Chapter 4
four
Julianna came to with a roaring headache. She didn’t dare open her eyes, on the off chance the pain might choose to intensify. Good grief, what had happened to her? Had she been assaulted by thugs? Robbed? Mugged while innocently savoring chocolate on a park bench?
She wrinkled her nose at the smell that seemed to be all around her.
Maybe she’d sat in bird poop so long that it was starting to take on an odor she hadn’t known it could.
Well, no sense in putting off the inevitable any longer.
She would have to open her eyes, get up and go home.
Maybe it was still dark outside and she would only be gaped at by night-people on the subway. It could have been worse.
She opened her eyes.
Oh. It was worse.
There, not five feet from her, was a man—a man she unfortunately recognized all too well. Damn, she thought she’d dreamed him. But there he was, with his little scrawny helper, starting to go through her purse.
“Hey,” she croaked. “Stop that.”
The man looked up calmly, as if he felt no guilt at rifling through her things. He held her chocolate in one large hand. Julianna watched in horror as he prepared to toss her box of truffles over his shoulder.
“That’s Godiva, you idiot,” she gasped, lurching forward.
He said one word very sharply. Julianna quickly ran through her mental New Jersey-synonym finder and came up with a blank. Searching back into the unused portions of her overeducated brain, she came up with an obscure word that sounded remarkably like what the man had just barked at her.
Poison.
“Heavens no,” she said. “Chocolate.” She held her head between her hands and crawled over to the man on her knees.
She kept one hand in place to keep her head from spinning off her shoulders and groped for her things.
She shoved what little he’d gotten around to investigating back into her purse and snatched the golden treasure from his hands.
“It might be the last of it I can afford.” She inched her way back to the wall she’d been apparently sleeping against and clutched her bag to her chest. No sense in letting it out of her sight again.
It took a moment or two for her head to clear, and when it did, she wished it hadn’t. Maybe she had a concussion. Maybe her headache was causing hallucinations. Maybe she was losing her mind.
Well, whatever the case really was, one thing was for sure: She wasn’t in Gramercy Park anymore.
She suspected she might not even be in Manhattan anymore.
Maybe there’d been more to Elizabeth’s map than met the eye.
She looked around her. She was in a ramshackle old stone church.
It still had a roof and walls, but there were plants growing where they shouldn’t be and all sorts of nestlike items loitering inside that she was just sure housed animals of dubious origin.
She looked to her right and saw an altar adorned with what she could only assume was an unconscious priest. She was worried he might be dead until he suddenly gave a great snort, then began to snore.
Okay, you might have found something like that in Jersey.
But that didn’t account for the guy facing her who continued to demand “Who are you?” and “Whence hail you?” in a language that sounded remarkably like Middle English.
When those very intelligible words gave way to what resembled Norman French to a frightening degree and a litany of curses she could only half understand, she began to think that even Jersey couldn’t produce something quite this strange.
Then there was the chain mail to consider.
A student of medieval languages didn’t learn the words without learning a great deal about the history.
His gear looked late 13th century. Maybe early 14th if he’d been poor and had to use hand-me-downs.
But his sword was very bright and no doubt very sharp.
She looked to her left and found two large horses standing just inside the front door of the church.
Hollywood movie set?
She had her doubts.
By the way, watch out for Gramercy Park. That place is a minefield. Fell asleep on a bench there once and wound up practically on another planet.
Elizabeth’s words came back to her mind with uncomfortable clarity. Another planet was just a figure of speech, wasn’t it? She hadn’t landed on some kind of Star Trek world where life was perpetually stuck in the Middle Ages, had she?
“. . . and to be sure, I only made the vow to assure myself of success,” the man was saying as he eyed her with distinct disfavor.
Julianna had been watching his lips move; she realized only then that he’d been using them to form words.
“I’ll need all of that I can have,” he continued with a grumble, “for removing his sorry arse from my keep will be a difficult task even if he can scarce hoist a sword to save his neck.”
Julianna felt as if she’d been dumped suddenly into a foreign country where the babbling going on around her had suddenly begun to resemble the language she’d been diligently studying.
