Chapter 4
CHAPTER 4
Bees buzzed among the yellow flowers on the other side of the porch steps, the blooms’ sweet scent faint in the hot, still air.
Anger buzzed in Max’s ears, anger rising in his chest, at the nickname bestowed upon him by Vivian Dee at the Royalty Watch blog, then his mind stuttered on the— “ 1897 ? The year ?”
Helped by Bart, who look her arm, Mrs. James sat down on the sturdy wood bench along the wall and poured a tall glass of the pale liquid. “You haven’t figured it out yet?” she said with a smile and slid the glass across the wood table toward him.
He gave her, then the glass, a suspicious look. A prank. This was a prank, courtesy of Vivian and her blog. “Figured out what?”
She nodded and slid a small flowered plate after the glass, gesturing at the food platters in the center of the table, which Calliope had been eyeing with great interest. “It took me a while, too,” Mrs. James said. “I thought I was having a hallucination from the lightning strike.”
Lightning strike? “You were…?”
“Hit by lightning in 2017. Woke up in 1895.”
It took a moment for him to fully grasp what she’d said, then he glanced around at the others, expecting them to laugh at the joke. But their faces—Bart’s, Calliope’s, Mrs. James’s—were deadly serious.
His pulse picking up a few beats, his head fighting to not outwardly scoff at the woman, Max took an exploratory sip of the drink…lemonade, sweet and tart in perfect balance. Already plotting revenge on Vivian— time travel , he scoffed inwardly—he was struck by a memory of the sheriff at the dedication ceremony telling him to be sure to hold onto the silver trophy cup.
A trophy cup that was struck by lightning while Max was holding on to it.
He narrowed his eyes, remembering, too, how Deputy and Mrs. Henderson had hurried out of the storm’s way while it was still thundering in the west. Remembered how the sheriff had turned and walked away from the bridge and up to the grandstand before the flood had hit.
Before there was any indication there would be a flood.
“ Time travel ?” he said, his voice rising a bit on the words. “Are you saying I’ve…?” He felt his head again for a bump and couldn’t find one, his hair stiff with leftover dried mud, his clothes even stiffer. “Don’t tell me your townspeople of the ‘future’ know about this,” he said, making air quotes as he tried to hold back his anger, all while he tried to wake from this crazy dream.
Mrs. James gestured for him to sit across from her, where Calliope had already piled a small plate with two halves of a beef sandwich and a square of a chocolate-laced sweet for herself and had started to eat after downing half a glass of the lemonade. “Why do you ask?” Mrs. James said, leaning closer over the table. “Did anyone there say something to you about it? No one warned me.”
His eyes still narrowed—prank, it had to be a prank—Max reluctantly sat on the wood bench, bits of mud dropping to the porch floor as he bent his legs. “Some behaved rather suspiciously.”
“That’s interesting,” Mrs. James said. “Did you have any indication before you traveled to Wyoming you might come here?”
“By here, I assume you mean 18…?” He raised an eyebrow at her.
“1897,” she said.
“Livie’s been here two years,” Calliope said at his side, reaching for a third half sandwich from the tall stack, this one ham, before she’d finished the first two, and Max grabbed two for himself before she had a chance to eat them all. “It was a shock to her, too.”
“Yes,” Mrs. James said, “but the question is, why is Prince Maximilian?—?”
“Max,” he said, brushing aside the unending lapses of protocol that had registered in a rote part of his mind since he’d first found himself being escorted to their ranch—a rigid decorum seemed ridiculous under the circumstances. “Please, let’s not be formal.” Not in a dream, or a prank, or in a?—
“Okay,” Mrs. James said. “I’m Livia. And the question is, Max, why are you here?”
Time travel. Max chewed a delicious bite of ham, mustard, and homemade bread, then took a longer drink of the lemonade, the sweet liquid kicking his brain into gear, reminding him of the sighting he’d had of the Evil Prince.
Impossible. Time travel was… “This is crazy.” He looked around the homey porch, at the sparkling windows of the house, then at the lush, well-tended flower garden beyond the porch swing. “Really. Where are the cameras?” He raised his voice and called out, “Okay, Vivian. Show yourself.”
“Vivian?” Livia said. “You mean, Royalty Watch ?”
“Yes,” Max said, “your partner in this prank.”
“It’s not a prank,” she said. “It’s not a dream. You’re not hallucinating. It’s simply that you’ve?—”
“Traveled through time.” Max stifled an impatient exhale. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “but this is preposterous.”
“It took Bart some time to believe it, too,” Calliope said, piling a second sweet onto her plate, her every move graceful, athletic…feminine.
