Secrets in Time: Time Travel Romance

by Alison Stuart

  Mercifully, the lane was deserted, and we reached the wall to what would become my garden. It was too high for me to manage alone. Bracing himself against the stonework, Nat cupped his hands and lifted me so I sat astride the wall. He lifted Christian up to me and I put out my hand.

  ‘You’re coming too,’ I said.

  He shook his head, grimacing in pain as he took his weight on his injured leg. ‘Jessie, I can’t...’

  ‘Yes, you can. If you stay here you are going to die. I’m not sure how, probably blood loss or gangrene or something horrible. You must come with me, Nat.’

  He looked up at me and a smile lifted the corners of his mouth. With an effort that must have taken every last bit of his strength, he hauled himself to the top of wall. With my hand firmly bunched in his collar and one arm around Christian, the three of us tumbled into the garden, ruining what was left of my dahlias.

  For a long moment I lay winded in the garden bed with Nat’s dead weight on top of me. Christian had crawled a short distance away and sat on the grass, his horsey in one hand, wailing as if his heart would break.

  As I looked toward the cottage, Alan flung open the kitchen door and stood framed in the doorway. I carefully pushed Nat off me and he rolled onto his back with a groan.

  I sat up and, gathered the crying child into my arms. ‘It’s all right, Christian,’ I told him. ‘We’re home now. We’re safe.’

  And my choking sobs joined Christian’s howls.

  Alan just stared and I could hardly blame him. His sister, the calm professional, always in control of the situation couldn’t move. I sat in a flower bed in a sea of damp skirts, my sneaker clad feet sticking straight out and a crying child clasped in my arms.

  For the first time in my life I had to leave it to Alan to sort out the mess.

  Nat’s fingers found mine. ‘Jessie. You’re not the one with a musket ball in the leg. For the love of our dear Lord, dry your eyes.’

  Alan recovered from his shock and ran across the grass toward us. He looked down at me. ‘Are you hurt?’

  Jerking my head in the direction of my lover who lay quite still among the broken dahlias, I managed to choke out ‘Nat...’

  Alan bent over and felt for Nat’s pulse. He glanced up at me, a thousand questions in his expression. Questions that would have to wait.

  ‘We’ve got to get him to hospital, Jess,’ Alan said.

  Not dressed like this.’ My wits had begun to return. ‘Get him to the cottage, Alan, and we’ll see how bad it is.’

  Between the two of us, we managed to manhandle the half-conscious man to the cottage. Christian trailed after us. He looked almost as pale as his father and his breathing sounded ragged, but the little boy’s plight was less urgent than his father’s.

  I sat the child on the sofa, wrapped in a knee rug, from where he watched us with large, round eyes, his thumb in his mouth, as we laid Nat on the hearth. In the harsh glare of the electric light, I saw with a sinking heart that beneath the stubble on his face he was ashen.

  ‘Whisky?’ Alan suggested unhelpfully.

  ‘You can pour me one,’ I said.

  ‘And me,’ Nat said, his eyes fluttering open.

  Alan pulled off Nat’s boots provoking what I took to be seventeenth century profanities. I found a pair of scissors and cut away the heavy woolen cloth of his breeches.

  The musket ball appeared to be lodged in his thigh, but in the absence of a scan, I had no idea how much damage had been done or exactly where the ball had lodged. I pulled the cloth from my coffee table, folded it into a pad and laid it over the wound, which had begun to bleed again with my probing.

  ‘Press on that,’ I ordered my brother. Alan complied and Nat swore again.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Alan looked at me, his brow furrowed with concern. I sat back on my heels and shook my head.

  ‘We can’t go to the hospital. Gunshot wounds have to be reported. There will be questions asked we can’t answer.’

  ‘You will have to use your own skills, Doctor Shepherd.’ Nat shook off Alan’s hand and pulled himself up so he sat with his back against the sofa.

  Alan went to wash his hands and returned with a tumbler of whisky. Nat took a hearty swill of the amber liquid.

  ‘Alan! He could be going under general anesthetic...’ I protested.

