So, maybe … Jonah dared to glance back at the crowd on the barge. He tried to look past the pus and the pockmarks, the missing teeth and limbs. There was something fake and strangely shallow about the conversation on the barge. As far as Jonah could tell, no one was saying, “What a fine king we’ll be crowning today!” No one said, “Can someone explain why we’re going to a coronation today when the king disappeared last night?”
Jonah looked around. The river was crowded with barges, all headed upriver. And whenever Jonah got a good glimpse of the shore, it looked like people on the streets of London were streaming in the same direction as well. Everyone was going to the coronation. Were people acting so artificially in all the barges, on all the streets?
“Do you see the spires yet?” a man asked his boy as he pointed off into the distance.
“There?” the boy said. “That’s Westminster Abbey?”
“Yes,” the man said. “Kings are always crowned there.” He paused. “It’s fine weather for a coronation, isn’t it?”
The barge docked at another wharf, and people began streaming off toward the church. Chip started to rush forward with the crowd, but Jonah and Alex held him back, keeping him in the barge. Chip struggled against them.
“I must …,” he hissed. “I have to—”
“Shh!” Jonah whispered back. “You can’t walk through that crowd, even invisible. People would freak out if they bumped into you.”
When everyone but the oarsmen had gotten off the boat, the four kids stepped cautiously onto the wood dock. They skirted the edge of the crowd, surging forward, then stumbling back to avoid elbows, shoulders, feet.
“This is impossible!” Katherine whispered. “We’re never going to get anywhere!”
But then soldiers came through the crowd, commanding, “Clear the way! Clear the way! Make way for the king!”
By twisting and diving and dodging, all four kids managed to land in the open area when the crowd parted.
“Sweet!” Alex muttered.
They had a clear path ahead of them, right up to the soaring cathedral.
Chip stood in the exact center of the open space, looking around.
“This is the path I would have taken,” he whispered. “I would have worn cloth of gold, there would have been a silk canopy. …”
Chip sounded calm, but he had a strange expression on his face. He had his eyes narrowed and seemed deep in thought, reminiscing. But he kept clenching his jaw, as though he was fighting some internal struggle. He ran his hand through his short hair, and then something like bafflement spread over his face, as if he’d expected to feel long, flowing curls.
Or as if he’d expected to touch a crown.
Jonah was so busy watching Chip, he failed to notice the hubbub behind him.
A procession was advancing toward them, toward the cathedral. Jonah could see knights in armor on horseback; he could see the peak of a white canopy, probably made out of silk, just as Chip had described. And then Jonah could hear what the crowd around the procession was yelling:
“Long live the king! Long live Richard the Third!”
Those words apparently reached Chip’s ears at the same instant. A change swept over Chip’s face, leaving only one emotion behind: pure fury.
“Usurper! Thief! Murderer!” Chip shouted. “You do not deserve to be king!”
And then he took off running.
SIXTEEN
Jonah could see exactly what Chip planned to do. He planned to dart invisibly past all the knights and horses and nobles. He planned to scream the entire way. And then he planned to tackle the impostor king and take the crown for himself.
Jonah shot a quick glance at Katherine and Alex. Katherine was just standing there, horrified. Alex looked strangely baffled and was mouthing the words, “Richard? Richard the Third? But that’s …”
Jonah decided that if anyone was going to do something, it’d have to be him.
He took off with a burst of speed behind Chip. Back in the twenty-first century Jonah could outrun Chip easily—he did it all the time playing basketball. But this time Chip had a head start.
And maybe an advantage anyway, since he fits in the fifteenth century and I don’t? Jonah wondered.
Jonah fell farther behind.
Then Jonah got lucky.
Chip darted around a horse but skidded in a pile of mud. No, probably horse manure, given that it’s right behind that horse, Jonah thought. Jonah pushed off harder with his big toe, the way his soccer coach had told him to run. He was making up ground now.
