A Midsummer's Day (26 page)

“Four years…  That’s longer than you’ve known me, you ass,” Sammie said.

Johnny chose to ignore that.  He wasn’t the one who was in the wrong.  “I answered your question.  You want to see the outside of this room again?  You better damn well answer mine.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you what you want to know.  But you won’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

It was amazing tale, full of intrigue and bull shit.  There was time travel.  Hiding and running and disguises.  Spending a non-existing night behind the mud pit stage.  There were death sentences and arrest warrants.  There was a corrupt Lord High Sheriff and a murderous Queen Elizabeth.  Sammie showed him again the scars on her wrist, which had appeared when Johnny shackled her to a wall in a dungeon beneath the drynke stand in the Dregs.

And then, he’d beaten the living tar out of her.

Wasn’t it amazing, then, that she didn’t have a single bruise on her?

“Well, don’t I sound like a monumental ass?” he asked at the end of the tall tale, which ended with him finding the two of them in the Pits.

“Because you’re not acting like one at all,” Vaughn said.

“You shut your mouth.”  Johnny stood.  “It would have been a lot easier if you’d just told me that you were having an affair.”  He walked to the door.

“And when were you planning on telling me about yours?” Sammie asked.

He forced himself not to turn back around.  “One of my constables will get you when it’s time for the dunke.  I’m sure you won’t mind the time to yourselves.”

<>

The door slammed.  The windows shook, and empty water bottles fell to the floor with plastic, hollow echoes.

“He’s unbelievable,” Sammie said.  “Completely unbelievable.  His affair was okay, but our kiss is so wrong?”

“He doesn’t think he has to take any responsibility because he doesn’t love her,” Vaughn said.

She sighed.  “At least I found out what he’s really like before we got married.”  She shuddered at the thought of marrying him now.  How horrible would it have been to marry that man?  How horrible would it have been to go through divorce proceedings once she found out who he really was?

“He was right about one thing, though,” Vaughn said. 

Sammie smiled.  She threw her legs over his and straddled him.  “That we’d enjoy some time to ourselves?”

“Damn straight.”  Vaughn put his lips on hers.

If only Johnny knew how right he was.  How mad would he be then?

Chapter 27

For the second time in as many hours, Sammie and Vaughn huddled close together in the holding cell on the dunking stage.

But, this time, the angry population of Nottingham was replaced with happy, excited tourists.  This time, it was Johnny, not Jameson Kent, who was giving the usual speech. 

Johnny was adamant in laying out the crimes of the lowly mud beggar Puck and the once noble and honorable Lady Anne Halloway.  There crimes were connected, so he introduced their crimes at the same time.  He built them up so much that Sammie and Vaughn, or their characters, Sammie forced herself to remember, seemed like spawns of the devil himself.  Every actor around the pond booed the couple.  The tourists joined in, and Johnny went on to explain the audience’s role as judge, jury, and executioner.

“Are you scared?”  Vaughn wrapped his arms around Sammie’s waist and rested his head on her shoulder.

“A little.”  She stared at the dunking chair as it sat on the stage.  The wood hadn’t even completely dried from the last dunke. 

It waited for her.  It waited to take her below the water, to a fate unknown.  She had no doubt that she would be the one pulled out of the stage first.  She would see the water first.

Would she come out of the water to the same reality?  Or to a different, more horrible one?

“He wouldn’t dare leave you below the water longer than you’re allowed,” Vaughn whispered.  “The dunkers would bring you up after thirty seconds regardless.”

“I know.  That’s not what scares me, though.”

She probably should have worried about just that, though.  Johnny was at a level of anger she’d never seen in him.  She knew what he was capable of.  She had seen it… in the eyes and the fists of Jameson Kent.

The same anger
now burned in her former fiancé
’s eyes.

Still, that wasn’t what scared her.

“It’s not that likely to happen again, Sam,” Vaughn said.  He could always read her mind.  “We were both in one form of water or another during both time changes.”

He was right.  Still…  “If I come out of the water and you’re Puck, I’m going to be pissed at you.”  They both laughed.

Johnny finished his speech.  He himself walked across the stage and pulled the cage door open.  He grabbed Sammie’s arm.

Vaughn grabbed the other.  “I love you,” he said.  But not in desperation.  A smile spread across his lips.

She wouldn’t wait until she was in the chair to say it this time.  “I love you too.”  She smiled, and let Johnny plop her roughly into the chair.

As soon as she’d touched down, the dunking crew lifted her into the air and swung her over the center of the pond.

“My Lady Anne Halloway,” Johnny said, resuming his role as the Lord High Sheriff Jameson Kent.  Not that it was a big stretch anymore.  “What hast thee to say to thy most wanton charges?”  It was the nicest way he could call her a whore in front of a hundred people.

Sammie took a deep breath.  She’d been trained to pull answers out of thin air.  But no matter what she said, she knew the water waited for her.  The audience never let anyone leave the pond dry.

“My Lord High Sheriff,” she said as the strong willed Lady Anne.  “A Lady shouldst choose her the man that she doth love.”

It was a dig straight at Johnny’s heart.  It was unavoidable.  There was nothing else to say after Johnny had spent so much time building up her crime of debauching herself with Puck.  She had no choice but to play it up.

Johnny didn’t send her to his briny deep immediately.  He went to the jury like he was supposed to.

The jury, of course, sealed her fate for him.

She fell through the air, hitting the water like a bullet.  She stopped moving.  She started to count in her head.

Ten came quickly.  At ten, she was pulled back up to the air.  So far, so good.

“My Lady Halloway,” Johnny said.  “What hast thee to say now?”

