A Knight in Shining Armor (Montgomery/Taggart #15)
Page 35Honoria was obviously shocked. “They do not teach music in your country?”
“They teach it, but I didn’t take any.”
“What does a woman learn in your country if not sewing and music?”
“Algebra, literature, history, things like that. Can you play an instrument? Sing?”
“Most certainly.”
“Then how about if I teach you some songs and you play and sing them?”
“But Lady Margaret—”
“Won’t mind. I’ll be the bandleader.”
From the way Honoria smiled, Dougless guessed that she’d like introducing new songs to the household. “We shall go to the orchard,” she said.
When Honoria left the room, Dougless took a few minutes to apply cosmetics very lightly—she didn’t want to look like a painted hussy, but it would not hurt her cause to look as appealing as she could.
Moments later, Honoria returned with a lute, and a man handed Dougless a basket that she saw contained bread and cheese and wine; then they were on their way outside.
Now that Dougless wasn’t afraid that any minute she was going to be thrown into a dungeon, she looked about her. There were people everywhere. There were children running up and down stairs carrying things; men and women scurried hither and yon. Some people wore coarse linen or wool, some dressed in silks, some had jewels, some not; some people wore fur, some men wore shorts like Nicholas, and some men wore long gowns. Nearly all the people seemed young, and what surprised Dougless the most was that the people seemed to be as tall as twentieth-century people. She’d always heard that people of the Elizabethan age were much smaller than modern people. But she found that, at five feet three inches, she was short in the twentieth century and short in the Elizabethan age as well. The people did seem to be a lot slimmer, though. From all the moving about they did, plus the poundage of their clothes, they probably couldn’t put on weight.
“Where is Nicholas’s room?” Dougless asked, and moments later, Honoria pointed to a closed door.
Dougless had to watch her step as she descended the staircase in her long skirts, but the brocade in her hand made her feel elegant.
As they made their way toward the back of the house, Dougless had glimpses of lovely rooms with gorgeously dressed women bent over embroidery frames. Outside, she and Honoria stopped on a brick terrace that had a low wall around it and a stone balustrade on top, and she had her first look at an Elizabethan garden. Before her, down some steps, was a maze of low, deep green hedges. To her right was another walled garden of vegetables and herbs set in perfectly arranged squares. A pretty little octagonal building stood in the middle. To her left she could see another garden of fruit trees with an odd sort of hill in the middle. On top of the hill was a wooden rail.
“What is that?” she asked.
“A mound,” Honoria replied. “Come, we will go to the orchard.”
They walked briskly down brick stairs, then across a raised walk beside a rose-covered wall, where Honoria opened an oak door and they entered the orchard. Dougless found that although the gown she wore very much constricted her upper body, from the waist down she was free. The farthingale held the weight of the skirts off her legs, and not wearing any underpants gave her the oddest feeling of being naked.
Honoria walked along the gravel path on the edge of the orchard to a grape arbor. As far as Dougless could see, there wasn’t a dead leaf or twig on the vines, and the unripe grapes hung down abundantly.
“This is very pretty,” Dougless whispered. “In fact, I’ve never seen a garden as pretty as this one.”
Smiling, Honoria sat on a bench in front of a pear tree that was perfectly espaliered against the wall and pulled her lute onto her lap. “You will teach me your songs now?”
Sitting beside her, Dougless pulled aside the cloth inside the basket she carried. Inside was a big piece of bread, white bread, but not like modern white bread. It was heavier, and very fresh, but there were odd holes in the crust. It was delicious. The cheese was tangy and fresh. Inside a hard leather bottle was a sour-tasting wine. There was also a little silver goblet.
“Does no one drink water?”
“The water is bad,” Honoria said, tuning her fat-bellied lute.
“Bad? You mean undrinkable?” She thought of the little houses she’d seen yesterday. If those people had access to the water, it was sure to be dirty. How odd, she’d always thought that water pollution was a twentieth-century problem.
