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and he was plainly intent on
walking to where the horses had been left, she went with him rather
than let go. “There’s nothing more to see here anyway,” she said
under her breath, not necessarily for anyone’s ears.
    For all that she’d founded her own business
in Shrewsbury, Bridget felt herself to be an unlikely candidate for
someone who would have done well in the Middle Ages. She hadn’t
been educated at Cambridge like Callum nor had she been in graduate
school in history or archaeology like Meg and Bronwen. A bunch of
the others had been good in school. She could have told that just
by looking at them, even before she learned that Rachel was a
doctor or Darren, with years of night school, had worked his way
from being a bobby on the street to MI-5.
    She didn’t have a university education. Her
parents had urged her to quit school at sixteen and get a job, and
she hadn’t struggled against their wishes. School hadn’t been so
much fun that she saw the point in continuing with it. Nobody in
her family had ever gone to university, and it seemed silly of her
to think that she would succeed at it either, especially when
nobody else could see the worth of it or imagine her working a job
that required a degree.
    Her first job, then, had been in a handwork
shop in Monmouth, not far from where she was born and raised on the
English side of the Wye River. She’d worked there for three years
before landing a job at a much bigger store in Cardiff, where she’d
been for the last five.
    She was good at what she did; she knew that.
She understood wool, which was more than she could say for
ninety-nine percent of twenty-firsters (as she called them), who
thought the only important thing to know about wool was that their
jumper had just shrunk in the wash.
    But she didn’t speak medieval Welsh, old
English, or anything better than schoolgirl French. She certainly
didn’t know Flemish, which would have been very useful once she set
up her own shop in Shrewsbury, since the Flems (as she called them)
seemed to have cornered the market in medieval textiles.
    She’d had a job in Cardiff that she enjoyed
for the most part. She’d found it inherently satisfying to find the
perfect yarn, the perfect fabric, or the perfect pattern for a
customer to make her happy, but she’d never imagined how much
better it might be to make a difference to so many people. It was a
heady feeling, and one that she hadn’t wanted to give up, even if
Bridget had never intended to start an entirely new industry in the
medieval world—nor provide a central spot for Callum’s spy network
to meet.
    When David had approached her about
returning to the modern world, her first reaction had been to jump
for joy, just on principle. She’d started cataloging all the things
she was going to do (most of which involved food), but then the
more she’d thought about it, the more her stomach had twisted in
dismay. She’d made a special trip up to Shrewsbury Castle, where
David had been staying, just to tell him she’d changed her mind and
wouldn’t go.
    But then David had looked at her with that
puppy dog gaze of his that implied sympathy and superior wisdom all
at the same time, and she’d bowed to his request after all.
    With her hand warm in Peter’s, Bridget told
herself that maybe it was time she stopped making these kinds of
mistakes. For practically the first time in her life, she had
listened to her own heart instead of letting other people’s ideas
about what was best rule her.
    Getting off the bus had been the right thing
to do.

Chapter Six
    Bridget
     
    D inas Bran was an
enormous castle, spread across the top of a hill a thousand feet
above the valley floor and the village of Llangollen. Back in her
old life, on holiday with a few girlfriends, Bridget had hiked up
to it. At the time, it had been impossible for her to envision an
actual castle from the ruins that remained. Lord Math (Bridget
couldn’t think of him as anything other than