She pulled herself up to her full sitting height.  “My Lord High Sheriff,” she said through her shaking breath.  “Mayhap if thee sought not to dabble with the gypsies, thou wouldst have found me not in the arms of a beggar.”

The audience oohed and ahhed.  And then they sent her back down.

The chair rose once she reached twenty in her head.  She took a deep breath, relishing in every bit of air that she could.

The third dunke was next.  What would happen when she went down a third time?

“What hast thou to say, Lady Anne, now that thou hast seen the water twice?”  Johnny paced around the edge of the stage.

Sammie took a deep breath.  She stared at Vaughn.  She took in every detail of the face she’d known her whole life.  She wanted to remember things as they were now. 

Just in case.

“A woman has the right to follow her own heart,” she said so quietly she doubted anyone beyond Johnny could hear her.

She took a deep breath as the jury cast their verdict.  She disappeared beneath the water.

And counted to thirty.

She didn’t move.

Oh God.  This was bad.  This was really, really bad.  Johnny was going to do it.  He was going to leave her down here on purpose.  She was going to di…

At thirty two, the chair rose.  She squinted against the brightness of the sun.

Get a grip, Sammie, she told herself.  Slowly she opened her eyes.  She looked at the cage on the far end of the stage.

Vaughn smiled at her.  His hands gripped the bars so tightly that his knuckles had gone white.  He had worried, too.

But, on his pinky, the sun glinted off of her claddaugh ring.

Sammie smiled.  Things hadn’t changed.  Not much at all.

Chapter 28

She ran a brush through her hair one last time and threw it back into her locker.

It felt so good to be free of her dresses for another day.  To be free of her Court gown and its unbearably scratchy lace ruff, and to be free of her dunking gown.  She felt like another person entirely in a pair of denim capris, with a flowery tank top and her hair pulled back into a ponytail.  She slipped into a pair of white cushioned sandals, glad to give up her festival shoes for the day.  She felt like she’d had them on for two days straight.

She left the locker room, situated just outside the walls of the festival on the edge of the parking lot.  Had the building been there when the parking lot had changed to a never ending sea of white tents?  She didn’t remember seeing it.

Then again, she didn’t remembering registering anything that wasn’t completely horrible at the time, either.

Vaughn waited for her outside, looking sexy and comfortable in jeans and running shoes, wearing a pinstriped jersey from his favorite baseball team.  A navy two would be on the back of it.

Sammie smiled at him.  “What do we do now?” she asked.

“Is your asthma up for a walk?”

“Unlike my gowns, these come with pockets.”  She pulled her inhaler from her front pocket and smiled.

A smile played on his delicious lips.  “I thought we might take one last walk through the grounds before we leave for the day.”

Before we leave for the day.  We.  There was never a word that sent such happy shivers through her spine.  “All right,” she said, and took his hand.

The tourists were gone for the day.  The long paths were emptying.  Artisans closed up their shops and vendors closed up their food and drynke stands.  Cleaning crews stabbed plastic cups and paper food containers with long, pointed sticks.

Sammie and Vaughn turned down Caravan Way.  The soap seller and her husband were getting ready to leave Sundries Corner.  Did the woman know how much she’d helped them almost five hundred years ago?  Could she even imagine such a thing?

They walked past Boleyn Stage and Seymour Stage.  Just beyond was the building with the break room.  So many things had happened there.  Good things.  Bad things.

Nearly the last thing Sammie ever knew.

It was strange…  The thing that had almost been her undoing was her asthma.  Not the beatings.  Not spending so much time below water.  It was her asthma that had almost killed her.

They turned down Hill Street.  It was much easier going down than up.  It was much easier going her own pace rather than following the pace of a murderous freak.

In the end, they ended up exactly where she thought they might.  Exactly where she hoped they might.  They stood next to the mud stage and looked over the tall grass to the pond.  The water glistened like crystal as the sun moved slowly towards the horizon.

How safe had this sanctuary really been?  From their vantage point, Sammie could see everything.  The point where they’d had their picnic.  Where they’d slept overnight.  All it would have taken was one person at the stage to turn around, to look away from the festival, to see them.

They hadn’t really been all that safe.

“It’s a beautiful sight, isn’t it?”

Robert Hastings, the director of the Players, came up next to Sammie.  “It is beautiful,” she agreed.

“I like coming here before I leave for the night,” Robert said.  “Sometimes I come in the mornings, too.  Would you believe that somebody left a pile of blankets behind the stage?  I think some teenagers must have been fooling around behind here.”  He chuckled.

Sammie and Vaughn looked at each other.  “That is just so wrong,” Vaughn said.

“So what happened with you and Johnny, Sammie?” Robert asked.

She sighed.  It figured.  Of course that baby Johnny would have to go crying to the boss.  “It’s complicated,” she said.  She prayed he wouldn’t press any further.

Thankfully he didn’t.  “Well, I’m going to make things less complicated.  You’ve always wanted to be a faery.”

Oh my God.  Oh my God.  Oh my God.  This was the moment she’d waited for.  This was what she wanted since she joined the festival.  “Absolutely,” she said, her voice an octave higher than normal.

“Nymph came to me after closing and begged me to add you as a faery now.  She really loved it when you sang with her.”  Robert smiled.  “You are always one for surprises.  Never has a noble even interacted with the faery before.  Anyways, your costume is waiting for you in the locker room, and the faery are returning on Monday to practice with you.”  He leaned forward and kissed Sammie on the cheek.  “I know how much you wanted this.”

She was so happy that she felt drunk.  So she had no idea what brought the next words to her mouth.  “What about the Noble Ladies?”  She bit her tongue in time to keep from asking about Johnny.  The Lord High Sheriff would do well enough without a betrothed to hold him back.