Timeless (26 page)

“I entered the building, and a man in a
uniform approached me, relief on his face. He asked my name, and I
reluctantly gave it.”

“What did you say?” I asked. Damien had had
no surname in our past life. Was it Montavere?

“I’m guessing you thought better of it?” I
asked.

“I did at first, not knowing the man, but
then I thought it might help. I didn’t think that the world had
changed so much that England no longer respected a knight of the
realm,” he said.

In a way, he was right. The Queen did still
bestow knighthoods, but men no longer earned them the way Damien
had. I didn’t have the heart to tell him. There would be time for
that later.

“I told him I was Sir Damien, the Black
Knight of Montavere, and he looked suitably impressed, despite my
shabby appearance,” Damien continued.

I smiled, wondering what they must have
thought of his thirteenth-century title.“Another man came up to me
at the station. ‘You are Sir Damien?’ he asked. ‘I am,’ I replied.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said. I had no idea who he was or
where he came from, but the man seemed to know me. ‘Can I be of
service to you?’ I asked him. ‘No, but I think I can be of service
to you. I’d begun to think you were a missing person and came to
file a report,’ he told me. How could this be so, I thought? I’d
only just arrived.”

“No, indeed,” I agreed. “So who was this
man?”

“A solicitor. That’s a man of law.”

“Yes, I know, dear,” I said, hiding my smile.
“What did he want?”

“It seems that I inherited a chateau in the
Loire valley and a townhome in London.”

My jaw dropped. My spell had worked wonders I
hadn’t even imagined; this magic was more powerful than I’d thought
possible.

“Who left it to you? Did you visit it?” I
asked eagerly.

“Not yet. I wanted to find you first. Madame
Rose de Lioncoeur, English wife to a French ambassador. She died
leaving no children, spouse, or other relatives but me. I had only
to claim it.”

I wondered who Rose de Lioncoeur was, but I’d
shelve that question for now.

“But how could you prove your identity with
no license or photo ID?” I asked.

“That’s the strange part,” he answered.

Really? That was the strange part of the
story?

“I put my hands in my pocket and pulled out a
small book. Here it is,” he said.

He handed me what looked like his passport,
complete with his picture, birth date, and country of origin. It
seemed that Damien de Lioncoeur had been born in Salisbury, England
on December 8, 1993. It had been stamped by customs officials in
Philadelphia.

I smiled.

“I’m older than you,” I teased.

My birthday was November 5, 1993. It was
ludicrous, really, I thought. He’s nearly eight hundred years old,
yet I was older than he was.

“Now, Emmeline, let’s not go into that
again,” he said, putting his passport away.

I stopped short, realizing that I must have
been older than him in my past life, too. Did that make me nearly
eight hundred years old also?

“It seems that Madame de Lioncoeur died
several months before,” Damien explained. “Once I’d proven my
identity, it was only a matter of retrieving the keys to the
townhome. Rose and her husband, Armand, stayed there when they
weren’t at Lion-sur-Loire, their chateau near Tours. I haven’t
traveled there yet, but from what they showed me, it looks like a
large, grand home, Emmeline, with pepper-pot turrets, gardens, and
a flowing fountain. I hope to take you there someday,” he said,
full of pride.

“Me too,” I thought, completely overwhelmed.
Did Damien have some other past, some family I didn’t know about?
I’d certainly never thought about any of this.

We had had a definite role reversal. Now he
was the wealthy noble, while I was, well, just plain old Emily St.
Clair. I understood what he must have felt in my past life—or was
it my present?

“The solicitor called a taxi to take me to
Belgravia, near Hyde Park. Here, I have a painting,” he said,
taking out a photograph from his pocket.

The size of the home astounded me. The
manicured lawn and roses looked like a brochure. We’d been to
London, but beyond watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham
Palace, I hadn’t seen anything of this upscale part of London.
Damien must be worth a fortune.

The townhome stood three stories high, or was
it four? Large Corinthian columns lined the front door, which
overlooked a courtyard and rose garden, enclosed by a black,
wrought-iron fence.

