I remained in the chair, surprised at how good it felt to be still. Perhaps I had fallen, or been dropped, when being transported from Dr. Raj’s office to this…whatever this was. While I should seek medical attention, I didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger, so I relaxed into the chair. Activity in the room returned to normal as the women picked up their work, talking quietly among themselves. The Elizabeth actor returned to her chair, sipped something from a jewel-encrusted goblet, then picked up a small book and began to read. With the women’s dresses sparkling like constellations and the warm air, and the quiet voices, the setting was almost peaceful.
My eyelids closed, but I forced them open again. Falling asleep with a concussion could be bad news. Instead, I examined the room in which we sat. Large windows behind “Elizabeth” were gray with the storm. Heavy drapes hung at the windows and large, dark tapestries had been draped across the remaining three walls. A few small dogs rested on some of the women’s laps. The ceiling was dark as well, carved into deep wells that arched over our heads.
I picked up that the woman who’d brought me to the room called herself “Lady Mary,” and the older woman who seemed to be in charge used the name “Kat.” Kat Ashley was Queen Elizabeth I’s dearest friend, so at least these women were accurate in their role-playing.
Then an attractive woman across the room caught my eye. Her black hair was pulled back and up into a sleek bun, and the small cap on the woman’s head matched her blue dress, which was the same dress that I wore. The costume shop must have run a discount on it. I smiled shyly, and she answered with an equally shy smile, as if to acknowledge we wore matching gowns.
But when I brushed a lock of hair back off my face and she did the same, my throat constricted. I straightened the lace dripping out my left sleeve. She did the same. What?
When I rose and approached her, she did the same. I reached out to touch her, but instead touched something smooth and cool.
A mirror.
I stared at the unfamiliar woman staring back at me, then ripped off my cap and tried to remove the wig, but it wasn’t a wig. I winced as I pulled the hair free of its constraining pins. What the hell was going on? My own hair was reddish brown, not black, and this face was all wrong. Dark blue eyes instead of light hazel. Fine eyebrows instead of thick ones. Wide forehead, high cheekbones.
I probed my face. Was this a mask? Prosthetics? Where were my cheekbones or my chin? My dainty ears?
Sudden fear squeezed my chest even tighter than the corset. “Off!” I yelled, and I began clawing at my dress. But there was no visible way to get it off—no buttons, no zippers, no Velcro. I yanked the nearest woman to her feet. “Off! Take this off!” With shaking fingers, I helped the woman untie and tug and unlace until I stood before the mirror wearing nothing but a thin white chemise. Stunned, I ignored the concerned murmurs that rippled through the room.
I lifted the chemise over my head, aware of the gasps and “Elizabeth’s” loud guffaw. This wasn’t my body. The breasts were large and full; mine were much smaller. The waist was thick, where mine was narrow. The thighs pressed against each other more than mine did. I wore a consistent size ten, but this body surely wore a size with an X in it, if not two. I stared at the body in the mirror, then touched it, feeling my hands on my body as I did so.
Fire truck.
Not only was I wearing someone else’s dress, but I was wearing someone else’s body.
Chapter Five
The sound of Chris puttering in the kitchen pulled me out of the sinkhole of sleep I’d fallen into. I stretched, rubbed my ear in a futile attempt to get rid of a high-pitched whine, then shot out of bed. I raced for the window. Twenty-first century buildings! Honking cars. Barking dogs. Wailing police sirens. When I bent double, clutching myself, I realized it was my body I held, not some stranger’s.
I was back. It’d been a nightmare, nothing more. Other than this irritating hum in my ears, life was back to normal.
I dashed into the kitchen, inhaling strong coffee, and flung my arms around Chris. “Thank God,” I murmured into her neck.
“That I’ve made the coffee already? Poor baby, you were really out. Guess you need this. Here.” She stepped back and handed me my favorite mug, the one with an image of the mosaic floor in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
My hands shook as I held the mug against my face. The warmth was reassuring.
“Are you okay?”
“No, I’ve got to give your Dr. Rajamani a piece of my mind. That stupid GCA really messed me up.”