But Chip was righting himself, aiming toward the crowd under the canopy, all those people in gleaming clothes. In jerky glances Jonah could see that one of the people under the canopy was carrying a crown on a tasseled pillow. If Chip got under that canopy, near that crown, Jonah wouldn’t be able to stop him.
Jonah lunged.
For a moment Jonah was sure he’d missed. Something squished beneath him—Ugh! Manure!—but his hands wrapped around something solid: Chip’s leg.
Jonah pulled Chip back from the people under the canopy. He rose up so he could shift his grip, grabbing Chip by the waist, then the shoulders. Finally he clapped his hand over Chip’s mouth and hissed in his ear, “This is not the way to do this!”
“You don’t understand!” Chip hissed back. At least he wasn’t shouting anymore. “He’s stealing my throne! That crown belongs on my head!”
“No!” Jonah whispered fiercely. “You belong in the twenty-first century. Here you’re supposed to be dead. Remember?”
At that, the fight went out of Chip. He sagged against the ground, as if he had no intention of ever getting up. Not even if a thousand horses and knights marched over him.
“Come on,” Jonah whispered. “I think I know what you can do to get some revenge. It might even help fix time.”
Chip frowned but stood up stiffly. Then the two boys dodged horses and knights again to get back to Katherine and Alex.
“How many people do you think heard him?” Jonah asked Katherine grimly when they reunited.
“Honestly, only the four or five who were right beside him,” Katherine said. “They’re the only ones who looked startled. Everyone else was cheering so loudly … these people believe in ghosts and sorcery and that kind of thing anyhow, so they wouldn’t be too suspicious, would they?”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” Jonah muttered.
While the procession was still advancing, slowly, Jonah and the others slipped into the church.
“Where can we go to get out of the way?” Jonah asked, pausing at the back of the huge sanctuary.
“I don’t want to get out of the way!” Chip said. “I—”
“Just so we can talk,” Jonah assured him. “And plan.”
“That way, then,” Chip said reluctantly. He pointed down a dark hallway.
They ended up huddling in a corner near eerie statues and flickering candles. In the dim light Jonah finally got a good look at Alex’s anguished face.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jonah demanded, tact having deserted him about the time he tackled Chip in the manure.
“I didn’t know it was Richard the Third,” Alex said. “I didn’t know who he was.”
“Because he’s not Richard the Third,” Chip said cuttingly. “He’s only Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Our uncle. Stealing the throne for himself.” He glared at Alex. “You knew his first name was Richard.”
“But not the Third.”
“So?” Jonah asked quickly, before Chip had a chance to interrupt again.
“Because Richard the Third—that’s Shakespeare,” Alex explained, grimacing. “There’s a whole play about him. He’s, like, one of the worst villains in literature.”
Jonah suppressed a shiver. Literature, he told himself. Not history.
“We already know he’s a villain,” Chip complained. “He tried to have us killed! He’s usurping the throne!”
“Wait a minute,” Katherine said. “Shak
espeare wrote a play about this guy, and Alex remembers it? That’s great! Now we’ll know what’s supposed to happen in reality!”
The light from the prayer candles glowed through her.
“Well … um … that is … er …,” Alex stammered.
“What?” Katherine demanded.
Alex winced.
“My mom’s a high school English teacher, okay?” he said. “She loves Shakespeare. She’s always trying to get me to read the plays or go to the plays or just listen to her quoting the plays. But—they’re all really boring, all right? I never pay any attention. I just know Richard the Third’s an awful villain, because she always says, ‘You’d think I was raising Richard the Third, the way you’re acting!’ any time I do something wrong.” He frowned. “Is Richard the Third the one where there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark?”
“We’re in England,” Jonah said flatly.
“Oh, right … I think that’s Hamlet,” Alex said. He made his hands into fists and pounded them against his forehead. “Think, think, think. …” He took his fists away from his forehead for a moment. “I can recite all of Einstein’s greatest formulas. Would that help?”
