe.”
“Then I’ve done it,” I murmured, smiling to myself and felt as if I would sleep again.
“Done what?” Quinn laughed gently.
“Dennis said I could do what I wanted – it wasn’t about angels getting wings, or Buffalo Gals. I could do what I wanted. It was all about what I wanted,” I said dreamily as sleep began to overwhelm me. “I got what I wanted after all.”
The deliciousness of that world between consciousness and sleeping had now taken me completely. I closed my eyes for a moment and then opened them, quite sure that Quinn would be gone, and part of a lovely dream was finally over and Donovan would enter the hospital room and begin disapproving of everything and everyone.
No, there was Quinn.
As if he could read my thoughts, I heard his voice, softly singing to me. I started to laugh, though the pain was shooting through me.
“One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small…”
“…I honestly didn’t think you would have the nerve to do it,” said the Proprietress a very long time after my release from the hospital.
She brought me a cup of coffee in my favorite mug, the travel mug with the strawberries on it, and set it before my laptop on the table – my usual table by the window looking out onto the high street of the village. It had come back to life when I returned. Fortunately, this time, I was one of the sages, helping lost souls figure out what they wanted to do. Joan of Arc was with me, as was Richard the Third, Anne Boleyn and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Marie Antoinette stopped by now and then when she wasn’t in a snit over something Richard or Joan had said or done. The others came and went as they pleased. Dennis spent most of his time now correcting, or what he thought was correcting the costume sketches in my notebooks, or proofreading my writing. Once in a while he commented on something.
“It couldn’t have happened any other way,” Joan of Arc added.
“I’d like to think that I mended a broken heart,” I said cheerfully as I settled in for that day’s work. “I put the pieces back together, didn’t I?”
“Yes you did!” Joan exclaimed and clicked her coffee cup to my travel mug.
My new life had begun.
Well, it didn’t truly begin for another day – or what might have been a day in the village where the sun rarely set, a village that looked like it was taken from the pages of a Thomas Hardy novel – or one of mine.
That day began like any other.
The Proprietress stood behind the counter stamping books, and my brother Dennis was whipping up a cheesecake at the café bar. Joan of Arc and Richard the Third shared a crossword puzzle and Joan managed to keep her temper and her hand off her sword. Eleanor of Aquitaine had taken up a pencil and sought to improve my costume sketches. No one looked up when the bell over the door tinkled.
I heard the footsteps and looked up from my writing and felt a familiar blush rising in my cheeks as Quinn, looking lost, glanced around and saw me. He smiled and joined me at my table, suddenly comfortable and aware of his new home, looking perfectly happy. In that knee-weakening smile, the same smile that had stolen my heart so many, many years before, I knew I would be loved for all eternity.
~ THE END ~
Acknowledgments
Gratitude, and lots of it, to Michelle Halket and Meghan Tobin-O’Drowsky for taking a mid-life crisis and helping me make something wonderful of it. And special thanks to Roxanne and Sandra. Love you all, ladies! HS!
About The Author
Ellen L. Ekstrom has been intrigued by all things medieval since seeing Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” as a five-year old—when it was first run in theaters. Now that she is in her own middle ages, the passion for the Middle Ages hasn’t abated. She is a member of the clergy in the Episcopal Church and serves as the parish deacon in a local church in Berkeley, California. To support her family and frenetic lifestyle, she works as a legal secretary. Once in a while, she sleeps.
She is also the author of THE LEGACY; ARMOR OF LIGHT; and A KNIGHT ON HORSEBACK.
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