Now dressed, my coffee mug empty, I ran down the apartment steps and hailed a cab, too impatient to bike to campus. The cabbie let me off in front of the Alexandra Building and I dashed up the stairs. Dr. Raj’s office door was closed, but that didn’t stop me. I burst in to find him on his cell.
Angrier now than I’d ever been, I tore the phone from Rajamani’s hand and flung it across the room. It shattered against the wall.
“What are you doing?” Raj leapt to his feet.
The humming in my ears became the roar of a chainsaw so I had to shout. “Your GCA gave me hallucinations. I thought my mind was in the body of some chick in Queen Elizabeth I’s court. Can you imagine what that felt like? All your talk of transporting my consciousness into another vessel started it, but I’m sure the GCA made everything worse. I can’t remember anything from yesterday after that last clap of thunder, but I somehow managed to get myself home safely, all the while thinking I was in some sort of Elizabethan costume drama.”
Hot rage spread like wildfire through my limbs. I wrapped my hands around Dr. Rajamani’s neck and squeezed until his eyes widened in fear. His hands clawed ineffectually at mine, but I was too strong. I shook him so hard his head snapped forward and back. “I’m going to shake you until your head comes off,” I yelled. “You’re a lunatic! You’re dangerous!” Dr. Rajamani’s lips began to turn blue, so I closed my eyes and squeezed harder.
“Blanche! Stop!”
I tightened my grip even though hands now tried to pull me off of Rajamani.
“Blanche! You must stop!”
Blanche?
With a shuddering gasp, I opened my eyes to find my hands wrapped around the throat of the woman next to me in bed. I let go, allowing the hands to drag me back. The room was dark, the only source of light the sputtering candle held by “Kat Ashley.” White candle smoke rose into the oppressive dark. The woman next to me struggled to sit up, coughing and clutching her throat.
“Blanche Nottingham, have you lost your senses?” “Kat Ashley” hissed. I held my pounding head and struggled to remember. I was sharing a lumpy bed with “Lady Mary,” while “Lady Charlotte” slept on a pallet on the floor. Across the room were women in two more beds. Ahh, the ladies chamber. All their shadowed faces looked haunted. “Mary” still clutched her throat.
I covered my mouth to cut off a scream. I’d had a nightmare within a nightmare. The room’s darkness weighed on me like a thick tapestry. My marvelous sense of direction was no help to me now. When you were trapped in something you didn’t understand, it was almost impossible to find a way out.
“Mary, are you able to breathe?” “Kat” drew the stunned “Mary” into her arms.
Finally, the woman nodded, croaking out her assurances.
I licked my lips. “Lady Mary, I am so sorry. I was having a nightmare.” Tears welled up, but I refused to yield. Instead, I leapt from the lumpy bed. “I will find somewhere else to sleep so you don’t need to worry.”
“Lady Charlotte” waved me toward her pallet, then she slid into the bed beside “Mary.”
I lay down on the pile of straw covered with a blanket and pulled a dirty fur rug up over my shoulders. The end of a goose feather poked through the pillow cover and scratched my cheek, so I punched the pillow down and tried to get comfortable. Despite the straw, cold rose up from the wooden floor and shackled my ankles, knees, hips. Thank God this wasn’t truly a straw bed from Elizabethan times, for that would have
been crawling with fleas and lice.
A small brown and white spaniel with long silky ears and serious brown eyes trotted over and sniffed at my face. When I offered a finger and was rewarded with a sandpaper lick, I lifted the covers in invitation, and the little thing hopped in. He circled a few times, a doggy trait I’d always admired, then curled up against my chest. I adjusted the covers so he could breathe, then began gently stroking his ears. My reward was a small sigh of approval.
I looked around the room, remembering now that “Lady Charlotte” had brought me here last night and taken pity on me. “This is your room. This is your trunk of gowns.” While a quiet-as-a-mouse actor playing a servant undressed me, the woman droned on about my shocking behavior. After the servant left, the woman pushed me toward the bed. “This is your bed. I suggest you use it.”
