Footsteps in Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  He took her face in his hands and met her eyes. “And every day we live the best we can, as we hope God would wish.”

  Mom didn’t move, just kept staring at him.

  “It’s been sixteen years since you pledged yourself to me,” Father said. “Will you say the words of marriage in front of my people?”

  “Yes, Llywelyn,” Mom said. “I missed you every day we were apart.”

  “Good!” Father kissed her for a long time. David looked away. It was great that his parents were together, but ... Enough! Let’s move on to the story!

  As if they’d heard his thoughts, they broke apart.

  “I want to know everything that has happened to you since you left me,” Father said.

  “Everything?” Mom said. “That will take a long time, Llywelyn.”

  “Since I cannot take you to bed, I have nothing else to do,” Father said.

  David could feel his face getting hot. Mom gave him a pitying look.

  “Papa!” Anna said.

  Father ignored them both. “Talk!” he said to Mom.

  First, Mom explained how she’d left Wales the first time. “I’d gone to you in the night, Anna. You’d had a dream that scared you and woke you up.”

  “I often do,” Anna said. “I don’t know why.”

  Mom nodded. “I took you to the garderobe. When I crouched in front of you, I heard a ‘pop’. My water had broken as I went into labor with David. I gasped, and we were gone.”

  “Just like that?” David said.

  “Just like that,” Mom said. “I found myself in the grass outside Grandma’s house.”

  “So, any shock could send us back,” Anna said.

  “That,” Father said, “would be unacceptable.”

  David agreed. There was no way he was going back now.

  “I wish I could reassure you,” Mom said. “But how it happens is a mystery to me.”

  “We’ll table it for the time being,” Father said.

  Mom then talked through the next fourteen years of their lives, until she reached the point where Anna and David disappeared from Pennsylvania.

  “My sister called me when you two didn’t arrive to pick up your cousin.”

  “Called you?” Math said.

  Mom hesitated, and then explained. “In our time, a person can speak into a machine that transmits her voice to another person far away.”

  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

  Some 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 sai
d. “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 18th 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?

  Mom’s and Papa’s wedding was set for a Sunday, after a noon mass, but Papa decreed that the assemblage of nobles should meet in the great hall on Friday. Two years before, when the nobility of Wales had assembled, the war with the English had been less than a year old. Now they gathered again, more confident and secure in their power.

  Unfortunately for David, he had to participate in the conference. For once, Anna wasn’t sorry to be a woman if it meant she didn’t have to sit through an all-day meeting, which David later told her consisted almost entirely of pontificating by one baron or another.

  Mom, however, had wanted to attend but hadn’t been able to defy convention enough to do it. “It isn’t that I object to being a woman,” Mom said as she and Anna crossed the courtyard, heading back to her room, “it’s that I don’t really enjoy being a medieval woman.”

  “You don’t have much choice, Mom,” Anna said.

  “I don’t have any choice,” Mom said. “I believed, in the first hours of my walk along Hadrian’s Wall, that I could control my destiny. Yes, I was a woman, but I was educated and intelligent, and had struggled and survived on my own in the twenty-first century w
ith two children. Surely this would make a difference? It was appalling to realize it made no difference at all.”

  “What do you mean?” Anna said.

  “Sir John knew that I’d saved his nephew, that I could read and write, but did he offer me a job as replacement for his thieving steward? Of course not. He sent me to the convent in Armathwaite.”

  “I can’t picture you in a convent, Mom.”

  Mom smiled. “As far as Sir John was concerned, it was the perfect solution for me—it would get me out of the way, yet be a place for me to stay while I waited for a safe method of travel to Wales. He didn’t even consider that I might be useful to him and could earn my own way. I was a woman, and thus needed to be taken care of.”

  “Why couldn’t you stay at the castle?”

  “Because he thought I was only twenty! Do I look twenty? I tell you ...” Mom paused, shaking her head. “Women age so quickly here. He looked at my relatively unlined face and soft hands and refused to believe I was thirty-seven and the mother of two grown children.”

  Actually, Mom had often been mistaken for a college student at home too, particularly when she wore shorts and put her hair in a pony tail. Still, if Anna thought back to the peasant women with whom she’d dealt in the past year, many of them had aged before their time. She remembered one woman in particular who’d given birth to her first child at fifteen, had nine children by thirty, and at thirty-three, when Anna met her, could easily have passed for fifty.

  Is that to be my fate, then? How many children will I have before I’m thirty?

  “Mom,” Anna said. “I’ve something to tell you.”

  Mom stopped and turned to Anna. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “I’ve wanted to ask if you were pregnant, but didn’t want to invade your space if you weren’t ready to tell me.”

  “I’ve been working up the courage to talk to you, and you already know!” Anna said. “How do you know?”

  Mom took Anna’s face in her hands and kissed her nose. “Because I’m your mom,” she said. “It’s my job to know these things. I’m happy for you and Math.”