Every Time with a Highlander by Gwyn Cready Read Free Book Online

to be forced to preside over a dispute about dressing room sizes or lead the hunt for a missing tin of throat lozenges.
    How long had he been here? A quarter of an hour? A half? Did each extra minute reduce the chances of him finding his way home? Was the play continuing without him? Would he return to find no time had passed, that Paris was still onstage, waiting for his cue? Hell, would he be able to return at all?
    Between the dizzying jolt of arriving in another time, Undine’s demands, and trying to navigate Bridgewater’s game of cat and mouse, he hadn’t had time to contemplate the full extent of his plight. But now, in the silent chapel, he felt alone—very alone.
    What did he even know about the eighteenth century? Let’s see, there was Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his The School for Scandal , and Oliver Goldsmith and She Stoops to Conquer . Wait. No. Those were from the far more sophisticated end of the eighteenth century, the one that butted up to Jane Austen and Alexandre Dumas. Here, in 1706, they were barely past doublets and jerkins. In fact, in 1706 in Coldstream, they were barely past running each other through with swords. If he recalled his history properly, the last pitched battle between the English army and the Scottish clans didn’t take place until 1746. And Coldstream, as Undine so picturesquely put it, straddled the bloody border.
    A shiver went through him.
    There’s no point getting lost in the terrifyingly broad canvas of history, Michael. Concentrate on what you do know.
    Which is?
    He considered. Undine: witch or naiad; blond and irritatingly beautiful caster of spells; woman with a past who wants no part of her fiancé, nobleman John Bridgewater. Bridgewater: imperious, self-centered, backward-thinking nobleman and army officer, whose only weak spot appeared to be—
    Michael paused.
    The bastard does seem to love her. Whatever she may think of him, he seems to love her.
    He wanted to hate the man, but he found he couldn’t. He actually felt a bit sorry for him. How was it that Bridgewater loved Undine when she so clearly didn’t love him? Why, if she didn’t want to marry him, had she accepted his proposal of marriage? And how on earth did a man like that ever come to court a woman like Undine?
    Michael slouched against the cool stone of the wall. His tour had not uncovered a single hidden door, genie bottle, or DeLorean. If he was able to return, it wasn’t going to be as easy as coming. And since he had no intention of living the rest of his life as an ascetic in the already-far-too-ascetic-for-his-taste eighteenth century, he needed to find the witch.
    As he began toward the door, an odd shape on the side of the lectern caught his eye. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been looking for a secret door. He drew closer and saw it was two ovoid pieces of wood connected by twine hanging from a nail—rather like, well, a pair of testicles—a pair of testicles with a piece of paper wrapped around the top of one of them. When he picked them up, he saw that each piece had been painted to look like a monkey.
    Don’t we think we’re funny?
    He pulled it free and read it.
    Come to the pump house. I need your help. Hurry.

Eleven
    Michael spotted the pump house immediately through the arrow slits that lined the curving stairwell. He exited in unsettling awe past a musket-armed guard standing outside the door at the bottom of the steps, hurried by a dank-smelling well from which a bonneted maid pulled a bucket, and nearly ran into a man with a cleft lip hammering a wheel onto the front of a carriage.
    Every image sent another stab of uneasiness through him, and the more seemingly “normal” the image, the sharper the stab of unease. He felt like Hamlet, stumbling unhappily through his haunted dreams. Now that he figured out how he’d gotten here (whether or not his brain could accept it as fact), he needed to