Timeless (25 page)

A sad look came over his face. I supposed the
pile of stones, only an outline of the grandeur of what the castle
had been, was an even greater shock for him than it had been for me
since I had the benefit of knowing that it likely had changed over
so many years. I still had not discovered the exact fate of the
castle from of the cryptic entry I’d found under Damien’s name in
the registry of knights.

“So did you find this entrance?” I
prodded.

“No. Before I could jump, one of the guards
hit me from behind, and I lost consciousness.”

I couldn’t imagine any of them actually being
able to overcome Damien alone, and I looked at him
questioningly.

“They used the handle of a sword to swipe me
over the head, I think,” he finished grimly.

I shuddered at the pain this must have caused
him.

I ran my hand along the back of his head.
Sure enough, I felt a swollen lump rising under his hair—a wound
hundreds of years old, I mused. No, that was wrong. It was only
last week. I had to keep reminding myself of this.

“When I awoke,” he continued, “I found myself
in the dungeon, but not in the cell with the secret passage. I
waited, losing track of time, and wondering every second what Lamia
had done to you,” he said.

He stopped then, a look of awe coming into
his face.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he murmured,
kissing my forehead, my eyes, and finally my lips.

I didn’t want it to end. I could die happily
now, I thought, and then shuddered as I realized I had died
before.

He finally released me, but we still held
each other. I leaned against him, enjoying the sound of his voice
as he told me the hardest part.

“She came into the cell much later. They’d
left me there in the dark, and I didn’t know what had happened to
you. I knew they’d come to kill me, but I had no idea…Emmeline, I
didn’t know they’d harm you. I thought your father would protect
you. It was me they were after because I wasn’t good enough for
you, because they thought I’d kidnapped you.”

“Oh, Damien! You were always good enough for
me,” I assured him, rushing to take his face in my hands.

“Am I? I doubt it,” he mused.

“No, Damien. Never say that again. Whatever
anyone else tells you, you have always been perfect for me, the
only one. How could you think otherwise?”

“Emmeline, a week ago you didn’t want to
leave with me, to marry me,” he said quietly.

I felt terrible. He was right. I hadn’t
wanted to marry him when he’d asked, at least not immediately. I’d
made us wait, wanting to seek my father’s permission. Vainly, I’d
hoped we could live together in the castle, not like fugitives on
the run. But I was wrong, and I said so.

“Damien, I’m sorry. I never realized how far
she’d go in her hatred of me. I didn’t know the strength of her
power over my father.”

“When she told me you were dead, I almost
lost my mind. She told me what they’d done to you, accusing you of
witchcraft,” he said.

His voice began to break. I had to remember
that, for him, this had happened last week.

“Darling, I’m here,” I murmured in his ear,
pulling him close and holding him.

“I knew then that I didn’t care what she did
to me, and she knew it to.”

He stopped for a moment, and I was afraid to
ask what happened next. Had I been too late? Had she tortured him,
playing with his mind and tormenting his body before she’d started
to carry out some hideous plan for his death?

“And then?” I gently asked.

“And then…then she began,” he said, looking
away. Comprehension dawned on me.

I slowly unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a
magnificent, muscled chest hardened from years of practice on the
field. Knights were, by far, superior in size and strength to most
modern athletes, having to carry most of their own weight in
hauberk, mail, and armor while wielding a heavy sword and shield
and controlling their horse. And that was before they fought other
equally well-trained knights coming at them full force.

By the time Damien reached the last button, I
saw what he meant. The red welts and lines crisscrossed his
abdomen, and his stomach was up bound in bandages, the wounds still
fresh.

I gasped at the cruelty of it, not daring to
touch him lest I cause further pain. When he turned, however, I saw
the evidence of her vengeance. It was not enough that she’d killed
me; she had left his back a bloody nightmare, the slashes marring
the beauty of his shoulder blades and lower back. I didn’t ask how
she’d done it. I remembered seeing the instruments of torture for
myself, and it wasn’t too hard to guess what she’d done to him.

