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used to unlock the storeroom's thick wooden door. "Rest well. Lady Jehane," he said, and was gone, his footsteps echoing faintly back out of the dark.
    It took a few minutes of banging into wooden bar-rels and bins and stirring up dust in the feeble light before she finally found the notch in the wall contain-ing a narrow bed frame. After setting the lamp down on a leather-bound chest next to the bed, she turned too quickly and tripped over one of her bags.
    Landing on the straw mattress, she stayed put. Her skirts snuffed out the wick as she fell, saving her from hav-ing to blow out the light.
    "Lucky I didn't catch my dress on fire," she mur-mured.
    She knelt in the center of the bed to wriggle out of her layers of clothes. As she recalled, nightgowns were unknown in this period, but she didn't want to have to sleep in the same clothes she would have to wear again tomorrow. And the next day, and the next. Maybe she would adopt a few laundry innovations as chatelaine of Passfair.
    She rolled around, settling the fur covering com-fortably, and almost immediately discarded any plan for change. She didn't dare alter a thing. Not one sin-gle, uncomfortable thing. She had a responsibility not to influence this alien culture. She could change the future. And stuck back here she'd have no way of

    knowing whether a ripple effect from one tiny alter-ation would prove good or ill for her own time. She sighed unhappily. She'd just have to live by this place and time's rules. Observe and not participate and get herself to a nunnery ASAP.
    She just hoped she didn't forget, screw up, or get fed up with life in a time warp.
    The straw-stuffed mattress wasn't much different from the thin cotton futon she slept on at home. The mattress did rustle dryly when she moved, and there
    were things in it that nibbled on her. But it was nei-ther the straw nor the bugs, nor even her spinning thoughts, that kept her awake. It was the silence. It was the dead still quiet of the night inside these stone walls that convinced her she was no longer at home. Alone in the silent darkness she faced the realization that she wasn't really in some weird overauthentic theme park produced by David Wolfe.
    Even in her quiet neighborhood in anIllinoistown there was white noise that went unnoticed except in its absence. Here in the south of England, probably sometime around 1209, there wasn't a dishwasher or airplane or car engine or stereo or lawn mower or air conditioner—not a mechanical whoosh or roar or thrum or blare or rattle or hum to be heard anywhere on the planet. She didn't like the dark silence; it pressed in on her ears and her mind.
    In the silence she couldn't stop thinking about what had brought her to this alien place. She was an alien here, no matter what Wolfe thought. He thought she lived for history. Maybe she did; her job had become her life in the last year. She gradually lost track of friends and family and the real world to con-centrate on historical research. She practically lived at the institute. She'd drifted away from the Medievalist Society, hardly ever called her mother anymore. There were no men in her life. She had thought she was satisfied with what she was doing.
    She suddenly knew she'd gotten so caught up in the project that she hadn't made time for anything else in her life. She thought her historical research was enough. She'd been enjoying herself.
    Enjoying herself and forgetting reality, she casti-gated herself. Now reality dodn't exist for her. Not the reality she wanted and didn't even realize she wanted until she'd lost her chance for it. It wasn't as if she hadn't planned to get on with real life someday. She'd hoped to find someone to love. It was just that she hadn't found anyone who'd met what her stan-dards were. Maybe someone who looked like Daffyd ap Bleddyn but acted like a gentleman.
    She tried not to feel sorry for herself despite the strangeness and discomfort other surroundings. She tried not to be