How could he have grown his beard back so soon?
“Nicholas?” she asked. “When you were last home, not the first time you came to me, but this time, what year was it?”
Nicholas slipped a short cloak of black satin that was trimmed in ermine about his shoulders, and from behind the bushes he pulled a horse, an animal as wild-looking as the rented Sugar had been. Easily, he vaulted into a saddle that was as big as an American cowboy’s saddle, but it had tall wooden uprights in front of and in back of the seat. “When last I was home this morn, it was the year of our Lord 1560. Now, you, witch, get from my sight.”
Dougless had to step back against the bushes to keep from being run down by the horse. “Nicholas, wait!” she called, but he was gone.
Disbelieving, Dougless stared after him until he was little more than a speck on the horizon; then she sat down on a big rock, her head in her hands. Now what? she thought. Did she have to start all over again and explain to him yet again all about the twentieth century? The last time she’d seen him, he’d come from 1564, but this time it was four years earlier. What had happened hadn’t happened yet.
Her head came up. Of course! That was it. When he’d found out about Robert Sydney, he’d been in jail—or the medieval equivalent thereof—and he couldn’t do much about saving himself. But this time he’d come forward four years earlier. Now there was time to prevent what had caused his execution.
Feeling a great deal more cheerful, she stood up. She had to go find him before he did something dumb, like walk in front of a bus again. Picking up her heavy tote bag from the ground, she slung it over her shoulder, then started walking in the direction Nicholas had gone.
The road was the worst she’d ever seen: deep ruts, rocks sticking up, narrow and weed-choked. The roads in rural America weren’t this bad, and she’d never seen anything like this before in England.
She stepped to the side of the road when she heard a vehicle coming around a corner. A tired-looking donkey was pulling a cart that had two big wooden wheels. Beside the cart walked a man wearing a short dress that looked as though it’d been made from a burlap bag. His legs, bare from mid-calf down, had great ugly sores on them. Dougless stared at him in openmouthed astonishment, and the man turned and gaped at her in the same way. His face was like leather, and when he opened his mouth, Dougless could see rotten teeth. He looked her up and down, his eyes fastening on her stocking-clad legs; then he leered at her, grinning and showing off his hideous teeth.
Quickly, Dougless turned away and started walking rapidly. The road got worse, the ruts deeper, and there was manure everywhere. “England’s using manure to fill the ruts now?” she muttered.
At the top of a little hill she stopped and looked down. Below her were three little houses, tiny places with thatched roofs and bare ground in front of them where chickens and ducks and children scratched about. A woman wearing a long skirt came out the front door of one hut and emptied a round container beside the door.
Dougless started down the hill. Perhaps she could ask directions of the woman. But as she neared the houses, she slowed. She could smell the place. Animals, people, rotting food, piles of manure, all of it reeked. Dougless put her hand to her nose and breathed through her mouth. Really! she thought, the English government should do something about this place. People shouldn’t live like this.
She went to the first house, trying to keep her shoes clean but not succeeding very well. A child, about three, wearing a filthy nightgown, looked up at her. The poor thing looked as though it hadn’t been washed in a year, and it obviously wasn’t wearing a diaper. Dougless vowed that when she got Nicholas straightened out, she was going to complain about this place to the English government. It was a health hazard.
“Excuse me,” she called into the dark interior of the house. It didn’t seem to smell much better inside than out. “Hello? Is anybody home?”
No one answered, but Dougless felt as though she were being watched. When she turned, she saw three wo
men and a couple of children behind her. The women weren’t any cleaner than the child she’d seen, their long dresses encrusted with food and no telling what else.
Dougless tried smiling. “Excuse me, but I’m looking for the Ashburton church. I seem to have lost my way.”
The women didn’t speak, but one woman stepped toward Dougless. It was difficult to keep smiling, for the woman reeked of body odor.
“Do you know the way to Ashburton?” Dougless repeated.
The woman just walked around Dougless, staring at her, looking at her clothes, her hair, her face.
“A bunch of looney tunes,” Dougless muttered. Living in filth as they did, they probably weren’t too bright. She stepped away from the stinking woman and unzipped her tote bag. The woman jumped back at the sound. Dougless took out her map of southern England and looked at it, but it didn’t help any because she didn’t know where she was, so she couldn’t figure out how to get where she was going.
She lowered the map when she realized one of the women was very near, her head almost inside Dougless’s bag. “I beg your pardon,” she said sharply. The woman’s head was covered with a cloth that was caked with dirt and grease.
The woman jumped away but not before she’d snatched Dougless’s sunglasses from her bag. She ran back to the other women, and the three of them examined the glasses.
“This is too much.” Dougless strode toward the women, her foot slipping in something, but she didn’t look down. “May I have those back?”
The women looked at her with hard faces. One of them had deep, pitted scars on her neck, and she held the sunglasses behind her back.
Dougless put her hands to her sides. “Would you please return my property?”
“Be gone with you,” one of the women said, and Dougless saw that three upper teeth were missing and two others were rotten.
It was then that she began to understand. She looked at the house before her, saw the firewood stacked outside, saw the onions hanging from the roof. The dirt, the carts, the people who had never heard of a dentist.
“Who is your queen?” she whispered.
“Elizabeth,” one woman said in an odd accent.