She glanced at her watch. Nearly two. She had some time before she needed to start dinner. She’d always been chief cook and bottle washer for her father when they sailed up the coast each summer to cruise among the San Juan Islands off the Washington coast. You could cook a decent meal in tight quarters if you set your mind to it. Funny. Her father had tried to make her into a physicist, but he was most content to let her do the woman’s work on their trips. Can’t have it both ways, Daddy. She sighed. The experience would stand her in good stead now, though. Not that the stupid Viking would appreciate her efforts. She grabbed the newspaper, sat at the table, and flipped it open. No mention of the time machine or a search for her and/or her Viking. Good.
Wait. . . . An article in the metro section said San Francisco General was doing some construction on the parking structure.
That couldn’t be coincidence. Her mind churned. Of course. They’d have to dismantle either the machine or the parking structure to get it out. She read the article carefully, only a couple of column inches. It said only that the residents nearby could expect construction between the hours of 7:00 A.M. and 9:00 P.M., with a quote from the hospital administrator apologizing for a few days of noise and dust. Why had something like this even made the paper? Maybe to keep people from complaining to city hall or loitering. The world beyond Jake’s boat was taking its own direction. That made her heart thump. Brad and Casey wanted the machine enough to dismantle a parking garage. They must know that without the diamond they could never make the machine work. They would pursue her to the ends of the earth.
She thought wildly of just mailing Brad the diamond and the book.
But that thought nearly made her ill, it felt so wrong. Jake was right. Casey would use the machine for his own purposes, and those were guaranteed not to be in the best interests of the world at large.
They were in a Mexican standoff. If Brad and Casey couldn’t find her and her Viking, she and Galen couldn’t get back to the machine to return him to his time, either. To do that, they had to have a working machine, and that meant giving Casey all he would need to use it. It was a trap, a horrible trap, and she couldn’t see any way out of it.
Okay, she told herself. Just calm down. There’s nothing you can do right now. Just take it one day at a time. She thought back to that time in Jake’s apartment when she’d looked into Galen’s eyes and known for sure that all they needed was time for him to heal. She wished she had that sureness now.
Speaking of healing, she pulled out the book she’d bought on nursing. The stupid Viking wouldn’t appreciate her taking care of his wounds, either. But Jake’s blithe instructions to change his bandages and remove his stitches when they were ready didn’t provide anywhere near enough detail. Was his wound infected? When exactly should she try to take the stitches out? She read through the whole section on the care of wounds, then read it again.
Well. Interesting. Seepage was normal. You bandaged the wounds primarily to absorb draining fluid. Once the wounds had stopped draining there was some controversy over whether you should bandage them at all. The only other reasons for bandages were to reassure the patient and keep the stitches from catching on clothes. In fact, after her second reading, she kind of came down on the side of those who said you shouldn’t bandage at all after the wounds stopped seeping if you could get away without it. The wounds healed better and were easier to keep clean. It was okay to get wounds wet, once they were sealed if you patted them dry, but not the dressings, because they held moisture and collected germs. Pulling the bandages off to disinfect the area just pulled at the stitches. And the book said you should take the stitches out in five to seven days, not the ten she’d thought. At least she still had some time. And she had a plan.
She put away the book and bustled around the kitchen, marinating some whole snapper, peeling asparagus. Would he know asparagus? There was so much she didn’t know about life in tenth-century England. She found a pan large enough to fry the snapper. Fresh bread and butter—he’d be used to those for sure.
A couple of hours later she whirled to find him behind her. For a big guy, he moved silently.
“Stinks good,” he said “Ic am hungry.” At least that’s what it sounded like.
She nodded to the sofa. “Sit. We eat soon,” she responded in English.
He nodded. Had he understood that? “After we eat, you will teach me your Englisc,” he said, reverting to Latin.
She nodded. The sooner the better. Latin was getting to be a real strain.
The woman could cook. The fish was delicious and the vegetable, too, whatever it was. The bread was sour, but he liked it. She said it wasn’t spoiled. It was supposed to be that way. And when he had insisted on mead instead of water, she had reluctantly produced beer in a glass bottle. Not mead. Not beer as rich or flavorful as he was used to, but better than nothing. She would allow him only one, though. It had something to do with the tablets that kept away pain.
He sat now and watched her cleaning up. He had been shocked this afternoon that she wore breeches that showed the rounded curve of her buttocks, but at least her legs were covered. Her torso was covered, too, but so tightly that every swell was clearly visible—a contrast to her tiny waist. Did women always dress to provoke a man in this time? And the shirt clearly showed the cleft of her generous breasts. This Brad was a lucky man.
She did not seem to long for her lover to come to her. She was, in fact, hiding from him with the very man he wanted to imprison. That meant she did not value him. Good. This Brad was not man enough to bind her to him. Galen could make her forget him. He would show her what belonging to a man could mean.
When she was finished, she got some large parchment from a cupboard aft and laid it out on the table. She patted the padded bench beside her. It was almost a command.
But it was easy for him to obey her in this small thing. She had something he wanted. He went and sat. She was very close. He could smell the soap she used on her hair and feel her heat. He watched as her nipples peaked beneath her thin, tight shirt. She held a strange wooden stick that appeared to have a charcoal center, for its tip left marks upon the parchment. She drew a line down the center before turning to him.
“You speak Danish and English very well,” she said slowly, in Englisc.
He got most of that. “Min moder is Englisc,” he said, also slowly. “Min fæder, Danir.”
“Do you read?”
“Ic raede and wrte.” He was proud of that. He was a rarity, if not in the way his mother had wanted, at least in some things.
“Good.” Here Lucy pointed. “Write your words here and I write my words there.” She pointed to each side of the parchment
He nodded. “Werds. We beginnen.”
She was so excited she nearly let him work at it too long. She sat back when she noticed the lines of strain around his mouth and eyes. “Enough. You are tired.” He didn’t understand that. “You work too hard.”
“I wyrce heard.” He wrote the words on his side of the makeshift ledger and gestured to her to do the same with her version. They had been through four pieces of chart paper, both sides. He already understood that modern English had simpler verb forms and he got the fact that the sentence order dictated whether the noun was a subject or object—you didn’t need a different word ending. He had the pronouns down cold and could name most everything in the boat. She’d gotten through conjugating the basic verbs, “to be,” “have,” “do,” “speak,” “know,” a few others.
Galen was really intelligent, maybe brilliant. She was nothing short of amazed.