Footsteps in Time (19 page)

Father exchanged a look with Math,
before folding his arms across his chest, not looking at all
satisfied.

Mom glanced at him. She patted his
knee. “It’s called a telephone. I mentioned it once before. I’ll
explain later.”

“
You were telling us about
Aunt Elisa,” David said.

“
Yes,” Mom said. “At the
time she was puzzled, and not a little angry, because you’d left
your cousin to languish at his friend’s house for hours. By the
time she got off work, however, she was genuinely worried. The
police came, but they never found any trace of you or the van. You
remain, I presume, an unsolved mystery.”

“
As will you,” David said.
“I wonder what the authorities are thinking now, with the addition
of your disappearance.”

“
What did you think when
we disappeared, Mom?” Anna said. “Did you think we were
dead?”

“
Not for more than a
moment,” Mom said. “During those first heart-wrenching hours when
you were missing, I refused to think it, and then, once the police
had left and I was alone, I realized I couldn’t think it. I was
very lonely without you, but I believed you were alive, just alive
somewhere else. Though I certainly was aware of the significance of
the date you disappeared ...” Tears welled up in her eyes again.
“It’s just too good to be true that you’re here!”

Anna, also teary-eyed, stood up and
hugged her.

Father and David looked at each other.
Just as David had thought earlier, the expression on his face said,
‘Okay—enough!’

Then Mom began to laugh, her shoulders
shaking as she struggled for control. Father looked startled, but
David remembered that Mom often laughed during stressful
situations. It was the crying that was unusual for her. Mom
squeezed Anna’s hand and David was glad to see the laughter instead
of tears.

“
I love
you,
cariad
,” she
said. “This has all been a little overwhelming.”

“
And you’re tired,” Father
said, “so let’s finish this.”

“
As I told Anna and David,”
Mom said, “I arrived at Hadrian’s Wall.”

“
But that’s hundreds of
miles from here!” Father said.

“
I know, Llywelyn. I was as
horrified as you to discover it.”

“
You really are from the
future.” Math rested his elbows on his knees and looked from Mom to
Father, and back. “There are times that I forget where Anna was
born, but now ...” He paused and then leaned back in his
chair.

“
Are you okay with this?”
Anna said.

“
This is fascinating,” he
said. “I’m very interested in what your mother has to say. Please
continue.”

Mom nodded. “I walked along the wall,
anxious to avoid meeting anyone. My clothes, of course, were
entirely inappropriate, and I was anxious about what time I found
myself living in. I only hoped that this was 1284—it could easily
have been another era entirely.

“
The first evening, I spent
in one of the ruined Roman forts along the wall. When I entered it,
however, I found that I wasn’t alone. A ten year old boy had hidden
himself there, frightened; hands tied behind his back, he huddled
in a corner.”

“
You’re kidding,” David
said, reverting to English.

Mom shrugged. “Turns out he
was the nephew of Carlisle Castle’s castellan, Sir John de Falkes,
who crusaded with Edward before being given custody of the region.
The boy, Thomas, had been riding with an English patrol—apparently
they start them early in war in England—which had come upon a
Scottish raiding party and gotten wiped out, with the boy as the
only survivor. The Scots had tied him up and thrown him over a
horse. Once it got dark, he slid off the back into the brush and
got away.”

“
So you helped him get
home?” Anna said.

“
I did,” Mom said. “We
walked all night. By dawn we’d reached the outskirts of Carlisle
and encountered Falkes riding out with his men to look for Thomas.
They took me in, cleaned me up, and sent me on my way to Wales,
though, in truth, he didn’t like that part at all.”

“
He didn’t want you to come
here?” David said.

“
England
is
at
war with us, after all,” Mom said. “In the end, however, I
convinced him I was harmless and he paid for my passage, if for no
other reason than to discharge the debt he owed me for caring for
his nephew.”

“
Chance, luck, and
happenstance.” Father’s eyes darkened and he looked very serious,
almost grim. “I don’t want to lose you three. I don’t want Wales to
lose you. How do I keep you here?”

Mom, Anna, and David shook their
heads, each solemn.

“
I don’t know,” Mom
said.

Chapter Three

Anna

S
ome people (like Goronwy) remembered Mom well, though their
memory must have been of a girl only a little older than Anna,
rather than the confident woman she’d become. Admittedly, she
looked pretty terrible when she arrived and they might not have
recognized her when Papa brought her into the great hall. They’d
threaded their way through the crowd seated at the tables and
disappeared into his private apartments with David, Math, and Anna
trailing behind. The fact that Papa and Mom were holding hands was
a pretty good give-away, however, that something was up, and by the
time the reunited family had finished talking and had come out for
the afternoon meal, the whole castle was in an
uproar.

But it was a
good
uproar.

Prince Llywelyn is
marrying Prince Dafydd’s mother!
He sent
for her but before she could reach Wales, her boat was wrecked in
the storm! The Jewish doctor saved her life!

At the end of the meal, Mom brought
Aaron to Papa. Jews couldn’t eat with gentiles, and so Mom had made
sure he had food and a place to eat in private. “If it please you,
my lord,” Mom said. “I’d like to introduce you to Aaron ben Simon,
a physician. I told you of his assistance on my
journey.”

Papa nodded.

“
And I’d like to introduce
you, Aaron,” Mom said, continuing in English, “to my future
husband, Llywelyn, Prince of Wales.”

Aaron’s eyes widened
but
Papa spoke before Aaron could say
anything.

“
Thank
you for caring so well for
Marged
,” Papa said.

“
It is my honor, sir, to
meet you.” Aaron bowed his head as Mom translated.

“
Is it true, Aaron the
Physician, that you’ve come to Wales to find a new life for
yourself, away from the persecution in England?”

