A Knight in Shining Armor

by Jude Deveraux

  He was staring at her, his eyes hostile.

  Her voice softened. “When you came to me, I didn’t believe you either,” she repeated. “You told me several things that weren’t in the history books, but I still didn’t believe you. Finally, you took me to Bellwood and showed me a secret door that held a little ivory box. No one, in all the years of the many different owners of the castle had found the door. You said Kit showed you the door the week before he died.” She didn’t like to think of Kit dying.

  Nicholas gaped at her. She was a witch, for, just recently, Kit mentioned a hidden door at Bellwood, a door he had not yet shown his younger brother. What had she done to Kit to persuade him to tell her of this door that by right should be known only to family members?

  In truth, what was she doing to his family and his household? Yesterday he’d heard a stableman singing some absurdity of a song called “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Three of his mother’s women now applied paint to their eyelids that they said came from “Lady” Dougless. His mother—his sane, level-headed, wise mother—took medicine from her hand with the trust of a child. And Kit watched the red-haired wench with the intensity of a bird of prey.

  In the few days she had been in the Stafford house, she had upset everything. Her songs, her outrageous dances, the stories she told (lately the castle folk had been talking about some people named Scarlett and Rhett), even how she painted her face was affecting everyone. She was a sorceress, and she was gradually putting everyone under her spell.

  Nicholas was the only person who made any attempt to resist her. When he tried to talk to Kit of the power the woman was gaining, Kit had laughed. “Of what consequence are a few stories and songs?” Kit had said.

  Nicholas didn’t know what the woman wanted, but he did not mean to so easily fall under her spell as the others had. He meant to resist her no matter how difficult that might be.

  Now, glaring at her, he knew that resisting her would never be easy. Her auburn hair was about her shoulders, and she held the little pearl cap in her hands. Never had he seen a woman as beautiful as she. Lettice, perhaps, was more perfect-featured, but this woman, this Dougless, who enraged him, had something more, something he could not name.

  From the first moment he’d seen her, it had been as though she had some secret hold over him. He liked being in control with women, like kissing them and feeling them melt against him. He liked the challenge of winning a difficult woman, and he liked the sense of power it gave him when he walked away from her.

  But from the first this woman had been different. He watched her far more than she did him. He was aware of every time she looked at Kit, of every glance she gave some handsome servant, of every time she smiled or laughed. Last night in his room his awareness of her had been to the point of pain, and this awareness had made him so angry he could barely speak or think coherently. Her effect on him enraged him. After she left, he had not slept because he knew she wept. The tears of women had never bothered him before. Women always cried. They wept when you left them, when you would not do what they wanted, when you told them you did not love them. He liked women like Arabella and Lettice who never cried for any reason.

  But last night this woman had spent the night weeping, and even though he could neither hear nor see her, he had felt her tears. Three times he had almost gone to her but he’d managed to restrain himself. He had no intention of letting her know she had power over him.

  As for her story of past and future, he did not so much as consider it. But something about her was strange. He did not for a moment believe she was a Lanconian princess—nor did he think his mother believed her, but Lady Margaret liked the odd songs and the woman’s strange manner of speaking. His mother liked the way this woman acted as though everything were new to her, from the food to the clothes to the servants.

  “. . . you’ll tell me, won’t you?”

  Nicholas stared at her; he had no idea what she’d been saying. But suddenly a wave of such desire for her flooded his veins that he stepped back against the door. “You will not bewitch me as you have my family,” he said as though he meant to convince himself.

  Dougless saw the lust in his eyes, saw the way his lids lowered. In spite of herself, her heart began to pound. You touch him and you return, she told herself, but you can’t leave until Kit is safe and Lettice’s treachery is exposed.

  “Nicholas, I don’t mean to bewitch you, and I haven’t done anything with your family that I haven’t needed to do to survive.” She put out her hand to touch him. “If you would only listen to me . . .”

  “Listen to your talk of past and future?” he said with a sneer. He leaned his face close to hers. “Beware of what you do, woman, for I watch you. When word comes that you have no uncle who is king, I myself will toss you from my home. Now get you from me, and do not spy on me again.” Turning, he stormed from the room, leaving Dougless alone and feeling helpless.

  She looked through his bedroom toward his retreating back. “Please, God,” she prayed, “show me how I am to help Nicholas. Let me do what I failed to do the first time. Please show me the way.”

  Feeling older than she had when she entered, she left the room.

  TWENTY - FOUR

  In the morning, Dougless saw Arabella just as she was stepping on a block to mount her beautiful black horse. Near her was a man who Dougless assumed was her husband, Robert Sydney. Dougless wanted to see him, wanted to see the face of the man whom Nicholas considered his friend, yet had sent his “friend” to be executed.

  Sydney turned, and Dougless drew in her breath. Robert Sydney looked very, very much like Dr. Robert Whitley, the man she had once hoped to marry.

  Dougless turned away, her hands shaking. Coincidence, she told herself. Nothing more than coincidence. But later that day she remembered how, in the twentieth century, Nicholas, when he’d first seen Robert, had looked as though he’d seen a ghost. And Robert had looked at Nicholas with hatred in his eyes.

