Secrets in Time: Time Travel Romance

by Alison Stuart

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t understand any of it.’ Looking up at her, I asked, ‘Are you really a witch?’

  She frowned and she put a hand to her chest, an expression of alarm on her face. ‘If they had the courage, there are some who may call me that, but not to my face. I am just an old woman with some skills in healing. Do not call me a witch in any person’s hearing, Mistress Shepherd, or I will be hanged.’

  ‘Sending people through time is not just “some skills in healing”. I have some skills in healing. What you have is much more powerful, and I don’t profess for a moment to understand it.’

  For the first time, a slight smile tugged at the corners of her lips. ‘I come from a long line of wise women, Mistress Shepherd. There are some who say we are descended from Nimue, King Arthur’s lover. I have a gift, as my mother and my grandmother and theirs had long before me.’

  ‘Has Mary inherited it?’

  ‘No, but it is not confined to the women’s line. Nat has snatches of it.’

  ‘Is that why you can move him around in time and talk to him?’

  She gave me an inscrutable look and I wasn’t going to argue. I had woken that morning in the twentieth century and I would be going to bed in the seventeenth century. Nimue, Merlin, Morgana--it didn’t really matter which sorcerer she believed she was descended from. I was too tired to take any more in.

  As if reading my thoughts, she stood and put her hand on my shoulder. ‘You have travelled far today, Mistress Shepherd. Go and rest and tomorrow we will talk further. I will send my maid to help you with your clothes.’

  At all of five feet, six inches, I seemed to be uncommonly tall for the time and, as I stood, I seemed to tower over Dame Alice. I smoothed down my rumpled skirts and nodded. I would never get out of the combined skirts, petticoats and bodice without someone to help me.

  ‘Good night, Dame Alice,’ I said at the door.

  ‘Good night, Mistress Shepherd.’

  I left her standing in the middle of the room, a small, still figure in a black dress.

  Chapter 7

  Magic and Modern Medicine

  When I finally make my way to Jessie, I find she has been crying and I am angry with Alice. I do not understand why she has brought Jessie with me.

  As I slip into the bed and take her in my arms, I can hear Alice tapping at the corners of my mind. I ignore her. Tonight Jessie needs me and I need her. We have so little time left. Perhaps tomorrow it will all make more sense.

  ~*~

  I woke alone to the sounds of voices in the courtyard, mingled with farmyard sounds of lowing cattle and squawking fowls. A knock on the door startled me and I barely had time to retrieve my borrowed nightdress before a maid entered the room with a bowl and a jug.

  ‘The master said you would like water for washing.’ She set the bowl and jug on the table with a pile of cloths beside it.

  Toothpaste would have been good too, I thought, running my tongue over my furry teeth.

  ‘Do you wish me to help you to dress?’

  I agreed that would be a good idea. It had taken the girl some time to get me out of my clothes the previous night. If she had noticed my strange footwear and unconventional underwear, she had known it was not her place to make a comment. I just hoped she had the discretion not to spread the story through the kitchen.

  As the maid tightened the laces on the bodice, the noise outside the window changed. Trailing the long suffering maid behind me, I crossed the room to look down on the courtyard.

  For a moment, I thought I could have been at one of Alan’s musters. Below me, soldiers in seventeenth-century clothing were forming in ranks. I almost expected Alan in his green coat to come striding self-importantly from the house. But this was real, this was war.

  At first I couldn’t see Nat and then realized he wore a wide brimmed hat with a curling red feather. He looked up at the window, as if sensed I was watching. I raised my hand and he smiled, his fingers going to the brim of his hat in an informal salute.

  The maid coaxed me back from the window and sat me on a stool while she attacked my hair. She proved more adept than the twentieth-century camp followers the previous day, and managed to coax it into some sort of bun-like arrangement coiled at my nape with long, curling strands framing my face. I quite liked the effect, or what I could see of it, in my tiny mirror.

  When she was finished and had excused herself, I pulled the stool to the window and sat with my chin on my hand, watching the activity in the courtyard.

