Chapter 19

So, this was how the other medieval half lived.

Imogen paused just inside the doorway of Jackson of Raventhorpe’s private den and realized how it was someone during the Middle Ages might actually survive without the yet-to-be-conceived comforts of modern life, like cheesecake and limeades made with crushed ice.

The room was sumptuous. The walls might have been stone, but they were covered with gorgeous tapestries that had to have cost a fortune. There were rugs on the floor, a roaring fire in the fireplace, and ample places to sit that definitely had a medieval flair but left her suspecting that she wouldn’t feel as if she’d spent the evening sitting on a plank.

The lord of Ravensthorpe was standing next to the fire, looking lordly. His wife, Amanda, was sitting down in a chair next to where he was standing, looking stunning. Imogen had grown used to looking at Rose, so she wasn’t as startled by Amanda as she might have been otherwise, but there was no denying that somewhere along the line, someone had been absolutely beyond gorgeous and passed down all those good looks. Amanda was both beautiful and serene.

Or, maybe not so serene. She was wearing a calm expression that Imogen might have believed if she hadn’t been tapping the toes of her feet inside her shoes. Maybe no one else would have realized that, but Imogen had made it a habit to notice that kind of thing. Occupational hazard, maybe, from always having to know what her siblings were thinking and what that might mean for her. She’d had an interesting life so far, that was for sure.

Phillip touched her elbow. “Let me see you seated by the fire,” he said quietly.

Imogen looked up at him quickly. There was something in his voice that was definitely reflected in his face. He looked like someone who had suddenly allowed himself to entertain the possibility that unicorns were real and that he might see them the next time he went outside. He didn’t look good.

“Yes, please come in, Imogen.”

Imogen looked at Lord Jake... and that was an odd name for a medieval lord, but they pronounced it with a soft J so maybe it was less weird than she thought. She nodded and took the seat Phillip indicated for her to take, across from Amanda and close to the fire. It was a relatively comfortable chair, she had to admit. Furniture store level while still managing to retain some medieval character. She wasn’t sure that kind of thing would fly on a medieval movie set, but what did she know? It wasn’t so much about what people would believe as it was that things looked like what people already believed.

She hoped that wasn’t a metaphor for her life.

Phillip sat down in a chair next to her—or perched in the chair next to her. Really, the man looked as if the slightest twinkle of fairy dust would send him bolting. Jake looked profoundly uncomfortable. Amanda continued to wiggle her toes in her shoes. Imogen wondered briefly if they were trying to come up with a way to tell her they had decided once and for all that she needed to be dealt with so they could get back to their medieval lives, but she didn’t see any sharp things in anyone’s hands. Phillip had left his sword by the door, which she supposed boded well.

She almost put her hand to her head. She was noticing where weapons were. Her life had become very weird.

Jake cleared his throat. “I’m not sure where to begin.”

“You should begin at the beginning, husband.”

“Difficult to decide where the beginning is, don’t you think?”

Imogen wasn’t about to help them. All she could do was wonder why they had asked her come talk with them. Maybe they were gearing up to tell her that they’d found her phone and someone was warming up the fire pit outside...

And then she realized what was so strange.

They were speaking in English.

She looked at Phillip and realized why he looked so uncomfortable. He was watching his aunt and uncle as if he expected them to do something truly unpredictable, as if perhaps speaking modern English in a medieval solar wasn’t enough. She looked back at the pair across from her. Well, look wasn’t the right word, she supposed. She gaped at them. It was all she could do to keep breathing normally.

“You’re speaking English,” she wheezed.

Amanda glanced at Jake, then looked at her. “That’s true.”

Imogen found herself on her feet. The only reason she hadn’t tipped her chair over backward was because Phillip had caught it. She groped for something to hold on to and saw a hand come into her field of vision. But that was Phillip de Piaget’s hand, Phillip de Piaget, medieval knight. No help from that quarter. She wrapped her arms around herself, then thought better of it and pointed an accusing finger at both Amanda and Jake.

“You’re speaking modern English.”

Jake nodded slowly. “We are.”

