She wiped sweat from her forehead as she bent over the stream and wrung out Warinus’s tunic. Laundry day. The weather had grown warmer as the calendar slipped past the first days of summer. In fact, it had grown downright hot this week, so much so she had taken off her monk’s cowl, replacing it with a simple shift and apron. Her companions were well beyond their shock at finding out she was a woman, and she no longer hid behind the name Brother Godwyn, or needed her cowl for anything more than warmth at night. Pounding wet clothes on the rocks had its advantages – it took care of all kinds of frustrations. No news about Adelaide’s imprisonment. No end to their tunneling. No word from Alberto. No sex. And all this, every fear, every danger, even every ounce of love she felt for Alberto, was due to the most improbable occurrence – time travel. It still seemed unbelievable that it had happened. She felt a sudden stab of melancholy, missing her family, California, her world. She used to find comfort in her language studies during difficult times, losing herself in the beauty of archaic poems, but she’d shut them out of her mind, because they hadn’t been created yet.