“Not right now,” Jonah said. “Not unless you can use those formulas to get us out of here.”
“And then Einstein probably wouldn’t ever exist because of us,” Katherine said gloomily.
“No, wait, I do have a plan,” Jonah said.
He’d kind of hoped that everyone would turn to him and fall silent, in awe. But Alex was pounding his fists against his forehead again, muttering, “Is ‘winter of our discontent’ from Richard III? Doesn’t matter, it’s summer now. ‘Parlous youth’? Maybe, but that’s no help. …” Katherine was frowning and watching Alex. Chip was staring off into the distance, toward the light coming from the open door. His eyes were narrowed to slits now, as if he was listening to the ongoing cheers outside: “Long live the king!” “Long live Richard the Third!”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Chip muttered.
“What doesn’t make sense?” Jonah asked, giving up on announcing his plan for the moment.
“It was just last night that someone tried to kill me, the real king,” Chip said. “They didn’t even succeed. There’s no proof of it, anyway. So how could they be having Richard’s coronation today?”
Jonah shrugged.
“Fast planning?” he suggested. “Overconfidence?”
“It takes a long time to plan a coronation,” Chip said. “That’s why I hadn’t been crowned yet. They were still working on all the details, all the invitations. …”
“Are you sure you were king?” Jonah asked, then flinched because he thought that might set Chip off again. “Can you be the king before you’re coronated—or whatever it’s called?”
“Crowned,” Chip said emphatically but without anger. “And I am the king, regardless. A coronation’s just a formality. A show, for everyone to see. I was supposed to have a grand one. But I was already king. I became king the minute my father died.”
“Oh,” Jonah said. “So how do you explain …” He gestured weakly toward the hubbub coming from outside.
“I can’t,” Chip said. “Did you see how much cloth of gold our evil uncle was wearing—the shimmery stuff, with real gold woven into it? And that purple velvet cape—I bet there was at least eight yards of it trailing behind him. …”
“So?” Jonah asked. He wouldn’t have expected Chip to care about fashion at a time like this.
“So—it all had to be woven and sewn by hand,” Chip said.
Jonah still didn’t understand.
“We haven’t had the Industrial Revolution yet. No mechanical looms or sewing machines,” Alex contributed before going back to muttering, “And I know it’s not ‘Et tu, Brute?’ because that’s Julius Caesar. …”
“Oh,” Jonah said. He thought it had been only about twelve hours since the mysterious intruders tried to throw Chip and Alex out the window. Maybe a team of seamstresses, sewing through the night, could produce eight yards of velvet cape that quickly. But Jonah couldn’t quite imagine the murderers coming back from their job, rushing into a roomful of seamstresses, and announcing, “Okay! That job’s done! Get to sewing!”
And coronation clothes made to fit Chip definitely wouldn’t have fit his uncle. Chip’s uncle—the guy Jonah had seen in a purple cape, anyway—was taller than Chip, more muscular.
More grown-up.
“You think he had everything planned and arranged ahead of time?” Jonah asked.
“He must have!” Chip snapped. “But how did he convince everyone to go along with him? All the knights and nobles in that procession with him … all those people cheering in the crowd …”
It was pain and sorrow that filled his expression now, not just hurt pride and outrage.
“No wonder you wanted to grab his crown,” Jonah said grudgingly.
“Yeah. Probably not the best idea, right? Not in front of hundreds of people, anyway,” Chip said. “I don’t know what came over me. I felt different again, kind of like I did when I was around the tracers last night. I wasn’t thinking like myself at all.”
“That’s weird,” Alex said, finally giving up on Shakespeare. “I wasn’t feeling like myself either when we were standing outside. But for me it just felt like I, uh, missed my mother.”
He sounded embarrassed.
“Fifteenth-century mother the queen, or twenty-first-century mother the Shakespeare teacher?” Katherine asked.