But the idea he’d gone back in time would explain a great many things. The lack of roads and modern amenities and modern sounds. The lack of any indication there was a search party looking for him—his life was usually spent in a protective royal bubble every moment of every day.
Most of all, time travel would explain the glimpse he’d had of the Evil Prince.
Livia picked up a newspaper he hadn’t noticed by the tray, the thin newsprint making a crinkly sound, the paper folded back to highlight a front-page story.
Max paused in midbite, his body tensing. More wild lies about him?
“His name is different,” Livia said to the others, tapping the newspaper article.
Max leaned forward and saw it was a story about the new owner of the Crown of the West. The new owner as in new in the late nineteenth century. He recognized the newspaper—the Mule Stop Gazette in its nineteenth-century form—from the photocopies Nelson had made of such articles in preparation for Max’s trip to Wyoming. Research that Max had assigned after the letter from Mule Stop had been received at the castle, requesting Zalgravia return the trophy cup, and the Royalty Watch blog had begun its series about Hugo, the Evil Prince.
Livia glanced up from the article at Max. “Say your name again, please.”
Her tone was polite and friendly, but Max fought a bristling at being told what to do. Protocol would have had this entire family keeping their distance.
But Calliope was patting her mouth with a white linen table napkin, looking adorable, her eyes alert and full of that excitement that seemed to vibrate from her. Bart, standing protectively beside his seated, pregnant wife, watched him with an eagle eye.
Max sighed and set down his sandwich. “Prince Maximilian Alphonse Frederick George.”
Livia nodded, then pointed at the start of the article. “The man at the Crown Ranch is Prince Maximilian Alphonse Edwin Hugo. Prince Maximilian, for short.”
Calliope nodded. “That’s what I hear folks around here are callin’ him.”
Leaning over his wife’s shoulder, Bart glanced at the article, then at Max, his expression stating clearly that he didn’t trust Max a single bit.
Max nodded at Livia. “The prince in your article was named after his father, King Maximilian VII. The prince went by the name Prince Hugo, to avoid confusion. My family—my current family, the one living in 2019—refers to him simply as the Evil Prince.”
Calliope laughed.
Livia smiled.
Bart, appropriately, looked even grimmer. The Evil Prince had earned the nickname. “So he’s a relative,” Bart said, and not in a friendly tone.
“In a manner of speaking,” Max said. “He’s not someone we readily claim kinship with.” He gestured at the newspaper. “May I?” he asked Livia.
She handed it to him across the table. The thin newsprint felt flimsy in his hands. The issue was dated June 20, 1897.
“Where did you get this?” he asked. The article was identical to the one Nelson had found in his research, except his copy had been printed out from an online database. The photograph of Hugo was eerily like the man he’d seen by the flooded valley.
Eerily—if one looked at it closely, past the muttonchop sideburns and mustache—like Max.
“It was delivered with the mail a month and a half ago,” Livia said.
Max wanted to protest, but with some food inside him, his instincts were ticking back into proper working order, and every instinct told him she spoke the truth.
His heart beating faster, he turned from the others and scanned the barn and other outbuildings beyond the line of tall, narrow evergreens on the far side of the sweep, giving the buildings a closer inspection than when he’d arrived. The large corral beside the immense red barn was full of the horses they’d ridden that morning, the horses being unsaddled by the ranch hands who’d accompanied Bart and Calliope on their mission to retrieve Max. A smaller corral lay between the larger one and a big rectangular, one-story log building that sprawled across the grass. More buildings, smaller ones, were scattered around the rest of the immense, open field, the river rushing behind them all, before curving around to run past the house.
Rising above the river on the far side was an honest-to-goodness, snow-topped mountain, the first of a series of peaks—the Sky Top Mountains, Calliope had told him as they’d ridden up the drive—and he realized the high bluff the house and other buildings sat on formed the foot of the mountain.
And over it all, a silence. No sound of motors, of planes. No jet trails. There truly was nothing modern anywhere.
Good God. Would he be stranded here?
His heart beating even faster, he turned back to the others, encountering a stern, still suspicious glance from Bart. And in that moment, Max realized it wasn’t what he thought about the time travel that mattered. It was about what Bart James thought of him .
“Okay,” Max said, easing the newspaper back onto the table, not making any rash moves, realizing there was a reason he hadn’t been invited into the house, despite the hot day.
They—or at least Bart—considered him a danger.
