“I will have a lifetime in which to make you forgive me.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes. It will take a lifetime.”
He glanced at the lightening sky. “We must go. I must tell my mother what I have done. Kit will no doubt be here soon.”
“They will be very angry. And my part in this won’t help matters any.”
“You must go to Kit with me. I will be shameless. I will tell my brother he must give us a place to live in memory of your saving him.”
Dougless looked up at the sky, saw it was growing lighter by the minute. She could almost believe she was going to be able to stay with him. “We’ll live in a pretty little house somewhere,” she said, her words beginning to gain speed. “We’ll have only a few servants, fifty or so,” she said, smiling. “And we’ll have a dozen kids. I like kids. And we’ll educate them properly and teach them how to wash. Maybe we can invent a flush toilet.”
Nicholas chuckled. “You wash too much. My sons will not—”
“Our sons. I’m going to have to explain to you about women’s equality.”
He stood up, then pulled her into his arms. “Will this explaining take long?”
“About four hundred years,” she whispered.
“Then I will give you the time.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “Time. We will have all the time we need.”
He kissed her then, kissed her long and hard and deeply; then his kiss lightened. “Forever,” he whispered. “I will love you throughout time.”
One moment Dougless was in his arms, his lips on hers, and the next she was in the church at Ashburton, and outside a jet flew overhead.
THIRTY - THREE
Dougless didn’t cry. What she was feeling was too deep, too profound for her to cry. She was sitting on the floor in the little church in Ashburton, and she knew that behind her was Nicholas’s marble tomb. She couldn’t bear to look at it, couldn’t bear to see the warm flesh of Nicholas translated into cold marble.
She sat where she was for a while and looked at the church. It looked so old and so plain. There was no color on the beams or on the walls, and the stone floors looked bare with no rushes on them. In the first pews were some needlepointed pillows, and now they looked crude. She was used to seeing Lady Margaret’s women’s exquisite needlework.
When the door of the church opened and the vicar came in, Dougless sat where she was.
“Are you all right?” the vicar asked.
At first Dougless couldn’t understand him. His accent and his pronunciation were foreign sounding. “How long have I been here?” she asked.
The vicar frowned. This young woman was so very strange. She walked in front of speeding vehicles, she insisted she was with a man when she was alone, and now she had just walked into the church and was asking how long she had been here. “A few minutes, no more,” he answered.
Dougless gave a weak smile. A few minutes. A lifetime in the sixteenth century and she had been away only a few minutes. When she tried to stand, her legs were weak and the vicar helped her rise.
“Perhaps you should see a doctor,” the vicar said.
A psychiatrist perhaps, Dougless almost answered. If she told her story to a psychiatrist, would he write a book and make what happened to Dougless into a Movie-of-the-Week? “No, I’m fine, really,” she whispered. “I just need to get back to my hotel and—” And what? What was there for her to do now that Nicholas was gone? She took a step forward.
“Don’t forget your bag.”
Dougless turned to see her old tote bag on the floor by the tomb. The contents of that bag had helped her throughout her time in the Elizabethan age. Looking at it, she felt a closeness to the bag. It had been where she had been. She went to it and on impulse unzipped the top of it. She didn’t have to inspect the contents to know that everything was there. The bottle of aspirin was full; none of the pills she had given away were missing. Her toothpaste tube was full, not flat. No cold tablets were missing, no pages gone from her notebook. Everything was as it had been.
She lifted the tote bag, slung the strap onto her shoulder, then turned away. But abruptly, she halted; then she turned and glanced back at the base of the tomb. Something was different. She wasn’t at first sure what it was, but something had changed.
Careful not to look at the sculpture of Nicholas, she stared at the base.
“Is something wrong?” the vicar asked.
Dougless read the inscription twice before she realized what was different. “The date,” she whispered.