Dougless spent a lovely two hours with Honoria in the orchard, eating the cheese and bread, sipping the cool wine from a silver goblet, watching the jewels on her own dress and on Honoria’s twinkling in the sunlight, and watching the gardeners go about their work. She didn’t know many songs, but she’d always loved Broadway musicals and had seen most of them on video, so when she began to think about it, she knew more than she thought. Besides “I Could Have Danced All Night,” she knew “Get Me to the Church on Time” from My Fair Lady. She made Honoria laugh at the title song from Hair. And she knew “They Call the Wind Maria” from Paint Your Wagon. She also knew the theme song from Gilligan’s Island, but she didn’t sing that.
After the fifth song, Honoria put up her hand to halt. “I must write these,” she said, then went back to the house to get paper and pen.
Dougless was content to sit where she was, like a lazy cat in the sun. Unlike her usual life, she felt no urgency to be somewhere else or do something else.
On the far side of the orchard a little door opened and she saw Nicholas enter. Immediately, Dougless was alert and her heart began to race. Would he like her dress? Would he like her better now that she looked like the other women of his century?
She started to get up, but then she saw a pretty young woman she’d never seen before enter behind him. Nicholas was holding her hand as the two of them went running down the path toward the grape arbor in the opposite corner of the garden. It wasn’t difficult to see that they were lovers slipping away to somewhere private.
Dougless stood up, her fists clenched at her side. Damn him, she thought. This is just the sort of thing that had gained him such an awful reputation in the twentieth century. No wonder the history books had nothing good to say about him.
Dougless’s first impulse was to run after them and tear the woman’s hair out. Nicholas might not remember her, but that didn’t change the fact that Dougless was the woman he loved. But, Dougless told herself, that was neither here nor there. She owed it to the future memory of Nicholas to put an end to this cavorting.
Feeling saintly, telling herself she was doing this for Nicholas’s own good, she swiftly walked toward the arbor. She was aware that every gardener in the orchard had stopped work and was watching her.
In the secret shade of the arbor, Nicholas already had the woman’s skirt up her bare thigh, his hand disappearing underneath. His jacket and shirt were open, the woman’s hand was inside, and they were kissing each other with a great deal of enthusiasm.
“Well!” Dougless said loudly, somehow controlling her urge to spring at the two of them. “Nicholas, I don’t believe this is the behavior of a gentleman.”
“Nicholas!” Dougless said sharply in her schoolteacher voice.
When Nicholas turned to look at her, she saw that his eyelids were lowered, and he had that sleepy look she’d seen only when he’d made love to her.
Dougless drew in her breath.
When he saw her, Nicholas’s expression changed to anger, and he dropped the woman’s skirt.
“I think you’d better leave,” Dougless, her body shaking with anger, said to the woman.
The woman, looking from Nicholas to Dougless as they glared at each other, hurried out of the arbor.
Nicholas looked Dougless up and down, and the anger on his face almost made her retreat, but she held her ground.
“Nicholas, we have to talk. I have to explain to you who I am and why I’m here.”
When he stepped toward her, this time she did step back. “You have charmed my mother,” he said in a low voice, “but you do not charm me. If you come between me and my actions again, I will take a batlet to you.”
He shoved past her so hard that Dougless nearly fell against the wall, and she watched with a heavy heart as he strode angrily down the path and out through the door in the wall. How was she supposed to accomplish anything if he wouldn’t listen to her? He wouldn’t even spend ten minutes in her company. What was she supposed to do, lasso him? Right, she thought, tie him up and tell him she was from the future and she had come back through time to save his neck—literally. “And I’m sure he’ll believe me,” she whispered.
Honoria returned with a wooden lap desk, big feathers that she expertly trimmed into pens, ink, and three sheets of paper. She plucked out the notes of the songs, and asked Dougless to write the music. Her opinion of Dougless’s education was further lowered when she found out that Dougless could neither read nor write music.
“What is a batlet?” Dougless asked.
“It is used to beat the dust from the clothes,” Honoria answered, writing the notes down.
“Does Nicholas . . . ah, fool around with all the women?”
Honoria stopped playing and looked at Dougless. “You should not lose your heart to Sir Nicholas. A woman should give her heart only to God. People die, but God does not.”