Alex didn’t have time to answer because the coronation procession had arrived at the threshold of the cathedral now. The royal horns were almost deafening; the cheers of the crowd overwhelming.
“You said you had a plan?” Chip said.
Jonah leaned over to whisper it in his ear.
Chip smiled.
“I’ll really enjoy that,” he said.
SEVENTEEN
Jonah barely had time to whisper his plan to Alex and Katherine, too, before the procession was streaming toward their dark hallway.
“This is perfect!” Chip said. “They’ll go to the shrine of the saints first. It’s right over there. Come on!”
He began rushing toward an opening between pillars, several yards down. It was lucky that Jonah, Katherine, and Alex followed him quickly, because seconds later royal pages were shaking out wide swaths of finely woven cloth for the royal party to walk on. One bolt of the cloth landed right where the four kids had been standing.
“They take their shoes off to be respectful to the saints,” Chip explained. “Crazy, isn’t it?”
He walked on through the opening into the saints’ shrine, a grottolike enclosure with a row of statues and an altar at the front.
“We can stand by the statues while they’re coming in,” Chip said. “Richard will come to the front and kneel, and everyone else will stay behind him.”
Jonah moved back between two statues with equally fierce expressions on their stone faces. He thought they looked more like soldiers than saints.
“Hi. How you doing?” Jonah muttered to the statues. “Do you know you’re missing a nose?”
Katherine shot him a look that clearly said, How can you make jokes at a time like this? Jonah shrugged.
The royal procession began entering the shrine. Richard—Duke of Gloucester, King of England, whichever he was—did indeed have the most luxurious clothes. Even in the dim candlelight everything about him shimmered. Only a small number of the noblemen followed him into the shrine—probably the highest-ranking ones. The man carrying the crown on the pillow was one of them.
“That’s Buckingham,” Chip whispered. “His good friend. And fellow traitor.”
A woman came into the shrine too, followed by another nobleman with a smaller crown on a pillow.
“Richard’s having his wife crowned today too?” Chip muttered. “That’s different.”
The queen—or queen-to-be—was a frail, sickly-looking woman with thinning hair and de
ep lines in her face. But the way she smiled at her husband almost made Jonah feel bad about what they were about to do to him.
Some guys in robes—priests?—began chanting, and then Richard and his wife went to kneel at the altar.
“Maybe you shouldn’t …,” Jonah began in a soft voice.
Chip flashed him a dirty look and went to crouch beside Richard. From his position by the statues Jonah could hear every word Chip said.
“You do not deserve to be king,” Chip hissed directly into his uncle’s ear. “After what you had done to your nephews, you don’t deserve to live. All this pomp and ceremony—bah! It is for naught. The crowd may cheer you now, but they will jeer when they know your sins. …”
Richard stayed on his knees, but he jerked to attention. Separating from a calm, devout-looking tracer, he peered around, something like panic on his face.
“Oh, yes, you will be found out,” Chip murmured. “And then … then you will die a terrible death, as terrible as the death you gave your nephews.”
“Begone!” Richard muttered through clenched teeth, glancing around again. “Plague me not!”
“I will plague you anytime I want!” Chip said, his voice rising.
Jonah thought maybe a few of the priests had heard him too, because they stopped in the middle of their chanting, creating more tracers.
Richard looked back at them.
“Leave me,” he commanded. “I require time to pray. Alone.”
The priests and the nobles exchanged baffled glances. This was evidently an unusual request.
“I … I am adding a new part to the coronation ceremony,” Richard said. “I was inspired, kneeling here, to know that a king needs time alone in communion with God.”
“But—,” a priest ventured timidly.
“Go!” Richard ordered.
At that they began filing out of the shrine, leaving their tracers behind. Only the man with the crown remained.
“You, too, Buckingham!” Richard commanded.
“Oh, er, I thought I …”
Richard pointed at the door, and Buckingham scurried out with the others.
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