“What trivial knowledge is remembered through these hundreds of years,” Nicholas said in anger.
She looked up at him with interest. “Is it true?” she asked. “About Lady Arabella? About the table?”
He frowned at her. “Nay, madam, such did not happen on that table.” Turning, he walked away.
Smiling, Dougless was relieved that the story wasn’t true—not that it mattered, but still . . .
“I gave the true table to Arabella,” he said over his shoulder.
Dougless gasped as she watched him walk away, but she hurriedly followed him. “You impregnated—” she began, but when he halted and looked down his nose at her, she stopped speaking. He had a way of looking at a person that could make you believe he was an aristocrat.
“We will see if these sottish people have violated my cabinet,” he said, again turning away from her.
Dougless had to run to cover the distance his long legs were eating up. “You can’t go in there,” she said as he put his hand on a door that had a NO ADMITTANCE sign on it. Ignoring her, Nicholas pulled on the latch. For a moment, Dougless closed her eyes and held her breath, waiting for a buzzer to go off. When there was no sound, tentatively, she opened her eyes and saw that Nicholas had disappeared behind the door. With a quick look around to see if anyone was watching, she followed him, expecting to walk into a room full of secretaries.
But there were no secretaries in the room, nor any people at all. There were just boxes stacked to the ceiling, and from what was printed on the sides, they looked to be full of paper napkins and other items for the tearoom. Behind the boxes was beautiful paneling that Dougless thought was a shame to hide.
She caught sight of Nicholas as he opened another door, so she ran after him. She followed him through three more rooms and got to see the difference between restored and unrestored. The rooms not open to the public had broken fireplaces, missing paneling, and painted ceilings spoiled by a leaky roof. In one room some Victorian had put wallpaper over the carved oak panels, and Dougless could see where workmen were painstakingly removing it.
At last Nicholas led her to a small room off a larger one. Here the ceiling had leaked until the plaster was a dirty brown, and the wide floorboards looked to be dangerously rotten. Standing in the doorway, she saw Nicholas looking about the room, sadness in his eyes.
“This was my brother’s chamber, and I was here but a fortnight ago,” he said softly, then shrugged as though to block the regret from his mind. He walked across the rotten boards, went to a section of the paneling, and pushed at it. Nothing happened.
“The lock has rusted,” he said, “or someone has sealed it shut.”
Suddenly, he seemed to become enraged and began hammering on the paneling with both fists.
Mindless of the disintegrating floor, Dougless ran to him, and not knowing what else to do, she put her arms around him, pulled his head to her shoulder, and stroked his hair. “Sssh,” she whispered as she would to a child. “Quiet.”
He clung to her, held her so tightly she could barely breathe. “It was my intent to be remembered for my learning,” he said against her neck, and there were tears in his voice. “I commissioned monks to copy hundreds of books. I began building Thornwyck. I have . . . Had. It is done now.”
“Sssh,” Dougless soothed, holding his broad shoulders.
He pushed away from her and turned his back, but Dougless saw him wipe away tears. “They remember a moment on a table with Arabella,” he said.
When he looked back at her, his face was fierce. “If I had lived . . .” he said. “If I had but lived, I would have changed all. I must find out what my mother knew. She believed she had knowledge that would clear my name and save me from execution. And once I know this, I must return. I must change what is now said about me and about my family.”
As Dougless looked at him, it was at that moment that she knew he was telling the truth. It was the way she, too, felt about her family. She didn’t want to be remembered for all the idiot things she’d done. She wanted to be remembered for her good deeds. Last summer, she’d volunteered to help children who couldn’t read. For four summers in a row she’d spent three days a week at a shelter where she worked with children who, for the most part, had had very little kindness in their lives.
“We’ll find out,” she said softly. “If the information still exists today, we’ll find it, and when we have the information, I’m sure you’ll be sent back.”
“You know how to do this?” he asked.
“No, I don’t. But maybe it’ll just happen once you know what you were sent here to find out.”
He was frowning, but, slowly, his frown changed to a smile. “You have changed. You are looking at me in a different way. Do you not tell me I am lying?”
“No,” she said slowly. “No one could act this well.” She didn’t want to think about what she was saying. A sixteenth-century man could not come forward in time, but . . . but it had happened.
“Look at this,” she said as she touched the section of paneling he had been pounding. A little door stood open about an inch.
Nicholas pulled the door open. “My father told only my brother of this hidden cabinet, and Kit showed me but a week before he died. I told no one. The secret of its existence died with me.”
As she watched, he stuck his hand in the hole and pulled out a roll of yellowed, brittle papers.
Nicholas looked at the papers in disbelief. “I but put these in here a few days ago. They were new-made then.”
Taking the papers from him, she unrolled them a bit. They were covered top to bottom, side to side, no margins, with writing that was incomprehensible to her.