  Alan shook his head. ‘No, he’s right, Jess. You’re going to have to patch him up yourself. He has no NHS history and a gunshot wound. Questions will be asked.’

  I stared at my brother. ‘I’m a children’s doctor. I don’t have the right equipment. It’s unhygienic...’

  Nat turned his head to look up at Christian, sitting on the sofa above him. ‘He shouldn’t see me like this. I need you to look after him, not me.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t have got yourself shot.’

  He cast me a cold glance. ‘I can wait. Please settle the child first. Then you can find your bag of magic...’

  He closed his eyes and took another gulp of the whisky and I turned to Christian. The boy in his strange clothes stared up at me with his large, knowing eyes. I had nothing suitable for a child anywhere in this house.

  ‘Alan, three doors away in Myrtle Cottage, Janice has three children. Please, can you go and knock on her door? Tell her I’ve got unexpected visitors who’ve lost their luggage and they have a two-year-old child. I need nappies and clothes.’

  Alan nodded and rose. He glanced at Christian with his long curls and skirts and frowned.

  ‘Boy or girl?’

  ‘Boy.’

  It is definitely a blessing to have a brother who is a student of the seventeenth century. He accepted my answer without question.

  While he was gone, I fed Christian baked beans on toast and a mashed banana. He pulled faces at the strange, unfamiliar food, but to his credit, managed to get most of it down. As I warmed some milk, Alan returned.

  I took Christian and the pile of clothes and nappies Janice had provided up to the bathroom. I contemplated running a bath, but didn’t want to frighten the child with too many strange experiences on his first night. Instead I washed him thoroughly, dressed him in a nappy and overlarge one piece terry toweling thing with feet in it and carried him downstairs.

  Janice, bless her, had provided one of those childproof cups with a spout. I filled it with the warm milk and with an overenthusiastic, ‘Say goodnight to Daddy,’ carried the boy up to the guest bed room, where I settled him into bed with his horsey.

  I lingered a little while to see that he went to sleep but the thought of his injured father downstairs stopped me from sitting with him and singing the lullabies of my childhood. Fortunately, the poor child must have been exhausted. His eyes closed and he was asleep within minutes. I looked down at his innocent little face and took a deep breath.

  Now I had to see to his father.

  ~*~

  I took a few minutes to extricate myself from my seventeenth-century clothes, and clean my teeth. I found a clean, but unsterilized, set of surgical scrubs in my cupboard and after the constricting garments I had been wearing for the last few days, I let out a sigh of relief as I pulled the inelegant garment over my head.

  In my medical supplies, I located some basic surgical instruments, sterilized gloves and wipes. They would have to do.

  Downstairs, I found Nat had finished off the glass of whisky and a second glass as well. He stared into the empty tumbler with a glazed look on his face.

  I rounded on my brother. ‘Alan, what were you thinking?’

  Alan shrugged. ‘Kills the pain?’

  ‘Can’t feel a thing,’ Nat’s voice sounded slurred.

  I scrubbed the kitchen table and laid it with clean towels and sheets while the surgical instruments boiled on the stove. I thought of the surgical tents I had seen at Alan’s musters. In Nat’s time there would have been no adherence to cleanliness and yet men had survived the brutal, primitive surgery. Modern medicine underestimates the resilience of the human body.
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  I had no anesthetic except a local, which seemed rather ineffectual given the extent of his injury, but I gave it to him anyway. The whisky may have been more effective. With Alan providing brute force, I did what needed to be done. Somehow the musket ball had managed to miss the major blood vessels and the femur. He had been lucky but I still had to ensure that I removed every shred of cloth and dirt before I dared close the wound.

  As I began to probe for the musket ball, Nat fainted and did not come around until after I had finished at which point the whisky took its toll and he was violently ill into a basin. I administered a good shot of penicillin and kissed his clammy forehead.

  ‘I knew the whisky was a bad idea,’ I whispered to him.

  Nat took a deep breath. ‘I think I want to sleep.’ His eyelashes flickered against his cheeks.

  ‘Oh no, you don’t. We’ve got to get you to bed.’ The doctor in me was in full flight now and I would make no allowance for human frailty.