But time travel…? Max gave each one of them a forgiving smile, lingering for a moment on Calliope. “You all are very convincing,” he said, a breeze rustling through the leaves of the trees at the end of the house. “I don’t know what Royalty Watch paid you to make me look like a fool on camera, but?—”
The sound of dogs barking came again from over by the barn.
Horse hooves galloped toward the house along the tree-lined drive.
A man dressed in cowboy clothes came into view, atop a white stallion, dust billowing behind the horse’s hooves. “Bart,” the man shouted, stopping twenty feet from the front porch. Wearing a black leather vest and black chaps, a black shirt and denim jeans, he leaped off the horse, his black boots hitting the ground with a quiet thud, raising more dust. His gloved hand tossed the horse’s reins to a stable boy who’d run toward the house from the barn the instant the dogs had started barking.
“What is it, Roy?” Bart said in an urgent tone, striding to the edge of the porch, stopping between Max and the newcomer.
“It’s that new owner at the Crown,” Roy said, moving fast across the dirt toward the porch steps, Roy tall, dark haired, and fit, Max saw as he leaned to the side of Bart for a better view. An old scar marked the left side of Roy’s lean, grim face beneath his black cowboy hat. A flat silver band on the hat’s crown caught a ray of sunlight a moment before he reached the shade at the top of the steps. “That new Prince Maximilian. His men just shot Robert Porter.”
The ladies exclaimed with dismay. Bart swore.
Max flinched. Damn Hugo.
Bart shifted again between him and Roy, blocking Max from Roy’s view. To avoid explaining an Evil Prince lookalike? To forestall any questions about the unwelcome time traveler?
Livia stood, ungainly with her large belly. “Is Doc with him?”
Stopping beside the rocking chairs, Roy nodded, accepting a glass of lemonade from Calliope, who’d stood and crossed to him with an increasingly angry expression on her pretty face—angry at Hugo, Max was sure. “Sam and Doc both are,” Roy said and took a long sip.
“Sam’s back in town?” Bart said.
“Yesterday, same as you. I came on ahead just now to warn you they’re bringing Robert here.”
“How bad?” Livia said.
“Doc’s got him patched up enough to travel,” Roy said. “But he says Robert will need someone to watch over him. He thought your infirmary, Livia, would do.”
“Of course,” Livia said. “I’ll tell Ian to make things ready.”
“You sit,” Bart told her and called out to the retreating stable boy, instructing him to pass a message on to Ian to prepare the infirmary for a patient, and to have a stretcher brought to the house, then he turned back to the others. “What happened, Roy?”
“Sam and I were up at the Porter spread for Robert to show us where that new prince was encroaching on his land. The prince had his men string barbed wire across the west edge of Robert’s ranch, claiming forty acres for himself. Robert had complained to the prince, who’d laughed in his face, so Robert sent one of his ranch hands to get us. While Robert was showing us the fence, one of those damned sidekicks the prince brought with him from Europe, Kuthbert, snuck up, hidden by a thick grove of pine, and shot Robert in the back.”
Max caught a silent breath. Hugo’s sidekicks, as Roy called them—the ones from Zalgravia who accompanied him everywhere—were better known among Max and his sisters as ‘Hugo’s Henchmen,’ their name for the four cruel, obsessively loyal, nineteenth-century lackeys who had done whatever dirty work the Evil Prince ordered. He realized now why the two Zalgravians he’d seen earlier with Hugo had seemed familiar. They were two of the henchmen, Leopold and Zimmer. But it was Kuthbert who was the worst. The former military officer and right-hand man to Prince Hugo was nearly as evil and infamous as the Evil Prince himself.
Roy took another long draught of the lemonade. “If Sam hadn’t seen the man through the trees at the last moment and given Robert a push,” he said, “that bullet would have gotten Robert in the heart. As it was, the bullet missed anything vital. Doc stitched him up, but says he needs careful attention to be sure infection doesn’t set in. Lucky for us, Doc had come with us from town to check on Robert’s wife Elizabeth and their new baby.”
Finishing off the lemonade, he handed the glass back to Calliope. “That damned prince,” he said, following her toward the table as she reached past Max for the pitcher. “Half the ranchers up here have been comin’ to the jailhouse to complain about the man. I just saw for myself on the way here the fence he built across the southwest corner of the—” His gray eyes met Max’s as Bart stepped aside. His tall black-clad body froze.
A pistol was in his hand faster than Max could ever have reacted.
“Easy,” Bart said, Max sitting as still as a statue on the wood bench, his hand gripping his lemonade glass tight, his mind shocked at how swiftly the people here saw the resemblance between him and Hugo. “This isn’t the one at the Crown.”
