Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  Arthur gave a little cry, and Lili reached across David’s desk to take the baby from him. “Husband, as long as girls aren’t educated equally with boys, as long as they can’t represent their towns in Parliament, change won’t happen the way we want it to.”

  Bronwen didn’t smirk at Lili’s ‘we’. One of their first conversations had been about the difference between her upbringing and Lili’s, and how Lili admired Bronwen’s surety as a human being. Bronwen believed herself worthy of respect and expected men to listen to her. Lili had wanted that for herself, and David had encouraged her, but she was still a medieval woman living in the Middle Ages. For all that they were pressing David now, Bronwen remained realistic about what they could change. This was one of those instances, however, when Bronwen was going to hold firm. “This is our project.”

  “As a compromise, who do we have who could stand up with Bronwen and Anna and lend credibility to their words?” Lili said. “He doesn’t have to say anything.”

  “I wish I could do it,” David said, “but I’m leaving today.”

  Since Bronwen felt she had won the battle, she was willing to give in slightly on the negotiations. “Roger Bacon should do very nicely. The man has pride. He’s already entranced at being on the cutting edge of our little scientific revolution. And he listens to me when I talk instead of pretending I’m not in the room.”

  David dropped the front feet of his chair to the floor with a thud. “Let’s talk to him together before I go.”

  “Can you make him understand what we’re trying to do here, do you think?” Lili gestured to the cantaloupe. “We don’t want him to undermine the little progress we’ve made.”

  “I am the King of England and Bronwen is a woman unlike any he has ever encountered.” David winked at Bronwen. “I’m pretty sure the two of us can convince him.”

  Chapter Two

  September, 1289

  David

  “We sail with the evening tide, my lord,” Callum halted in front of David and gave him a quick bow. They’d arrived at Cardiff at midday and were departing at sunset, facing an eighteen-hour journey across the Irish Sea.

  “How long until then?” David said.

  “An hour, no more,” Callum said.

  “Then I suppose we ought to get everyone on board,” David said. “The longer it takes for us to get to Ireland, the more ready Valence will be for us.”

  The ship on which they were sailing might be called a ‘cog’ or a ‘hulk’ by historians. It was an oak-timbered, single-masted ship with a square-rigged sail. Each cog had been fitted to carry between twenty and thirty horses and a comparable number of men. David’s ship presented the one exception. He would sail with only five horses and fewer men because, like Air Force One, it had been designed with substantial accommodation for him.

  When William the Bastard had conquered England in 1066, he’d brought two thousand horses across the English Channel. David wasn’t trying to duplicate that feat. He was taking ten ships carrying two hundred men and horses. In Ireland, they would meet Gilbert de Clare, to whom David had given oversight of the royal estates, and join the army he’d gathered. Dublin was the most common port in Ireland for disembarking, but David had chosen to land at the smaller port at Waterford, far to the south.

  “Well, my king.” Humphrey de Bohun sauntered up to David. “The time of reckoning has come.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” David said. “We have a long way to go before we can rein in Valence.”

  Humphrey rubbed his hands together with undisguised glee. “I hear he has dug in at Wexford, and if we’re to get to him, we’re going to have to dig him out.”

  David knew that Humphrey wanted Wexford for himself. That wasn’t necessarily part of David’s plan, though he might have to reward Humphrey somehow if he made a major contribution to the upcoming fight. It made David uncomfortable to know that to the Irish, he was of the conquering nation. The Welsh had always been the underdog, and David liked knowing that his was the side of justice.

  Thus, David’s sympathies remained with the native Irish people, and one of the more pressing tasks that faced him was how to control all of his Norman barons who viewed Ireland—like the March of Wales—as their own private playground. He couldn’t afford to lose their support, especially now. But in the long run, he wanted the Irish to govern Ireland. While the situation with Valence appeared clear cut to David, leaving the issue of Irish independence unresolved was one of the many compromises he’d made since becoming king. Sorting all this out was a delicate task if there ever was one, and how he was going to square his conscience with what he might have to do—or not do—he didn’t yet know.

  “Son.” A hand dropped onto his shoulder, and David turned to see his father standing to his left. “It was good to see you.”

  “Good to see you too.” David went to embrace his father, but then stopped himself.

  “What’s wrong?” Llywelyn said.

  David grimaced. “I’m not feeling great.” That was, in fact, an understatement. He had a sore throat and ached all over. It wasn’t a good way to start a trip across the Irish Sea, but he felt that he had no choice but to continue what he’d started.

  His father didn’t hide his concern, and they settled for grasping forearms.

  “It’s why I stayed away from the twins last night,” David said.

  Yesterday, David’s company had spent the night with David’s family at Caerphilly. He and his mother had managed a short evening of conversation before she’d disappeared to nurse his twin siblings, and then he’d stayed up talking with his father until well past midnight. Even if David was paying for the late night now, he wasn’t sorry. He’d listened to all the advice his father could give him, and he found it terrifying to think that the rest was up to him. David had taken on the absurd mantle of the King of England, but in his father’s presence, he realized how little he knew about governing, and how much he was still feeling his way in the dark.