“But... but this is 1254.” Imogen found herself sitting down and realized that was far preferable to swaying right into the fire, which she’d been on the verge of doing. She didn’t dare look at the man who had pulled her down into her chair because regardless of what anyone else believed, she was fairly sure he thought he was in 1254. “How in the world would you know modern English—unless this isn’t 1254 and you all have been running a really method-actingish reality show that I never want to be on again.”

Jake smiled. “No, this is the real thing.” He looked at Amanda. “And we should speak in the current tongue, in deference to Phillip.”

Imogen didn’t want to look at Phillip, but he’d saved her from singeing herself without an accusation of witchcraft to keep her company, so maybe she owed him at least a look.

He was still wearing that same look of horrified anticipation, as if he had finally come to grips with the reality of mythical creatures but now fully expected to see a few tromp through his uncle’s private den. She wished she could have said something to help him, but she was too busy trying to figure out something intelligent to say to his uncle.

She looked at Amanda. “You spoke English.”

“That’s what happens when you’re wed to a man from the Future,” Amanda said calmly.

Imogen shook her head. She shook it again when the first try didn’t help her make sense of what she was hearing.

“The future?”

“The Future.”

She supposed she might be able to appreciate the difference with enough time, but at the moment, all she knew was that she had heard someone speak words she could understand without trouble, never mind the posh British accent tinged with something that sounded a little like Brooklyn.

It was bliss.

She looked at Jake. “You’re from the Future? Really?”

He nodded. “Guilty as charged.”

“Wait,” Phillip said, holding up his hand. He was speaking in Norman French. “Wait. I don’t understand.”

“Do your kids know?” Imogen asked, because she couldn’t help herself. “Well, of course they know. Rose spoke English—”

She stopped at the look on their faces. Amanda’s and Jake’s, rather. Phillip still looked as if someone had definitely confirmed the unicorn thing for him.

“Would someone,” he managed in a garbled tone, “please tell me what is happening here.”

Jake pulled up a stool and sat down, looking at his nephew. “I have an interesting tale to tell you. I don’t share this with very many people,” he said carefully, “but I will trust you with it.”

“And my father?” Phillip said hoarsely. “Have you trusted him with it?”

Jake looked as if he wished he weren’t sitting where he was. Maybe he wished he were back wherever he’d learned that posh English accent he’d been using. “Robin was the first one I told.”

“Before your wife?” Phillip asked incredulously.

“Before my wife—a sore point with her still, thank you for reminding her.”

Phillip didn’t look as if he appreciated the humor Jake was obviously trying to inject into the situation. Imogen appreciated it only because she’d been watching Amanda’s face and had seen that while it might have been a sore spot initially, it had obviously become a cherished private joke between them. She also could plainly see that there was a deep, lasting affection between the two sitting there.

She envied them.

“Did you tell anyone else?” Phillip demanded. “Are there others you entrusted with these important tidings?”

“Nick,” Jake admitted, “but there are special reasons for that. Perhaps a few others.”

“But not me.” Phillip looked less stricken than the beginning of very angry. “You couldn’t bring yourself to trust me yet you could trust...” He spluttered for several moments. “My father? My giddy uncle Nicholas? By the saints—”

“If you can be patient, Phillip, I will tell you what I know and answer any questions you have,” Jake said patiently, “and I do trust you. That was never the issue.”

“Then what, pray tell, is the issue?” Phillip asked angrily.

“The perilous nature of what I’m about to tell you,” Jake said. “This truth isn’t so much secret as it is deadly. And there was no reason for you to know. Well, no reason before, that is. Now? Now, I think you have a very good reason to know quite a few things you haven’t before.”

Imogen didn’t want to speculate on what that reason might be and she was definitely not about to interrupt what was going on. She zipped her lips, mentally tossed away the key, and waited for the details to come out. She had the feeling that Phillip wasn’t nearly as excited about the thought of it as she was.

A man from the future. She could hardly believe it.

“I am not from our current day,” Jake said carefully, “but where I am from requires a bit of a tale.”

“What do you mean,” Phillip said, “I’m not from our current day?”

“I was born in the Year of Our Lord’s Grace 1973,” Jake said carefully. “Seven hundred years from now. Well, seven hundred and a bit.”