  Coincidence, she told herself again. It could be nothing more.

  During the next two days Dougless rarely saw Nicholas. When she did see him, he was glowering at her from a doorway or frowning at her across a table. Dougless was kept very busy by the household because they had come to regard her as TV, movies, carnival, and concert all in one. They wanted games, songs, stories; their demand to be entertained was insatiable. Dougless could not walk in the garden or in the house without someone stopping her and asking for one more bit of entertainment. She was kept busy for long hours trying to remember everything she’d ever read or heard. With Honoria’s help, she devised a crude version of Monopoly. They played Pictionary with slate tablets. When she ran out of fiction stories she’d read, she started telling them history stories about America—Lady Margaret especially loved these. Nathan Hale became a favorite hero of the household, and Lady Margaret kept Dougless up half of one night asking questions about Abraham Lincoln.

  Dougless tried her best to stay in the entertainment field and not talk about religion or politics. After all, just a few years before Queen Mary had been burning people for being of the wrong religion. Twice Kit asked her questions about farming in her country, and, despite knowing little, she was able to make a few suggestions about compost and how it could be used with the crops.

  Dougless knew that Lady Margaret’s ladies were appalled at Dougless’s poor education, at her speaking only one language and at her not being able to play a musical instrument. And they could not read her handwriting. But for the most part they forgave her.

  While Dougless was teaching, she was also learning. These women did not have the pressure on them that twentieth-century American women did to be everything to everyone. The sixteenth-century woman was not supposed to be a corporate executive, an adoring mother, a gourmet cook and hostess, as well as a creative lover with the body of an athlete. If the woman was rich, she was to sew, look after her household and enjoy herself. Of course she didn’t expect to live past about forty, but at least during her
few years on earth, she wasn’t under society’s constant pressure to do more and be more.

  As the days in sixteenth-century England accumulated, Dougless remembered her time of living with Robert. The alarm went off at six A.M., and she hit the floor running. She had to run to get a day’s work done in a day. There were meals to prepare, groceries to buy, the house to be straightened (Robert had a cleaning woman once a week), and the kitchen to be cleaned again and again and again. And in her “spare time” she had a full time job. Sometimes she’d wished she could stay in bed for three days and read murder mysteries, but there was always too much to do to consider being lazy.

  Besides, there was the guilt. If she was resting, she felt she “should” be at the gym trying to keep her thighs from spreading, or she “should” be planning some scrumptious dinner party for Robert’s colleagues. She felt guilty when, exhausted, she served a pizza from the freezer for dinner.

  But now, here in the sixteenth century, the modern-day pressures seemed far away. People didn’t live alone and isolated. This wasn’t one house with one woman to do twenty jobs; this was one house with a hundred and forty-some people to do maybe seventy jobs. One tired, lonely woman didn’t have to cook, clean, wash, and so on, plus hold an outside job. Here one person had one job.

  Modern women had their own self-made guilt to make them miserable, but the sixteenth-century people had diseases, their fear of the unknown, their ignorance of medicine, and constant and ever-present death to haunt them. People in the sixteenth century died frequently, and death was always nearby for the Elizabethans. There had been four deaths in the household since Dougless had arrived, and all of them could have been avoided with decent emergency room care. One man died when a wagon fell on him. Internal bleeding. When Dougless saw the man, she would have given anything to have been a doctor and able to stop the bleeding. People died from pneumonia, flu, or a blister that became infected. Dougless passed out aspirin, dabbed wounds with Neosporin ointment, gave out spoonfuls of Pepto-Bismol. She might help people temporarily, but she could do nothing about decaying teeth, about torn ligaments that left people crippled for life, or about appendixes that burst and killed children.

  Nor could she do anything about the poverty. Once she tried to talk to Honoria about the vast difference between the way the Stafford family lived and the way the villagers lived. It was then that Dougless learned about sumptuary laws. In America everyone pretended to be equal, saying that a man who was worth millions was no better than some guy who sweated for a living. But no one believed that. Rich criminals got off with light sentences; poor men got maximum sentences.

  In the sixteenth century Dougless had found that the idea of equality was a concept that was met with laughter. People were not equal, and by law they were not even allowed to dress equally. In disbelief, Dougless had asked Honoria to explain these sumptuary laws. Earls could wear sable, but barons could wear only the arctic fox. If a man had an income of a hundred pounds a year or less, he could wear velvet in his doublet but not in his gown. If he made twenty pounds a year, he could wear only satin or damask doublets and silk gowns. A man making ten pounds or less a year could not wear cloth costing more than two shillings a yard. Servants could not wear a gown that reached below their calves, and apprentices constantly wore blue (which is why the upper classes rarely wore the color).

  On and on the rules went. They covered income, furs, colors, cloth, cut. Dougless was allowed to wear whatever a countess did because she was one of Lady Margaret’s ladies. Laughing at it all, Honoria said that everyone wore what he could afford, but if a person was found out, he had to pay a fine to the city coffers; then he returned to wearing whatever he wanted to.