Only, she was beginning to wonder if her brief semester exchange at Cambridge had been enough to get her American professors’ accents out of her ears.
Then it struck her that she was listening to a man gripe at her in Norman French and curse the teenager sitting next to him in Middle English—and it was then she began to be firmly convinced that she was losing her mind.
“ ’Tis his father’s sorry arse he speaks of,” the teenager supplied cheerfully. “Stole his—”
The kid ducked a friendly, if pointed, cuff to his ear and fell silent. Julianna looked at the man and latched on to the one word she thought she could repeat without screaming.
“Vow?” she asked hoarsely.
“Aye, pox rot you,” the man replied curtly.
She blinked at him.
He cursed. “To rescue and defend any and all maidens in distress—”
“Protect,” the priest supplied in a weak voice, then began to cough, which precipitated an abrupt slide off the altar. He landed with another cough and a snort. He shifted around, made himself comfortable, then almost immediately began to snore again.
The man threw the man of the rotting cloth a dark look, then returned his unfriendly gaze to her. “Now, for the last time, what is your name? Whence hail you?”
Julianna took a deep breath. It was just all too unreal. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She didn’t want to believe what she was smelling. Her every molecule of common sense didn’t want to come to the conclusion that seemed most obvious.
Time travel.
It wasn’t possible.
Was it?
She looked at the man and smiled weakly.
What the hell. Might as well try out the truth on him and see how he reacted.
Maybe she would exhaust his stores of Norman French, and he would give up the game and admit it had all been an elaborate hoax.
He’d show her to the showers, beg her forgiveness for pulling her leg so hard and long, and then offer her a job with his reenactment society.
Or maybe he wouldn’t do any of those things.
Maybe he wouldn’t believe her, he’d think she was a witch, and try to burn her at the stake.
Because no matter what her common sense said, she was almost certain she wasn’t in Manhattan anymore.
Though her forays into the lands south of the city had been few, she was almost certain that not even Jersey could cough up scenery like this.
The one thing she was sure of was that the man she was going to have to get help from didn’t exactly look like he headed up the local Welcome Wagon.
“Your name,” he repeated.
“Name,” she agreed with a croak. “Julianna Nelson. I’m from New York.” She was certain her accent was far from perfect, but she hoped she was managing to get her words in the right places and get her meaning across. “Manhattan,” she clarified.
“Manhattan?” he repeated. He shook his head with a frown. “ ’Tis unfamiliar to me.”
“That ain’t the half of it, buddy,” she said under her breath.
Then she took a deep breath—and wished she hadn’t.
Memories flooded back, as did the strong suspicion that she’d had the contents of a Porta Potti dumped on her.
She started to hiccup. It always happened to her when she got really stressed.
It was unpleasant during job interviews; now it was just downright annoying—probably because every time she sucked in air involuntarily, she wasn’t quite sure what else she was sucking in off her clothes.
“Water,” she asked. “Hic-hic.”
“Hic-hic?” He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind, but another round of violent hiccups apparently cleared up the mystery for him. He frowned. “There is a stream—”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Where?”
He rose, eyeing her bag once more, but apparently her smell was enough to keep him at bay. He kept his distance enthusiastically as he led her out the front of the chapel and a small distance away. He pointed to the small trickle, then folded his arms over his chest and waited.
Julianna took a big drink, praying the water wasn’t polluted enough to kill her.
It didn’t stop her hiccups, but it slowed them down enough that she could turn her mind to others things—namely a bit of a bath.
Never mind that it was raining enough to soak her through to the skin.
Never mind that there wasn’t enough current for a good wash and that a good wash would likely have given her pneumonia.
She wanted her clothes off, her hair clean and she wanted to do it in peace. She looked at her unwilling host.
“Go,” she said pointedly. No sense in muddying up the communication flow with words that didn’t need to be there.
“Nay.”
“Privacy,” she attempted, with another hiccup.
He looked at her blankly.
“I want to be alone,” she said, in her best Garbo imitation.
That only served to force his eyebrows up below his ragged bangs. He put his hand on his sword.
“My vow,” he said, as if the very words left a bad taste in his mouth. “I will protect you. ’Tis my knightly duty.”