Page 208 of Feathers in the Wind
‘That is my book of receipts. The sum total of my knowledge.’ She looked up at me with her grandson’s clear eyes. ‘It would be wonderful to be born in your time, to have your knowledge.’
‘What do you know of my time?’ I challenged.
‘What I have seen, Doctor Shepherd. Extraordinary machines that do the work of men and horses. Magic lights and water that comes from the walls, but I have also seen unhappiness and poverty. Those things are universal to any age.’
‘How do you see?’ I looked around the room, wondering if she kept a crystal ball or some sort of bowl with magical divining liquid in it.
She touched her eyes. ‘I see these things when I close my eyes,’ she said.
‘Did Nat know what you intended for him?’
She tilted her head to one side. ‘We discussed it at length.’
I pondered that revelation and the duplicity of my lover.
‘Why me?’
‘You are linked to the cottage.’
My heart skipped a beat. I had been right. This was not about me, it was about the cottage.
‘I only bought it eighteen months ago. How can I possibly be linked to it?’
‘All things are connected in one way or another, and the cottage has properties that allow it to sit on either side of time.’
‘I knew it!’
Dame Alice turned her compelling gaze to me again. ‘It is not what you are thinking. It was not just the cottage. I have been waiting for you.’
I frowned. ‘You knew I would buy the cottage?’
She gave me that inscrutable smile.
‘If you know the future, then you know what is to happen to Nathaniel.’
She nodded and her lips tightened. The first glimmer of hope sprang in me. ‘Is there a plan? Can we save him? Is that why you have brought me here?’
‘So many questions, Mistress Shepherd. All in good time.’ I think, from the little half smile, she enjoyed being mysterious. ‘For now, I would like to talk to you about your healing arts.’
Despite the fact she had turned my world upside down, sent me a man to fall in love with—a man with a death sentence—dragged me across three centuries and seemed to revel in being mysterious, I liked Dame Alice. I saw the same hunger for knowledge in her as I saw in her grandson. She, like him, did not belong in this time.
While he might have become machine-mad, Dame Alice would have made a fine doctor. She quizzed me extensively about the body and disease. At a time when the circulation of blood had only just been explained, the concept of unseen microbes and germs would have flummoxed anyone other than this extraordinary woman.
We were so engrossed, we did not hear the door open and it was only when Nat said, ‘It is pleasing to see the two of you so deep in conversation,’ that we looked up.
‘Nathaniel, you should knock,’ his grandmother reproved him.
‘I did. And now if you can spare Jessie for a short time, I would like to borrow her.’
I rose from the uncomfortable stool on which I had been perched and excused myself. In the doorway, Nat spanned my corseted waist with his hands and kissed me
‘Your grandmother...’ I mumbled, conscious of Dame Alice’s presence in the room behind me.
‘Oh, don’t mind Grandam,’ Nat responded. ‘She knows about us.’
I had an uncomfortable feeling that Dame Alice had some kind of seventeenth century closed circuit TV installed in my cottage. Who knew what she had seen?
‘I know, but still--’