“Then who the hell is he?” Roy growled.
“Someone from the future,” Bart said with an ease that made Max realize Roy must be in on the secret of Livia’s origin. “A relative of our prince.”
Roy’s mouth dropped open for an instant. “You’re joking.”
“He washed up in a flash flood along the Elkhorn River,” Calliope said, some of her anger at Hugo seeming to fade under her renewed excitement about discovering Max. “We rescued him from his relative afore the relative could get him.”
“Whose side is he on?” Roy said, the pistol still aimed uncomfortably at Max’s heart.
“Yours,” Max said, but the tension emanating from Roy didn’t lessen. “There’s no love lost between the crown of Zalgravia and him. I’m distressed the resemblance you seem to find so startling exists.”
“Look at his wrist,” Livia said in a quiet tone.
Roy’s gaze zeroed in on Max’s gold smartwatch, which, though dulled from a thin film of dried mud, seemed after a long moment to convince him. Slowly, he slid the pistol back into his holster.
The sound of metal wheels on dirt and gravel came down the drive.
The unseen dogs near the barn set up another chorus.
A gray buggy with a roof came into view, driven by an older woman dressed in a long, high-necked yellow dress similar to Livia’s, a straw bonnet on her dark hair. “What’s all the fuss?” the woman said in a calm tone as she stopped the buggy in front of the porch, looking a great deal like an older version of Calliope.
“I found me a prince, Ma,” Calliope said, hopping down from the porch.
Standing beside her ma’s buggy, Cally glanced back at Max up on the porch, wondering how he was taking a new century in. Livie had been disoriented when she’d arrived two years ago. Max didn’t seem to be confused, just hungry and disbelieving, and angry at a woman named Vivian, but he stood at the sight of her mother.
Cally’s ma handed the reins to young Ted Harkins, one of the ranch hands, who’d come running from the large corral after depositing Roy’s white horse there, then she stepped from the buggy she’d taken to visit Cally’s brother Kit and his new wife, who lived a half mile away on the west side of the bluff the main ranch house was built on. “I found myself a prince,” she said when Ted, driving the buggy back to the barn, was out of earshot, Ma correcting Cally’s grammar—part out of habit, Cally knew, part out of the awareness that a stranger who was young enough to marry Cally was present, Ma’s gaze pausing on Max.
“Yes, Ma,” Cally said. “He’s from the future,” she added in a lower voice.
Her ma paused midstride on her way to the porch steps.
“Ma,” Bart said, “allow me to introduce Prince Maximilian of the Kingdom of Zalgravia, from the year…”
“2019,” the prince said, and Cally could see he wasn’t sure yet he weren’t dreamin’ or bein’ made a joke of. When Ma had reached the top of the steps, he gave her a bow like he’d given Cally and Livie. “And Max will do. How do you do, ma’am?”
“Max,” Bart said, “this is my mother, Mrs. Bart James, Senior.”
“Welcome to our home,” Ma said. “You’ve met my daughter, Miss Calliope?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Max said as Cally clomped up the stairs to join her ma up on the porch. “Thank you, ma’am.” He gave Ma a handsome smile like the ones he’d given Cally, sending Cally’s heart a-thumpin’ again, then he turned to Bart. “How many of your townsfolk are aware of the time travel you believe has occurred?”
“This is about it,” Bart said, and Cally knew he was reluctant to share even that information, Bart not cottoning onto the prince, and she knew he worried what the prince’s arrival might mean for Livie. “A few more folks, that’s all.” He gave Max a wry expression, though Cally could see the tension in his shoulders. “Your timing is fortuitous. Most of the rest of them will be arriving shortly. Saves us having to round them up.”
Roy only had enough time to start in on a ham sandwich before the cattle dogs Cally’s brother Kit bred started barking in the kennels again by the barn. The sound of more horse hooves came on the front drive.
Doc Jannings rode up slowly through the trees with Robert Porter and Deputy Wilmo Tate, Robert slumped in front of Wilmo on the deputy’s horse, his eyes closed, his square face haggard. His worn brown work shirt lay open, a blood-stained white bandage underneath that seemed to wrap around his chest.
Doc and Wilmo looked terrible grim.
Bart, Roy, and Livie hurried off the porch to greet them.
“Livie is a doctor,” Cally told the prince and started pouring glasses of lemonade for the new arrivals, her chest tightening with worry for Robert, who looked real pale, Robert a few years older than she was and married to Elizabeth Kline, with two young ones at home.
