Out of the Blue (A Regency Time Travel Romance) (15 page)

“In the morning,” Marcus agreed, watching
Peregrine’s departing back before reaching to the table beside him
and picking up one of the two strangely put together books he had
found in Cassandra’s purse. The books, called
Travel Guides,
one concentrating on London and the other a general compendium to
all of England, had kept him busy most of that afternoon,
engrossing him with their strange pictures and stranger words until
well after the dinner gong rang. He had read nearly half of the
London guide before Goodfellow came looking for him, discreetly
pointing out that the family had all been gathered in the drawing
room for some time.

Now, at last convinced he would not be
disturbed for the remainder of the evening, he pushed away all
thoughts of Peregrine, Aunt Cornelia, Cassandra, and her outrageous
proposal, and opened the larger of the two booklets, the one
dealing with England in general. A few minutes later Goodfellow
tiptoed in, placed a fresh decanter of brandy on the table beside
his master, and tiptoed out again. The marquess did not even notice
his presence. Turning page after page, Marcus at last came to a
section on Sussex.

Later, just as the tall clock in the far
corner of the room struck the hour of twelve, Marcus Pendelton,
Marquess of Eastbourne, placed a slightly trembling finger on page
214 and traced each and every word once, then twice, and then a
third time.
Cassandra has told me that she is frightened, and
justly so,
he thought.
Would it reassure her, I wonder, to
learn that she is no longer the only person in this house to be
experiencing some niggling concern for the future and their place
in it?

“W
here does a
two-thousand-pound canary sit?”

Marcus looked up from his notes and peered at
her across the desk. “I haven’t the foggiest notion, Cassandra,” he
answered in the same slightly exasperated tone he might use when
dealing with a precocious but well-loved child. “Where
does
a two-thousand-pound canary sit?”

Grinning, for she had been trying without
visible success to gain his attention for the past twenty minutes,
Cassandra fell back in her chair, spread her arms wide, and
announced gleefully, “Anywhere he wants to!”

Marcus directed a long, dispassionate stare
at her. “And this passes for amusement in your time? Interesting.”
With that, and still remarkably straight-faced, he returned his
attention to the papers on the desk.

“Well, I for one don’t understand,” Aunt
Cornelia said a moment later from her own perch on the window seat.
“Why wouldn’t it sit in the trees? You make precious little sense
at times, gel.”

Cassandra hopped out of the chair and looked
at each of them in turn; then shrugged, taking her comedic failure
in stride. “Tough room,” she remarked as if to herself as she
approached the desk and picked up a small jar holding what appeared
to be a long-dead frog. “I could trot out a little Eddie Murphy, I
suppose, but I don’t think you guys are ready for that yet.”

“If this Murphy fellow is anything like that
woman, Lucille Ball, whose Italian vineyard antics you reported to
me yesterday, then no, Cassandra, I do not believe we English are
as yet ‘ready’ for such humor.” Marcus stabbed one of the papers
with his forefinger. “For now, I should like to get back to our
discussion of twentieth-century architecture, if you please. We
spoke of skyscrapers yesterday, but I am still having some trouble
imagining the form. Perhaps if you’d draw one for me?”

“I hear and obey, O master,” she said as she
bowed in his direction. Her smile fading, Cassandra dutifully
picked up the sketchbook Marcus had given her and a stick of
charcoal and retired to the opposite end of the window seat, which
was still occupied by Aunt Cornelia, her self-appointed chaperon
and near-constant companion these past three weeks.

And what a wild three weeks they had been,
beginning with Marcus’s confession to his relative that they were
harboring a bona fide time traveler beneath their roof. After that
flabbergasted woman had recovered from her swoon, it had taken her
no more than a few days to pass from disbelief to concern, then to
out-and-out delight. She had pestered Cassandra nearly every waking
moment with penetrating questions about people, fashions, and
scandals that might be of interest to “an old woman who must take
her delights where she can.”

