which told him he was definitely in the right place. Someone behind him—several someones, actually—gasped. He turned around and smiled as pleasantly as possible.
“Blinded by the glory of the sun?” he asked, pointing upward, “or mayhap the passing of Her Majesty’s barge?” He pointed toward the Thames and nodded knowingly.
A woman looked at him in alarm but started to nod to apparently keep up with his nodding, which he couldn’t keep up for very long at all. Fortunately some enterprising soul thought he’d seen something—Derrick sincerely hoped it wasn’t the queen herself—and had all sorts of people rushing over with him to have a look at that something. Samantha took him by the arm.
“This way,” she said. “Hurry.”
He didn’t have to hear that twice. It also crossed his mind that it was out of character for him to follow along so docilely, but he was, as he would have admitted almost freely, not at his best.
He supposed he should have waited to attempt the textile rescue until dark, giving himself a bit more time to get himself together, but he hadn’t felt as if he’d had any choice. The longer that lace languished where it wasn’t supposed to be, the more chance of it being found or ruined or stolen. And as long as he knew it existed in another time, he couldn’t simply leave it there. The truth was, the problem was of his making and honor demanded he be the one to see to the solving of it.
Besides, who else would he have sent? Oliver and Peter had no experience with traveling through time—if they even truly believed that such a thing was possible—and he couldn’t ask anyone else in his family to take his place. No, the responsibility was his. He regretted that he had to drag Samantha into it, but, again, he hadn’t had any choice. He was convinced, given the ease of their recent journey, that he never would have gotten through the gate without her.
The crowds were as they had been the time before, only this time he drew an entirely different kind of attention. Obviously clothes did make the man. Whether attention was better than anonymity, he couldn’t have said. There was nothing to be done about it. He would just have to get through as best he could and hope they weren’t robbed. He wasn’t sure he had the energy to fend off some twentysomething bent on mayhem.
Samantha led him along a path he knew he never would have managed on his own in his current condition. He followed her, trying to focus on his surroundings. If he’d only had one more night to rest and recover, he would have been fine—
Samantha stopped next to a building. Derrick heard a faint gardyloo but couldn’t even bring himself to look up and see if it might affect him. He wasn’t at all surprised to find it had. He looked down to see sewage dripping down his left arm, but he was past caring. All he wanted to do was sit down until the world stopped spinning so violently.
“It’s here,” Samantha breathed. “And my phone as well.”
He looked at her in surprise. “You’re kidding.”
“Completely broken, but it’s there.” She shoved the lace into her bag, then leaned over and collected the pieces of her phone.
“Is it all there?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “I think I have all we have time to get.”
He would have argued, but when he stepped forward to bend over and look at the ground, he saved himself from bashing his head against a wooden post only because Samantha was fortunately stronger than she looked. She pushed him back upright, then held on to his arm.
“You stink,” she said.
“Yes, I imagine—”
“Let’s go.”
He didn’t fight her, mostly because he couldn’t fight her. It was truly appalling how terrible he felt, but half the battle was won and there was no turning back.
“Hold on to me,” he said thickly.
“Are you going to fall?”
“No, I just don’t want . . .” He had to take a deep breath. “Don’t want to lose you back here. Hold on.”
She took hold of his arm, which he supposed earned them a few looks that he wasn’t paying attention to. He focused on the path in front of him, was grateful that the London of Elizabeth’s time was a very busy place, then plowed doggedly on. He attempted a supercilious look directed toward those who got in his way, but he was too ill to judge how