From inside his ballooned shorts, the man pulled out a white linen handkerchief and handed it to her. Dougless blew her nose noisily.
“Have my enemies hired you?” the man asked. “Do they plot against me more? Is not my head enough for them? Stand, madam, and explain yourself.”
Gorgeous, but off his rocker, Dougless thought. “Listen, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Slowly, she stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
She didn’t say any more because he drew a thin-bladed sword that had to be a yard long, then held the sharp point against her throat. “Reverse your spell, witch. I would return!”
It was all too much for Dougless. First Robert and his lying daughter, and now this mad Hamlet. She burst into tears again and slumped against the cold stone wall.
“Damnation!” the man muttered, and the next thing Dougless knew he had picked her up and was carrying her to a church pew.
He put her down to sit on the hard pew, then stood over her, still glaring. Dougless couldn’t seem to stop crying. “This has been the worst day of my life,” she wailed. The man was scowling down at her like an actor out of an old Bette Davis movie. “I’m sorry,” she managed to say. “I don’t usually cry so much, but to be abandoned by the man I love and attacked—at sword point, no less—all in the same day, sets me off.” As she wiped her eyes, she glanced down at the handkerchief. It was a large linen square, and around the border was an inch and a half band of intricate silk embroidery of what looked to be flowers and dragons. “How pretty,” she choked out.
“There is no time for trivialities. My soul is at stake—as is yours. I tell you again: Reverse your spell.”
Dougless was recovering herself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was having a good cry all alone, and you, wearing that absurd outfit, came in here and started yelling at me. I’ve a good mind to call the police—or the bobbies, or whatever they have in rural England. Is it legal for you to carry a sword like that?”
“Legal?” the man asked. He was looking at her arm. “Is that a clock on your arm? And what manner of dress is it that you wear?”
“Of course it’s a clock, and these are my traveling-to-England clothes. Conservative. No jeans or T-shirts. Nice blouse, nice skirt. You know, Miss Marple–type clothes.”
He was frowning at her, but there seemed to be less anger about him. “You talk uncommonly strangely. What manner of witch are you?”
Throwing up her hands in despair, Dougless stood up and faced him. He was quite a bit taller than she was, so she had to look up. His black, curling hair just reached the stiff little ruff he wore, and he had a black mustache above a trim, pointed, short beard. “I am not a witch, and I am not part of your Elizabethan drama,” she said firmly. “And now I’m going to leave this church, and I can promise you that if you try anything fancy with that sword
of yours, I’ll scream the windows out. Here’s your handkerchief. I’m sorry it’s so wet, but I thank you for lending it to me. Good-bye, and I hope your play gets great reviews.” Turning sharply, she walked out of the church.
“At least nothing more horrible than what I’ve already been through can happen to me today,” Dougless murmured as she left the churchyard. There was a telephone booth beyond the gate, within sight of the church door, and Dougless used it to make a collect call to her parents’ home in the U.S. It was early in the morning in Maine, and a sleepy Elizabeth answered the phone.
Anybody but her, Dougless thought, rolling her eyes skyward. She’d rather talk to anyone on earth than her perfect older sister.
“Dougless, is that you?” Elizabeth asked, waking up. “Are you all right? You’re not in trouble again, are you?”
Dougless grit her teeth. “Of course I’m not in trouble. Is Dad there? Or Mom?” Or a stranger off the street, she thought. Anybody but Elizabeth.
Elizabeth yawned. “No, they went up to the mountains. I’m here house-sitting and working on a paper.”
“Think it’ll win a Nobel prize?” Dougless asked, trying to make a joke and sound carefree.
Elizabeth wasn’t fooled. “All right, Dougless, what’s wrong? Has that surgeon of yours stranded you somewhere?”
Dougless gave a little laugh. “Elizabeth, you do say the funniest things. Robert and Gloria and I are having a wonderful time. There are so many fantastic things to see and do here. Why, just this morning we saw a medieval play. The actors were so good. And you wouldn’t believe how good the costumes are!”
Elizabeth paused. “Dougless, you’re lying. I can hear it over the phone. What’s wrong? Do you need money?”
Try as she might, Dougless could not make her lips form the word “yes.” Her family loved to tell what they called Dougless-stories. They loved the one about the time Dougless got locked out of her hotel room when she was wearing only a towel. Then there was the time Dougless went to the bank to deposit a check and walked into a bank robbery. What they especially loved about this story was that when the police arrived, they discovered that the robbers were carrying toy guns.
Now she could imagine Elizabeth’s laughter when she told all the Montgomery cousins how funny little Dougless had gone to England and been left at a church with no money, no passport, nothing. “And, oh, yes,” Elizabeth would say over the howls of laughter, “she was attacked by a crazed Shakespearean actor.”
“No, I don’t need money,” Dougless said at last. “I just wanted to say hello. I hope you get your paper done. See ya.” She heard Elizabeth say, “Dougless” as she dropped the receiver into the cradle.
For a moment Dougless leaned back against the booth and closed her eyes. She could feel the tears starting again. She had the Montgomery pride, but she’d never done anything to be proud of. She had three older sisters who were paragons of success: Elizabeth was a research chemist, Catherine was a professor of physics, and Anne was a criminal attorney. Dougless, with her lowly elementary school teaching job and her disastrous history with men, was the family jester. She was an endless source of material for laughter among the relatives.
As she was leaning against the telephone booth, her eyes blurred with tears, she saw the man in the armor leave the church and walk down the path. He glanced quickly at the ancient gravestones, but didn’t seem to have much interest in them as he headed past the gate.
Coming down the lane was one of the little English buses, as usual doing about fifty miles an hour on the narrow street.
Suddenly, Dougless stood up straight. The bus was coming, the man was walking very fast, and, somehow, she instinctively knew he was going to walk in front of the bus. Without another thought, Dougless started to run. Just as she took flight, the vicar walked from behind the church in time to see the man and the fast-moving vehicle. He too started running.