“So what happened next?” I wondered, nearly
speechless with all of this. Who was Damien?

“I rang the front doorbell, and we were
greeted by another man in a uniform,” Damien continued.

The butler, I presumed.

“Conrad was most helpful, filling in the
information I needed, helping me to find appropriate clothes and
make travel plans once we’d found you.”

“How did you know where to look?” I
asked.

“Conrad helped me to hire a private
investigator who looked for every Emmeline de Vere in England,
Scotland, and Wales. There aren’t any.”

“So how did you find me?”

“I contacted the man who found me in the
woods again. He thought he remembered that the red-haired girl’s
name was Emily St. Clair. ”

I felt an eerie chill. How did this man know
me? I was sure I hadn’t told him anything about myself.

“Once we had your name, it was relatively
simple to locate you here in Florida.” He drew out Flo-ri-da.I
remembered that in 1216 America hadn’t yet been discovered. Florida
wasn’t even an idea yet to Europeans then.

“You must have done this all in just a matter
of days,” I said, amazed at the speed with which he had found
me.

“I must give Conrad the credit. He arranged
the details for me, and I came over immediately.”

“Where did you get the car?”

“Conrad purchased it for me in London, then
had it shipped here and ready for me at the airport.”

“But how did you know how to drive?” I
wondered.

“It isn’t all that hard, you know,” he said.
“Not nearly as hard as learning to handle a horse.”

I laughed.

“I guess not,” I said.

“I also have a driver. I’m still learning,
but I did drive over here myself,” he told me proudly. My jaw
dropped. A driver?

I got up and stared out of the window.

“Is he waiting inside the car?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“Then where is he?”

“At the house,” he said quietly. “I’m still
learning, but I felt sure enough to drive these smaller roads. And
I wanted to come alone.”

“The house? What house?”

“The one I had Conrad purchase for me.”

“You bought a house?”

I realized I was repeating everything he
said. But it was too much to comprehend all at once. He’d traveled
through time, discovered that he’d inherited what appeared to be a
fortune, found me halfway across a world that he hadn’t known
existed, traveled in an airplane, bought the nicest car I’d ever
seen, and now he was telling me he’d bought a house—all in the
space of a week. Was there anything he couldn’t do?

“Where is it?” I asked.

“About twenty minutes from here. It’s large,
white—quite lovely—and very private. It’s surrounded by blooming
gardens.”

Sugar Hill. Set on an incline on the banks of
the St. Johns River, it had become a tourist spot in DeLand, and as
far as I knew, still belonged to old Mr. Ramsey, who hired high
school students every spring and summer to work in the gardens
during peak tourist season. The plantation dated back to the
eighteenth century and had, at one time, produced sugar cane,
though it had long ceased to exist as a working plantation.

The house itself was white and featured a
two-story, wrap-around porch. Every girl in DeLand dreamed of
getting married there. I’d been several times on class trips over
the years, and Ben had taken me once to see the azaleas in bloom.
The plantation was vastly reduced in size from its early days, but
it was still a considerable estate.

“I didn’t know it was for sale,” I said,
puzzled by what he’d told me.

“It wasn’t. Conrad can be very
persuasive.”

I couldn’t imagine how much money Damien had
spent to buy it, and I was afraid to ask. Wealth had been a sore
spot in our relationship before; I didn’t want it ever to be
again.

I could hear Aunt Jo drive up in the
Saratoga. We were running out of time.

“I should go,” he said, but we were both
reluctant to part.

“What if you leave out the front and then
come back once we turn off the lights? Or better yet, come back in
about fifteen minutes. I’ll sneak out and meet you down the road,”
I suggested.

He looked at me, more than a little
surprised.

“Emmeline, anything could happen to you out
there,” he said, waving his hand in the general direction of the
night.

I looked at him skeptically. I guess he had a
point, but really, this was DeLand.

“We’re not finished, Damien. There are things
that I need to tell you,” I said.

