A Bridge Through Time: (Time Travel) by Gloria Gay Read Free Book Online

gap to the side of her mouth.
    “Hi, Nellie,” Jane said in a friendly voice as the young girl still stared at her as if she were a ghost, and added, “As I told Mrs. Claye, I don’t want my breeches cut. I want to be helped out of them. Could you just pull at each leg, slowly, alternating little by little? Don’t worry about causing me pain.” Here she was, calling her jeans “breeches” of all things!
    After five minutes of excruciating pain and when Jane almost gave up, the jeans came off, inch by painful inch. After that Nellie helped Jane out of her denim jacket which she also handled with great curiosity. Then running her hand over the zipper in the jeans, Nellie  placed all articles on the bed with great care, as if she were handling objects of great worth at a museum.
    “Thank you, Nellie,” Jane then pointed to a chair. “Could you please place the clothes on that chair?”
    Nellie folded the pair of jeans and jacket slowly, apparently reluctant to let go of them.
    “You don't want them laundered, mum?” Nellie asked.
    “They're dusty, but it's all right,” Jane replied. “Just shake out the dust and leave them on the chair, please, Nellie.”
    Nellie then turned to her large basket, which held a bed pan. “If you want, miss, I’ll help you with your…”
    Jane glanced at the bed pan and shook her head. “Goodness. I can just hobble over to the bathroom, if you will just help me, Nellie.”
    “Bathroom?” Nellie asked perplexed.
    My God, thought Jane. Did they also pretend in this infernal place that there were no bathrooms, to go along with their costume farce?
    “You have no bathrooms?”
    “I – don’t…if you will explain, miss,” said Nellie, her voice anxious.
    “Bathroom – a place where one does – what one does in that bed pan.” Jane explained.
    “No mum – no – I don’t – that is, we only have the bed pans. Otherwise the outhouse, out in the back, beyond the garden – but it’s for the workers to use.”
    “Goodness, no! All right. I’ll just have to manage with the bed pan,” Jane said with resignation. “You’ll have to help me, Nellie, I can’t move my leg.”
    ***
    A few minutes later and just as the young maid was shaking out the dust from Jane’s jeans and placing them on the back of a chair, Dr. Lenn walked in, wearing a long cape and a powdered wig. With him was a thin woman in a gray dress and white apron who was trudging along in his wake. She appeared to be an aide or nurse. The doctor, in costume, presented a curious spectacle. Jane forced herself not to smile in amusement.
    “I attended the masquerade ball at Lord Halensford’s, Miss Fielder,” Dr. Lenn said to Jane, after introducing himself, “and hadn’t yet arrived home when a groom from here caught up with me. “You were lucky I live just a quarter of a mile from here!”
    Dr. Lenn was a friendly man of middle age with salt and pepper hair and a slight frame. He appeared more like what Jane would have envisioned a vicar to look – a vicar with a white wig. He had pleasant grey eyes in a large round face that did not match his thin frame and made him look like a lollipop. But he had a ready smile and a nice soothing voice.
    Jane noticed there was a gap in his teeth, to the side. Apparently gaps in teeth were common here.
    Dr. Lenn removed his long brown cape, his wig and his gloves and tossed them on the nearest chair.
    “All right, young lady, let us see what we have here. A nasty cut on the head, eh?” Dr. Lenn removed the pillows from under Jane’s head and tossed them to a settee nearby. He then pulled back the coverlet and examined Jane’s leg.
    “This leg is very swollen,” he said.
    Dr. Lenn pressed Jane’s leg in different areas and Jane moaned with pain. From his medical kit he took a jar that contained a pungent paste. He gave some instructions to the assistant he had brought with him. The woman then applied the paste to Jane’s leg and then bandaged it. He then