Timestruck (4 page)

“That number! It’s the same number I
mistakenly typed into the computer. What have I done to
myself?”

“What is a computer?” asked Dominick.

“It’s a machine. If my suspicions are right,
there is no way I can possibly explain it to you. You don’t even
have electricity. Or indoor plumbing.” She twisted her hands
together to stop them from shaking.

“I don’t wish to alarm you, but it’s plain to
me that you are not in your right mind,” Dominick said in a
soothing tone of voice. “After speaking with you, I think I
understand why. I see how unpleasantly thin you are, and how
closely your hair has been cut, most likely to conserve your
strength. Those signs, added to your confusion, must be the results
of a debilitating sickness. Perhaps you contracted your illness
during the past winter, when the weather was so unusually cold and
snowy. What I do not understand is how or why you left your home,
how you traveled here to Feldbruck, which is far from any other
settlement, and how you got past my guards and into my room.”

“I fell through the roof,” she said.

“The ceiling is undamaged,” he pointed out
with calm reasonableness. “Or are you a sorceress?”

“No, definitely not,” she gasped. The next
thing she knew, he’d be burning her at the stake. “I don’t know
anything about magic.”

“I choose to believe you,” he said, “for now.
I do wonder how you know your name – if Gina really is your name –
while making no sense at all when you attempt to answer my other
questions. But I assure you, I will learn how you reached
Feldbruck, whether you came here with companions, and, if so, where
they are. More important, I will learn why you are here.”

“No one came with me,” she said. “I’m alone.
Completely alone.”

His eyebrows rose in unconcealed disbelief.
He looked at her as if he was trying to read her very soul. Gina
kept her eyes locked on his, even though he was making her more
afraid than she already was. She didn’t dare tell him what she was
beginning to believe, that the computer in The Brown Detective
Agency had somehow sent her into the distant past.

She decided that until she could figure out
how to get back to the last day of the twentieth century, there was
only one thing to do. She was going to have to go along with
Dominick’s false conclusion and pretend to be a dazed creature
recovering from a dreadful illness. Considering how confused she
felt and how little she knew of the time and place where she found
herself, acting dazed wasn’t going to be difficult.

“You cannot continue to wear those garments,”
Dominick said, casting a disapproving eye upon Gina’s short black
skirt. “There is a trunk in one of the storerooms that ought to
have a dress or two in it that you can wear.”

“Oh, really? Do you keep extra clothing handy
in case a woman drops in on you unexpectedly?” She couldn’t believe
she’d said that. She sounded positively jealous. But she wasn’t.
She couldn’t be. It was just that her nerves were badly jangled.
She didn’t care how many females came to see him.

“It doesn’t happen very often,” he responded
dryly. “I will call one of my servants to help you.” He began to
pull on a pair of rough woolen trousers with a drawstring at the
waist.

“I don’t need help,” Gina told him, watching
with compulsive attention as he pulled the drawstring close around
his narrow midriff. “I can dress myself.”

“But not very well, as your present costume
proves.” He tucked his trousers into boots of soft brown leather,
then belted his tunic. ’’Please remain in this room until I return.
I fear your present appearance will shock my people, should anyone
see you.”

“You forgot your sword,” she said when he
opened the bedchamber door. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll use it against
you when you come back?”

He looked at the sword propped against the
wall, and then he looked at her as if he was seriously considering
the possibility.

“If you use both hands, you might be able to
pull it from the scabbard,” he said. “I doubt you are strong enough
to lift it without breaking one of your delicate wrists. Certainly
hands as small as yours are incapable of wielding so large a blade
forcefully enough to cause much damage. However, you are welcome to
try.”

With that he was gone, leaving her to wonder
whether he had intended an insult with those cracks about her
delicate wrists and small hands. She was as strong as any woman her
size. If he tried to touch her again, she’d prove how strong she
was. She’d jab him in the eye and knee him in the groin, and when
he doubled over she’d whack him in the back of the head with his
stupid sword.

