Chapter 17

Imogen stood in a tower room in a medieval castle, dressed in medieval clothing, and felt just a little like Rapunzel.

She didn’t have yards of really great hair, but hers would do in a pinch and the genuine medieval clothing was making up for lots of things. Besides, with enough perseverance maybe she would learn how to put her hair up in a bun. Who was going to be looking at her hair anyway? Her dress was amazing, the bodice covered with all kinds of embroidery she would have to examine later, and she had medieval shoes that fit. What else could she ask for?

Well, a cup of coffee and working Wi-Fi would have been nice, but she wasn’t going to complain.

She put her hand to her head. Complain? No, she wasn’t going to complain, she was going to have a complete nervous breakdown. She was standing in a castle’s tower room, wearing clothing made eight hundred years before she was born, and she had no idea how she was ever going to get back to where she was supposed to be.

She walked over to the window, such as it was, and looked out over the sea. It was truly one of the oddest sensations she’d ever had, that of looking at a sea that didn’t really change and realizing she was looking at it centuries away from when she should have been.

If she’d had any sense, she might have been tempted to just hang around for a few weeks and soak up the local culture. What a dissertation she could have written after that. She could take notes with Bartholomew’s gear, reapply to that exclusive little university in that sleepy little East Coast town she’d ditched without remorse, and knock the socks off her advisor and his committee. They would probably award her a degree on the spot.

And then what?

That was the question, wasn’t it? It was a question she’d never had a good answer for. She’d only known that in her house, it was always about the next big thing. There had never been any time to simply have an accomplishment be good enough. Upward and onward was her father’s motto, something his investment broker could readily attest to. Never rest, never be content, never enjoy what he’d worked for.

Maybe there was something to be said for a little sabbatical in the Middle Ages where savoring the current meal was a good idea just in case there wasn’t another one around the corner. And that right there was probably reason enough to want to go home. The question was how to get there.

Her location on the map was undeniable. Her spot in time was equally hard to deny. The only thing that was even remotely in question was the exact mechanics of how she’d come to be so out of her time and place. The only thing she could figure was that it had to do with Phillip’s sword. His grandfather’s missing sword with the blue gem in the hilt.

She would have to find it.

The problem was, she had no idea where to begin to look for it and very few of her usual resources at her fingertips. Her phone was useless, the local library hundreds of years out of reach, and her options for transportation limited to hooves belonging to an animal she really couldn’t control. The impossible nature of what she needed to attempt was almost enough to leave her hyperventilating.

She forced herself to focus on what she had going for her because that helped her feel like things weren’t hopeless. She’d had a wonderful sleep in a bed that had felt like a featherbed and woken to find her phone still under her pillow. She’d had a bath. She’d been dressed in the aforementioned amazing clothes.

Realizing she had no idea what had happened to her clothes or her backpack was terrifying, but she was almost sure the girl who had helped her had said something about her gear having been put in Rose’s trunk, which was good. The alternative was that her knickers had been put on display in the great hall below. They’d already been on display in London; why not Ravensthorpe? Well, that was something to gnaw on later. What she needed was a plan to find Phillip’s sword and she wasn’t going to find that in her current location. Maybe she could ask Rose a few pointed questions and see where that led.

She walked over to the door and opened it, then jumped in spite of herself. The blond twins were loitering out on the landing, obviously waiting for her. They immediately turned to her and made her low bows.

“We’re here to watch over you,” one of them said.

“And not lose you,” the other added.

Imogen looked from one to the other and decided those two were a good place to start with her questions. But first things first.

“How do I tell you apart?” she asked.

“Sam’s the stupider one,” one of them said. “I’m Theo, the clever one.”

The other one, Sam, if his brother was to be believed, snorted heartily. “Theo is an idiot and not at all clever. I’m Sam, the clever and smart one.”

She decided immediately there was no possible way to tell the two apart. They were obviously exacerbating the problem with identical haircuts and clothes. She looked at the one on the right.

“You do this on purpose, don’t you?” she asked.

“What?” he asked.

“Dress alike,” she said, “right down to the boots.”

He looked at her approvingly. “Of course.”

“So you can blame each other for whatever trouble you get into?”

One of them looked at the other. “She’s canny.”

“I like her.”