“From the future,” Max said, frowning at the injured man, his face getting all serious all of a sudden. He’d started to stand when Doc and the others rode up—to help them, she figured—but then he’d sat back down on the bench with a grimace, as if he were rememberin’ Roy’s reaction to him, Doc and Wilmo not having glanced his way yet.
“That’s right,” Cally said. Bart hadn’t wanted to tell the prince that. He hadn’t wanted to tell the prince anything about Livie, but Livie had argued—before Cally and Bart had gone to round up Max—that the only way they’d get the prince to trust them was to tell him the truth. Better that than to have him stumbling around the past making folks suspicious.
Bart had argued that the prince wouldn’t need to know what century Livie was from for him to be told he’d traveled through time, but Livie had said the prince would want to know where they’d gotten their information about the future when they quizzed him. Besides, she’d said, anyone who behaved the way Prince Max had in the future wouldn’t have much in common with the Prince Maximilian who’d bought the Crown of the West two months ago.
“That’s your nickname for her?” Max asked. “Livie?”
“Yep,” Cally said, sitting down beside him. “We’re good friends, even before she became my?—”
“He’s been in and out of consciousness,” Doc said to Livie. Dressed in the cowboy clothes he wore when he was ridin’ to the ranches outside town to check on folks, he looked angry and dust blown as he helped Bart and Roy get Robert down slowly from Wilmo’s horse and onto the stretcher Tom had brought back, the stretcher—two long wood poles with a long, wide stretch of sturdy canvas in between—lying flat on the ground. “It was a close thing. That damned Kuthbert aimed for his heart.”
Anger rushed through Cally. Darn it, no one had a right to go around shootin’ at innocent people.
She glanced at her prince, the one she’d found down by the Elkhorn River, his face like stone. Was Livie right about him, sayin’ he wasn’t much like the other prince over at the Crown?
Or was Bart the one who had it right?
Had Cally brought home a viper?
“Why on earth would he shoot Robert?” Ma called out as she hurried down the porch steps with the damp cloth she’d run inside to get when she’d learned Roy’s news, the cloth dripping with lavender water.
Doc frowned. “The young man had the audacity to complain to the prince that not only was the prince’s new fence on his property, but that Kuthbert had been disrespectful to his wife.”
“Oh, dear,” Ma said, wiping Robert’s sweating brow once he was settled on the stretcher. “And for that, the prince would have him shot?”
“That’s Hugo,” Max murmured, so low that Cally was sure she was the only one who heard him.
“Where’s Sam?” Bart said beside Livie, who was checking Robert’s pulse.
“He’ll be here shortly,” Deputy Wilmo said, still astride his horse. As young as Robert, he was wearing his lawman clothes today, a tan leather vest and brown chaps over a striped shirt and denim trousers, his star-shaped silver badge glintin’ on his vest. “He went to investigate Matthew’s complaint about the prince pulling the same trick on his land, the prince building a new fence across the southwest corner of Matthew’s spread. Once he’s done there, we’ll go arrest Kuthbert for trying to kill Robert.”
Down on the stretcher, Robert groaned, seeming to be comin’ to. Doc bent, arranging the big bandage around Robert’s muscled chest. “The bit of laudanum I gave him is wearing off,” Doc told Livie, who was blocking the noon sun from Robert’s face.
“Livia told us about that new fence,” Bart said, Matthew Fielding and his wife good friends of Cally’s family, their ranch just south of the Sky Top, and Cally began to understand just how much had changed while she, her brother, and her ma had been away. That was two local ranches Max’s evil ancestor had tried to steal acreage from.
“Be glad your land doesn’t border the Crown,” Doc told Bart, straightening up from the stretcher. “It’s been nothing but mayhem since that new prince arrived.”
Cally felt Max flinch beside her.
Was he ashamed of his family? She would be if she were related to someone like his relative.
Was he a-wishin’ he were back home?
Bart and Roy, one at each end of the stretcher, picked up Robert, who’d started to writhe and call out with pain, and carried him fast across the drive and through the line of juniper trees toward the bunkhouse over by the small corral, Livie and Doc at Robert’s side.
Ma, who’d gone back into the house again, came out with Flora Zandt, their housekeeper and cook, the two gathering up the trays of food and drink on the picnic table, Cally hurrying to help.
Ma turned to Deputy Wilmo. “Come inside, out of the sun,” she told him, giving him the welcome Bart had refused to give Max, then her gaze moved to Max, including him in the invitation. “Mrs. Zandt” —she nodded at Flora— “is putting together more food and drink.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Wilmo said, but Max, with a respectful nod at Cally’s ma, then Flora, strode down the steps toward the bunkhouse.