For a minute, the duke appeared to stop breathing. “You came from the future?”
“Yes,” Michael confirmed.
“You understand all this is difficult to believe.” The duke called for more wine.
Michael held up his empty cup. “What do you think it’s like for me?” he asked.
“You sound mad,” the judge told him.
“I wonder it myself,” Michael admitted.
“You must keep this to yourself. Tell no one else.”
“Why?” Michael asked, fixing his unblinking gaze on the judge while Whimsey dismissed all the servants but John.
The two of them sat opposite each other before a large fireplace. John the butler stood behind his lord’s chair.
“People will not understand. They will think you demon possessed or mad.”
“Oh, right.” He wasn’t sure at this point that he wasn’t either one.
“But you may tell me. Let’s hear your story,” the duke allowed. “Start at the beginning.”
Michael told him about his phone call from Mr. Green to go to some lawyer’s office to pick something up that was bequeathed to him by a distant aunt and would help aid in a missing person’s case. “Well, I get there and this Mr. Green hands me an old, worn down, blackened brooch. I ran my finger over it.” He remembered the strange light, the feeling of having no control over his thoughts. “Pendragon. That was the word on the brooch. I said it and then I was here.”
“You spoke the name Pendragon and then you were here,” the duke echoed.
“And he rubbed the brooch,” John added.
The duke held up his finger and looked at Michael, not the butler. “Ah, but more important is the name Pendragon.”
“You believe me?” Michael asked, astounded. He realized he needed someone to believe him.
“I have my own reasons why I believe you.” the duke said in a mild tone. “For you, ’tis real, whether it truly is or is not.”
“It’s real,” Michael told him in earnest. “I’m telling you the truth. I…uh…understand that it’s hard for you to believe this crazy story. It’s hard for me to believe and it’s happening to me. I’m a New York City detective. I’ve been with the police force for eleven years.”
The duke whispered, “An officer of the law.”
“Yeah,” Michael said and continued. “This morning, I woke up in the twenty-first century. I showered—you don’t have showers here, do you?”
“You mean rain showers? Of course—”
“No,” Michael said with disgust. “I’m not a plumber, but there are pipes behind the walls in my bathroom, with a showerhead, or a nozzle that comes out of it.” He lifted his hand over his head to demonstrate. “You turn a switch and water comes out and you have a shower.”
“Fascinating.”
Michael didn’t know what the duke thought was so enthralling, a shower or that Michael had come up with it.
“I touched some…I don’t know…magic piece of jewelry and supposedly came back in time almost three hundred years. I was at some square. Maybe I woke up there, but I don’t remember that. Maybe I was drugged, brought to England and dumped on the streets. There was a crowd—all dressed like—do you have more wine, whiskey maybe?”
The duke nodded and turned to John. “More wine for our guest.”
Michael was grateful and continued. “I saw your daughter pickpocketing some people. I realized my things were gone, too.”
“Pickpocketing,” her father whispered somberly. “John, is she home?”
“No, my lord. She left.”