“Let’s keep her.”

“You can’t just keep a person, Sam, you lackwit,” Theo said with a snort. “We’ll have to woo her with tales of our vast accomplishments and convince her to stay.”

“Have you been alive long enough for vast accomplishments?” she asked politely.

“Ten summers,” Sam said proudly. “Barely.”

“Meaning we’ve barely survived this long,” added Theo with a heavy sigh. “We have found ourselves in various pieces of dire peril from which we scarce escaped with our lives.” He looked at her seriously. “I don’t anticipate that ending anytime soon.”

“Not with the work we’ve set ourselves,” Sam agreed thoughtfully.

“And what would that be?” she asked, trying not to smile. What a couple of charmers.

“We investigate,” Sam said.

“Mysteries,” Theo added.

“Of all sorts and varieties,” Sam finished. “We intend to go down in history for it.”

Charming and extremely dangerous. She wasn’t sure if she should ask them for help or run away before they figured out just what sort of mystery she was in the middle of. For all she knew, they would think she was a mystery to be solved and then she would definitely be finding herself standing in a pile of kindling.

“We came to fetch you for an afternoon of leisure,” Sam said.

“Outside the keep walls,” Theo added. “Uncle Jake thought we might like room to stretch our legs.”

“Tell the truth,” said a voice from the turn of the stairs.

Imogen saw the twins’ older brother, Connor, standing there under the torch. He smiled at her, then turned a stern look on his brothers.

“The truth,” he insisted.

Sam sighed first. “Very well, we’re being tossed out the front gates.”

“Because Uncle Jake is overprotective of his wine cellar,” Theo added. “We weren’t drinking anything.”

“Just looking behind things.”

Connor straightened from where he’d been leaning against the wall. “Don’t believe them. They were likely pawing at the foundations of the keep in an effort to find hidden gold. They do it all the time. I shudder to think what they’ll stumble upon eventually. Outside, lads, before Jake realizes you’re still within his walls.” He let his brothers scamper past him, then smiled at her. “We have been invited to take our ease for a bit just the same, if you care for it.”

“It would be wonderful,” she said honestly. It beat the hell out of the week she’d had so far.

She followed the boys through the hall, collected a few more people she didn’t know and a couple she did, then walked with them out the front gates and around the corner to a bluff overlooking the beach. She was horribly tempted by the water, but she didn’t see an easy way down that wasn’t a bit of a hike and she wasn’t sure how safe it was to go that far without a guard.

Without a guard.That she was even thinking like that was probably reason enough to believe she’d been in the Middle Ages just a bit too long.

She sat down on a blanket of some sort and found herself in the middle of lots of kids. She guessed most of them belonged to her hosts given that the boys looked a lot like Jackson and the youngest girl, who had to have been about Sam and Theo’s age, looked just like a younger version of Rose.

It was utter chaos.

But there was food and drink and she felt safe. The twins were looking at her with far more curiosity than she was comfortable with, but she supposed there wasn’t much she could do about that. At least she wasn’t wearing her decorated raincoat any longer. Her French was apparently passable enough that she didn’t earn any strange looks, she understood most of what was going on, and she was getting an up-close-and-personal look at medieval life.

If she’d been able to draw, she would have been sketching madly. She would have been tempted to take a picture with her phone—

She froze and her blood ran cold. She had left her phone in the tower room, on the window ledge.

“Imogen?”

Phillip had dropped down to sit next to her and he was looking at her with alarm.

“Nothing,” she croaked. “Nothing.”

“You don’t look well.”

“I’m fine,” she said. She pasted a smile onto her face because what else was there to do? Run back to the castle like a madwoman? The tower room had been empty and didn’t look as if it were used very often. All she had to do was get back to the castle as quickly as she could and find a reason to get back upstairs. If she didn’t look like a lunatic, no one would get suspicious, and life would go on. She couldn’t imagine that anyone would find her phone, much less examine that little box made of materials they would have never encountered in their worst nightmares, then immediately run to the local witch-burner and blurt out all kinds of details she would have rather kept private.

Would they?

Phillip handed her a cup. “Drink.”

“Poison?”