“Oh my dearest love,” I whispered, afraid to
hug him. It must have been ten thousand agonies for him to have
carried me inside and hold me against him. But he hadn’t cried,
complained, or even winced at the pain.

He shrugged back into his shirt and smiled at
me.

“It’s over,” he said simply, not wanting to
speak of it again.

I swallowed, wanting to cry out for him.

“About the time I thought she was getting
ready to kill me,” he continued, “I hit the ground and must have
passed out. I thought, when I awoke, that I felt weak from the loss
of blood. Then I thought they’d either mercifully knocked me
unconscious or already killed me. I heard your voice calling me,
and the sun shone down on me. I was in a place I didn’t recognize,
with stones scattered in piles all around. It took several minutes
for me to understand that I was exactly where I was before, only it
was a different time.”

“How did you know it was different?” I
asked.

“I don’t know. I just did. One minute, I was
lying tied up on a table, her disgusting face laughing above me.
The next, I was lying on the ground staring at the sky.”

I thought for a moment. Perhaps he had come
back when I’d been in the chapel, only he was in the castle, while
I was…

“No!” I shrieked, realizing what had
happened. If I’d just returned to the castle, I would have found
him. We could have been together! He had only been a mile or so
from me. How could I have been so stupid? Of course that’s where he
came through. It made perfect sense since that’s where he’d been
when I brought him over.

He looked at me, puzzled.

“Sorry,” I said, “it’s just that I realized
that I should have gone back for you. I brought you here but didn’t
think it had worked. It didn’t occur to me to go back to the castle
for you. I thought it would have been a waste of time. How did you
get out?”

“I walked,” he said and smiled.

I punched him lightly on the arm, careful not
to harm his midsection.

He looked at me strangely, and I realized
that we interacted in a much different way together in the
thirteenth century. Girls were probably a lot less assertive and
certainly never hit anyone, even playfully. There was much I would
have to explain to Damien about modern life and male-female
relationships. I wondered if I’d had a sense of humor in my past
life.

“I did walk,” he continued, undaunted by my
less-than-maidenly antics, “and a long way too. The world has
changed so much, Emmeline,” he finished, becoming more serious
now.

“Yes, we’ll get to that later,” I assured
him. I was amazed that we’d been speaking to each other in
English—modern English—the entire time. I’d mentioned nothing about
this in my spell. Perhaps I’d mentally channeled it to him?

“What happened after you woke up? Where did
you go?” I asked him.

“I walked for awhile, and I met a large man
in the woods,” he explained.

“Yes, I know him. He found me too. Did he
tell you what year it was?” I asked. “Yes. But he looked at me
strangely,” he answered.

“I’ll bet,” I said, laughing as I thought
about the strange morning he’d likely had coming across both of
us.

“The man who found me answered most of my
questions,” Damien said.

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth, or what I could make of it.”

I remembered how virtuous Damien was. He
would consider lying to be dishonorable; even if the world thought
he was crazy, he wouldn’t stoop to telling a false story.

“I told him I’d awoken in the ruins just
beyond the forest and that I didn’t know where I was. I was looking
for you, and he said he’d already seen a young woman with long red
hair. He gave me food to eat, and then we were on our way,” he
explained.

“So he took you to the train station?”

“Yes. I had no idea, Emmeline, how fast
mankind can go…And they need no horses!” he finished, still amazed,
I could tell, by everything he’d seen in this new world.I realized
just how long eight hundred years really was.

“What time did you catch the train?” I
asked.

“I don’t know. It was midday,” he
answered.

I guessed that he’d probably taken the 12:00
train to London.

I had just missed him by one train since I
had taken the 10:30. I couldn’t believe my bad luck. If I’d just
waited, we could have been together.

“So you arrived in London. It was a little
different than you’d remembered?” I asked, thinking of the
thirteenth-century map I’d found online before the trip. I couldn’t
help but smile.