“
Yes, my lord. That is
true,” Aaron said.

“
Marged
respects you greatly, and if
you would like to remain with us, I offer you the position of court
physician. We are in need of someone with your
skills.”

If Anna had been in Aaron’s
shoes, she would have been feeling pretty overwhelmed by now, but
Aaron had a magisterial air that nothing could suppress. “I would
be honored to serve you, my lord. I lost all that I owned when we
were thrown into the sea and this is more than I dared hope
for.”

After relaying his words to
Papa, Mom smiled. “I have a room prepared for you. Please allow me
to have a servant show you to your quarters. Tomorrow, perhaps, we
can talk, and see about replacing your belongings. We’ll need you
to provide us with a list of tools, books, and herbs that will
assist you in your work.”

“
I await your pleasure,
Madam,” Aaron said.

“
Meg,” Mom said. “I am as
I was. My clothing is clean and I’m well fed. That is the only
difference.”

Aaron looked into her eyes for half a
second, and a ghost of a smile played around his lips, before he
bowed once more and found a seat at one of the lower
tables.

Anna was glad for Aaron
that he’d arrived in such a spectacular fashion, as Math wasn’t
quite as optimistic about the tolerance of the Welsh people as
Aaron was. In this case, however, the fact that he came with Mom
and had been received by the prince boded well for him. For Anna’s
part, she couldn’t get enough of Mom and found her eyes drawn to
her mother again and again, still not really believing that she was
there and this was real.

Wales is full of orphans, but it is a
peculiar state of being, Anna had found. Math’s mother died at his
birth, and he’d lost his father ten years later. David and Anna
were half-orphaned when Anna’s father died, and fully orphaned for
the first weeks in Wales, or so they thought. With no parents in
the picture, Anna had found that she no longer felt obligated to
please them and their absence instilled a certain sense of freedom,
but at the same time, the rock on which she’d built her house had
washed into the sea.

One of Mom’s
anthropologist colleagues had commented that in a certain region of
Africa, the standard greeting was:
How is
your mother?
And if a person
replied:
She is well
, the response was always:
Then it
must be well with you.

And it is well with
me, perhaps for the first time since we arrived.

“
What are you thinking?”
Math said. He and Anna had retreated to their room to prepare for
bed. Math sat in his chair, his bare feet stretched towards the
grate. It was the end of August, but the night had grown cool and
he’d lit a fire to take the chill from the room.

“
That I’m a different
person with my mother here,” Anna said.

Math held out his hand.
Anna went to him and took it. She knelt on the rug in front of the
fire and rested her head against his knee. He stroked her hair with
his other hand. “I’m glad. I’ve always been a little scared that if
you were given a choice between returning to your time, or staying
with me, you’d choose to leave.”

“
Oh, Math,” Anna
said.

He pulled her into his lap
so she could rest her head against his chest.

“
There were times when the
decision might have been hard,” she said. “Maybe even as recently
as three weeks ago.”

“
When you
first told me of this traveling in time, I believed
you
, but I couldn’t
believe
it
,” he
said.

“
I
thought as much,” Anna said. “Now with Mom’s arrival, everything
has changed. It’s like our old world was
this
close just a moment ago, and now
it’s gone again.”

“
Perhaps,” Math said, “if
you are given the choice to return, you could take me with
you.”

Anna sat silent,
thinking—thinking about what that could mean for them, together and
separately. “No.”

Math sat up
straighter.

Anna shushed him with a finger to his
lips before he could protest. “It would be more difficult for you
to live in my time than for me to live in yours. I would rather
stay here with you, than either leave you, or ask you to come with
me. Thank you, however, for offering.”

Math hugged Anna closer.
“I’m glad you want to stay with me, but in truth, I wasn’t planning
on giving you a choice.”

* * * * *

The wedding wasn’t,
as it turned out, the next day. Goronwy had objected, not because
he didn’t want Mom to marry Papa, but because it sent the wrong
message to the rest of Wales. To do it right, they needed a
big
wedding, if only to
thumb their noses at King Edward and his Church.

Invitations went out to all the lords
of Wales, from the tiniest commote to those whose power rivaled
Papa’s. Thus, it was only a week before David’s sixteenth birthday
that everyone gathered at Aber, Papa’s primary seat in
Gwynedd.

The moment Anna had
walked through the castle gate for her own wedding to Math a year
earlier, she’d nearly swooned with happiness. Aber wasn’t a castle
in the traditional sense. It had a large ring wall surrounding it,
within which were the usual stables and kitchens and a large
chapel. However, the two primary structures were an ‘H’-shaped
building, several stories high that served as Papa’s administrative
center, and a large manor house that wouldn’t have looked out of
place in the 18
^th
century. Made of stone and wood with many rooms,
it was the warmest place Anna had slept since coming to
Wales.

It also, miraculously, had a bath.
Papa’s forefathers had built Aber over the top of an old Roman
villa, meaning it had tunnels underneath it, some of which were
walkable, and amenities Anna hadn’t experienced since leaving
Pennsylvania.

The year before, when
Papa had given Anna away, David had stood up with Math. Anna had
worn a wine-colored dress (not a white one—that was a later custom)
made of the finest carded wool, with floor length drop sleeves and
embroidered neckline, sleeves, and hem. It had laced up the back
and even had a train. Anna had felt like a real princess, like any
girl would want to feel on her wedding day. What had felt the best,
however, was how
right
it felt. It had been the culmination of everything she’d been
through in the year since she’d come to Wales. Even though
butterflies had filled Anna’s stomach, she was nervous only about
the wedding ‘show’, not about Math himself.
How could I have met anyone like Math in
Oregon?