  In the twentieth century Dougless had never cared much about clothes. She liked them to be comfortable and long-wearing, but other than that she paid little attention to them. But these beautiful Elizabethan gowns were another matter! In the few days she’d been in the sixteenth century, she’d found the people to be obsessed with clothes. Lady Margaret’s ladies spent hours planning gowns.

  One day a merchant arrived from Italy, and he and his two cartloads of fabrics had been welcomed into the Presence Chamber as though he’d discovered a cure for flea bites. Dougless had found herself joining in the frenzy of pulling out bolts of narrow fabrics and holding them up to herself and the other women.

  Both Nicholas and Kit had joined them. Like most men, they loved being surrounded by laughing, excited, pretty women. To Dougless’s embarrassment, but also her delight, Kit had chosen fabric for two gowns for her, saying that it was time she wore her own clothes.

  That night in bed, Dougless had lain awake for a while and thought how different, yet how much alike these Elizabethans were from people of her own time. From reading novels set in Elizabethan times, Dougless had thought the people did nothing but discuss politics. Even with TV, radio, and weekly news magazines, the American people weren’t half as well informed as the players in medieval novels seemed to be. But Dougless found these people, like ordinary Americans, much more concerned with clothes and gossip, and the smooth running of the enormous and complicated household, than in what the queen was doing.

  In the end, Dougless decided to do what she could to help, but she didn’t believe her job was to change sixteenth century life. She had been sent back through time to save Nicholas, and that was what she planned to concentrate on. She was an observer, not a missionary.

  However, there was one aspect of medieval life Dougless could not tolerate, and that was the lack of bathing. The people washed their faces and hands and feet, but a full bath was a rare occurrence. Honoria kept warning Dougless against her “frequent” bathing (three baths a week), and Dougless hated that the servants had to haul the tub into the bedroom, then lug in buckets of hot water. The ordeal of preparing a bath was so enormous that after Dougless bathed, two more people would use the water. Once Dougless was the third bather and she saw lice floating on top of the water.

  Bathing was close to becoming an obsession with her until Honoria showed her a fountain in the knot garden. The “knots” were hedges that had been planted into intricate designs, with bright flowers in the loops. In the center of the four knots was a tall stone fountain set in a little pool. When Honoria motioned to a child weeding the garden, he ran out of sight behind a wall; then, to Dougless’s delight, water came from the top of the fountain and flowed down into the pool. The child had been sent to turn a wheel.

  “How lovely,” Dougless had said. “Just like a waterfall, or a . . .” Her eyes began to gleam. “Or like a shower.” It was at that moment that a plan began to form in her mind. Privately, she talked to the child who had turned the wheel and arranged to pay him a penny if he’d meet her at four A.M. the next morning.

  So, at four A.M. the next morning, Dougless tiptoed out of Honoria’s room, down the stairs, and out to the knot garden. She carried her shampoo and rinse, a towel, and a washcloth. The child, sleepy-eyed but smiling, took the penny (which Honoria had given Dougless) and went to turn the wheel. Dougless hesitated for a moment about whether to remove all her clothes or not, but it was still quite dark and it would be a while before the rest of the household woke. So, she slipped off her borrowed robe and the long linen shirt and stepped, naked, under the fountain.

  Never has anyone in history enjoyed a shower more! Dougless felt as though years of dirt and oil and sweat were washing off of her. She’d never been able to feel clean using a bathtub, and after weeks of not showering, she felt grimy. She shampooed her hair three times, then conditioned it, shaved her legs and underarms, then rinsed. Heaven. Sheer, perfect heaven.

  At long last she stepped out of the fountain, gave a whistle to the boy to stop turning the wheel, then dried and put on her robe.

  She was smiling broadly as she started back down the path toward the house. Perhaps she was grinning too broadly to be able to see properly, or maybe it was still too dark yet to see well, because she ran into someone.

>   “Gloria!” she said before she realized it was the French heiress. “I mean,” she said, stumbling, “I guess you’re not Gloria, are you? Where’s the lioness?” Dougless gasped at what she’d said. She’d rarely seen this girl, but when she had, she’d always been accompanied by her tall, overbearing guardian of a nurse. “I didn’t mean—” Dougless began, apologizing.

  The heiress didn’t reply but sailed past Dougless with her nose in the air. “I am of an age to care for myself. I need no nurse.”

  Dougless smiled at the girl’s plump back. She sounded just like Dougless’s fifth graders. They, too, thought they were old enough to take care of themselves. “Sneaked out, did you?” Dougless said, smiling.

  The girl turned quickly and glared at Dougless, then her face softened. “She does snore,” she said with a bit of a smile; then she looked back at the fountain. “What do you here?”

  When Dougless looked at the fountain, to her horror, she saw that the little pool was full of soap bubbles. To Dougless, the bubbles were pollution, but the heiress seemed to think they were wonderful. The girl lifted a handful of suds.

  “I took a bath,” Dougless said. “Want one?”

  The girl gave a delicate shudder. “Nay, my health is most delicate.”

  “Bathing won’t hurt—” Dougless began but stopped. No missionary work, remember? she reminded herself. Moving to stand by the girl, Dougless looked at her closely in the early light. “Who told you you were delicate?”