He looked at me, grinning.

“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t know where anything
was, so I stopped a man on the street and asked him if he knew
you.”

I could just imagine the reaction that
Damien, with his strange, beautiful accent and even stranger
clothes, would have made. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have had the
armor to contend with since he’d been under torture in the castle.
I wondered if he’d had anything on at all, but I was too shy to
ask.

“So where did you go?”

“I wandered around the city for awhile and
then made my way to Westminster Abbey.”

I imagined it looked a lot different than it
had in the thirteenth century. I thought I’d remembered the tour
guide telling us that most of the church had been pulled down in
1245, so Damien likely wouldn’t have recognized it except, perhaps,
for the name.

“Did someone help you there?” I asked.

“Yes. A kind woman asked me to wait and then
said I could take a taxi to the police station when I told her I
was searching for you. I was beginning to understand that London
was not only completely different but also a much bigger city, much
larger than any I’d ever seen before. The buildings, all of them,
rise like cathedrals in the sky. And yet, they are not so
beautiful,” he finished, looking somewhat melancholy.

I thought that he likely meant skyscrapers,
which had a certain grace all their own, but not, of course, the
haunting beauty of a cathedral spire or castle tower.

“Everything moves so quickly, Emmeline, even
the people. They talk rapidly, sometimes to no one at all. It’s
difficult for me to catch everything they say. Many times, I
thought they were addressing me,” he said. Cell phones, I
thought.

I mentally kicked myself. I’d not anticipated
any of this when I cast the spell. Yes, he could speak modern
English, but that didn’t mean that he could process the speed with
which the modern world moved. Thirteenth-century England was a
vastly different age. I thought of the absolute quiet of the chapel
by the woods and of the merriment of the castle inhabitants in my
dream. With all the noise, cars, and people talking to the air on
their cell phones, it likely was a louder, more obnoxious, and more
quickly paced world than Damien could have ever imagined.

“How did you afford your taxi?” I asked,
guilty that I hadn’t thought ahead to the practical details. I’d
had months to prepare, and what did I do? Moon around the place,
worried I couldn’t bring him here. If I’d just known how successful
I would be, I could have planned better. As it was, Damien had had
to fend for himself. By the looks of things, though, it seemed like
he had done alright.

“I honestly don’t know,” he answered. “I
looked in my pocket, and there were strange coins and papers. I
recognized the coins for money, but I didn’t know the purpose of
the paper. The kind lady from the Abbey explained it to me,
welcoming me to the city and asking me where I was from. She was
quite surprised when I said England. ‘Country folk,’ she’d said in
a huff. ‘You couldn’t pay me to leave London.’ I think she thought
perhaps that I actually wasn’t from England.”

I could easily see that. His accent wasn’t
British, but it wasn’t anything else I recognized either. And then
I realized it sounded most like the recording Ms. May had played
once for us of someone reading Middle English when we’d studied
Chaucer. Except that he spoke modern words. He’d retained the
sounds of his dialect, just not the linguistic pattern. I was
fascinated. He rolled his “R’s” and put emphasis on the last
syllable of my name so that it sounded a little like Emily with an
“n” on the end. There was also something slightly French in the way
he spoke, and I remembered that all of the knights could speak
French and some of them, including Damien, had been trained in
Latin.

French, I’d read online, was still a primary
language spoken by the king, his nobles, and many of their knights
during the early thirteenth century. But I couldn’t say that
Damien’s accent was French precisely. It had the musicality of a
Romance language, but it reminded me also of Ireland—even though
I’d never visited. It was as though he’d combined the accents of
several languages, taking the best of them all for his speech. The
effect produced a slightly exotic, entirely erotic sound.

“When the taxi arrived,” he continued, “I
climbed in, not understanding what I was supposed to do. The driver
became a little frustrated but took me to the police station when I
told him I was looking for you.

“What happened then?”