  ‘Nathaniel will see you later this morning.’ Dame Alice’s voice made me jump. I stood and turned to face her.

  ‘Is that another prognostication?’ I inquired.

  She smiled. ‘No, he gave me the message. He said there is something he wishes to show you. Until then, perhaps you would care to come with me. You may be interested in my potions and herbs. I really do have some skills in healing and you, as a practitioner of the healing art, may find my receipt book of some interest.’

  ‘Receipt book?’

  Alice frowned. ‘The book where I record the ingredients and the method of making my unguents.’

  ‘Oh…a recipe book.’

  Alice just gave me a puzzled glance.

  ‘Are you going to tell me how you know who I am?’ I asked as I followed her through the maze of stairs and corridors.

  ‘In good time, Mistress Shepherd,’ she replied, stopping to unlock and open the door to what she called her still-room.

  She stood back to allow me to enter first. Bunches of drying herbs hung from hooks and little round clay pots crammed the shelves between stoppered flagons. My nose twitched. The room smelled of sage and rosemary with the tinge of something sweet, such as honey. We had touched on the history of medicine in my studies and here was an opportunity to study it at firsthand. My professional curiosity overcame any reservations I may have had about Dame Alice.

  ‘This is extraordinary,’ I said.

  She shut the door behind her and indicated a heavy, leather bound volume on the table. ‘That is my book of receipts. The sum total of my knowledge.’ She looked up at me with her grandson’s clear eyes. ‘It would be wonderful to be born in your time, to have your knowledge.’

  ‘What do you know of my time?’ I challenged.

  ‘What I have seen, Doctor Shepherd. Extraordinary machines that do the work of men and horses. Magic lights and water that comes from the walls, but I have also seen unhappiness and poverty. Those things are universal to any age.’

  ‘How do you see?’ I looked around the room, wondering if she kept a crystal ball or some sort of bowl with magical divining liquid in it.

  She touched her eyes. ‘I see these things when I close my eyes,’ she said.

  ‘Did Nat know what you intended for him?’

  She tilted her head to one side. ‘We discussed it at length.’

  I pondered that revelation and the duplicity of my lover.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘You are linked to the cottage.’

  My heart skipped a beat. I had been right. This was not about me, it was about the cottage.

  ‘I only bought it eighteen months ago. How can I possibly be linked to it?’

  ‘All things are connected in one way or another, and the cottage has properties that allow it to sit on either side of time.’

  ‘I knew it!’

  Dame Alice turned her compelling gaze to me again. ‘It is not what you are thinking. It was not just the cottage. I have been waiting for you.’

  I frowned. ‘You knew I would buy the cottage?’

  She gave me that inscrutable smile.

  ‘If you know the future, then you know what is to happen to Nathaniel.’ My chest tightened and the first glimmer of hope sprang in me. ‘Is there a plan? Can we save him? Is that why you have brought me here?’

  ‘So many questions, Mistress Shepherd. All in good time.’ I think, from the little half smile, she enjoyed being mysterious. ‘For now, I would like to t
alk to you about your healing arts.’

  Despite the fact she had turned my world upside down, sent me a man to fall in love with--a man with a death sentence--dragged me across three centuries and seemed to revel in being mysterious, I liked Dame Alice. I saw the same hunger for knowledge in her as I saw in her grandson. She, like him, did not belong in this time. While he might have become machine-mad, Dame Alice would have made a fine doctor. She quizzed me extensively about the body and disease. At a time when the circulation of blood had only just been explained, the concept of unseen microbes and germs would have flummoxed anyone other than this extraordinary woman.

  We were so engrossed, we did not hear the door open and it was only when Nat said, ‘It is pleasing to see the two of you so deep in conversation,’ that we looked up.

  ‘Nathaniel, you should knock,’ his grandmother reproved him.

  ‘I did. And now if you can spare Jessie for a short time, I would like to borrow her.’

