He gave her a piercing stare. “And in your day men are noble? They do not abandon women? They do not leave them to the mercy of the elements, with no means of support, no protection, no funds to so much as find a night’s lodging?”
Dougless turned away, blushing. So maybe she wasn’t in a good position to argue about this. “Okay, you’ve made your point.” She looked back at him. “All right, let’s get down to business. First we go to a drugstore, or chemist, as it’s called here in England, and we buy toiletries.” She sighed. “I need eyeshadow, base, blush, and I’d kill for a tube of lipstick right now. And we need toothbrushes, toothpaste, and floss.” Halting, she looked at him. “Let me see your teeth.”
“Madam!”
“Let me see your teeth,” she repeated in a no-nonsense voice. If he were an overworked graduate student, he’d have fillings, but if he were from the sixteenth century no dentist would have touched his mouth.
After a moment, Nicholas obediently opened his mouth, and Dougless moved his head this way and that to look inside. He had three molars missing and there looked to be a cavity in another tooth, but there was no sign of modern dental work. “We need to get you to a dentist and take care of that cavity.”
Instantly, Nicholas pulled away from her. “The tooth does not pain me enough to have it pulled,” he said stiffly.
“Is that why you have three teeth missing? They were pulled?”
He seemed to think this was obvious, so Dougless
opened her mouth, showed him her fillings, and tried to explain what a dentist was.
“Ah, there you are,” said the vicar from the back of the church. “So you two have become friends.” His eyes were twinkling.
“We haven’t . . .” Dougless began, intending to explain that they hadn’t become the friends that the vicar’s tone was implying. But she stopped. The truth would take too much explanation. She stood up. “We have to go, as we have a great deal to do. Nicholas, are you ready?”
Smiling at her, Nicholas offered her his arm, and they left the church together. Outside, Dougless paused for a moment and looked at the enclosed graveyard. It had been just yesterday that Robert had left her here.
“What shines there?” Nicholas asked, looking at one of the grave markers.
It was the gravestone Gloria had fallen against, then lied to Robert about her scrapes, saying Dougless had hurt her. Curious, Dougless went to the stone. At the bottom, hidden by grass and dirt, was Gloria’s five-thousand-dollar diamond and emerald bracelet. Picking it up, Douglass held it up to the sunlight.
“The quality of the diamonds is good, not excellent,” Nicholas said as he peered over her shoulder. “The emeralds are but cheap.”
Smiling, Dougless clasped the bracelet tightly in her hand. “I’ll find him now,” she said. “Now he’ll come back for sure.” Quickly, she went into the church and told the vicar that should Robert Whitley call and ask about a lost bracelet, he was to say that Dougless had it; then she gave him the name of the bed-and-breakfast where she and Nicholas were staying.
As Dougless left the church, she felt jubilant. Everything was going to work out now. Robert would be so grateful that she’d found the bracelet that . . . Her mind flooded with visions of Robert’s protestations of undying love and endless apologies. “I didn’t know I could miss anyone as much as I missed you,” ran through her head in Robert’s tearful voice. “How can you forgive me?” and “I wanted to teach you a lesson, but I was the one who learned from you. Oh, Dougless, can you—?”
“What?” she asked, looking up at Nicholas blankly.
He was frowning. “You said we must see an alchemist. Do you prepare new spells?”
She didn’t bother to defend herself; she was too happy to allow anything he said to bother her. “Not ‘alchemist,’ a chemist’s,” she said happily. “Let’s go shopping.”
As they walked, she made a mental list of the things she’d need to be looking her best when she saw Robert again. She needed products for her face and hair, and she’d need a new blouse that didn’t have a cut sleeve.
First they went to the coin dealer and sold another coin, this one for fifteen hundred pounds. There Dougless called the B and B to reserve their room for three more nights because the dealer had said he needed time to find a buyer for Nicholas’s rarer coins. And to give Robert time to find me, Dougless thought.
Then they went to a chemist’s shop. As the doors to a magnificent English drugstore, a Boots, opened, even Dougless looked about in awe. The English didn’t fill their shelves with gaudily packaged over-the-counter medicines—even cough syrup was kept behind the counter—but, instead, the shelves were full of products that smelled good. Within minutes, Dougless, a canvas shopping basket at her feet, was trying to decide between mango shampoo or jasmine. And should she get the aloe face pack or the cucumber? she wondered as she tossed a bottle of lavender-scented conditioner into the basket.
“What is this?” Nicholas whispered, looking at the many rows of gaily wrapped packages.
“Shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste, all the usual stuff,” Dougless said distractedly. She had lemon verbena body lotion in one hand and evening primrose in the other. Which?
“I know not those words.”
Dougless’s head was full of the decisions she was trying to make, but then she looked at the products as an Elizabethan man must see them—if Nicholas were from the past, which of course he wasn’t, she reminded herself. Her father had said that until recently, people had made all their toiletries at home.
“This is shampoo to wash your hair,” she said as she opened a bottle of papaya-scented shampoo. “Smell.”
At first whiff, Nicholas smiled at her in delight, then he nodded toward the other bottles, and Douglass began opening them. With each product, Nicholas’s face showed his wonder. “This is marvelous. These are heaven. How I’d like to send one of these to my queen.”
She recapped a bottle of hyacinth-scented conditioner. “Is this the same queen who cut off your head?”