Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  Cassie had laughed and gotten along well with her grandmother after that. Lady Jane seemed to be cut from the same cloth, and Cassie hoped that maybe she would have her grandmother’s common sense too.

  Cassie and Callum took the stairs down to the lobby floor, but stopped in the stairwell before exiting through the door. Callum peered through the narrow glass window into the foyer beyond it. A bank of elevators faced them, and several people got on and off.

  “No alarm yet,” Cassie said.

  “Seemingly not. Maybe we need to give it another minute.” Callum went through the door. To their left was an expansive lobby that was divided in half by a glass partition and guard boxes. Anyone coming into the Office had to pass through security scanners before entering the building proper.

  “Would your ID get us past that if we had arrived like normal people?” Cassie said.

  “My badge wouldn’t,” Callum said. “It has a bar code that in the past was updated once a month. This, on the other hand—” He pulled out his phone, “—this has all the updates programmed into it. Did you know that at the airport check-in you can scan your mobile, and it substitutes for a boarding pass?”

  Cassie stared at him. “No.”

  “MI-5 identification now operates on the same principle.”

  “What if you lose your phone?” she said.

  “It’s the same as losing your badge.” Callum shrugged. “At the very least, if there was a question as to my identity, my iris won’t have changed.”

  “We don’t actually know that, though, do we?” Cassie said, as the new idea struck her. “Could the time traveling have altered our DNA? Have we been disassembled and reassembled like on the transporter platform in Star Trek?”

  Callum glanced at her, his eyes widening, but with a smile on his lips. “I don’t think I want to know the answer to that.” Leaving his phone on, Callum put it back in his pocket.

  Cassie eyed the action. “You want them to stop us.”

  “I want to know if they feel the need to.”

  Instead of heading out to the lobby, Callum turned the other way and walked past the elevators and into a maze of branching corridors, all unlabeled. He reached an equally unmarked set of double doors and pushed through it, revealing a fully equipped cafeteria.

  Driscoll was already seated at a table on the left-hand wall, near a bank of windows that overlooked a central courtyard. He’d been talking on his cell phone as they entered the cafeteria, but waved them over when he saw them. “I chose an assortment: soup, bread, fish and chips.” He gestured to the food on the table in front of him. “I didn’t know what you liked, and I know it’s been a long time since you’ve eaten anything like this. Can I get you a coffee, Cassie?”

  “Yes, please.” Cassie accepted the seat Callum pulled out for her. He was being particularly chivalrous today, and she couldn’t decide if it was for Driscoll’s benefit, or if the change of scenery had awakened old habits.

  Driscoll seemed to have gotten on board with the time travel thing, or was pretending really well for their benefit. He set a cup of coffee in front of Cassie with what looked like Bronwen-proportions of cream and sugar in it. Cassie hadn’t witnessed Bronwen’s habits in person, of course, since coffee wasn’t available in the Middle Ages, but she’d heard about them.

  “What nosh did you miss the most?” Driscoll seated himself across from them.

  “Nosh?” Cassie said.

  “Nosh.” Driscoll snapped his fingers. “You know, food.”

  “Oh,” Cassie said. “That would have to be chocolate—”

  “Potatoes—”

  Cassie laughed and poked Callum in the shoulder. “You are just so English to miss potatoes.”

  “You don’t have potatoes in the Middle Ages?” Driscoll’s brow furrowed. “How is that possible?”

  “They’re what David calls a New World food,” Cassie said. “They weren’t brought to Europe until after 1492. Same with chocolate.”

  Driscoll was staring at her with his mouth open. “How do you live?”

  Cassie laughed. It felt good to be having a regular conversation with someone who was truly listening to her instead of questioning her sanity.

  Callum leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “Have you heard anything?” He didn’t have to explain to either Cassie or Driscoll that he was asking about David.

  Driscoll shook his head. “I haven’t had a recent update.”

  “How about a less recent one, then?” Cassie said.

  “He’s in sub-basement two in one of the interrogation rooms,” Driscoll said. “Natasha is with him.”

  “What about the sack over his head?” Cassie said. “That didn’t look good.”

  “I can assure you that he’s fine.” Driscoll put down the cup from which he’d been drinking.

  Callum sat back and tapped his fingers on the table. “I need to know what’s happening with David. I need to be part of his interrogation.”

  Driscoll shook his head.

  “I’ve been reinstated,” Callum said. “How can they not let me in?”

  “I might not be let in,” Driscoll said.

  “Then we’ll have to get through to Natasha,” Callum said.

  “You’re not understanding me,” Driscoll said. “Lady Jane herself has taken over Cardiff station. She’s the one you have to get past. David is not your responsibility now. Let it go.”

  “We can’t let it go. You are literally asking for something we cannot do,” Cassie said.

  Callum had moved infinitesimally closer to Cassie while they’d been talking and had started pressing gently on her right foot. He was trying to stop her talking, and it occurred to her only now that Callum might not trust Driscoll, and she was kind of running at the mouth. She put her lips together and sat back. “You’re right. We need to be patient.”

  Callum draped his arm across the back of Cassie’s chair. “The mission is paramount. While all I want to do is help, I can accept that my help is not wanted at present. Tomorrow I will speak to Lady Jane about what I can do.”

