Chapter 24
Stephen stood on a stop just outside his father’s walls, looked up at the modern-day castle rising into the air in front of him, and took a deep breath. It was the same view he had looked at for the whole of his life, but somehow it was as if he were seeing it for the last time.
Obviously lack of sleep had made him maudlin.
He rubbed his hands over his face and reviewed his morning so far.
He had arrived at Artane before dawn, parked in the car park, then gone inside his father’s hall.
He had written his mother a note and asked her to move his car inside for him, giving her the excuse that he was going hiking for the next few days with friends and would be having a lift from them.
He’d left his keys with the note, retrieved his shorter sword from where he’d left it near the front gate, and gone out into the darkness.
The honest truth was, he’d initially looked at the time travelers he’d met with a very jaundiced eye. While he had never been one to mock others openly, he had certainly indulged in his own private, silent snorts of disbelief.
That was until he’d met Kendrick de Piaget, his uncle, who wasn’t precisely a time traveler but had most assuredly had a most interesting journey to the present day.
Kendrick looked very much like Gideon, but that could possibly have been coincidence.
Stephen couldn’t say he’d spent all that much time with Kendrick initially, so his exposure to those of a different vintage had been light.
And then he’d had the pleasure of meeting both Zachary Smith and John de Piaget within a year of each other.
If listening to Zachary’s tales hadn’t made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, listening to Zachary’s wife Mary—Stephen’s auntie, as it happened—babble on in perfect Norman French had been.
Her husband’s command of it had been equally impressive.
And he and John de Piaget could have passed for twins if it hadn’t been for the age difference.
He’d already spoken to Zachary whilst about the happy work of rescuing Peaches from the past, so he’d had nothing further to ask him. Now that he’d had his own experience with time gates, he thought he might know what to expect.
It wasn’t the traveling through time that gave him pause. It was what he would find on the other side of that stretch of centuries that left him almost frozen in place.
On one side of the gate, his current side, lay a situation that was absolute pants.
He could hardly wrap his mind around it, but there was no denying that David Preston, the wastrel Duke of Kenneworth, held the deeds to Artane, Haulton, Blythewood, and Etham.
His attorney, the very canny Geoffrey Segrave, didn’t think that included the private property inside, but that hardly mattered.
Artane was priceless, and not just for the history and the memories it held.
Stephen imagined they could liquidate every personal item possessed by the entire family yet still not have enough to meet an appraised price.
The situation was absolutely impossible.
It had occurred to him, as he’d watched Peaches sleep on the couch in his library, that he would be wise to set aside something in trust for their children—assuming he was able to earn enough to have anything to set aside for children he could only hope to have with her—something apart from his lands and titles that was untouchable.
It was a pity his father hadn’t had a better lawyer to do the same for him.
It was then that he’d begun to consider with deadly seriousness the germ of the idea he’d had at Chattam Hall. What if he could convince one of the early lords of Artane to set aside something for future generations?
Or, rather, for him?
He had left Peaches sleeping peacefully, driven like a fiend north, and arrived at his ancestral home well before dawn.
He’d written the aforementioned notes, then slipped out of the castle before dawn and retreated to where he was now, the appropriate spot near his father’s keep, to consider possible destinations in time.
He’d known where the gate lay partly because he’d seen Pippa step through it to the past, and partly because he could see it there, shimmering in the morning sun.
He’d wondered how many souls had stepped on that unassuming patch of ground and found themselves in a place they hadn’t intended to go? Or perhaps it only worked at certain times and for certain people.
He sincerely hoped the time and the person was right at the moment.
He hoped for either Rhys de Piaget or Mary’s father, Robin.
He didn’t know either of them himself, but he knew from very brief and uncomfortable conversations—the discomfort coming from his side, of course, thanks to his inability to believe the things he was hearing—with both Mary and John that either man was reasonable, fair, and shrewd.
Robin was the more unreasonable swordsman, spending innumerable hours in the lists torturing his guardsmen, but both had loved Artane.
