“Dougless,” he said in delight. “Come join us.”
She stood there feeling like a wet cat, her hair plastered against her head, her clothes sticking to her, a gallon of water in each shoe, a puddle at her feet that could sail a three-masted schooner.
“Get up from there and come with me,” she said in the voice she used to settle down unruly schoolchildren.
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Nicholas said, smiling and mocking her at the same time.
He’s drunk, she thought.
He kissed each woman on the mouth, then leaped onto the seat, bounded over the table, and swooped Dougless into his arms. “Put me down,” she hissed, but he carried her through the pub and outside.
“It’s raining,” she said, her lips tight and her arms folded over her chest.
“Nay, madam, it is a clear night.” Still holding her, he began to nuzzle her neck.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said. “You’re not going to start that again. Put me down at once.”
He put her down, but he did so in such a way that her body slid down his.
“You’re drunk,” she said, pushing him away.
“Oh, aye, I am that,” he said happily. “The ale here pleases me. And the women please me,” he said as he caught her about the waist.
Dougless again pushed him away. “I was worried about you and here you were boozing it up with a couple of floozies and—”
“Too fast,” he cried. “Too many words. Here, my pretty Dougless, look at the stars.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, I happen to be very wet and I’m also freezing.” As though to emphasize the fact, she sneezed.
Once again, he lifted her into his arms. “Put me down!”
“You are cold; I am warm,” he said, as though that settled the matter. “You feared for me?”
Was it possible to stay angry at this man for very long? She was willing to admit defeat as she snuggled against him. He was indeed warm. “I said some awful things to you, and I’m very sorry. You aren’t really a burden.”
He smiled down at her. “Is this the cause of your fear? That perhaps I was angered?”
“No. When you were gone, I thought maybe you’d walked in front of a bus or a train. I was afraid of your being hurt.”
“Do I appear to have no pia mater?”
“Huh?”
“Brain. Do I seem stupid to you?”
“No, of course not. You just don’t know how our modern world works, that’s all.”
“Oh? Who is wet and who is dry?”
“Both of us are wet, since you continue carrying me,” she said smugly.
“For all your knowledge, I have found what we need to know, and tomorrow we ride to Goshawk.”
“How did you find out anything and from whom? Those women in there? Did you kiss it out of them?”
“Are you jealous, Montgomery?”
“No, Stafford, I am not.” That statement proved that the Pinocchio theory was false. Her nose didn’t grow at all. (She checked to make sure.) “What did you find out?”
“Dickie Harewood owns Goshawk.”
“But didn’t he marry your mother? Is he as old as you?”
“Beware, or I will show you how old I am.” He shifted her in his arms. “Am I feeding you too much?”
“It’s more likely you’re weak from flirting with all the women. It saps a man’s strength, you know.”
“Mine has not been impaired. Now, I was telling you?”
“That Dickie Harewood still owns Goshawk.”
“Yes, on the morrow I shall see him. What is a weekend?”
“It’s the end of the workweek when everyone gets off. And you can’t just go riding up to some lord’s house. I hope you’re not thinking of inviting yourself for the weekend.”
“The workers get off? But no one seems to work at all. I see no farmers in the fields, no one plowing. People now shop and drive cars.”
“We have a forty-hour workweek and tractors. Nicholas, you’re not answering me. What are you planning to do? You really can’t tell this man Harewood you’re from the sixteenth century. You can’t tell anyone that, even women in bars.” She tugged at his collar. “You’ve ruined that shirt. Lipstick never comes out.”
Grinning, he shifted her again. “You have on none of this lipstick.”
She moved her head away from him. “Don’t start that again. Now, tell me about Goshawk Hall.”
“The Harewood family owns it still. They come for the end . . .”
“Weekend.”
“Aye, the weekend, and—” He gave Dougless a sideways look. “Arabella is there.”
“Arabella? What does the twentieth-century Arabella have to do with anything?”
“My Arabella was Dickie Harewood’s daughter, and there seems to be a Dickie Harewood again at Goshawk hall, and he again has a daughter named Arabella who is the same age as my Arabella was when we—”
“Spare me,” Dougless said, then looked at him in silence for a moment. The papers recently found, another Arabella, and another Dickie. It was almost as though history were repeating itself. How odd, she thought.