  I rose from the uncomfortable stool on which I had been sitting and excused myself. In the doorway, Nat spanned by corseted waist with his hands and kissed me

  ‘Your grandmother...’ I mumbled, conscious of Dame Alice’s presence in the room behind me.

  ‘Oh, don’t mind Grandam,’ Nat responded. ‘She knows about us.’

  I had an uncomfortable feeling that Dame Alice had some kind of seventeenth century closed circuit TV installed in my cottage. Who knew what she had seen? ‘I know, but still--’

  He cut me off again with a kiss.

  ‘Go, both of you,’ Dame Alice said. ‘You know I find young lovers tedious.’ ‘Where are we going?’ I asked as Nat shut the door to Dame Alice’s still room. ‘I want you to meet my sons, the center of my universe,’ he replied.

  ~*~

  Nat led me to a room that had not been part of the twentieth-century tour of the house. Beyond the closed door, I could hear children’s voices.

  He turned to look at me, his face grave. ‘I would like you to look at Christian and tell me what ails him.’

  ‘Is he sick?’

  He swallowed and nodded. ‘He has never been strong and the doctors tell me that he will not live to manhood. We have searched for a healer who may provide us with the answer we seek.’

  I stared at him, seeing the grief in his eyes for the child that seventeenth century medicine could not save.

  ‘Is this why I have been brought here?’

  He took a breath before he replied. ‘I would be easier knowing there is nothing I could have done that could change his fate.’

  Nothing he could have done? This father had travelled three hundred years to find the answer to that question.

  I took his hand, giving it a small squeeze before Nat opened the door to be greeted with shrieks of delight as two small children, hampered by long skirts, hurtled across the floor. Nat went down on his knees and gathered them to him, kissing their soft curls.

  ‘Why are they wearing skirts?’ I asked.

  He looked up at me with surprise. ‘Because boys are not breeched until they are at least five years old.’

  He disentangled the children and rose to his feet. With his hands on two small auburn heads, he turned the boys toward me. ‘Boys, I would like you to meet Mistress Shepherd. Now remember your manners.’

  I smiled as the two tots executed wobbly bows, made even more bizarre by their heavy skirts.

  ‘This is Nathaniel,’ he tapped the shoulder of the taller and stronger boy, ‘and this is Christian, the eldest.’

  I didn’t need to examine Christian to diagnose his symptoms. He was smaller than his twin and thin to the point of emaciation. His pallor and the slight blue tinge to his lips were all I needed. My heart sank.

  I greeted the boys with my professional cheerfulness and allowed myself to be shown their wooden Noah’s ark. Their father played with them on the floor while I spoke to their nursemaid.

  ‘The little one, Christian,’ I said. ‘Does he have trouble eating or playing?’

  She eyed me suspiciously. ‘Aye, but it’s not my fault. He gets same as Master Nathaniel.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m not blaming you for anything. I have some skill with healing and his father asked me to look at him.’

  A stethoscope would have been useful but I made do by pressing my ear against the little boy’s frail chest. He giggled and squirmed but when his father told him to be still, he obeyed without question. Even without my reliable modern technology I heard enough to confirm my diagnosis.

  When I had finished, I smiled at the child, unable to look at Nat and see the question in his eyes. ‘All done. You’ve been a good boy, Christian. How about a story?’

  Nat sat down in a large oak chair and pulled Christian onto his knee. Little Nathaniel, the boy who would grow up to become a confidante of Charles the Second, scrambled up on mine and I wrapped my arms around his warm, well-clothed body and recounted the story of Peter Rabbit in Mr. McGregor’s garden. The boys listened with rapt attention and out of the corner of my eye, I could see the nursemaid had stopped her chores to listen as well. I am not the best story teller in the world, but the tale is timeless.

  When I was done, Nat stood up and kissed both boys.

  ‘I will be back later,’ he said in answer to their cries of disappointment.

  I hugged the children and followed their father from the room and down the stairs to another room I hadn’t seen in any tour of the house.

  ‘My study,’ he explained, and gestured at the bookcase. ‘My books.’

