Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance

(
A stand-alone novel within the world
of the
After Cilmeri
Series)

by

* * * * *

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Woodbury

www.sarahwoodbury.com

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Other books by Sarah Woodbury

Footsteps in Time: A Time Travel Fantasy

Prince of Time

The Last Pendragon: A Story of Dark Age
Wales

The Pendragon’s Quest

Cold My Heart: A Novel of King Arthur

c
a hard ‘c’ sound (Cadoc)

ch
a non-English sound as in Scottish
"ch" in "
loch
” (Fychan)

dd
a buzzy ‘th’ sound, as in “there”
(Dafydd)

f
as in “of” (Dafydd)

ff
as in “off” (Gruffydd)

g
a hard ‘g’ sound, as in “gas”
(Gruffydd)

l
as in "lamp" (Llywelyn)

ll
a breathy “th” sound that does not
occur in English (Llywelyn)

rh
a breathy mix between ‘r’ and ‘rh’
that does not occur in English (Anna)

th
a softer sound than for ‘dd,’ as in
"thick” (Tathan)

u
a short ‘ih’ sound, or a long ‘ee’
sound (Cymru—pronounced “kumree”)

w
as a consonant, it’s an English ‘w’;
as a vowel, an ‘oo’ sound (Llanrwst)

y
the only letter in which Welsh is
not phonetic. It can be an ‘ih’ sound, as in “Gwyn,” is often an
“uh” sound, and at the end of the word is an “ee” sound (thus, both
Cymru—
the modern word for Wales—and
Cymry
—the word
for Wales in the Middle Ages—are pronounced “kumree”)

M
y husband’s body
lay cold on the table in front of me. A sheet covered all but his
face, but that didn’t stop me from imagining the damage to his
body—from the car accident and from wounds inflicted long before
tonight.

The chill in the room seeped all the way
through me, nearly as cold as the January air outside. The morgue
was just as I’d imagined—feared—it would be. A classroom-sized box
with fluorescent lights, sanitized metal tables, sinks and counters
lined against one wall, with implements whose function I didn’t
want to know. I tried not to look anywhere but at Trev, but as I
began to struggle against the rushing in my ears and the narrowing
of my vision, I had to glance away, my eyes skating over the rest
of the room. The police officer took my right elbow and spoke
softly in my ear. “Come sit, Mrs. Lloyd. There’s nothing you can do
here.”

I nodded, not really listening, and pulled
my winter coat closer around me. The officer steered me out the
door and into in the hall, to an orange plastic chair next to the
one in which my mother waited. It was the kind of hallway you could
find in any public building: utilitarian, sterile, with off-white
tile flecked with black, off-white walls, and thin, metal framed
windows that wouldn’t open, holding back the weather. I met my
mother’s eyes and we shared a look that needed no words.

What the officer didn’t understand—couldn’t
understand—were my conflicting emotions: horror and sadness
certainly, anger, but overlying all that, relief. Relief for him,
having had to live for six months with increasing despair, and
relief for me that he had self-medicated himself into oblivion,
releasing me from living with a man I no longer loved and couldn’t
like.

“It’s nothing to do with you,” Mom said. I
turned to look at her. Her face was nearly as white as her hair,
but her chin jutted out as it always did when she was determined to
get her point across and she thought I was being particularly
stubborn.

“I know, Mom. I know that.” I leaned forward
and rested my head in my hands. The tears I’d controlled in the
morgue finally fell, filling my eyes and seeping between my
fingers.

My mother’s voice came softly. “He made his
choice,
cariad
. Even he could see that this was a better
end.”

“I know that too.”

I stand on the porch of my mother’s house,
my hands on my hips. Anna is napping in her room and I’ve been
enjoying a quiet hour alone. The bright sunlight of the August
afternoon heats my face. I shield my eyes with one hand, wondering
where I left my sunglasses, as Trev parks his car and gets out,
coming around the front to stand on the sidewalk, his arms calm at
his sides. I brace myself for his plea. He’s going to ask me to
come back to him. I’m ready to say no; strong enough now to say no
as I should have been the first time he hit me.

It’s been three months since I’ve seen him.
Three months which I spent reveling in my new-found independence
and planning the rest of my life, and as always, thankful that I
had somewhere to go—that my mother had been willing to take us in.
I’ve already started at the community college; I’m going to get
myself back on track to the future I’d had before Trev had
interrupted it.

“
I need you, Meg,” Trev says.

“
No you don’t. Or only as a punching
bag.”

“
You don’t understand,” he says, taking a
step forward.

I hold out one hand. “Don’t come any
further. You need to stay on the sidewalk or I’ll call the
police.”

He knows now that I’ll do it and takes one
step back. He raises his hands, palms out, as if in supplication,
except that he’s never asked me for anything in his life, never
stooped to saying please. This time he does.

“
Please come home, Meg,” he says. “I’m
dying.”

I gape at him. “What?”

“
It’s the reason I’ve been unstable
recently. The reason I’ve lost so much weight.”

“
The reason for that is that you’ve
stopped eating and opted only to drink straight scotch,” I said.
“That or bourbon.”

