“I cannot believe it,” Dougless said, looking away from his face. “I will not believe it. Time travel cannot happen.”
“What would make you believe?” he asked softly.
SEVEN
As Dougless walked with him toward the ice cream shop, she pondered the question. What would make her believe? she asked herself. But she could think of nothing. There seemed to be explanations for everything. He could be a fabulous actor and merely pretending that everything was new to him. His teeth could have been wrenched out while playing rugby in school. Since she could verify nearly everything he’d told her, that meant he could have found the information previously, then used it in his charade.
Was there anything he could do to prove to her that he was from the past?
In the ice cream parlor she absently ordered herself a single cone of mocha ice cream, but for Nicholas, she ordered a double cone of French vanilla and chocolate fudge. She was considering her question so hard that she didn’t see his face when he took his first licks, so she was startled when he leaned over and kissed her quickly, but firmly, on the mouth.
Blinking, she looked up at him and saw the sublime happiness on his face as he ate his ice cream. Dougless couldn’t help laughing.
“Buried treasure,” she said, and startled herself with the words.
“Mmm?” Nicholas asked, his attention one hundred percent on his ice cream.
“To prove to me that you’re from the past, you have to know something no one else does. You have to show me something that isn’t in a book.”
“Such as who the father of Lady Arabella Sydney’s last child was?” He was down to the chocolate scoop and looked as though he might melt from happiness. Placing her hand under his elbow, she ushered him to a table.
Sitting across from him, looking at those blue eyes and thick lashes as he licked his cone, she wondered if he looked at a woman like that when he made love to her.
“You gaze at me most hard,” he said, then looked at her through his lashes.
Turning away, Dougless cleared her throat. “I do not want to know who fathered Lady Arabella’s kid.” She didn’t look back when she heard Nicholas’s laugh.
“‘Buried treasure,’” he said as he crunched the cone. “Some valuable trinket that was hidden, but is still there after four hundred and twenty-four years?”
He can add and subtract, Dougless thought as she looked back at him. “Forget about it. It was just an idea.” She opened her notebook. “Let me tell you what I found out at the library,” she said as she began to read her notes about the houses.
When she looked up, Nicholas was wiping his hands on a paper napkin and frowning. “A man builds so that something of himself lives on. It pleases me not to hear that what was mine is gone.”
“I thought children were supposed to carry on a person’s name.”
“I left no children,” he said. “I had a son, but he died in a fall the week after my brother drowned. First his mother, then the child.”
Dougless watched pain shoot across his face and suddenly felt how easy and safe the twentieth century was. Sure, America had rapists and mass murderers and drunk drivers, but Elizabethans had plague and leprosy and smallpox. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry both for you and for them.” She paused a moment. “Have you had smallpox?” she asked softly.
“Neither small nor large,” he said with some pride.
“Large pox?”
He glanced about the room, then whispered, “The French disease.”
“Oh,” she said, understanding. Venereal disease. For some reason she was glad to hear that he’d never had “large pox”—not that it mattered, but they did share a bathroom.
“What is this ‘open to the public’?” he asked.
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“Usually the owners couldn’t afford the houses, so they gave them to the National Trust, so now you pay money and a guide takes you through the house. They’re great tours. This particular house has a tea shop and a gift shop and—”
Nicholas suddenly sat up straight. “It is Bellwood that is open?”
She checked her notes. “Yes, Bellwood. Just south of Bath.”
Nicholas seemed to be calculating. “With fast horses we can be to Bath in about seven hours.”