  Thank goodness he had Callum with him. Callum wasn’t David’s father, but he knew more about more things than anyone David had ever met outside his own family.

  “I’d tell you to be careful, but I know it won’t do any good,” his father said.

  “I’m always careful,” David said.

  His father laughed. “Except when you’re not.” Then he sobered and gripped David’s shoulder, shaking him a little. “Come back to us.”

  David nodded. “I will. You can count on it.”

  “My lord, it’s time.” Callum reappeared, holding out a hand to David, having overseen the disposition of David’s men on the other ships.

  “Of course.” David patted his father’s arm, nodded to Humphrey, who would be sailing on a different ship, and walked up the gangplank in front of Callum.

  “Do you get seasick, my lord?” Cassie greeted him from the top of the gangway. She stood with legs spread, as tall as the average man, beautiful and uncommon in her male clothing. She had pulled her cloak close around her against the wind that blew from the east. It meant they would get to Ireland all the faster.

  “No, I don’t,” David said. “My mother does. How about you?”

  “I haven’t before,” Cassie said. “When Callum and I sailed to Orkney, the ride was smooth enough, but there’s a chop to the water today that I didn’t expect.”

  David studied the waves that lapped at the side of the ship. All the waters around Britain, the Bristol Channel included, were known for their unpredictability. “We’ll hope for the best.”

  “All aboard who’s coming aboard!” The ship’s captain ordered the ropes untied. The shallow bottom of the ship meant that, unlike larger sailing vessels in later centuries, it could be moored at a dock. Soon, the wind filled the sail, and the ship sailed out of Cardiff harbor into the Bristol Channel. They’d be sailing west and then northwest, since Waterford was on the south coast of Ireland.

  Once David saw that they were properly underway, he turned to Callu
m. “Let me know if something happens. I’m going to sleep.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Callum smirked.

  “You may laugh, but your time will come.”

  “Of course, my lord,” Callum said.

  Despite the stress of being King of England, David had managed a good night’s sleep most nights, but not since the birth of Arthur. Even though Lili or a nanny took on the bulk of the baby’s needs at night, David had changed one or two middle-of-the-night diapers. Cassie had given no sign that a child was in the offing for her and Callum, but unless something was very wrong with one of them, children were inevitable. David crawled into his narrow bunk and grinned evilly at the ceiling, thinking of Callum as a father. He’d make a great one.

  The old wooden cog was salted and splintered, but seemed sturdy enough. David recalled the first night he’d been given a room of his own after his father had told him he was his son. David had reveled in the feeling of the down mattress and marveled at what it was like to be alone. Tonight, he missed Lili and Arthur, but didn’t regret that he’d arranged for every counselor other than Callum to ride in a different ship. On one hand, David might regret avoiding the mountain of paperwork he could have worked through during these eighteen hours. On the other hand, he could sleep instead.

  He closed his eyes, but found his mind still churning over his last conversation with Bronwen at Windsor. In the nine months since he’d become King of England, he’d upended every aspect of the social order. Bronwen complained about the slow pace of his policies regarding the role of women in society, but the idea of establishing village schools to educate all boys in England was terrifying to many noblemen, most of whom couldn’t read or write themselves.

  David’s insistence on educating girls as well as boys, and including their mothers and grandmothers on village councils—not to mention Parliament, which was the next step—had them apoplectic with shock and horror. It was astonishing to David that medieval men wouldn’t want their wives and daughters educated, but thousands of years of history couldn’t be undone in a year. It probably couldn’t be undone in a hundred.

  The status of women was just one of a dozen issues at hand. David’s lecture on the scientific method at the newly established college of Peterhouse at Cambridge had been given to a packed house. Much of what had gone into that talk he’d plotted out with Callum in a marathon study session. Callum had said openly that he’d survived his first months in the Middle Ages only because of the help David had given him, but from David’s perspective, the benefit had gone almost entirely the other way. Callum had himself gone to university at Cambridge, and while David felt himself capable of understanding anything once taught, every day he was reminded of his own lack of education.

  When he’d come to the Middle Ages, he’d been a freshman in high school, taking Algebra II and advanced biology. It was only through concentrated study with his mother, Aaron, Bronwen, and now Callum, not to mention the endless pages he’d printed out that frantic afternoon at his aunt’s house in Radnor, that he was able to feel like he could hold his own with his elders. He just plain didn’t know enough.

  All the while, he’d had to deal with numerous sticky political situations. The nobles of England were growing in their acceptance of him—he hoped—but they would lose their faith in him and his ability to lead if he allowed Valence continued freedom to wreak havoc throughout his domains. The man had to be stopped somehow. David didn’t yet know how he was going to do it.

  He might even have to order the man killed. Humphrey de Bohun was only the most recent baron to suggest rather loudly that a beheading was in order. The delegation from the throne of Scotland he’d spoken in front of had happily concurred. David had reached a point where he needed to act. When he found Valence, he would first try to speak to him, but he assumed that by now, whatever words he used needed to be backed up by an army.

