Chapter 20
Twenty
Sam had wondered over the years, should he ever have found someone he liked well enough to ignore his stringent dating rules for, how he would go about telling that same woman about himself without leaving her running off screaming into the night.
Harriet was merely watching him, her right hand twitching occasionally as if she wished she’d had pen and paper to use for her usual business.
She hadn’t gotten up to run away and she hadn’t drawn his sword to use it on him, which was promising.
She was simply watching him as if she might be making very detailed mental notes about his sanity, which was less of that same thing.
“I’m not lying,” he said, just in case that hadn’t been clear.
“If you are, you’ve suddenly become much better at it than you were ten minutes ago.”
He smiled. “I think that was a compliment.”
She patted his sword. “Don’t think I’m completely on board with you here or that I won’t use this on you if you do stray off into the weeds of mendacity. Let’s talk specifics while assuming that I believe what you just told me.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Tell me your birthdate again.”
“1242, the end of March.”
“Here in England?”
“In the north, aye.”
“How did you get here? And if you tell me it was via an alien spaceship, I really will stab you.”
He suspected she wouldn’t manage it only because she was obviously ignoring how badly she was shaking.
It took a great amount of self-control not to reach over and take her hands, but he suspected that wouldn’t be soothing.
The best he could do was continue to hold onto his tea and look as harmless as possible.
“Theo and I found one of those gates like the one you saw in the forest.”
“And of course you, being who you are, used it,” she finished for him.
“How could we not?”
She lifted her mug to drink, but that didn’t go very well.
Sam jumped up and rescued her tea before it went all over her, put her mug back on the table, then fetched her a towel that was thankfully not as used as it could have been.
He squatted down in front of her and dried off her hands, then hesitated.
“You’d best see to the remainder.”
She dabbed at the front of herself, but it was fairly hopeless. She held onto the towel and looked at him. “A gentleman to the last, I see.”
“My father’s knightly code of honor,” he managed. He looked at her and was fairly alarmed to find that her eyes were red. “Ah, you aren’t going to … ah …”
“Freak out?”
He quickly ran through his mother’s suggestions for aid with that sort of thing, but there was no time for sleep, he’d already seen the results of trying to give Harriet something to drink, and at the moment he had no idea what she might consider beautiful.
He cast caution to the wind and looked up at her.
“A hug?”
She took a deep breath, set her towel aside, then nodded.
He rose and pulled her up out of her chair, then wrapped his arms around her.
He wished he’d had some sort of comfort beyond that to give her, but he scarce knew where to begin.
Either she would believe him or she would indeed bolt the first chance she had.
He decided a bit of soothing music couldn’t go wrong, so he attempted to hum one of his mother’s favorite violin pieces.
“That’s Schubert,” Harriet said hoarsely. “That’s not medieval.”
“I heard it somewhere once,” Sam said, deciding abruptly that, given the conversation he’d once had with his mother a handful of years ago about her own experiences with traveling through time and his irritation—hastily apologized for—over her own bouts of hedging, keeping his mouth shut about several things was the best choice.
He closed his eyes and hoped that perhaps a tender embrace would do what words could not.
He realized eventually that Harriet was patting him on the back, as if she were the one trying to soothe him.
“You don’t feel medieval.”
He smothered a smile. “And what would that feel like, I wonder?”
“I’m not sure.” She pulled back and squinted up at him. “How old are you again?”
He pursed his lips. “Thirty-one.”
“Plus 800 years,” she said. “Give or take.”
“It depends on your perspective.”
She snorted. “And here I thought TD Piaget was a fossil.”
“I am not a fossil,” he protested.
She smiled briefly, but didn’t dispense with her assessing look. “Is this why your brother writes books set in medieval times?”
He nodded.
“And you really were knighted by King Henry III?”
He nodded to that as well. “Out of all my cousins I daresay we deserved it the least, but we were in the right place at the right time.” He shrugged. “I’m not sure it means anything now.”
She was staring at him, open-mouthed, then shut her mouth with a snap. “I think I need to sit.”
