Chapter Twenty #3
“It’s not unsafe. I lock my doors, have an...
alarm,” she said, and saw his confusion.
She turned back to Etta and moved the subject along.
“My parents live pretty close, within five minutes,” she told Etta.
“My neighbors are even closer than the village is to you. I’ve been there for four years, have never had any problems.”
It was so much easier to talk to sweet Etta.
She wasn’t trying to punish Bram. And she certainly wasn’t going to behave as though every ordinary conversation between them required some dramatic reminder that he’d hurt her.
She simply wasn’t going to hand herself over so freely anymore.
She’d done that on the road without realizing it, offering him every thought that entered her head, asking what he thought about everything, searching his expression for amusement or approval until his companionship had quietly become the center of her days.
And then she’d mistaken closeness for promise. She wouldn’t do it again.
“Actually, I know I’m safe. I have this one neighbor, Mrs. Donnelly.
She texts me constantly while I’m at work about absolutely everything that goes on in the neighborhood—strange cars parked in front of my house, someone’s garbage can blowing into the street, a delivery left on my porch.
Once she texted me three times because a dog she didn’t recognize was walking around without its owner. ”
“At work?” was what Etta questioned her about.
Anna was relieved she hadn’t asked for a translation of texts.
“Um, yes. I go to work each day—well, Monday through Friday, but not in the summer.” TMI, she thought immediately.
She was going to have to learn to tailor her answers to what they could reasonably understand without every explanation requiring three more explanations.
She just wasn’t sure how to do that when virtually every ordinary detail of her life seemed capable of exposing another seven-hundred-year difference.
“What work do ye do?” Etta asked.
“I’m a teacher.” That, at least, seemed safe.
Anna waited, and when the silence continued, began to suspect she'd miscalculated again.
“Ye teach?”
There was enough astonishment in the question that Anna frowned. “Yes.”
“Ye can read?”
“Of course I can read.” She caught herself. “I mean—yes. I can read.”
Etta's eyes widened further. “And write?”
“Yes.”
“Latin?”
“No. English.” Anna paused. “And some Spanish, but that's probably not helpful.”
Etta was still staring at her with such open fascination that Anna almost laughed. Apparently airplanes, phones and indoor plumbing weren't required to make herself incomprehensible in the fourteenth century.
“I teach reading and writing, math—numbers—and science and history. Children mostly, eight-year-olds.”
Etta sat up a little straighter. “I imagined only priests taught such things. Or clerks. Learned men.”
Anna glanced toward her, realizing only then what Etta found so remarkable. “Women are learned, too, where I come from. Girls go to school just like boys do. I went to school for years, and then to college so I could become a teacher.”
Etta absorbed that slowly, looking at Anna seemingly in an entirely new light. “Ye are a learned woman.”
The description sounded so grand that Anna laughed.
“Oh, gosh, no. I mean, yes, I’ve learned.
But... well, I’m discovering that most of what I know isn't going to be particularly useful here.” She finally turned again in Bram’s direction.
“Your brother can tell you. I can’t ride a horse—can’t even get on a horse or walk one down a steep hill. ”
Bram held her gaze, and something in his blue eyes told her he remembered that particular disaster every bit as well as she did, but not with frustration now.
Anna felt the beginning of a smile tug at her mouth. “I can’t build a fire,” she continued, still looking at him, “and I don’t know when people mean to do harm. I wouldn’t know an edible mushroom from a deadly one and I’m not too good with an axe.”
His brow lifted at that last one.
“Oh, don’t,” she warned, though she was smiling now. “You know perfectly well how miserable I was trying to break that shackle off your wrist. Have I forgotten anything?”
His mouth shifted faintly. “Aye. A few things.”
Harsain, seated beyond Bram, who had apparently been following the exchange with some interest, observed, “Ye arrived in one piece, lass. Canna be entirely hopeless.”
Anna laughed fully now. “Thank you, Harsain, for the vote of confidence.” She faced Etta again. “But still, as you can see, I’ve spent the last two weeks feeling considerably more ignorant than learned.”
They finished their breakfast and soon Etta was dragging Anna away from the table and outside the keep, and Anna kept her eyes fixed on the stone archway ahead, refusing to let them drift back toward the high table where Bram sat.
That was the discipline required, she realized as they stepped into the yard. Not how to dislike him, because she suspected she would fail miserably at that, and not even how to stop wanting him, because apparently her common sense had very little authority over that particular problem.
She simply had to stop hoping.
Bram could be kind to her without it meaning anything more. He could watch her, smile at her, pursue conversation with her, or call her Anastasia in that low voice that made her stomach swell with butterflies, and none of it had to become something larger simply because she wished it would.
She’d learned that lesson once.
She certainly didn’t want Bram to have to teach it to her again.