  Cassie cleared her throat. “Lady Jane said something about housing us here in the Office. Is that what you understood?”

  Driscoll nodded. “Yes.”

  “Personally, I’d like to see a little of Cardiff.” Cassie glanced at Callum. “I’m particularly fond of the castle.”

  “You aren’t supposed to leave the building,” Driscoll said. “If you try, I believe you will be stopped.”

  “Both of us?” Cassie said.

  “For now.” Driscoll’s phone beeped at him. He pulled it out and read the screen. “I have somewhere to be.”

  “Where?” Callum said.

  “Nothing important.” Driscoll rose from his seat, about to leave, but then he hesitated.

  “What is it?” Callum spoke softly. “What’s going on?”

  Driscoll jerked his head, as if he’d decided something, and then turned back to them, leaning on his hands which rested flat on the table. “I want to do what’s right. If you need help, you can count on me.”

  The reversal was a bit too sudden for Cassie, and she didn’t need Callum’s warning touch to know that caution was required. She put her lips together and let Callum do the talking.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Callum said.

  “If time travel is real, I want to be a part of it,” Driscoll said. “But I don’t believe in using David, even in the name of national security, and you need help from someone on the inside. In return, I ask that you take me to the Middle Ages with you when you go.”

  His words left Cassie stunned, but Callum contemplated his former colleague without a change of expression. “It’s not an easy life. Why would you want to come with us?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Driscoll looked down at their upturned faces. The slightly ironic expression he’d worn up until now was wiped away in favor of a bright-eyed enthusiasm.

  “What about your wife?” Callum said.

  “S
he left me three months ago, we have no kids, and I haven’t spoken to my parents in two years,” Driscoll said. “I have nothing to keep me here.”

  “I lived there for five years,” Cassie said. “I know what it’s like and what it takes, and you really don’t want to come with us.” The conversation with her grandfather had shaken her a bit, and she didn’t know any more if she herself wanted to go back, but now wasn’t the time for waffling on that decision in public. She and Callum needed to have a serious talk about all of this. But not now, not in front of Driscoll.

  “I do,” Driscoll said.

  “I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know where to begin.” Callum rubbed at his chin.

  Driscoll looked at his phone again. “For now, you should sit tight. I’ll touch base with you later.”

  Callum grinned. “You’ve been watching too many American police procedurals. I almost hear a southern accent in there.”

  “Shut it,” Driscoll said, though he smirked as he pushed off from the table and departed.

  Chapter Eleven

  September, 1289

  Anna

  The five minutes it had taken for the three women to travel from the upper bailey to the lower one had been spent in heated argument, and this time Anna found herself on the side of practicality, rather than emotion. The tears in the stairwell had wrung her out, but because of them she’d been forced to admit—to herself only, since neither Bronwen nor Lili had said it out loud—that she’d been thinking entirely about herself. She didn’t want to hurt more. Well, who did?

  And they were right about the living part too. She hadn’t been living. She’d been going through the motions, even after Bran’s birth. Her family had been kind enough, and loving enough, not to slap her out of it. Somehow she was going to have to let this fear go, not simply shove it down deeper inside herself and pretend it wasn’t there. The middle of a siege seemed both hardly the time, and the perfect time, to start anew.

  “We have to bring them inside the castle, Anna!” Bronwen said.

  “We can’t,” Anna said matter-of-factly. “You know we can’t.”

  “They’ll die out there,” Bronwen said. “If Valence gets through the walls, his men will show no mercy.”

  Anna stopped and turned on Bronwen. Lili stayed two paces away, not interfering, for which Anna was grateful. Lili had known instinctively that the patients in the infirmary adjacent to the abbey could not be brought inside the castle itself. The city walls would protect them and the nuns who cared for them. Bronwen, however, wasn’t seeing it their way.

  “Some of them are very ill, Bronwen,” Anna said. “Many will die, no matter what we do for them. What happens when we bring them inside the castle and they start to die in here? Where will that leave us? Are we going to put wounded men alongside sick children and hope both groups survive that contact? You’d be all but writing a death sentence for the injured!”

  “But—”

  Anna put her hands on Bronwen’s shoulders. “You must know that my heart agrees with you, but my head says we have to be practical. I hope Valence doesn’t breach the walls of either the town or the castle, but it’s as likely as not that he will do both, given time. Not everyone has an equal chance to live, and right here, right now, is where we start to triage.”

  Bronwen looked like she was going to argue some more. In fact, Anna had rarely seen her so passionate about anything.

  “What would Ieuan tell you to do?” Anna said.

  Bronwen stuck her finger in Anna’s face. “Don’t bring that listen to your husband crap down on me.” She was speaking full American now; Anna wasn’t sure Lili could keep up, which was probably a good thing. “I put up with it most of the time, but just because we live in the Middle Ages doesn’t mean we have to act like it. Lili is right about that, at least.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting anything of the sort,” Anna said. “I was merely pointing out that in this we do need to think like medieval people. The sick are in quarantine. We didn’t house them inside the castle in the first place for that reason—and it was a good reason. Do you want to expose Catrin to scarlet fever? Or Arthur?”