He smiled briefly. “Wine. I think I can personally guarantee that ’tis drinkable. My uncle keeps a very fine cellar, which I understand”—he shot the twins a pointed look—“two of our company have discovered personally this morning.”

“We didn’t taste,” Theo said promptly. “Well, nothing that wasn’t already opened.”

“Your poor father,” Phillip said. “My poor father. Poor anyone who must needs host you two terrors for more than a day or two.”

“Oh, we hardly need that long to begin our investigations,” Sam said cheerfully. “Wouldn’t you agree, Theo?”

“We don’t dawdle,” Theo agreed. “Our father always said timeliness was a virtue.”

“That’s not all our father says,” Connor said with a gusty sigh, sitting down on Imogen’s other side. “But because there are ladies present, I’ll refrain from repeating any of it.”

Imogen sipped at wine that was supposedly drinkable, but she never had dared learn to appreciate anything past a good cup of coffee so she supposed she wasn’t one to offer an educated opinion. She felt immediately better, but that could have been because no one was looking at her as if she’d suddenly grown horns. She forced herself not to think about how much worse someone finding her phone could make things.

She watched the cousins alternately sparring with swords and wrestling, laughing and teasing each other, and realized at one point that she was experiencing some serious envy that she had never had relationships with her siblings that even remotely resembled what the people in front of her had.

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

She realized Phillip had stretched out on his side next to her and was leaning on his elbow, watching her. She wondered how long he’d been doing that and what had shown on her face.

“Several,” she admitted. “Two brothers and two sisters. All older than I am. You?”

“Two younger brothers and a younger sister,” he said. He continued to study her. “Were they unkind to you?”

“Aren’t all siblings?”

“Nay.”

She took a deep breath. “My family is...” She groped for the right word in English and couldn’t find it, never mind looking for it in French. “Different,” she managed finally.

And just how did she go about describing her very driven family to a medieval guy who probably wasn’t going to understand what lawyers and doctors and psychiatrists and entrepreneurs were, even if she could manage to describe them properly? Well, Prissy might have translated across time, but the rest? Probably not. The only thing she could say was that they were painfully driven, dutifully following their parents into careers where stress was not only acceptable, it was sought after. They were all drama junkies.

And all she wanted to do was make movies. Barring that, she wanted to be trapped in a Jane Austen novel, but maybe that was something to examine later when she didn’t have a gorgeous man approximately twelve inches from her, looking at her as if he expected her to say something intelligent.

He had the most amazing colored eyes she had ever seen.

“You have gray eyes,” she said, before she thought better of it.

He smiled. “And yours are a happy combination of green and brown.”

“Ordinary.”

“Rather lovely, actually,” he said. “I’ve looked into my father’s for perhaps too much of my life to find mine anything interesting.” He sighed. “He’ll have much less to say about my eyes than my actions, I fear.”

“Why is that?”

“Aye, Phillip, why is that?” Connor asked brightly. “Do tell.”

“Wait, don’t start without me,” Jackson said, kicking Connor’s feet aside and collapsing onto a corner of the blanket. “I can scarce wait to enjoy these tidings.”

“Are you being helpful?” Phillip asked shortly.

“Oh, we never promised that,” Rose said, sitting down next to her brother and turning to lean her back against his. “But we’d best have a discussion of it all sooner rather than later, don’t you think? The last of the scouts is back in.”

Imogen watched Phillip go still. It was something she’d seen actors try to portray on screen, but she’d never seen it in real life. She could hardly believe she was even thinking it, but there was a guy who probably kept himself alive thanks to gut feelings.

“And what did he find?” he asked casually.

“Nothing,” Rose said with a shrug, dislodging her brother, who cursed her, then resettled himself. “But I daresay that doesn’t surprise you.” She shook her head. “I could have sworn we were being followed, but perhaps I was imagining things. All the lads say they’ve seen nothing unusual.”

“Well, Phillip does tend to overestimate his importance in the world,” Connor drawled. “I have serious doubts that anyone would want his head on a pike outside their gates. Perhaps there was someone who had a look at either you or Imogen and decided ’twas past time he took a wife.”

“The saints preserve me,” Rose said with a shudder. “Imogen can do as she pleases, but please, not me.”

“Oh, no thank you,” Imogen said, wishing her hands didn’t feel so cold. That was the last thing she needed, to get stuck in medieval times with a guy who had no clue what indoor plumbing was.