Dougless sighed. “True, but while we’re alive, people can make living worthwhile or not.” Dougless started to say more, but she glanced up, and standing on the terrace of the house, she saw someone’s head, and it looked like . . .
“Who is that girl?” Dougless asked, pointing.
The girl, from this distance, looked just like Gloria, just as fat, just as petulant. Dougless remembered Lee saying that Nicholas’s older brother was to marry a French heiress and that was why he’d refused Lettice’s offer of marriage.
“So, Nicholas is to marry Lettice, and Christopher is engaged to a child,” Dougless said. “Tell me, if that girl were to die, would Kit consider marrying Lettice?”
Honoria looked taken aback at Dougless’s casual use of Christian names. “Lord Christopher is heir to an earldom, and he is related to the queen. Lady Lettice is not of his rank.”
“But Nicholas is.”
“Sir Nicholas is a younger son. He does not inherit the estates or the title. For him Lady Lettice is a good match. She also is related to the queen, but distantly. Her dowry, though, is not large.”
“But if Lettice married Nicholas, then, say, Christopher died, Nicholas would be the earl, right?”
“Aye,” Honoria said, and stopped writing notes. Looking up at the terrace, she saw the fat, spotty, sickly French heiress go back into the house. “Sir Nicholas would become the earl,” she said thoughtfully.
TWENTY - THREE
By the time Dougless climbed into bed beside Honoria that night, she was exhausted. No wonder she’d seen so few fat people and the women had such tiny waists. Between the steel corset and the constant activity, fat didn’t have a chance to settle on a person’s body.
She and Honoria had left the garden to attend a service in the pretty little chapel on the ground floor of the house. They’d listened to a richly dressed minister and they’d spent a great deal of time on their knees. Dougless couldn’t pay attention to what the minister was saying for looking at the stunning clothes of the men and women around her: silk, satin, brocade, fur, jewels.
It was in the chapel that she had her first glimpse of Christopher. He looked like Nicholas, but not so young or handsome. But there was a quiet strength coming from him that made Dougless stare at him. When he glanced across at her, there was so much interest in his eyes that Dougless looked away, blushing. She didn’t see Nicholas watching the two of them and frowning.
After chapel was supper, which Dougless took in the Presence Chamber with Lady Margaret, Honoria, and four other women. There was vegetable beef soup, a nasty bitter beer, and fried rabbit. A man, who Honoria said was the butler, had to chip cinders from the crust of a loaf of bread before he served it to them, and thereby explained the holes in the crust of Dougless’s earlier loaf.
The other women, Dougless learned, were Lady Margaret’s gentlewomen and chamberers. As far as Dougless could tell, everyone in the household had a specific rank, and servants had servants who had servants. And, to her surprise, they also had specific duty hours. Her knowledge of servants was based on what she’d read of Victorian households, where the servants worked from very early to very late, but she learned from questioning Honoria, there were so many servants in the Stafford household that no one worked longer than about six hours at a time.
At supper, Dougless was introduced, and the ladies eagerly asked about her country of Lanconia and her uncle the king. Dougless, squirming with the lie, muttered replies, then asked the ladies about their clothes. She received some fascinating information on the Spanish style of dress, the French, the English, and the Italian fashions. Dougless became very involved in this, and soon found herself planning a gown in the Italian style that had something called a bum role under the skirt instead of a farthingale.
After supper, servants cleared the tables, then moved them against the wall, and Lady Margaret asked to hear Dougless’s songs. What followed was an energetic and laugh-filled evening. With no TV and professional performances ever seen, no one was shy about singing or dancing. Dougless knew she was terrible compared to the people she’d heard on the radio and on records, but before the evening was over she found herself singing solos.
Christopher came to join them, and Honoria taught him “They Call the Wind Maria,” which he played on the lute. Everyone seemed to play an instrument, and before long Lady Margaret and all five of her ladies were playing the melodies on oddly-shaped, strange-sounding instruments. There was a guitar of sorts but shaped like a violin, a three-stringed violin, a tiny piano, an enormous lute, several kinds of flutes, and a couple of horns.