“Why do you all keep asking if I’m ill?” Even to her own ears, the question was a piteous moan. “Do I look sick?”
Eyes looked her up and down and Scarlett could see he was restraining a nod. “Hae ye no’ then?” he asked instead. “Yer to thin and wan. Yer hair shorn and walking aboot in yer bedclothes. What else might we think?”
Too thin? Wan? “Bedclothes?” Dumbly, Scarlett looked down at her white maxi dress once again. To whom would it look like nightgown? Or rather, when would it have looked like a nightgown? Not too long ago really. Early twentieth century even. Maybe the 1950s?
Casting a glance about at the dozen men around her once more, Scarlett was fairly certain that she wasn’t going to be that lucky. “Ah, since I am so obviously out of it, right now. Would you mind telling me the date?”
“Hae ye suffered so long ye cannae ken the time that has passed?”
“Apparently not,” Scarlett muttered to herself.
“’Tis the fifteenth day of August, my lady.”
Scarlett nodded, biting her lip. True enough. But…
“And the year?”
Her breath caught and held as the question she tried to convince herself didn’t need to be asked popped out anyway.
Rhys lifted a brow warily. “’Tis the year of our Lord, fifteen hundred and …”
The blood roared in her ears, drowning him out. Fifteen hundred? Fifteen? Oh God! This was bad, so very bad. Either she’d gone completely around the bend, her captors all had, or her worst fears had been realized.
A warm hand touched hers and Scarlett flinched, casting a terrified look at Rhys before struggling to regain her composure. “My lady? Lass?” His soft brogue was filled with concern. “I pray that dinnae come as a great surprise for ye, my lady.”
The bitter burn of bile rose in the back of her throat but she swallowed it back with a grimace and shook her head woodenly. Insanity would have been preferable to the alternative, but the truth was undeniable. After all, if you eliminate the impossible…
Scarlett gasped for air, dragging in a ragged breath.
Damn. Sherlock-ed by logic.
How? How had it happened? Beyond Sci-Fi, no logical explanation was readily available. Even searching within the genre, she would be hard put to unearth a reasonable explanation.
How then? There hadn’t been any blue police boxes about. No mysterious, bow-tied ‘doctors’. No big balls of ‘wibbly, wobbly, time-y, wimey stuff”.
Scarlett’s stomach knotted, threatening a revolt despite her better efforts to remain calm.
“Are ye well, my lady?”
She really wished he would stop asking her that.
6
“Yer looking a wee bit better, my lady.”
There wasn’t a miniscule bit of humor left within her to even summon a mordant smile at that. If ‘better’ meant that she was no longer curled up in the fetal position over the pommel moaning “wibbly wobbly, wibbly wobbly” to herself over and over any longer, then sure, she supposed she was better.
That her insides no longer quivered with the persistent urge to be outside of her body was also a good sign. Bodily, she was actually rather numb. Mentally, she was almost deafened by a cacophony of jangled questions, rising like a terrible crescendo until her mind was about to burst. It was almost… orchestrophic, Scarlett decided. A nonsensical word being only too perfect for a situation like this.
Picked apart, the questions themselves hadn’t changed at all. Questions she had no answer to. How? Why? And how again.
Too emotionally exhausted to go another round with mental anarchy, Scarlett looked to her companion for distraction. “What’s your name? Rhys?”
“Sir Rhys Hepburn of Crichton, at yer service,” he told her, bowing from the waist in his saddle. “And ye, lady?”
“Scarlett Thomas.”
Rhys’s brow lifted even higher at that. “Thomas? An Sassenach name.”
“An Anglicized name,” she corrected wearily, rocking from side to side with the sway of the horse as they plodded along. The orchestra in her head was dulling to an out-of-tune fifth grade band with a hyperactive ten-year-old beating the living daylights out of the bass drum. “But either way, it isn’t Lindsay.”
Ha! At least she now knew why none of them had recognized her.
“Is it no’?” he retorted with guarded doubt. “Yet ye expected the Lindsay clansmen to recognize ye, did ye no’? I would even say ye were most genuinely confused when he dinnae.”
Yes, she had been but not for the reasons he thought. Should she tell them? Try to explain? Scarlett shook off the thought without hesitation.
One did not simply announce that they were a time traveler. Such a revelation was far more likely to bring her death far more quickly than salvation, no doubt. They might not hunt witches with torches and pitchforks here, but she’d seen enough of The Tudors series to know that this was a time when heretics were frequently beheaded or burned at the stake.
If she proclaimed herself a time traveler, even with proof to back it up (the contents of her purse would provide that readily enough), there was little doubt she would be labeled a heretic and probably a witch as well.
Personally, she had no desire to be grilled to a crispy well-done. All this was torture enough.
“Where is yer home then? I confess we find yer speech most odd.”
“Memphis.”
More doubt, but Scarlett was willing to wager there would be a lot of that going around in the days to come. Days? Weeks? Forever? Bile rose in her throat along with a nauseating quiver in her chest. God, she hadn’t even thought of that yet. What if…
“Memphis? Is that no’ an ancient city of Egypt?”
Distraction, Scarlett reminded herself. Take it. She couldn’t let them see her panic. That shouldn’t be too hard; she was an actress and a celebrity. One more than the other made her good at masking her emotions. A deep soothing breath and the mask clicked into place. “It’s in Tennessee. I grew up there.”
“I dinnae ken such a place. Is it in Spain? France?”
Recalling what Laird had said before, Scarlett felt