She reached for the sword hilt, wanting to
have the weapon handy just in case he came back with the wrong idea
in mind. Then she stopped, looking at her outstretched hand. It was
small, and her wrists were tiny, just as he’d said. Could he
possibly have meant his words as a compliment? Did men in this time
and place actually say things like that to be nice?

She circled one wrist with her fingers, the
way Dominick had held it against the mattress. His hands were much
larger than hers, and she knew from trying to wrestle herself from
his grasp how strong they were. She held out both hands, fingers
spread wide. She wore no jewelry, not even a watch, and her nails
were filed short, but they were neat, and she used hand cream every
night. Her hands were her livelihood, so she took good care of
them. But she had never thought of them as attractive or
delicate.

“Don’t be silly,” she warned herself. “If
he’s paying compliments, it’s because he wants something, and you
know what it’s likely to be.”

With that thought in mind, she slid the sword
out of its scabbard. She needed both hands to do it, just as
Dominick had warned, and the weapon was so long and so heavy that
when she held it straight out she could barely lift it to shoulder
height. Nor could she hold it that high for more than a moment or
two. She laid it on the bed. As she did so she noticed for the
first time that the sheets were of finely woven linen and the quilt
was so lightweight that it almost drifted out of her hands when she
lifted it. A tiny fluff of feather poked through the bright blue
fabric.

“Dominick is not a poor man,” she murmured,
smoothing the quilt into place.

He had called himself a knight, and the lord
of Feldbruck. She went to the open windows to look at his land. Now
that the mist was gone from her eyes, she was seeing with a clarity
that only added to the strangeness of her situation.

The mountains—the Bavarian Alps, from what
Dominick had told her—filled the horizon with their imposing mass.
Next came the forested foothills in shade upon subtle shade of
green, then the cleared area that was Dominick’s farmland, and
closest of all, the tall wooden palisade. Gina’s unnaturally
sharpened eyesight showed her the bark remaining on the upright
logs that formed the palisade. Just inside the fence was a small
orchard of trees bearing diminutive green fruits. The garden she
had noticed while falling from the sky was out of sight on the
other side of the house.

As for Dominick’s bedroom, the walls were
plastered and whitewashed, and the window and door frames were made
of a smooth, golden wood. The twin windows were unglazed, with
sturdy shutters that could be closed in bad weather. A table under
the windows held a basin and a pottery pitcher full of water and
covered with a folded linen towel. Opposite Dominick’s bed were two
wooden chests with intricate designs carved into the tops and
sides. They looked like hope chests, and one of them had pillows
ranged against the wall to form a seat. The other chest was topped
by several books.

That was all the furniture, yet the room was
comfortable in a thoroughly masculine way. She was sure Dominick
didn’t want or need fancy curtains, or rugs on the floor, or a dust
ruffle on the bed.

Giving way to curiosity, Gina picked up one
of the books and tried to flip through it. But the volume was too
heavy for her to flip the pages, and it felt different in her hands
from books she knew. The binding was leather, apparently stretched
over a pair of thin boards. The pages were not paper.

“This must be parchment,” Gina said, touching
a page with respect. Her wondering gaze fixed upon the miniature
painted figure of an angel with red and green and blue wings, who
was holding up the first large letter of the page. The angel’s halo
shone with real gold applied to the parchment with incredible care.
“Someone painted these decorations and wrote out this entire book
by hand,” she murmured in awe.

Since she could speak Frankish, perhaps she
could read it, too. She studied the unfamiliar script, and after a
few minutes she deciphered a couple of words. The book wasn’t in
Frankish, however. Gina wasn’t totally uneducated in the liberal
arts; she knew Latin when she saw it. Dominick read Latin
books.

“So, he’s not only well off and a nobleman,
he’s well educated, too.”

She stood there, holding the first handmade
book she had ever seen, while she looked out the windows at the
wooded Bavarian landscape and tried to adjust to the incredible yet
indisputable fact that she was in a time totally different from her
own.