  With Christian in the spare bed, Alan and I managed to manhandle the semi- conscious cavalier up the stairs and into my bed. I settled him as best I could, and despite Alan’s protests, I sent him home, telling him I needed the sofa to sleep on.

  After a stiff gin and tonic and a catch-up on the evening news, I looked at the sofa and decided I would rather be in my bed. I slipped into bed beside my lover, placing extra pillows around his leg so I didn’t accidentally kick him during the night. Entwining my fingers in his, I lay on my side watching him sleep for a long time while I tried to make sense of the events of the day and tried to think rationally about what we could about tomorrow.

  I had brought a man to twentieth century England from a culture as foreign to my own as if he had come from Mars. He could not read or write modern English, he had no useful skills, no concept of working for a living. A civilized man in his own time, in this time he would be little better than a savage. On the other hand he had already proved himself adaptable. He was intelligent with a thirst for knowledge. Nat would survive, even if it meant I had to go in search of that mythical Northamptonshire forger to provide him with an identity.

  Christian presented a much greater problem. I had a seriously ill child with no birth certificate and no National Health Service number. He needed to see a pediatric cardiac specialist as soon as possible and the best, and only, specialist in Northampton was Mark Westmacott.

  The problems ahead of me whirled around in my head until the stress of the last few days caught up with me, and I fell into an exhausted sleep.

  Chapter 10

  For the love of a child

  ‘Alice?’

  I have tried to reach her but I only hear the echoing void of time that lies between us now. Whatever our connection, it is severed now. I am dead to my own time.

  I stare at the ceiling as the lights from a passing motor vehicle light up the room. Jessica, poor Jessica, has not shut the curtains. I turn my head and look at the sleeping woman beside me. A lock of hair has fallen across her face. I push it back behind her and she stirs and murmurs but does not wake. She does not hear Christian crying but his distress reaches me in the dark still hours before the dawn. I close my eyes and feel the weight of the task ahead of me on my heart.

  He is my son, my responsibility.

  I had accepted the inevitability of my death. I never envisaged that Jessica would bring me back with her and now the future frightens me. The child and I only have each other and we must learn to make our way in this new world.

  ~*~

  I woke to an empty bed. For a horrible moment I thought I had dreamed it all and that the events of the last few weeks were just figments of my imagination--except for the pillows in the bed and the sound of the television drifting up the stairs.

  I found Nat asleep on the sofa with Christian curled in his arms, also sound asleep. How Nat had managed to get up without waking me, dress and carry the child downstairs given the state of his leg, I had no idea.

  I didn’t wake him, just tiptoed into the kitchen and began making coffee. The smell of eggs and bacon and coffee had the desired effect, and he straightened and twisted on the sofa to look into the kitchen.

  He ran a hand through his hair, and it stood on end as he regarded me with bleary eyes.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘How long have you been there?’

  He shook his head. ‘The child cried out in the night.’ He managed a crooked smile. ‘I have no talent as a nursery maid, I fear.’ He pulled a face. ‘He is somewhat damp.’

  Our voices woke Christian, who sat bolt upright and began to cry. I extricated him from Nat’s arms and dealt with the sodden nappy.

  As Christian sat beside his father chewing happily on some cut up apple, I gave Nat a professional scrutiny. Beneath the stubble, he still looked pale and when he moved I noticed the grimace of pain.

  I handed him a cup of coffee with his customary three sugars. ‘You had enough whisky and pain killer to knock you out for months. I can’t believe you heard the child cry and I didn’t.’ I gave him a rueful smile. ‘I obviously need some training in motherhood.’

  He shrugged and took my hand, turning it over before kissing the palm. ‘You were exhausted. A troop of parliamentary horse riding through the bedchamber would not have woken you.’

  I brought breakfast into the living room on trays. I had no idea what small boys in the seventeenth century ate for breakfast but Christian seemed quite happy to share his father’s eggs and bacon and toast.