“Impossible,” Phillip said, but he didn’t sound as if he thought it were all that impossible.

Imogen realized what Jake had said and gaped at him. “What?”

“Child of the seventies,” Jake admitted. “And everything tacky that entails.”

“1973,” Imogen repeated. “You were born then.”

“Yes.”

“But now you’re here.”

“In 1254,” Jake agreed. “Yes to that, too.”

Imogen looked at Phillip. He was watching his uncle with now absolutely no expression on his face. She thought that might have been a bit more worrying than having him look shell-shocked.

“It’s an interesting story,” Jake continued, “but obviously fairly unbelievable unless you’ve lived through it. Which apparently, Imogen, you have.”

Imogen thought she might have babbled something. She was torn between wanting to agree with Jake and wanting to tell him to shut up so Phillip didn’t turn that expressionless look on her.

Jake looked briefly at Amanda before turning back to addressing... well, she was unsure whom he was addressing. Either her or Phillip, or maybe both. He looked like he would have rather been talking to a less-invested-in-the-story-type audience, but hell, the guy was living hundreds of years out of his time. Maybe he was used to it.

“The details of my trip here are not really all that important, I suppose,” Jake said, “though I’ll give them to you anyway for the sake of being thorough. I was driving along in a perfectly restored 1967 Jag, it flipped, and I woke up here. Well, not here. I woke up near Artane.”

“I found him in the grass,” Amanda said. “I was running away from a marriage and ran into him.”

Imogen was torn between watching Jake and Amanda squirm and watching Phillip grow stiller and stiller. Rose’s parents were interesting. Phillip was frightening.

“I thought she was a princess,” Jake said. He smiled at his wife. “Still do.”

“You paid enough to the king for that to be the case,” Amanda said, “as I continue to remind you.”

“You were well worth it,” Jake said. He sighed and looked at Imogen. “I managed to talk a king out of this hall and Amanda’s father out of his oldest daughter and here we are several years later, living our lives in bliss.”

“In the past.”

“In the present,” Jake corrected. He shrugged. “It depends on how you look at it.”

“You said you were from London,” Phillip said in a low voice. “You’ve said that to me scores of times.”

“I did say that,” Jake agreed slowly, “and there is truth to it, in a manner of speaking. I had a business—a trade, if you will—in London, of importing very expensive gems and selling them to those with money to purchase them.”

“You’re a merchant,” Phillip accused.

“In a former lifetime,” Jake said, “aye. And to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t born in London. I was born in a different country.”

“Which one?” Phillip asked curtly. “One that hasn’t been discovered yet?”

Jake looked at him solemnly. “Exactly that.”

Phillip snorted, then looked at his aunt. “And you knew. You know. You’ve known this all along!”

“Aye, Phillip,” she said gently, “I’ve known.”

“And you didn’t tell me!”

“If it eases you any,” Amanda said seriously, “we haven’t told our own children.”

Phillip pushed himself back in his chair. “This is too fantastical to be believed—” He stood up. “That language you spoke.”

“English,” Jake said. “It is spoken in my former time.”

“Your future time,” Phillip snarled.

“Well, that, too.”

“But Jennifer,” Phillip spluttered, “and Persephone...” His mouth worked for a moment or two as if he searched for words direct enough to express what was going on in his head. “Are you all from that accursed place?”

Jake only looked at him steadily.

Imogen watched Phillip consider, then simply turn and leave the solar. He pulled the door shut behind him and it closed with a bang. Imogen sat there with Jake and Amanda and listened to silence descend, a silence broken only by the crack and pop of the wood in the hearth as it was consumed by the very lovely fire. She realized it was the first time she’d been warm in days. If she had to live in the past, she would have built that kind of fireplace as well. No wonder Jake had.

She looked at the man who had been born in her time and tried to smile. She didn’t imagine she’d done a very good job.

“I’m not hallucinating,” she said.

He shook his head. “Nope, you’re not.”

He was speaking in modern English. That she was starting to qualify what version of the language being spoken based on its position on a timeline was a little alarming. She wanted to start shaking her head, but she was afraid if she started, she would never stop.