TWELVE
Dougless watched Nicholas atop the stallion and held her breath. She’d heard of people riding horses like this one, but she’d never seen it. Every employee and every visitor at the riding stables had stopped to watch as Nicholas brought the high-strung, angry, mean-tempered animal under control.
Last night they’d stayed up until after one A.M. while Dougless made him tell her all about his relationship to the Harewoods. They’d had estates near one another. Dickie was old enough to be Nicholas’s father and he’d had a daughter, Arabella, who’d married Lord Robert Sydney. She and her husband had hated each other, so after she’d given him an heir, they’d lived apart, although Arabella had given birth to three more children.
“One of them yours,” Dougless had said, taking notes.
Nicholas’s face softened. “There is no reason to think ill of her. She and the child died in that childbirth.”
“I’m sorry,” Dougless said with a grimace, and knew that the woman could easily have died from something as simple as the midwife’s not washing her hands.
Dougless tried to think of a way to get invited to the Harewood estates as quickly as possible, but she had no credentials as a scholar, and although Nicholas was an earl, his title had been taken from him when he was condemned for treason. He couldn’t even claim to be his own aristocratic descendant. She thought until she couldn’t stay awake any longer; then she’d bid Nicholas good night and gone to her own bed.
“This is better,” she thought as she drifted into sleep. She had her emotions under control. She was getting over Robert and she was no longer thinking she was falling for a married man. She’d help Nicholas get back to his wife, help him clear his name; then she’d go home feeling good about herself. For once in her life she was not going to fall for an unsuitable man.
Nicholas woke her early the next morning by throwing open the sitting room door. “Can you ride a horse? Can anyone today ride a horse?”
Dougless assured him she could ride, courtesy of her Colorado cousins; then after breakfast she’d found a nearby riding stables. It was four miles to the stables and Nicholas insisted they walk. “Your machines have made you lazy,” he said, slapping her on the back as he set off at a brisk pace. At the stables, as Dougless sat on a bench fanning herself, Nicholas had turned up his nose at all the horses for rent, but his eyes had lit up at the sight of an enormous black horse in a field. The animal was prancing about and tossing its head as though it dared anyone to come near it. As though in a trance, Nicholas had walked toward the creature. When the horse ran toward him, Dougless sat up and bit her knuckles in fear.
“This one,” Nicholas said to the stableman.
Dougless hurried to him. “You can’t really think of riding that horse. There are lots of horses here; why don’t you pick one of them?”
But nothing anyone could say would change Nicholas’s mind. The owner of the stables came into the yard, and he seemed to think it would be a great joke to see Nicholas break his neck. Dougless knew that in America there’d be talk of insurance, but not in England. A groom got a rope around the stallion’s neck, then led it into a stall, where another groom saddled it. Finally, the horse was led into a cobbled courtyard and the reins were gleefully handed to Nicholas.
“I never seen nobody ride like that,” one of the grooms said as soon as Nicholas had mounted and pulled the horse under control. “He ride a lot?”
“Always,” Dougless answered. “He’ll get on a horse before he’ll get in a car. In fact, he’s spent much more of his life on a horse than in a car.”
“Must have,” the groom mumbled, watching Nicholas with awe.
“You are ready?” Nicholas asked Dougless.
She mounted her sedate mare and followed him as he took off. Never had she seen a happier man, and it struck Dougless afresh how different the modern world must be from what he knew. He and the horse fit together as one being, as though he’d become a centaur.
Rural England is full of footpaths and horse trails, and Nicholas went galloping down one of them as though he’d been down it a thousand times—which he probably had, Dougless thought. She called out to him that maybe he should ask directions, but then she doubted if someone had moved Goshawk Hall in the last few hundred years.
She had trouble keeping up with him, lost him repeatedly, and once he returned for her. She had stopped at a crossroads and was looking at the ground for his tracks. When he saw her, he was very interested in what she was doing. Dougless, trying her best to control her mare, who was reacting to the aggressive nearness of Nicholas’s stallion, told him she’d buy him some Louis L’Amour books and read to him about tracking. Laughing, he pointed the way to her, then left in a flurry of mud and leaves.