Trev shakes his head. “It stops the ache,”
he says. “I’ve just come from the doctor. He says I have a chance
to live—chemotherapy and medicines that will make me even sicker. I
can’t do this alone. I need you.”

So I’d gone with him, out of guilt and
obligation and pity. Trevor Lloyd: my husband of two years and the
father of our little girl, Anna. It was for her that I’d initially
stayed with him, and because of her that I’d left him. Returning
because he had stage-four pancreatic cancer at twenty-three may
have seemed the right thing to do at the time, but it had been a
mistake, one to which the bruising from the black eye he’d given me
only the night before testified. How he’d even been able to stand I
didn’t know, nor why I’d not been smart enough to get out of his
way. That had always been my problem. I’d let him go, incapacitated
as he was, strung up on who knew what cocktail of medications and
alcohol, thankful that he was leaving me alone.

And now he was dead. Was that my fault?

And now he was dead and I was free.

* * * * *

I tossed my purse on the floor of the living
room, pulled off my coat, shoulders still dusted with snow from
outside, and plopped myself onto the couch next to Anna and my
sister, Elisa, who’d been reading her a book. Elisa, two years
younger than I, was home for Christmas from her freshman year in
college and would soon return to school.

It was three days since Trev’s funeral; a
week since he died. A week wasn’t a long time to mourn, Mom said,
but I’d been feeling his loss for months already, if not years,
from the first time he’d slapped me across the face and sent me
spinning around the kitchen table. His death had only been the
final note in a long, mournful tune.

“A guy at the community college just asked
me out on a date,” I said.

“Really?”

I gave Elisa a glance and a half-smile. “Do
I have three heads or something?” I said, and then confessed before
she could answer, “I was just surprised. It’s been a while since I
thought about myself that way.”

“Since you stopped nursing and lost some
weight, you look really great, actually.”

What could I do but laugh? Elisa had a way
of getting straight to the point. “Well, thanks,” I said. “I think.
I feel more like myself. Like I’m waking up from a long sleep, or
as if I’ve been wrapped in Styrofoam and I’ve finally broken
through it.”

“So you really are okay?” Elisa said.

“Yes. I think, finally, yes.”

“No more losers,” she said. “Any guy that
you meet and start to date, you have to run through both Mom and me
before you get serious. Bring him home and he has to submit to
twenty questions before you get any further.”

“That’s pretty strict!” I said. “What if I
just want to go to a movie with him?”

“Nope.” Elisa shook her head. She was very
serious. Admittedly, she was always serious but I could tell she
really meant it and it touched me.

I smiled at her. “You are what I want to be.
I’m so proud of you.”

“Me? You’re the one who’s had to deal with
all this stuff.”

“I’m the one who chose the wrong dream to
follow. Is it too late for me?”

“Of course not!” Mom bustled in. “You’re
going to be fine. You’re only twenty.”

“I’ll be twenty-one soon.”

Mom shook her head. “You’ve just made a
small detour. Besides, look what we got out of it!” She leaned over
the back of the couch to kiss the top of Anna’s head. “
Cyn wired â'r pader
.”

Elisa and I rolled our
eyes in unison. ‘As true as the Lord’s Prayer!’
Mom
had said. She knew enough Welsh to get by, as she
said, and she’d diligently taught it to us. That just happened to
be her favorite phrase. She’d emigrated to Pennsylvania from Wales
as a girl, settling in Radnor with an aunt and uncle (long since
dead). She’d grown up in Cardiff, a city in south Wales, and one
anglicized enough that she’d never quite become fluent in the
language.

Yet, she’d found comfort in the Pennsylvania
hills that reminded her of home and in the remnants of the Welsh
language that she found along the Main Line. She’d never been back
to Wales, though, and Radnor, where we still lived, was as close as
she’d gotten to living in a Welsh community.

After working for twenty years as a
housekeeper, she married Evan Morgan. He’d been ten years older
than she and delighted to find himself with a wife—and within a few
years of marriage, two daughters, long after he thought himself an
established bachelor. Mom had already been forty when they married
so they hadn’t had as long as they would have liked together; she
blamed my sojourn with Trev on grief at my father’s death.

Unfortunately,
none of us knew
any more Welsh
than
Mom
. . . and what had Elisa and I learned in high school?
French
, and confounded our parents with our grasp of the language.
Sitting on the couch with Elisa and Anna, I recalled that I used to
be good in school.
A lifetime
ago.
Maybe I could be
again.

“Can we go, Mommy?” Anna said.

I smiled down at her and tickled her under
her chin. She giggled. She had curly, dark hair, almost black, and
her dark eyes looked at me with an intent expression. Her little
legs stuck straight out in front of her as she held the book on her
lap. She was only two and a half years old but already talking in
long sentences. Sometimes I was the only one who could understand
what she was saying through her little two-year-old lisp, but at
least she was saying it. I didn’t need her to articulate “ice
cream”, however, to remember my promise.

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“What about dinner?”
Mom
said. I stood to look at her, not wanting to argue
in front of Anna.
Mom
met my eye, and then
nodded. “Dessert first, then dinner. Sounds wonderful.”

“Thank you,
Mom
.” I
leaned forward to put my arms around her plump waist and my head on
her shoulder. “Thank you for everything.”