The Baron’s Gambit (Love Through Time #2)

Chapter 1

One

HARPER

Present Day

The manuscript room at the London Archive reminded me of my childhood with the scent of old paper, leather bindings, and the faint mustiness of the centuries filling the space.

I’d learned that olfactory signature as a museum curator in Boston, where I’d spent the last eight years coaxing fragile documents into the light.

Harper Ainsley, better with old documents than relationships. With a shake of my head, I grabbed my tools as I settled into the conservation booth, pulling on my cotton gloves with the ritual reverence reserved for objects that had survived more than eight hundred years.

This psalter was something else entirely. The illuminated manuscript lay open before me, its vellum pages creamy and supple despite their age. The gold leaf caught the specialty lighting I’d set up, not too bright, never too hot.

“Just a basic cataloging,” my supervisor, Dr. Allen, had said that morning. “Acquire date, condition notes, photo documentation. We’re backlogged with donations.”

Routine work. The kind I could do with my eyes closed after eight years. Except nothing about this psalter felt routine.

The pages showed all the markers of the early thirteenth century.

The hand-milled vellum, the iron gall ink, the exquisite marginalia done in what looked like genuine lapis lazuli.

But the illustrations were off. Anachronistic.

The figures in the borders wore clothing that didn’t quite match the style.

The architectural elements in the decorated capital letters showed perspectives that shouldn’t have existed yet.

I leaned closer, squinting at the Latin text. My Latin was rusty. The words seemed to blur and refocus as I read them. Domine, audi me. Lord, hear me.

Standard psalm stuff. Nothing that explained why my stomach had begun doing that peculiar flipping thing it did when I encountered something genuinely mysterious.

The next page was worse. Better. I couldn’t decide which.

One of the gold-leaf illuminations showed a castle, legitimately medieval, appropriate to the period, but the banners flying from the towers were too detailed, too vibrant.

Gold and blue in a checkerboard pattern, painted with a precision the rest of the work didn’t quite match.

As if the illuminator had copied them from life.

And in one of the margin sketches, someone had drawn a woman in what looked suspiciously like modern clothing.

Not obviously modern. But there was something about the way she stood, the proportions of her dress, that struck a chord in my gut.

I checked the catalog number and made a note. Probable later additions to margins. Investigate provenance.

That was when the page started to glow.

Not metaphorically or in the way old gold leaf catches light if you’re romantic enough to think of it that way. An actual luminescence, warm and golden and impossible, spreading across the vellum like spilled water.

I jerked back in my chair, trying to catalog what I was seeing. Bioluminescence? Unlikely in a eight-hundred-year-old object. Chemical reaction? My hands were clean, gloved, I’d done nothing that should trigger anything. The glow intensified.

My breathing picked up. The studio had gone very quiet. Through the glass walls I could see the archive beyond. Normal, ordinary, everyone going about their work. No one was looking at me. No one was noticing that the room had become a small globe of golden light.

I should have called for Dr. Allen. Should have hit the emergency button. Anything but lean forward again, drawn like a moth to one of those old lamps my grandmother used to keep on her porch.

The text shimmered and reformed. No, reformed wasn’t right. Revealed. Like a palimpsest, words appearing that hadn’t been visible a moment before. My Latin crashed against them, failed, reformed.

Redire non potes. You cannot return.

That made no sense. A psalter from 1215 wasn’t going to contain future-perfect grammar about returning to places. I squinted harder, trying to parse—

The light flared white.

I had approximately three seconds to think that this was either a medical emergency or the most spectacular object deterioration event in conservation history before everything went the color of pearls and I fell into very solid darkness as my stomach lurched the way it did when the front car went over the first hill on a rollercoaster.

My head hurt. That was my first conscious thought, and it seemed like an important one to cling to, because it proved I was alive.

The headache was vicious and three-dimensional, starting at my temples and radiating down through my sinuses.

Also, I was on stone. Cold, rough stone that was currently pressing into my left hip and making me regret whatever decision-making process had landed me on medieval flooring.

Medieval flooring? Wait, what?

I cracked an eye open.

The room resolved itself into shapes. There were arched windows with stone walls that seemed to breathe, and a vaulted ceiling that belonged in a cathedral.

I was lying half on, half off a pallet. A genuine, straw-filled pallet, under what appeared to be a wool blanket so coarsely woven it was barely distinguishable from sandpaper.

This was either an extremely committed historical reenactment, or I’d experienced some kind of neurological episode.

Except, if it was either of those, why wasn’t I in my office in Boston? The last thing I remembered was the conservation booth. The psalter. The white flare. If I’d had a stroke, I should be in a hospital bed with a saline drip in my arm and Dr. Allen filling out an incident report.

If I’d fainted, I should be on the floor of the booth with security saying my name and the EMTs unfolding their kit. I should not be on a straw pallet in a stone tower I’d never seen, alone with a wool blanket that smelled like something a sheep had recently been wearing.

I pushed myself up on my elbows, which turned out to be a mistake because the room tilted in three directions simultaneously and my headache developed a new rhythm that felt like someone using my skull as a drum.

“It’s not possible,” I muttered, and waited for the spinning to stop. “Time travel isn’t real.” Where had that thought come from?

The pallet was in a tower room. That was clear from the window placement and the curved walls.

The window itself was narrow, the kind of opening you’d build for defense rather than light.

When I finally managed to stagger over to it and look out, I saw a landscape that made my legs start to buckle as I placed a hand on the wall.

