Page 210 of Feathers in the Wind
‘I will be back later,’ he said in answer to their cries of disappointment.
I hugged the children and followed their father from the room and down the stairs to another room I hadn’t seen in any tour of the house.
‘My study,’ he explained, and gestured at the bookcase. ‘My books.’
He walked to the window and stood with his hands behind his back, looking over the garden.
‘Well?’ he demanded, turning back to face me.
‘He has a hole in his heart, Nat. He was born with it and your doctors are right, it will kill him before he reaches adulthood.’
His shoulders slumped and I threw my arms around him, holding him close, pressing my face into the wool of his jacket.
‘There is nothing you could do, Nat. Even in our time, it would be major surgery.’
‘But in your time, you could save him?’
‘Without further investigation with ultrasound and echocardiography it is impossible to know exactly what the abnormality is, Nat. Sorry I can’t be more specific.’
He turned back to the window and leaned on the windowsill, his head lowered.
‘I’m going to die tomorrow, Jessie. When I ride away from here, I will never see those two boys again and they will never see me. Nathaniel will grow up without his father. I won’t be there to comfort him when Christian dies and even without the knowledge of what you have just told me, I know Christian will die because Nathaniel inherits the estate. You’ve seen his portrait.’
And suddenly it all made sense—of a sort. ‘Has this always been about Christian?’
He nodded. ‘I... we... Alice and I…We’ve been searching through time. We hoped if we found the right person, there may be something that could be done.’
‘All I can do is give your family ideas to make his life more comfortable, but without an operation he does not have long.’
He turned his head to look at me. ‘Can you do this operation?’
I was in the seventeenth century and I may as well have been in the darkest jungles of Brazil.
I shook my head. ‘No. It is a complex procedure, Nat.’
He thumped a fist into the windowsill.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. His grief went too deep for what comfort I could offer. I had given parents bad news so many times but always with the calm dispassion of a professional. This time I could feel my own heart breaking. A beloved child would die but before then the child would see his father’s death.
I sank into a chair, stifling a sob that rose unbidden, stinging my eyes with tears. It had always been there, the knowledge of Nat’s death, but back in 1995 it had seemed like a fantasy. Here it was reality. Outside the house, real soldiers, with real weapons rehearsed for a battle that was to come. Nat may as well have been a man on death row, awaiting execution. He would die, leaving a child living his own death sentence.
I held two lives in my hands. One I could not save, the other I could but not here, not in 1645. As a doctor, I felt utterly helpless. As surely as I knew Nat would die at the battle of Chesham, I knew nothing in the seventeenth century could save Christian.
For a long moment the grief overwhelmed me. I could do nothing, even the tears would not come. I began to shake with the pent-up emotion. I choked back a sob and Nat raised his head. He turned to me and gathered me up from the chair, folding me in his arms as the tears came.
‘I could change it,’ he whispered. ‘I could refuse to go.’
I shook my head, knowing, without really being able to explain it logically, that it could not be changed. I pushed away from him and stood holding his hands, my face wet with tears I could no longer hold back.
I found my voice and said in a voice that shook with emotion, ‘You know you can’t, Nat. Fate will catch you--if not tomorrow then on the field at Naseby.’
Nat made a cutting gesture with his hand. ‘Enough, Jessie. We can talk later. There is one more thing I have to show you.’
He crossed to a heavy oaken chest, unlocked it with a key he retrieved from behind the books in the case and took out a second box, bound with heavy metal bands. He lifted out a large rectangular bundle wrapped in a soft leather cloth. Laying it on the table he reverently peeled the layers back to reveal a large, leather bound volume that even in 1645 smelt old and musty.
I gasped as he turned the pages, recognizing the unmistakable hand in the fine pen drawings.
‘Da Vinci! It’s real? In my time it would be worth a fortune.’