  He didn’t want more war. But he’d come to realize in the six years he’d lived in the Middle Ages that he had to find it within himself to use force. The key was to understand the difference between using it as a shortcut to get what he wanted, and using it for justice.

  Chapter Three

  September, 1289

  Callum

  Callum sat upright with a jerk. Something had woken him, and it wasn’t only that Cassie wasn’t beside him on the narrow bunk they shared. He threw off the blanket and got to his feet. Because he could see well enough without a lantern to find his clothing and weapons, dawn wasn’t far off. Callum pulled on his boots, wrapped his cloak around his shoulders, buckled on his sword, and went to find his wife.

  He ducked under the lintel but had to catch the frame of the door in order to keep himself upright. While the weather had been fair when they’d gone to bed, clouds had blown in overnight, and the waves had grown larger. In the murk of the morning, the only real light came from lanterns that lit up the deck aft and stern and swung with the motion of the ship.

  Callum found his wife standing at the bow, her hands tucked into her cloak and her hood up against the wind and the chill of the morning. “Why aren’t you in bed?” he said.

  “As it turns out, I don’t get seasick, but the rocking of the ship was bothering me. I lay awake for hours before I decided to get up so I wouldn’t disturb you with my tossing and turning.” Cassie turned her head to look at him. “That so-called bed was hard, even by medieval standards.”

  Callum had slept in far worse circumstances, as had Cassie, but instead of mentioning this, he put his arm around her shoulders and looked with her towards Ireland. The fierce wind whipped the waves ever higher, and other than the faraway lights from several of the ships that sailed with them, all he could see were gray clouds and sea.

  David had arranged it so that only Callum, in his station as Earl of Shrewsbury, sailed with him in this particular ship. Ever since the White Ship had gone down in the English Channel a hundred and fifty years ago, losing England its prince and the flower of its nobility who’d sailed all in the same ship, no English king had sailed with more than a handful of his retainers in a single craft. To continue that tradition made sense and, in this case, served David’s purposes.

  Back at home, Callum would have been surprised not to find David up and about by dawn, but here, alone for once, he could sleep without interruption. Most of the time, Callum forgot that David was only twenty years old. For all that he took up more space than the average man, he looked his age—maybe younger. When Callum was twenty, he’d still been growing and had been known to sleep for fifteen hours at a stretch.

  Callum moved behind Cassie, placing his arms around her waist and his chin on her shoulder. “The wind is picking up.”

  She leaned against him. “It’s changed direction again.”

  Callum licked his index finger and stuck it in the air. He’d seen other people do that to gauge the direction of the wind, but all it did for him was make his finger cold. Better to look at the sail above their heads. “It’s coming down from the north.” His brow furrowed. “That’s not usual.”

  “It isn’t,” Cassie said. “A north wind is an ill wind; isn’t that what the old wives in Scotland say?”

  Callum laughed. “You would know better than I. All I know is that we’re in the middle of the Irish Sea with no radio or GPS.”

  “If this turns into a real storm, is it too late to make for safe harbor at Pembroke?” Cassie said.

  Callum looked behind them, in the direction they’d come. “I can’t see land anywhere.”

  “If I had a thermometer, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the temperature had dropped twenty degrees in the last ten minutes,” Cassie said.

  Callum held out his hand as the first drops of rain began to patter onto the deck. “We should get under cover.”

  Cassie moved with him back towards their tiny cabin, but before they reached it, the captain planted himself in front of Callum. “I swear to you, I inspected the ship myself this morning,” he said. “The rudder was whole the
n.”

  Callum’s stomach sank into his boots. “But it isn’t now?” The rudder was a very important part of the ship.

  “The tiller has jammed. I can’t steer her.”

  Cassie edged closer to the captain. “Can you rig something up? The way you swing the sail steers us too, doesn’t it?”

  “Normally, yes, but if this squall becomes a storm, I’ll have to shorten sail, maybe even drop it. We’ll be dead in the water with no way to control the ship.”

  Callum lifted a hand to protect his eyes from the rain, which fell harder, sweeping across the deck with each gust of wind. He tugged up his hood, but the wind immediately blew it off his head again. The ship began to rock uncomfortably with each swelling wave. “I’ll wake the king. Maybe he’ll have an idea.”

  “He doesn’t and knows far too little about sailing.” David stood in the doorway of his cabin, clutching the frame and rocking back and forth as the ship dove into another trough and came up the other side. “Captain Evan, do you suspect sabotage?”

  The captain bowed low before David. “I couldn’t say. I can vouch for every one of my sailors.”

  “I don’t doubt that, since without a rudder, they’re in the same predicament as we are,” David said. “Presumably none of them have a death wish.”

  The captain’s eyes crossed as if he wasn’t entirely sure what David was saying. Callum could have told him that he wasn’t the only one who didn’t always catch David’s meaning.

  “Can you fix it?” David said, overriding the captain’s confusion.

  “Not without getting into the water, which would be deadly in this weather,” the captain said.

  David took in a deep breath and let it out, and then stepped out of the doorway to look beyond the rail of the ship. Looking with him, Callum could make out the lights of only two of their ships, both at least two hundred yards to the south.