“And you’re stuck here,” she said.

“Oh, no, not stuck,” Jake said.

She felt her heart stop. “You aren’t?”

“Not at all. I’m here because I choose to be here.”

“But he could go back to the Future at any time,” Amanda said. “If he wanted to.”

Imogen felt her heart start beating again, which she supposed was a handy thing. “Then I could, too. Go home, that is.”

“In theory, yes,” Jake said. He rubbed his hands together. “There are spots here in the UK—England and Scotland both—that seem to act as gates of a sort.”

“Gates,” Imogen repeated.

“Through time.”

“I didn’t go through a gate.”

Jake tilted his head. “How did you get here, then?”

“I put my hand on a sword and passed out. I woke up in Haemesburgh. Not the Haemesburgh in the twenty-first century, if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” Jake assured her. He looked at his wife. “That’s interesting.”

“How do I get home?” Imogen asked.

“Do you want to go home?”

“Of course I want to go home!” She looked at him in shock. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Jake shrugged. “No Wi-Fi signal keeping you up at night. Lots of peace and quiet.”

“Lots of lack of coffee,” she said pointedly. “You’re also missing several other critical inventions like refrigeration, indoor plumbing, and random Internet searches.”

“But we have silence,” Jake said with a smile. “A slower pace. Good food, good wine, endless stars when the skies are clear.” He reached for his wife’s hand. “Someone to love.”

“Well, I’m fresh out of the last,” Imogen said, though she had to admit her prospects back home weren’t very good, either. “How do I get home, do you think?”

“What’d you do with the sword when you woke up?” he asked.

“It was gone.”

His eyebrows went up. “That’s a bit of a problem.”

“Apparently it’s Phillip’s sword from his grandfather,” she added. “Or so I’ve been told. Heather of Haemesburgh stole it, I think.”

“How do you know?” Amanda asked. “Though I’m not doubting you.”

“Because Heather is the one who brought me to Haemesburgh in the future and had me put my hand on Phillip’s sword. In the Future.” Good grief, she was starting to capitalize it as well.

“We’ll have to give this some thought,” Jake said.

“Please think fast.” She started to get up, then looked at Jake. “I’ve lost my phone.”

He pulled something out of a pocket. “This one?”

She felt relief wash over her. “That’s it.”

“Amanda found it upstairs,” he said, “and I understand that your things are in Rose’s trunk. She doesn’t know what they are, I’m sure.”

“Oh, I’m sure about that, too,” Imogen said, because she held out as much hope for that as she supposed Jake did. She smiled grimly. “I’ll go talk to Phillip.”

“He doesn’t like secrets or mysteries.”

“And this was both,” Imogen said. “I’ll see if he’ll talk to me.”

Jake looked at his hands for a moment or two, then up at her. “Be careful.”

“Do you think he’ll stab me?” she asked, trying to muster up a laugh and only succeeding in making a sound that sounded a bit like a bleat instead.

“I’m afraid he’ll be rude.”

“I don’t know him very well,” she said, “but I think he’s less likely to punch me than he would be you.”

Jake smiled. “There is that.”

“And he left his sword there in the corner. I’ll take it to him. Maybe that will make him feel better.”

“Punching me is the only thing that’s going to make him feel better,” Jake said with a bit of a laugh, “but I’ll leave that for later. Good luck. See if you can get him to come back inside. He’ll run himself into the ground if we leave him out there.”

Amanda nodded. “My brother—his father—does that. It drives his wife mad, but there you have it. Men of energy and purpose, those lads.”

“And what does that make me?” Jake asked, sounding as if he were trying to muster up an offended tone.

“The love of my life, when you sit still long enough for me to tell you the same,” Amanda said, leaning over and kissing her husband.

“I’m outta here,” Imogen said, but she realized she wasn’t being heard. It was just as well, she supposed. She needed to find Phillip and talk him down off the wall before he did something stupid.

She understood, really. There was nothing like having one’s worldview shattered to leave a person feeling a little unhinged.

She left the solar to find Sam and Theo waiting for her. She started to tell them to get lost, then decided she would find out from them where Phillip had gone and then tell them to get lost.