This was not Boston. Where was my beloved city? Green hills rolled toward a river. The river was wide and slow, the color of old pewter. And along the bank, maybe a quarter mile away, stood a castle, a real, honest-to-God medieval castle, with towers and crenellations and a moat.

I gripped the cold stone of the window frame.

“Okay,” I said, my voice rough. “Okay. So this is…what, Cinerama? Am I on a set?”

But I knew the answer before I’d finished asking.

The museum partnered with film productions sometimes.

I’d been on sets. Sets had tells. Tape lines on the floor.

Crew radios crackling somewhere. Cables under the doorways.

The hum of distant generators or air conditioning or, at the very least, the low grumble of Boston traffic six blocks down.

Here there was no hum at all. The silence was absolute in a way silence in modern Boston never was.

No cars. No planes. No city noise. Beyond the river, woodland ran unbroken to the horizon.

The kind of woodland that hadn’t existed in hundreds of years.

No fields divided by hedgerows. No farmhouses.

No road. No power lines. No contrails. The city had vanished.

Wait. Had I stumbled through a forest? Asked for help? It was all a bit hazy around the edges.

And then I spotted the banner. It flew from the highest tower of the castle, snapping in the wind.

Gold and blue, divided in a grid of checks.

Chequy or and azure, my brain supplied the heraldic term, the arms of an English noble house I had spent the morning cross-referencing in my pre-cataloging research, before I’d ever opened the psalter.

Two hours ago, I had photographed that exact banner in the gold-leaf illumination of a castle in the manuscript on my conservation booth’s table. I had noted it specifically. Painted with a precision the rest of the work didn’t match, as if the illuminator had been working from life.

Because they had. Whoever painted that psalter had stood somewhere very close to where I was standing now and looked at this castle and banner, painting what was in front of him.

The psalter that was dated to 1215.

I turned away from the window.

My eyes caught on the wall opposite the pallet, where a small wooden cross hung above an iron sconce. I crossed to it without deciding to.

The wood was new. Not freshly cut. It had been carved and finished and hung, was probably a year or two old. But newly made. The grain was bright. The cut surfaces were clean. There was no chemical darkening, no candle-smoke patina, no surface change of any kind from age.

I had spent eight years working with medieval objects. Every single one, every cross, every spoon, every hairpin, every fragment of vellum, carried hundreds years of accumulated wear. Surfaces darkened by candle smoke. Edges rubbed soft by use. They were always, always old.

This cross was bright.

I sat down on the stone floor underneath it. The panic was real. I was wearing modern jeans in a stone tower in what looked very much like the 13th century, and people would not understand my attire. I was going to die here. Hysterical laughter escaped before I could stop it.

But underneath the panic, and heaven help me, I knew exactly how stupid it was, there was a second feeling.

Because if this was real, if I had actually fallen through that psalter and landed in another time, in a world I’d spent my entire career studying, I was about to see things no medievalist had ever seen.

The Magna Carta. Not just the document, but the room, and the men.

The terror and the excitement arrived in the same heartbeat. Then my hands started shaking.

My stomach lurched. I made it to the ceramic pitcher on the chest and was grateful to find water, probably not the hygiene choice of a woman from the twenty-first century, but I was desperate as I splashed my face, which accomplished exactly nothing except making my headache worse.

A sound came from beyond the door. Footsteps, heavy and booted. More than one person.

I stood very still, suddenly aware that I was wearing the same clothes I’d put on that morning in my Boston apartment. Jeans, a fitted blouse, modern shoes with actual rubber soles, and that these items would raise questions in any genuine medieval setting. Or reenactment. Or wherever I was.

The footsteps stopped outside the door.

I heard the sound of a key turning in a lock, an actual key, maybe made of heavy iron, and then the door swung open.

Two men stood in the doorway. Both wore mail hauberks over what looked like linen undergarments. Both had swords and were staring at me with expressions that suggested I’d just done something catastrophically wrong.

“You,” the one on the left said. He was older, maybe fifty, with iron-gray hair and the kind of bearing that suggested he was used to people listening when he talked. “You’re awake.”

“I…” I started, and stopped. My throat was dry. Everything felt simultaneously too real and fundamentally impossible. “Where am I?”

The two men exchanged a look that made my skin prickle.

“Thames Castle,” the younger one said. He was tall, fair-haired, with eyes the color of winter. Something about the line of his jaw suggested he was related to the older man. “You’re in the tower.”

“Locked in the tower,” the older man corrected, and there was something like satisfaction in his voice. “Until we decide what to do with you.”

“But I didn’t—” I started, then realized that no amount of protesting my innocence would matter when I couldn’t explain how I’d gotten here in the first place. “What year is it?”

Both men went very still.

“What year?” the younger one repeated slowly, as though I’d spoken in a language he recognized but couldn’t quite understand. “It’s 1215, woman. Early May. What kind of fool question is that?”

1215 May.

Confirmation of what the banner and the cross had already told me.

The Magna Carta would be signed next month.

The psalter. The light. Redire non potes. You cannot return.

I sat down on the pallet because the strength had just gone out of me, and I watched the two men’s faces harden as they realized I was either mad or hiding something, and neither option was going to make them any less likely to keep me locked in a tower.

“I need to see the psalter,” I said, very quietly. “The illuminated manuscript. If you want answers, if you want to understand where I came from, you need to show me the psalter.”