At last she reached an open gate with a small brass plaque that said, “Goshawk Hall.” She rode down the drive to see an enormous, rectangular fortress of a house set amid acres of beautiful, rolling gardens.
Dougless felt a bit embarrassed to be riding up to this house uninvited, but Nicholas was there, already off his horse and walking toward a tall, grubby-looking man on his hands and knees in a bed of petunias.
Gratefully dismounting, Dougless took her horse’s reins and ran after him. “Don’t you think we should knock on the front door first?” Dougless asked when she reached him. “Why don’t you ask for Mr. Harewood and tell him we’d like to see the papers.”
“You are on my ground now,” he said over his shoulder as he walked toward the gardener.
“Nicholas!” she hissed at him.
“Harewood?” Nicholas said to the man on his knees in the flower bed.
Turning, the tall man looked up at Nicholas. He had blue eyes and blond hair that was now turning gray, and his face had the smooth, pink complexion of a baby’s. He also didn’t look especially intelligent. “Ah, yes. Do I know you?”
“Nicholas Stafford of Thornwyck.”
“Hmmm,” the man said as he stood up, not bothering to dust off his dirty old trousers. “Not the Staffords with that rogue son who got himself tried for treason?”
Dougless thought the man could have been speaking of something that happened last year.
“The same,” Nicholas said, his back straight.
Harewood looked from him to his horse. Nicholas was wearing a very expensive riding outfit with tall, shiny black boots, and Dougless suddenly felt grubby in her Levi’s, cotton shirt, and Nikes. “You ride that?” Harewood asked.
“I did. I hear you have some papers on my family.”
“Oh, yes, we found them when a wall fell down,” he said, smiling. “Looks like somebody hid them. Come in and we’ll have some tea and see if we can find the papers. I think Arabella has them.”
Dougless started to follow them, but Nicholas, without looking at her, dropped the reins of his horse into her hand, then calmly strode off with Lord Harewood.
“Just a minute,” she said as she started after the men, leading the horses behind her. But when Nicholas’s stallion started prancing, Dougless looked back at the animal. It was looking at her with a wild-eyed expression, as though it meant to do something bad. Dougless had had enough of men—any kind of man! “Just try it,” she warned, and the horse stopped prancing.
Now what do I do, she wondered. If she was supposed to be Nicholas’s secretary and she was supposed to find out what secrets may or may not be in the papers, why was she standing here holding the horses?
“Should I rub them down, your lordship?” she muttered as she started walking toward the back of the house. Maybe there was a stables where she could get rid of the animals.
There were half a dozen buildings in the back of the house, so Dougless headed toward one that looked as though it might be a stables. She was nearly there when a horse and rider came tearing past her. The horse was as large and as mean-looking as Nicholas’s stallion (it was probably a stallion too, but Dougless always thought it was rude to look) and on top of it was a stunning woman. She looked like what all women wanted to grow up to look like: tall, slim-hipped, long, long legs, an aristocratic face, big br**sts, a straight-backed carriage that would make a piece of steel envious. She had on English riding breeches that could have been painted on, and her dark hair was pulled back in a severe bun, but that only emphasized the striking features of her beautiful face.
The woman halted her horse, then jerked on the reins and turned it around. “Whose horse is that?” she demanded in a voice that Dougless knew men would love: deep, throaty, husky, and powerful. Let me guess, Dougless thought, this is the great-great-great-etcetera-granddaughter of Arabella-on-the-table. Just my luck.
“Nicholas Stafford’s,” Dougless said.
The woman’s face turned pale—which made her lips redder, and her eyes even darker. “Was that meant to amuse me?” she asked, glaring down at Dougless.
“He’s a descendant of the Nicholas Stafford, if that’s what you mean,” Dougless answered. Dougless tried to imagine how an American family would react if someone mentioned the name of an Elizabethan-era ancestor. They’d have no idea whom she was talking about, but these people acted as though Nicholas had been gone only a couple of years.