  He walked to the window and stood with his hands behind his back, looking over the garden.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded, turning back to face me.

  ‘He has a hole in his heart, Nat. He was born with it and your doctors are right, it will kill him before he reaches adulthood.’

  His shoulders and I threw my arms around him, holding him close, pressing my face into the wool of his jacket.

  ‘There is nothing you could do to change that. Even in our time, it would be major surgery.’

  ‘But in your time, you could save him?’

  ‘Without further investigation with ultrasound and echocardiography it is impossible to know exactly what the abnormality is, Nat. Sorry I can’t be more specific.’

  He turned back to the window with his back to me and leaned on the windowsill, his head lowered.

  ‘I am going to die tomorrow, Jessie. When I ride away from here, I will never see those two boys again and they will never see me. Nathaniel will grow up without his father. I won’t be there to comfort him when Christian dies and even without the knowledge of what you have just told me, I know Christian will die because Nathaniel inherits the estate. You’ve seen his portrait.’

  ‘Has this always been about Christian?’

  He nodded. ‘I...we...Alice and…We have been searching through time...we hoped if we found the right person, there may be something that could be done.’

  ‘All I can do is give your family ideas to make his life more comfortable, but without an operation he does not have long.’

  ‘Can you do this operation?’

  I looked around. I was in the seventeenth century. I may as well have been in the darkest jungles of Brazil. I shook my head. ‘No. It is a complex procedure, Nat.’

  He thumped a fist into the windowsill.

  I didn’t move. I couldn’t. His grief went too deep for what comfort I could offer. I had given parents bad news so many times but always with the calm dispassion of a professional. This time I could feel my own heart breaking. A beloved child would die but before then the child would see his father’s death.

  I turned away from him, sinking into a chair and stifling a sob that rose unbidden. Now I held two lives in my hands. One I could not save, the other I could but not here, not in 1645. As a doctor, I felt utterly helpless. As surely as I knew Nat would die at the battle of Chesham, I knew nothing in the seventeenth century could save Christian.

  Tears stung my ey
es. It had always been there, the knowledge of his death, but back in 1995 it had seemed like a fantasy. Here it was reality. Outside the house, real soldiers, with real weapons rehearsed for a battle that was to come. Nat may as well have been a man on death row, awaiting execution. He would die, leaving a child living his own death sentence.

  For a long moment the grief overwhelmed me. I could do nothing, not even cry. I began to shake with the pent-up emotion. I choked back a sob and Nat raised his head. He turned to me and gathered me up from the chair, folding me in his arms.

  ‘I could change it,’ he whispered. ‘I could refuse to go.’

  I shook my head, knowing, without really being able to explain it logically, that it could not be changed. I pushed away from him and stood holding his hands, my face wet with tears I didn’t even know I had shed.

  I found my voice and said in a voice that shook with emotion, ‘You know you can’t, Nat. Fate will catch you--if not tomorrow then on the field at Naseby.’

  Nat made a cutting gesture with his hand. ‘Enough, Jessie. We can talk later. There is one more thing I have to show you.’

  He crossed to a heavy oaken chest, unlocked it with a key he retrieved from behind the books in the case and took out a second box, bound with heavy metal bands. He lifted out a large rectangular bundle wrapped in a soft leather cloth. Laying it on the table he reverently peeled the layers back to reveal a large, leather bound volume that even in 1645 smelt old and musty.

  I gasped as he turned the pages, recognizing the unmistakable hand in the fine pen drawings.

  ‘Da Vinci! It’s real? In my time it would be worth a fortune.’

  He raised an eyebrow and looked at me for a moment before he spoke. ‘I found it on a street stall in Florence and had to haggle hard for it, but in truth, I would have paid twice what the man wanted.’ He pointed to a drawing that resembled a modern bicycle.

  ‘I tried to make this. Flying machines, war machines...truly Da Vinci had the gift of foresight.’

  We were interrupted in our study of Da Vinci’s fantastical drawings by rapping on the door.