Peregrine Walton, relieved of his position of
“cousin,” at least within the confines of the Grosvenor Square
mansion, had become a good friend. He was always there to save
Cassandra from herself whenever, as she still did, she suffered a
mental lapse and went groping for a light switch as she entered a
darkened room, or forgot herself and asked one of the servants if
she could have a Coke with her dinner. Although obviously still
nervous around her, Peregrine had announced only the other day that
he believed Cassandra to be “a ripping good sport about the thing,”
for he, if landed in a similar situation, “should surely have
slipped my wits by now.”

And there had been times when Cassandra might
have agreed with Peregrine’s assessment of the effects of time
travel. As March gave way to early April, she had wondered more
than once whether this whole affair was nothing more than a bad
dream, and she had been the victim of some freak accident—like
walking in front of a bus—and she was actually lying in a coma
somewhere.

But that wasn’t her only theory. After all,
the characters who resided in Grosvenor Square with her could have
been drawn from any of several dozen characters she had read about
as she edited books for the Mayfair line. Perhaps her familiarity
with the architecture, the furnishings, the food, the fashions—and,
most especially, the eccentric characters of the time—had combined
with her presence in London to make her believe she had actually
traveled through time, when all she had really done was to take a
nose dive down those curving stairs in the White Tower. She might
really be confined to an asylum and was mistaking the nurses and
doctors for real Regency people.

For some reason the idea of an asylum seemed
preferable to being locked in a coma in a hospital. At least she
was eating well.

It was only Marcus’s presence in her life
that kept her from putting too much credence in either theory. Yes,
she might have dreamed up a devastatingly handsome Regency hero
along with all the others, but Marcus was unlike any Regency hero
she had ever encountered in her authors’ books. Regency heroes,
after all, were by and large arrogant sorts and spent their time
going to balls, and sparring with Gentleman Jackson, and going to
cockfights, and caring more for their wardrobes and their
mistresses and their horseflesh than they did about the effect of
sunlight on mushrooms or the reason Roman roads still survived
while many newer, English-built roads were constantly in need of
repair.

In short, the man was a bottomless pit of
curiosity on every subject from war to morals to literature to
politics to imagining the possibility of traveling through time. In
the past three weeks she had more than once felt as if she had been
turned inside out and upside down by his questions, his constant
probing, his insatiable appetite for learning all he could about
her world. And he had absorbed the information she had given him
like a thirsty sponge; he had assimilated knowledge with an ease
that fascinated her. Patiently, and while taking copious notes on
all she said, he had led her through the subjects of electricity,
transportation, television, the two world wars, the latest
antibiotics, organ transplantation, the diminishing rain forests,
and even nuclear energy and space travel.

He did, however, become upset when she could
not go into detail on some subject that interested him—resorting to
taunts as to the quality of the college education she had received
in “the colonies.” When he had laid her solar calculator in front
of her and demanded she explain how it worked, she had apologized
through clenched teeth that she had not had the foresight to bring
a set of encyclopedias with her when she entered the blue mist, a
remark that had only led him to pick up his pen once more and
inquire into what advancements had been made in the area of
publishing.

Between questions concerning her “time,” she
received lessons from Aunt Cornelia and Marcus in the proper
behavior of a young lady in Regency times—schooling her in matters
of deportment, the importance of titles, and explaining the
intricacies of morning visits and calling cards. Cassandra had
fallen into bed each night exhausted, too tired to cry, too worn
out to worry as to whether or not her stay in Regency England was
indeed to be permanent.

Her gorgeous new wardrobe had arrived, but
that didn’t mean that Marcus had allowed her any more fresh air
than she could breathe while pacing like a prisoner inside his
walled garden. Her only contacts with the outside world had been
the half dozen or so merchants summoned to the house to supplement
her wardrobe with various pelisses, reticules, scarves, gloves,
boots, and bits of intimate apparel, and a French hairdresser who
had wrung his hands at the sad state of her hair for nearly an hour
before taking ten or twelve infinitesimal snips at it, standing
back, and announcing that she was now
ravissante.

