Dougless grimaced. Stupid man! According to the cook, Arabella showed everything in her room to every male who visited Goshawk Hall. With a malicious little smile, Dougless began looking through her handbag. Smiling brightly, she walked into the parlor. Every light except one dim one was off, Arabella was pouring a water glass full of bourbon, and Nicholas sat on the sofa with his shirt half open.
“Oh, your lordship,” Dougless said briskly as she began going about the room turning on every light. “Here’s the calculator you wanted, but I’m afraid the only one I have is solar. It will only work in a brightly lit room.”
Nicholas stared with interest at the small calculator she handed him, and when she began to demonstrate it, his eyes turned to saucers. “One may add?”
“And subtract and multiply and divide. See, here’s your answer. Say you wanted to subtract this year, 1988, from 1564, the year your ancestor was accused of treason and lost his family’s fortune forever, you’d get a minus four hundred and twenty-four years. Four hundred and twenty-four years in which to right a wrong and keep your descendants from laughing at you—at him, I mean.”
“You,” Arabella said, so angry she could barely speak, “leave this room at once.”
“Uh-oh,” Dougless said innocently. “Was I disturbing the two of you? I’m so awfully sorry. I didn’t mean to. I was just doing my job.” She started backing toward the door. “Please carry on with what you were doing.”
Dougless left the room, walked down the hall a few feet, then tiptoed back to stand outside the door. She saw the shadows from the room darken.
“I need light,” Nicholas said. “The machine does not work without light.”
“Nicholas, for God’s sake, it’s only a calculator. Put it away.”
“It is a most wondrous machine. What is this mark?”
“It’s a percent sign but I can’t see what it matters now.”
“Demonstrate its function.”
Dougless could hear Arabella’s sigh through the walls. Smiling, quite pleased with herself, Dougless continued her search for Lee’s room. He greeted her wearing, of all things, a silk smoking jacket. Dougless refrained from giggling. One look at his face and at the martini glass he held, and Dougless knew that he had no intention of talking to her about anything except why she should jump into bed with him. She took the martini he offered her, sipped it, then grimaced. She hated martinis, dry or otherwise.
Lee started by telling her how beautiful her hair was, how surprised he was to find such a stunning woman in this moldy old house, what a great dresser she was, and how little her feet were. Dougless could have yawned. Instead, when he refilled her glass, she surreptitiously took two of her stomach tranquilizers from her bag, opened the capsules, and poured them into Lee’s drink. “Bottoms up,” she said cheerfully.
While she was waiting for the pills to take effect, she showed Lee the note Nicholas had slipped under her door the night before. “What does this say?”
He glanced at it. “I think I should write the translation.” He took a pen and paper and wrote:
I think my selfe moch
bownden unto yow.
I am Desyrynge yo
assystance no further.
“Desyrynge?”
“Deserving.”
She had come close to guessing what Nicholas had written last night when he’d left her, before she’d found him in a tavern.
Yawning, Lee rubbed his hand over his eyes. “I feel a little—” He yawned again.
With many apologies, he stood up, then went to the bed and stretched out “for just a minute.” He was asleep instantly, and Dougless quickly went to the little wooden chest on the table near the fireplace.
The papers inside were old, yellow, and brittle, but the writing was clear, the ink not faded as modern inks faded in a mere year or two. Dougless eagerly grabbed the papers, but her heart sank as she looked at them. They were in the same kind of handwriting as the note Nicholas had slipped under her door, and she couldn’t read a word.
She was bent over the papers, trying to decipher a word here and there, when suddenly the door burst open.
“Ah ha!” Nicholas said, his sword in his hand, as he charged into the room.
When Dougless’s heart settled back in place from the fright he’d given her, she smiled at him. “Arabella finish with you?”
Nicholas looked from Lee asleep on the bed to Dougless bending over the papers, and began to look embarrassed. “She was off to bed,” he said.