“Are you wed, then?” Connor asked.

“No,” Imogen said firmly. “I haven’t found the right guy.” And the guy who wanted to marry her was absolutely the wrong one, though she had to admit he would have been absolutely beside himself with excitement over her current straits if they had been his straits. She could only imagine what kind of craziness he would have been causing. She doubted he would have lasted more than ten minutes without becoming very familiar with the inside of the nearest dungeon.

“Phillip’s available,” Jackson said with a smirk. “Apparently.”

“Imogen should aim much higher than him,” Rose said, elbowing her brother in the ribs. “Phillip snores.”

“So do you,” Phillip said, throwing a handful of weeds at her.

“I do not,” Rose said archly. “I breathe enthusiastically from time to time, especially when trying to keep my temper in check thanks to the louts who vex me from morn till night.” She threw the weeds back at her cousin. “Tell Imogen why you’re not wed, unless you want me to do it for you.”

“She already knows,” Phillip said, lying back on the grass and putting his arm over his eyes. “She was with us at Haemesburgh, remember?”

“Aye, trying to get out whilst you were trying to get in,” Rose said dryly. “For a moment there, I half suspected Imogen was actually Heather trying to escape her fate.”

Imogen felt things go very still. She would have thought that was just in her head, but she felt that stillness settle over the rest of the group. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. The younger kids were still going at it as if nothing had happened. Phillip was unmoving, though he could have been asleep. Rose and Jackson were seemingly studying various parts of the beach where interesting things were perhaps to be found. Connor, though, was looking at her thoughtfully. He smiled, then kicked Phillip’s foot.

“We should go find supper,” he said.

“In a bit,” Phillip said. “I want another quarter hour of sun on my face before I must needs face the reality of my life.”

Imogen thought she might understand the sentiment. The reality of her current life was definitely not what she’d bargained for, though now that she had a bit of time to think about it, she couldn’t deny that as she’d traveled to Haemesburgh, she had been thinking it would have been amazing to have seen the castle in all its medieval glory. How coincidental that she should get that wish. Even more fantastical was that Heather had been right there to watch her put her hand on Phillip’s sword—no, Heather hadn’t watched her do it, Heather had insisted that she do it.

Had Heather been looking for someone to take her place in the past?

“If you ask my opinion,” Connor said quietly, “Phillip was fortunate to find Imogen there instead of Heather. ’Tis odd, though, isn’t it, how alike they look?”

“As if you would know,” Jackson said with a snort.

“Phillip and I both heard a detailed description of her,” Connor insisted. “There is a resemblance.”

“Nay,” Phillip said, not taking his arm from his eyes, “Imogen is much prettier.”

Imogen was terribly tempted to blush, but if there was one thing she had, it was iron control over her own reactions. Phillip was making conversation, not complimenting her. No point in getting all worked up over it.

“I think he’s well rid of Heather,” Rose said, “but ’tis a pity he couldn’t have found Grandfather Rhys’s sword.”

Imogen suspected that Phillip would never find his grandfather’s sword as long as Heather of Haemesburgh had anything to say about it. What she couldn’t force herself to entertain seriously was the thought that Heather had used Phillip’s sword as a means for a time-travel sort of switcheroo. No one could be that devious. Well, with the possible exception of her siblings, but that was a different story. This was a medieval noblewoman trying to escape an unwanted marriage to a truly gorgeous, chivalrous man, not a crazy Maxwell spawn trying to inflinct pain and misery on other Maxwell spawn.

“I think we need a hot fire,” Phillip said. “Imogen’s shivering.”

She was, but it wasn’t from the sea breezes, which were glorious, or the fact that Phillip had taken one of her hands in his and was rubbing her fingers to perhaps bring some circulation back into them. She was shivering because she thought she just might have discovered the reason Heather of Haemesburgh had been insistent on getting her to her castle.

Now all she had to do was find Phillip’s sword, convince a woman who apparently really didn’t want to be hanging around the Middle Ages that that was where—or when, rather—she belonged, and further convince that same woman that that gorgeous man there was worth the trouble of coming back for.

When that was what was on the agenda, getting to the future in order to do any of the three seemed like the easy part.