He saw her safely returned to her chair, then sat down across the table from her. He wasn’t entirely certain how to carefully explain the particulars so as to preserve her fragile—
“All right, let’s start with that,” she said briskly, pointing to the pinboard without looking at it.
“Let’s say for the sake of argument that those are real people and not characters in your brother’s books, how did you figure any of this out?
And don’t think about scampering out of the kitchen before you’ve given me the answers I want.
I will absolutely chase after you with your sword. ”
So much for treading lightly. He decided smiling would perhaps set the wrong tone for the conversation at hand, but she was so damned earnest as she stood on the edge of the field, surveying the battle before her.
“Sam?”
He blinked and pulled himself away from admiring her before she truly did draw his sword to use it on him.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Just jump in the deep end with both feet and start talking,” she said. “I’m braced.”
He smiled, had a warning look in return, then took a deep breath and jumped in as requested.
“When Theo and I were ten-and-six—er, sixteen, rather—”
“In 1258.”
He blinked. “Aye, that’s right.”
She scowled at him. “I can add, even while my mind is being blown. Carry on.”
He decided he would save her term to share with his father who would thoroughly appreciate it, then he carried on.
“I have to set the stage a bit first. It wasn’t that Theo and I hadn’t already seen several unusual things in our investigations of various cousins and such.”
“Your poor family.”
He smiled briefly. “My uncle Robin would agree. I suppose what started us truly down this path was witnessing a cousin and her future husband standing on opposite sides of one of those portals, trying but failing to reach each other.”
“No wonder you make matches,” she said faintly.
“I suppose that was the start of it,” he agreed. “Of course at the time we were younger and the thought of romance was very unpleasant, but the gel in question is my favorite cousin and I couldn’t bear to see her unhappy. Or alone in the Future, which was where she stood on her side of the gate.”
“The future as in our current day or just a random future as seen from—when was it again?”
“1258.”
She shot him a quick smile. “Just testing.” She blew out her breath. “Go on. I’m already knee-deep in this big pool of crazy with you and I hate not knowing how things end. So you were hanging out by one of those gates in the forest—”
“This one was just in the middle of a field.”
She shot him a look. “Whatever, but so I know what to look for in the future, what kind of field was it?”
“Just a pasture near a castle.” He paused. “And the whole situation is a bit more complicated than that.”
“I can hardly believe that.”
He couldn’t help but smile then. She was so lovely and wry and not looking at him as if she thought he needed to be locked up in Bedlam so she could run off with his sword and star in the nearest medieval faire.
Well, perhaps judging by the way she occasionally patted his sword—as if the two of them had made a pact to discuss that sort of thing later—he knew wasn’t completely out of the woods with her, but he was willing to take what he could get.
“The thing is,” he continued, “Zachary had already used that same gate to take my cousin to the Future before he returned to our time on an errand—”
“Wait,” she interrupted in surprise. “Our Zachary?”
He smiled at the term. “Aye, our Zachary.”
“Then he knew about these gates?”
That was definitely a conversation for another day.
“He has an interesting history with them that I’ll tell you about later if you’re still curious.
Let’s just say that events led to a moment where Maryanne was on one side of that gate in the field, Zachary was on the other, and it looked as if they might not reach each other in either century.
We would have rushed to their aid, of course, but Jackson leapt first and gave Zachary a push.
We might have accidently pushed Jackson into the gate’s loving embrace directly afterward, but I’m a little fuzzy on the details. ”
She rolled her eyes. “I imagine you aren’t, but it does seem like 800 years is a long time to be holding a grudge for that.”
“He might have other vexations to repay us for,” Sam conceded, “but I daresay being shoved into the Future might top his list.”
She shook her head, but she was smiling. “You and your brother are incorrigible.”
“We definitely were then,” he agreed. “Jackson also met the love of his life in our current day, so you would think that might earn us a bit of forbearance, but perhaps not. As for the rest, once Theo and I realized what was possible, we couldn’t help but investigate a bit more.
That left us eventually here in present-day London, trying to make lives for ourselves that include the theater and writing and other things that are even more unbelievable. ”
“Such as your side-gig of matchmaking through the ages, aided and abetted by ghosts that I thankfully haven’t seen in your kitchen tonight.”
“Exactly that.”