Her sleeve was too tight to push up, but she could feel his hot lips through her clothing. “When shall we begin making them? I should like more children.”
Her eyes were closed, her head back. “More?” Suddenly, something that Nicholas said came back to her. A son. He’d said he had no children but he’d once had a son. What exactly had he said?
She pulled her arm from him. “Nicholas, do you have a son?”
“Aye, an infant. But you need not worry, his mother died long ago.”
She was concentrating hard. A son. What had Nicholas said? I had a son, but he died in a fall the week after my brother drowned. “We have to return,” she said.
“But we will eat first.”
“No.” She stood up. “We have to see about your son. You said he died a week after Kit drowned. Tomorrow will be a week. We must go to him now.”
Nicholas didn’t hesitate. He left a man to pack the food and dishes, while he and the o
ther men and Dougless tore back to the Stafford house. They jumped off their horses at the front gate. Lifting her skirts, Dougless ran after Nicholas.
He led her to a wing of the house she’d never been in before, then threw open a door. What Dougless saw horrified her more than anything she’d yet seen in the sixteenth century. A little boy, barely over a year old, was wrapped from his neck to his feet in tight bindings of linen—and he was hanging from a peg on the wall. His arms and legs were pinned to him exactly like a mummy. The bottom half of the bindings were filthy where he’d relieved himself but not been changed. Below him on the floor was a wooden bucket to catch excess “drippings.”
Dougless could not move as she stared in horror at the child, whose eyes were half open, half closed.
“The child is fine,” Nicholas said. “No harm has come to him.”
“No harm?” Dougless said under her breath. If a child in the twentieth century were treated like this, it would be taken from its parents, but Nicholas was saying the child was fine. “Take him down,” she said.
“Down? But he is safe. There is no reason to—”
Dougless glared at him. “Down!”
With a look of resignation, Nicholas took the boy by the shoulders and, holding him at arms’ length so he’d drip onto the floor and not on his father, he turned to Dougless. “And what am I to do with him?”
“We are going to bathe him and dress him properly. Can he walk? Talk?”
Nicholas looked astonished. “How am I to know this?”
Dougless blinked. There was more than mere time between their two worlds. It took Dougless a while, but she got a big wooden bucket brought to the room and filled with hot water. Nicholas complained and cursed, but he unwrapped his smelly, dirty son and plunked him into the warm water. The poor child was covered with diaper rash from the waist down. Dougless used some of her precious soft soap to gently wash him.
At one point the boy’s nurse came in and was very upset, saying Dougless was going to kill the child. At first Nicholas wouldn’t get involved—probably because he agreed with the nurse, Dougless thought—but when Dougless glared at him, he made the woman leave.
The warm water made the boy perk up, and Dougless guessed that the bindings had been so tight the boy had been in a bit of a stupor. She said as much to Nicholas.
“It keeps them quiet. Loosen the swaddlings and they weep most loudly.”
“Let’s wrap you in bindings like that, hang you on a peg, and see if you don’t cry bloody murder.”
“A child has no sense.” Obviously, he was puzzled by her actions and her thoughts.
“He has the brain now that he’ll go to Yale with.”
“Yale?”
“Never mind. Have safety pins been invented yet?”
Dougless had to improvise diapers. Nicholas protested when she used one diamond and one emerald brooch to fasten the corners of the boy’s linen diaper. She wished she had some zinc ointment for his rash.
When at last the child was clean, dry, and powdered (thanks to another hotel giveaway sample from her tote bag), she handed the boy to his father. Nicholas looked horrified and bewildered at the same time, but he took the boy, and after a moment he even smiled at him. The child smiled back.
“What’s his name?” Dougless asked.