  After breakfast, I changed the dressing on Nat’s leg. It looked painful but seemed quite clean and there did not appear to be any signs of infection and fever. Then I gave Christian what was, apparently, his first ever bath. After some earsplitting screams, once he was in the water he quickly got used to the idea and I had more screaming as I attempted to get him out of the bathtub.

  Before I dressed the child in the borrowed clothes, I checked him over, listening to his heart with my stethoscope. The obvious murmur confirmed my diagnosis. The worst would not be imminent but from the blue tinge to the boy’s lips, the sooner we acted the better.

  ‘I’m taking him in to the hospital to see the specialist this morning,’ I told his father. I didn’t tell Nat the specialist’s name. Only Mark could do the necessary operation.

  ‘I’m coming too.’

  I gave him a withering glance and he subsided on the sofa. Even stubborn cavaliers know their limitations.

  ~*~

  Outside the hospital I knew so well, my hand tightened on Christian’s and, as if sensing my tension, he began to cry. I crouched down and held him in my arms as the busy hospital moved around us.

  ‘Okay, little guy, this is it. How about I carry you?’

  I hoisted him into my arms, surprised at how light he was in comparison to a modern child of his age. His voluminous clothing had masked his frailty.

  The glass doors slid open for us.

  I stopped outside Mark’s office and knocked. At his peremptory bidding, I poked my head around the door and smiled.

  ‘Are you busy?’

  ‘You know I am,’ he replied. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I was wondering if you would look at a patient for me.’ Without waiting for Mark to protest I carried Christian into the office and sat him on the examining bench.

  Mark rolled his eyes, checked his watch and his appointment diary. ‘I’ve got a couple of minutes, that’s all.’

  Mark, for all his faults, is very good with children. Christian submitted to his poking, prodding and occasional tickling. He placed the stethoscope on the child’s chest, listened for a moment, grunted and looked up at me. Knowing him as I did, the deepening frown worried me.

  As I redressed the boy, Mark perched on the edge of his desk.

  ‘You’re right, Shepherd. This is one very sick little boy. If he’s not operated on, his life expectancy is no more than a year, two at the most.’ His voice held a somber note and I flinched at the verdict.

  Now came t
he hard part. I gathered my courage in both hands.

  ‘Can you do it?’

  He gave a dismissive shrug. ‘Book him in. You know the procedure. I’ll need to get some imaging and tests done. Have the parents been told?’

  ‘Parent. He only has his father, and yes, he knows.’

  ‘Then I need to speak to him. Is he here?’

  I shook my head. ‘He’s my friend Nat’s son.’

  Mark’s expression closed over, his lips thinning with disapproval. ‘Oh, I see. Well, get him to sign all the consents and we’ll fit the boy in to surgery over the next couple of days.’

  He sensed my hesitation. ‘There’s a problem, Mark.’ He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Nat’s...um...Nat has no National Health Service ID. This will have to be a private job.’

  Mark’s eyebrows rose. ‘What do you mean he has no ID?’

  ‘Please don’t ask me questions, Mark. I’ve said this is a private job. My cost.’

  ‘You know I can’t operate...’

  ‘Yes, you can.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Mark, I know I am presuming on our friendship...’

  ‘Former friendship!’ Mark reminded me.

  ‘Professional friendship,’ I corrected. ‘What is important here is the life of this child.’

  Mark shot a glance at Christian, now seated on my lap, playing with one of the drug company mannequins he had pulled off the desk.

  He ran his hand through his thinning hair. ‘I’ll do it for the kid, Jess. Not for you or for whatever his name is.’

  I rose to my feet. ‘Thank you, Mark. I won’t forget this.’ ‘Do you have the money to foot this operation?’

  I nodded. ‘I still have a little left over from my parents’ estate.’

  ‘And you’d blow it on someone else’s child?’ Mark stared at me, his lip curled in what looked like a sneer.

  ‘He’s not just anyone,’ I said as I closed the door.

  ~*~

  Waiting rooms of hospitals are grim places at the best of times, let alone when you have a small child undergoing surgery. The worst thing a doctor can do is become emotionally involved with a patient, and I had complete faith in Mark and his team.