One part of her mind began to scream
frantically, hysterically, that she wanted to return to the time
where she belonged, even while another part of her being was
responding to the beauty of the countryside and those soaring,
snow-topped mountains.

There was also a part of her that responded
to the man who had treated her kindly and was trying to help her,
even though he believed she wasn’t in her right mind. He had been
annoyed when she woke him out of a sound sleep, but what person,
man or woman, wouldn’t be upset to have a complete stranger come
crashing out of nowhere? Once he recovered from his surprise,
Dominick had proven to be downright nice.

“He’s a man. Don’t trust him,” she warned
herself. Still, there was a quality about Dominick, something deep
in his silvery eyes and in the quiet, assured timbre of his
low-pitched voice, that told her he could be trusted.

He was such a gentleman that he actually
knocked at his own bedroom door when he returned. He brought with
him a middle-aged woman whose sturdy form was clothed in simple
brown wool, her skirt reaching to her ankles. Seeing the woman’s
cheerful expression and dancing blue eyes, Gina relaxed a
little.

“This is Hedwiga, my chatelaine,” Dominick
said. “She sees to my comfort, and she will take care of you,
too.”

“If you will come with me, Lady Gina,”
Hedwiga said, smiling, “we can choose some new clothing for
you.”

Lady Gina? That wasn’t the exact title in
Frankish, but to Gina’s mind that was how it translated. She
wondered what Dominick had told Hedwiga about her and how he had
explained her sudden appearance at Feldbruck. Gina could tell she
was going to have to be very careful what she said.

Hedwiga was waiting. Gina gathered up her
coat and purse, then looked to Dominick for some hint as to how she
ought to behave. He only smiled benevolently and allowed Hedwiga to
lead her away. She was oddly reluctant to leave Dominick, but at
least the tension she felt in his presence dissipated once he was
out of sight.

Dominick watched the woman who called herself
Gina leave his bedchamber. He kept his smile in place until the
door closed, in case she decided to look back at him. She was a
spy. Unless she really was a madwoman, which he considered unlikely
after talking with her, he couldn’t imagine any explanation other
than spying for her sudden appearance in his bed. Whoever had sent
Gina was a person lacking in subtlety and without any real
understanding of Dominick’s character.

The first candidate who sprang to mind was
Queen Fastrada. Gina denied having been sent by the queen, but
then, she would deny knowing Fastrada if she was that she-devil’s
agent. Fastrada was perfectly capable of setting a trap for
Dominick. She had tried it once already, with his wife. Perhaps
Fastrada was making a second attempt to ruin him.

There was also the possibility that one or
more of his fellow nobles could be conspiring to draw him into a
rebellious scheme. Dominick was aware of the resentments smoldering
just below the peaceful surface of Frankish life. Even in isolated
Feldbruck he had heard the rumors.

He considered several ways to discover proof
of who had sent Gina to him and why. He decided to begin with the
simplest method: being kind to her and encouraging her to talk in
hope that she’d misspeak and thus provide a hint as to her purpose
and her accomplices.

If sympathy failed, he’d threaten dire
punishment unless Gina told him what he wanted to know, and he’d
hint at mercy if she cooperated. It was unlikely, yet possible,
that one of his own people was involved and had helped Gina sneak
into his bedroom. If that proved to be the case, he’d find out who
it was, and then he’d drag Gina and her accomplice to Regensburg in
chains and turn them over to Charles. If he could prove that
Charles’s queen was involved in the scheme, so much the better. He
owed Fastrada retaliation for what she had tried to do to him.

If nothing else worked, he’d seduce Gina and
then coax a confession from her in the aftermath of passion. It
wasn’t a method he preferred, but he’d do it if he had to. Whether
the devious and bloody-minded queen of the Franks or a rebellious
nobleman was behind Gina’s appearance in his home, Dominick’s honor
and his life were at stake, along with the welfare of Feldbruck. To
preserve what he cherished, he was willing to relinquish the
private vow of celibacy he had made to himself when his marriage
ended.