Despite the soft warmth of the dog, loneliness pierced me like a thousand tiny arrows. But was I alone only in my mind, or in reality? I could only come up with three options for my situation. Perhaps I was collapsed on the floor of Raj’s lab, locked in a drug-induced dream or nightmare. Or I could be in a coma at University College Hospital, locked in the same dream or nightmare, with Chris at my bedside, my frantic parents and brothers flying across the Atlantic to join me. With both of these options, my knowledge of London and my fascination with all things Tudor were providing the details. So far everything I’d seen could have been culled from the books I’d read, the movies and shows I’d watched.
The third option? That the freaky Rajamani had actually located my consciousness and somehow transported it into the body of a woman named Blanche Nottingham sometime in the mid sixteenth century. But this was too bizarre to believe.
No, the more logical answer was a coma.
I scratched a few itches on my calf, then curled around my only friend, grunting at the uncomfortable straw. I was still Jamie Maddox. I’d been born in 1984 at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My parents were Rick and Julia Maddox. I had a younger brother, Marcus, and an older brother, Jacob.
I was still the girl who had fallen while running down the sidewalk and cracked open my chin on the head of the antique doll in my arms. There’d been no plastic surgeon on duty, so an inexperienced resident had stitched me up. Thank God the eight stitches were out of sight on the underside of my chin, but I knew them intimately, for I often ran my thumb over the bumpy ridges when nervous.
I reached for my chin and felt nothing but skin smooth as a peach.
No. I was still the girl who’d fallen while trying to skateboard down the low brick wall at the Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church a block from our home. I reached for the resulting scar but touched only flawless skin on a plump knee.
As I shifted on the straw, I winced at the waves of body odor escaping the covers. I’d read that Elizabeth used scented rose water to both mask her scent and the scent of others, but this was a perfect example of a detail my mind could have conjured up while I rested in a warm, pristine hospital bed, deep in a coma, instead of on a dry, rustling pile of straw that attracted cold rather than repelled it.
I needed help. I needed to ask Chris for advice. Call Ashley and Mary and Jake. Maybe they could help me figure it out…but apparently nightmares didn’t come with cell phones.
The candlelight jumped wildly as the wick began drowning in melting wax. Then it went out. I closed my eyes as the dog’s paws twitched in his dreams. If only my dreams could be as pleasant.
I stroked the soft fur. I would figure this out in the morning.
Chapter Six
The next morning, I couldn’t think of how to escape this nightmare. My only solution was to remain in bed, in retrospect a pretty cowardly choice, but I hoped each time that I awoke I’d be home where I belonged.
Several times a day someone brought me bread and broth. Perhaps to punish me they forced me to use a chamber pot, and scowled in confusion when I demanded a flush toilet. I slept and slept.
Each day I made a small mark with my thumbnail in the soft leg of the wooden table next to my bed. After seven marks it was clear the nightmare wasn’t actually a nightmare, but some sort of reality, so I arose on the eighth day to the dawning awareness that this body I inhabited, either for real or in my coma fantasy, needed a bath. My skin looked drab and my head itched as I imagined an army of lice on patrol. My ankles were red with bites. These people might have been taking the whole realism thing just a bit too far, for there had been fleas in the bed.
While “Lady Mary’s” maid, Rosemary, helped her dress, I cleared my throat. “Lady Mary, once again, I’m sorry for hurting you the other night.”
The short woman shrugged it off. “My brother and I would fight like dogs when we were small, so I am used to it.”
“Speaking of dog,” I motioned to my sleeping companion for most of the week, now sitting on my left foot. “What’s this guy’s name?”
She shook her head. “You know perfectly well his name is Vincent.” She frowned. “What is odd, however, is that he suddenly appears to like you. He has never had any love for you before.”
I scooped Vincent up into my arms and kissed the white blaze streaking down his forehead. He looked up at me with those liquid eyes, brow furrowed as if he were as confused about his feelings for me as “Lady Mary.” I bumped my nose against his, pleased his owner was also a fan of van Gogh’s. I stopped Rosemary as she turned her attention to me. “Before I dress, do you think we could find a basin of water somewhere? Clean water? I’d like to bathe.”