  Bronwen stabbed the toe of her boot into in the dirt of the bailey. “But they’ll die.” She sounded sad now, and tired. They all were tired and the battle hadn’t even started.

  “We don’t know that,” Anna said.

  Lili stepped between them and put her arm around Bronwen’s waist. “Dafydd has done everything in his power to protect this castle and Windsor town. He spent the last two months strengthening the town walls. Perhaps he had a vision of the future and knew that it might be the only thing standing between us and death. Regardless, given the suddenness of the threat, we are as prepared as we can be.” Between the twenty-foot-high town wall, begun under Edward and finished very recently, and the moat created by water diverted from the Thames, Valence wasn’t going to break through their defenses quickly.

  Bronwen closed her eyes, rubbing at her temples with her fingers, finally calming down. Lili was right that David had planned ahead, though Anna wasn’t going to admit that he had the sight, Welsh blood or not. It was bad enough that people routinely referred to him as the return of King Arthur. David wasn’t King Arthur, and she wasn’t Morgane, even if she grew more and more into the role with every year that passed. David had named his son ‘Arthur’ because of that legacy, though few people beyond Anna and her mother truly understood the cynicism behind that act—and the extent to which it had been a blatant political ploy.

  It had been unlike David, and thus exactly like him too.

  “Even if we are forced to retreat to the castle as a last resort,” Anna said, “and Valence’s men overrun the town, they won’t want to get anywhere near our patients. They know what scarlet fever looks like and how contagious it is.”

  “They could set fire to the abbey and burn everyone inside it,” Bronwen said.

  Lili stepped in. “They will do the same to the castle if they can. In fact, with the abbey in the center of Windsor and the castle forming part of the defenses of the town, it is the castle that is in the more vulnerable location.” She looked at Anna. “We should think about moving the children to the northwest tower of the lower bailey, where they can be protected by the river and the walls. It’s the most defensible tower in the whole castle.”

  Their conversation had carried them into the lower bailey Lili had mentioned. The gatehouse lay just in front of them, and the stairs up to the southern battlements formed a line to their left. Anna wasn’t sure if Bronwen had even heard Lili, since she turned away and mounted the stairs without responding. Lili and Anna followed. Many of the scholars had heard the news of Valence’s approach; they’d had the same idea. Anna found herself standing on the wall-walk with Lili on one side of her and Roger Bacon on the other.

  “War is the last recourse of the wise and the first of fools,” he said by way of a greeting.

  Anna glanced at him. “Who said that?” If it wasn’t Shakespeare or the Bible, she wasn’t going to guess.

  Bacon mumbled something under his breath which Anna didn’t catch, and then said, “I did.”

  Anna gave a low laugh. She was sure the internet in the twenty-first century was full of pithy quotes by Roger Bacon. She wouldn’t be the one to ask if this quote got passed down through the ages, though it sounded familiar to her, like maybe Plato had been the one to say it first. From where they stood, she could see the dust churned up by Valence’s approaching army. It hung in the air, the particles glinting in the light of the setting sun. The soldiers marched up the King’s Road, which led to the main gate of the town of Windsor.

  The gate itself faced southeast, overlooking the lands that fed the town. Anna was no farmer, but she recognized the different grains by now—barley mostly, but also wheat—interspersed with pasture where sheep and cattle grazed, and patches of woods. The castle was located in the northeastern corner of the town, accessible only from the town itself. Thus, its wal
ls formed a protective curtain around that quarter of Windsor, which had only two entrances: the southeastern gate on the King’s road, and a northern gate that guarded the bridge across the Thames River and the road to London. The original castle, built at the time of the Norman Conquest, occupied a natural chalk mound overlooking the Thames River. The castle had been much expanded since then with the addition of two more baileys and a dozen towers.

  “They’ve already raised the sluice gates,” Bacon said.

  Anna stood on her tiptoes and peered between the crenels, looking straight down into the frothy water below. Since its completion, the moat had been filled only once, as a test case.

  Here at Windsor, the Thames flowed west to east, heading towards London. The town had been built on the south side of the river. After consulting a host of engineers, David had built a dike and installed a sluice gate at the northwestern end of the town. The gate could be opened at need to divert a portion of the Thames into the moat that now surrounded the town and castle on the west, south, and east sides. The water then flowed back into the Thames at the northeastern side of the castle.

  Though impressive, and even to Anna’s modern eyes, sophisticated, this kind of project had been done before at other castles. David had simply taken the best of what had been tried to its logical conclusion.

  “You could have run, my Queen,” Roger Bacon said, leaning back to look past Anna to Lili. “You should not feel that by fleeing Windsor, you would have abandoned us. Your duty to your country and husband would be, first and foremost, to protect your son.”

  Anna didn’t tell him how strange it was to think that the country to which Bacon was referring was England, not Wales.

  For her part, Lili calmly shook her head. “Quite aside from the fact that I am one of the few people in this castle who can shoot a bow, Math felt the risk of leaving outweighed the risk of staying. Valence force-marched his men night and day to get here. Our own riders were barely ahead of them.”