She had become accustomed to the formality of
their everyday meals, the pomp and ceremony that accompanied the
serving of each lush course, and she now believed being served hot
chocolate in bed every morning and stepping straight from her
prepared tub—to be wrapped in a fluffy, warmed towel before being
led to a dressing table where Rose lovingly dried and brushed her
hair—beat the hell out of grabbing a quick shower and wolfing down
a strawberry Pop Tart before racing for the subway.

But, as Cassandra well knew, she was not a
happy camper, no matter how luxurious her life had become from the
moment she stepped out of the marquess’s carriage in front of the
stone steps that led up to the mansion in Grosvenor Square.

For she was a prisoner, not only in time, but
in this same mansion. Her outburst that first day—she knew her
behavior at the time had been shocking—had led her to make Marcus a
startling proposition, and now, three weeks later, she was still
waiting for an answer. Yes, their possible betrothal had been a
spur-of-the-moment inspiration and, yes, she had known how forward
she was, lying on the bed with him, deliberately toying with his
cravat and his emotions, but she had been desperate.

She was still desperate, and Marcus had
avoided being alone with her ever since that night, as if she might
attack him if neither Aunt Cornelia nor Peregrine were present.

The whole situation was beginning to prey on
her nerves.

“There,” she announced mere moments later,
rising from the window seat to take the sketchbook to Marcus.
“
That’s
a skyscraper. It’s called a skyscraper because it’s
so high it looks as if it touches the sky.”

Marcus took the sketchbook and studied the
drawing carefully before looking up at her severely. “I believe I
recall telling you that I don’t appreciate being fobbed off with
fanciful fibs whenever you become bored with my questions. It was
bad enough when you tried to tell me that you can send printed
pages from one country to another through wires—”

“It’s called a fax machine, Marcus, and it
does work,” Cassandra protested, interrupting him “I’m sorry if I
can’t tell you how, but it does.”

“Don’t attempt to distract me,” he warned,
turning the sketchbook upside down, as if looking at it from
another angle might improve matters. “This is not a building,
Cassandra. This is nothing but a rectangle with squares inside
it.”

“Those aren’t squares, Marcus, they’re
windows. The whole building is almost nothing but windows. And
nearly all skyscrapers look like rectangles.”

He eyed her quizzically. “Where are the
columns, the pediments, the buttresses, the domes? This is all so
unremittingly plain, so ugly. And you call this progress?” He shook
his head, throwing down the book.

Cassandra agreed with him, but she wasn’t
going to give him the satisfaction of admitting it. “Hey, you
asked” was all she said as she took her seat in front of the
desk.

“She’s right, you know, Marcus,” Aunt
Cornelia said from the window seat. “I don’t know why you go on and
on, day in, day out, about such unimportant matters. I haven’t
given up my lifelong habit of staying abed until noon to hear about
obese canaries. Now, if you ask me, Sally Jersey’s fate is much
more to the point. My dear gel, can’t you recall what happened to
her?”

Cassandra turned to look at the older woman,
once more amazed by her erect posture and stern features, a façade
of sophistication that, if she were to have been born in the
twentieth century, would have hidden the heart of an avid reader of
supermarket tabloids. “Sorry, Aunt Cornelia. All I can remember is
that she once had an affair with your Regent, people called her
‘Silence’ because she talked all the time, and she was a patroness
of Almack’s. Marcus,” she said, turning back to him in sudden
anticipation, “will you be able to get me a voucher to Almack’s?
I’d kill to see that place.”

“I doubt you will have to resort to
bloodshed, my dear, as I do, for my sins, travel in the first
circles,” Marcus answered, his tone so calm, so controlled, that
Cassandra longed to jolt him into awareness of her by doing
something totally outrageous. She settled for crossing her legs so
that her ankle showed below her hem, a move she had already learned
seemed to rob Marcus of some of his thirst for knowledge. It
worked. Turning away, he said, “Cassandra, please,” as if this was
sufficient to correct her wanton behavior. “I thought you had come
to understand at least the rudiments of correct posture.”