“Lady Mary” looked at me down her long nose, her brown eyes small and close together. “God’s teeth, you are irritating today. I am glad you are recovering from your fall, but it has only been a fortnight since your last bath. The queen will call for the tubs when she is ready for us to bathe. Until then, the wash basins are where they have always been.”
When I didn’t respond, she sighed and took me into a sort of closet in the next room. I thanked her gratefully and washed myself as well as I could without taking off my chemise and robe. The hair would have to wait.
Getting dressed left me exhausted and humiliated because I needed so much assistance. First, Rosemary helped me step into two skirts, one stiff brown taffeta, the other a brocaded orange. Then she slipped a sleeveless tawny-orange bodice on, lacing it together in back, then tying it to my skirts. What followed was a short, stiff white collar. Next was the padded, triangular corset thing, which came to a point well below my navel. This was the dreaded stomacher.
Rosemary then tied the stomacher to the bodice. Next she attached the sleeves, which were brown with long slashes lined with orange silk. Tiny beads lined the slashes, the fitted wrists, and the edges of the stomacher.
I looked down at my chest. The snug bodice and even snugger stomacher had turned my breasts—or rather, Blanche’s breasts—into rosy, rising bread dough, threatening any second to overflow their container. “Lady Mary,” I said, “let’s cover up the girls a bit.” I motioned to the fabric that covered her own décolletage.
She laughed. “I swear you have lost much of your mind. You know perfectly well your bosom remains bare until you marry.” Right. Gotta advertise the goods.
Rosemary brushed my hair back, expertly twisted and pinned it to the back of my head, then topped it off with a soft velvet cap trimmed in more beads, work detailed enough to require bifocals of even the youngest seamstress.
I thanked Rosemary, then followed “Lady Mary” to the outer chamber where food was to be served. In doing so, I banged against two tables and the doorframe. It wasn’t just the heavy skirts, it was the hips. Wearing someone else’s clothes was awkward enough; wearing someone else’s body was insane.
I helped myself to a thick slice of grainy bread and a plate of cut apples and pears for breakfast. I poured myself a mug of the brown liquid from a glazed blue jug, took a drink, then spit it back into the mug immediately. Wine, spiced with cloves. I searched the table for water. A servant refilled the blue jug. “Ex
cuse me,” I said, “but is there anything to drink besides wine? Perhaps some water?”
The woman’s eyes bulged like a fish’s. “Water? You would die of some horrible sickness, m’lady, if you drink water from the Thames or any other river.”
“Could you boil me some water to drink?”
Now the servant looked worried, as if I might be dangerous. “M’lady, everyone drinks the mulled wine. Why would you ever want to drink water?”
I licked my dry lips and resolved to hold out for water as she hurried away, even though dehydration surely lurked in my future.
The other women bustled in and out of the room, clearly occupied waiting on the “Queen,” but I didn’t dare participate. It was as if I walked across a thawing lake, with the ice cracking and melting. No matter where I placed my foot, it would be wrong.
The sounds of musicians drifted down the corridor—a flute and some sort of stringed instrument, and a woman singing. I peeked into the room but did not enter. This must be the Queen’s presence chamber, for it was dominated by a huge carved chair raised on a dais, and decorated with dozens of flags and emblems. “Elizabeth” sat in the chair with an older man dressed in heavy robes at her side. The room was filled with men and women pretending to be courtiers in elaborate Elizabethan dress. The air was thick with perfume that couldn’t hide the musky, moist smell permeating the room.
I slid back against the wall into the hallway. It was getting harder and harder to convince myself this was all in my coma-fied imagination. But yet, it had to be. The alternative was beyond impossible. I even managed to chuckle at creating two levels of impossible: the regular impossible and the beyond impossible. But my chuckling didn’t change the fact that a high-pitched scream of terror crouched at the base of my throat, desperate for release. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, which was supposed to be calming. It took many minutes of inhaling and exhaling before Terror’s little sister Anxiety arrived to take Terror’s place. I still didn’t feel calm, but I preferred a little anxiety to terror.
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