Stephen supposed he could have chosen any number of men through the ages to visit, but for some reason, he was drawn to the past.
The artifacts were worth more, actually.
He looked up at his father’s keep in front of him, closed his eyes, then stepped forward.
The sense of vertigo was so strong, he stumbled forward until he finally found his footing in a layer of crusty snow that hadn’t been there a heartbeat before. He looked up, almost dreading what he would see.
The floodlights were gone, but it was Artane, thankfully. He had no idea what the year was, but he would find that out soon enough. Perhaps things would go very well, and he would meet Robin just a month after John had left him—
He shook his head. That would mean that Nicholas should have been in his early thirties at their last encounter, which he certainly wasn’t.
And those sons of his, the blond twins who had bought them a meal at the inn when he had gone back to rescue Peaches, those lads had been perhaps twenty, possibly younger.
If the gates worked according to the wishes of the person using them, then perhaps he would arrive in the past soon after the last time he’d been there.
The thought of it gave him a sharp pain between his eyes, actually, so he turned his thoughts to something else. The sun was beginning to rise over the sea. He watched it, then sighed. Some things never changed, thankfully.
He kept a careful eye on the guards he could see standing on the walls, then made his way up to the gates. He was stopped, which he expected, and his business demanded, which he also expected.
His announcement that he had a message for the lord of the keep from his brother was apparently enough to earn him a trip inside the gates.
He could only hope the journey wouldn’t end inside Artane’s dungeon.
He knew what that place felt like in the twenty-first century.
He had no desire to experience it in all its medieval glory.
He held it together quite well, to his mind, until the moment he found himself standing in front of one of the hearths in the great hall.
There was something profoundly strange about standing in his own home, the home he had lived in from the moment of his birth, yet knowing he was standing in the same spot eight hundred years before he’d been born.
He was surrounded by guardsmen, which didn’t surprise him.
What he hadn’t expected was to be facing the lord of Artane and feeling as though he were looking into a mirror.
That de Piaget ancestor was older than he was, substantially, but he carried himself like a young man. He was roughly the same age as Nicholas had been, so Stephen wondered if it might be Robin himself.
“Lord Robin,” one of the guards said sternly, “this man here presented himself at the gates and said he had a message for you. Said he needed to deliver it himself.” He handed over Stephen’s sword. “He was carrying this.”
Stephen watched Robin pull the sword halfway from the sheath, freeze briefly, then resheath the sword.
Very well, so it couldn’t be mistaken for anything but a modern sword.
He’d had it made to his specifications by a man Ian MacLeod had recommended without reservation.
Robin looked at it again, then handed it back to Stephen.
“Nice sword.”
“Thank you, my lord Artane.”
Robin lifted an eyebrow briefly. “I believe, lad, that you should follow me.”
“But, my lord,” said the guardsman, aghast.
“I believe, William,” Robin drawled, “that I can handle this dangerous lad here for as long as it takes to cut his business from him. You may follow us to my solar and stand without. If I need aid, I’ll call for you.”
Stephen glanced at the guard and found himself the recipient of a lingering dark look. He doubted anything he could say would improve matters, so he kept his mouth shut, his hood close around his head, and followed Robin across the great hall.
It was, he had to admit, very, very strange.
Once they had reached Robin’s solar, which was actually still the lord’s solar in Stephen’s time, and Robin had shut the door and bolted it, Stephen began to breathe a bit easier.
He wasn’t any less weary, though, and it took a fair amount of control not to simply sit down across from Robin when he cast himself down into a chair and looked up at Stephen casually.
But he waited, because that was his grandfather, the usual number of generations removed sitting there, and he had been taught decent manners.
“Take off your cloak, lad, and let me have a look at you.”
Stephen pulled his hood back, then took off his cloak completely. He watched Robin as he did so, wondering what the man’s reaction would be.
Robin would have made an amazing poker player.
“Who are you?” Robin asked politely.
“Stephen, my lord.”
Robin studied him. “And your father?”