“I know,” he replied quietly.

“Damien,” I gulped, suddenly nervous. This
was going to be hard. “I’m a witch.”

“I know,” he said.

That surprised me.

“You do?”

I heard Aunt Jo’s keys turning the lock at
the front door. I quickly kissed Damien, knowing I wouldn’t be able
to once she walked inside.

She came in and looked at us, but she wasn’t
surprised. The Audi was still parked out front.

“Emily, it’s after eleven. Your…friend…will
have to leave,” she began in a no-nonsense tone.

She saw my crestfallen face.

“He can come back tomorrow,” she assured
me.

Damien stood up, helping me to rise as well.
He kissed my hand.

“Ladies,” he began, “I bid you
goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” we said in unison, our eyes
following him to the door. Before he left, he’d taken both of my
Aunt’s hands into his and kissed them as well. He was, by far, the
most charming person I’d ever met. There was something wonderfully
old-fashioned about his manners. Then again, old-fashioned was an
understatement considering our past.

I could tell that Aunt Jo was remembering
boys, specifically one boy, from a different time. She had never
married—her fiancé had tragically died before their wedding some
fifty years before. I’d never understood why she didn’t show any
interest in other boys. Now I knew. If I lost Damien, I wouldn’t
want anyone else either.

I put my hand on her shoulder and squeezed. I
knew what it was to lose the person closest to you. Time didn’t
heal all wounds.

Chapter Thirteen

"The New World"

With the drawing of this Love and the voice
of this

Calling

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

I decided to ditch school the next week. Even
if I had been able to concentrate on what we were covering in
classes, Damien needed my help. The butler he’d inherited in London
had gotten him this far, but Damien needed a crash course in modern
life. Even Conrad wouldn’t have understood how, as a modern
teenager, he didn’t know about televisions, radios, computers, or
cell phones.

And there were also things about me that
Damien needed to know first. First, he thought I’d actually escaped
somehow, like him, from the thirteenth century and Lamia. I
supposed he’d drawn his own conclusions once the shock of finding
himself alone in the ruins of the castle had worn off. Evidently,
those conclusions involved regarding me as a witch. I was more than
a little upset by this, even though it was true. While someone
today might laugh—I know I had when I’d first entered Ramona’s
store—a thirteenth-century knight would have regarded a witch as a
perilous creature of the night, the next thing to Satan himself.
True, it hadn’t affected his feelings for me; he’d located me
within the inside of a week, an impressive feat given that he’d
just arrived, bruised, beaten, and otherwise tortured, from another
century. But it was something we had to talk about.

Not surprisingly, I decided against telling
Aunt Jo I was skipping school. I got up at my usual time and drove
the Saratoga down to the outskirts of town. Sugar Hill wasn’t a
long ride out, but it also wasn’t just around the corner. I enjoyed
the scenery as I entered the estate grounds. The drive wended
through woods that gave way to the more formal gardens I’d
remembered visiting several years before. I couldn’t believe Damien
actually lived here.

The black Audi was nowhere in sight. I
remembered that there were stables that Mr. Ramsey had converted
into a garage, so I assumed Damien parked his car there—or had his
driver park it for him. I shook my head in disbelief at the
abundance of his wealth. I had been concentrating pretty hard that
day, I thought. While I hadn’t consciously thought to make him
wealthy, I did want him to have everything he hadn’t had in his
past life.

He was out the front door and down the steps
before I could get out of the car, opening the door for me and
helping me up. He looked down at me, a frown on his face.

“Emmeline, do you always walk around half
naked?” he asked, a stern look in his eyes.

I looked down at my shorts. The weatherman
had forecasted eighty-eight degrees as the high, and my shorts
weren’t that short. All in all, I thought my sleeveless white top,
khaki shorts, and sandals were entirely respectable unless you were
very old fashioned. And besides, it was the only clean outfit I
had. In all the excitement of his return, I’d forgotten the more
mundane parts of my life, like laundry.