A Contemporary Asshat at the Court of Henry VIII

by MaryJanice Davidson, Camille Anthony, Melissa Schroeder

  He pulled back and stared at me, aghast. “No, oh no! Say it should never come to pass, lady, I beg you.”

  “Shhhh! I mean, um, perhaps the angels are wrong. Maybe this is a test? But they wanted me to tell you, and you can never tell anyone else, not even your priest, until after. Of course, no one can tell the King of England what to do,” I added, seeing the small eyes narrow, the small mouth tighten. “I’m just passing along their suggestions. But cheer up. Maybe it won’t come to pass. Maybe I’m just insane.”

  Just like that, the pursed lips loosened and he was smiling again. “I would never wish such an affliction on thee, my lady. And I will do as the angels bid, and pray that they beg God for mercy for us all.”

  “Thank you.” There was a pause, and I was reminded that there was a curious crowd right behind me and I had unfinished business. “If Your Majesty will excuse me?”

  “We do excuse you. Come back to us soon, Lady Joan.”

  And I got it. I felt it: man’s charisma hit me like a wave that drowned the sensible part of my brain. His focus wasn’t just flattering, it was intense. I’d read that Henry VIII had the gift of making anyone feel special, whether they were a royal Duke or a blacksmith.

  (Authentic!)

  If anything, the books underplayed it. I wanted to smile back and hug him. I wanted to make him laugh. I wanted him to see me and then keep seeing me.

  For the first time, I understood all the sycophancy and enabling that had turned Henry Tudor from golden prince to raging tyrant. People wanted to please him, to be his focus, to get his approval. Not because he was king. Because of him. He could have been a baker and still been interesting.

  Not only did being around him make me (reluctantly) like him, it gave me even more respect for Queen Catherine, who knew exactly what she was up against, but fought anyway, right up until she died of it.

  “Time to go,” Thomas murmured, taking my hand and placing it firmly on his forearm.

  “Oh yes,” I replied. Truer words were never, etcetera.

  “I’ve gotta be on my own nitrous. It’s the only thing that makes any goddamned sense.”

  Found her!

  Chapter Seventeen

  “It was above and beyond for you to help me.” The three of us—Wolsey’s bastard, the dentist, the part-time student/medical transcriptionist—were on the outskirts of London by now, on a road I was going to know well—The Gray Horse was just over the rise.

  The dentist, a wild-eyed brunette with skin the color of good amaretto, had been bundled into an ill-fitting dark gray woolen dress and a cloth bonnet.

  (Authentic!)

  She flinched away from me until I got her attention with, “I’ll bet none of these people floss. Which is so important when it comes to good dental hygiene and fighting gingivitis, don’t you think?” Then I couldn’t get her off me, poor thing. Even now, half an hour later, she was clinging to my hand and my fingers were dead white.

  “Just … really, really decent. Above and beyond, truly.” I was still babbling at Thomas, knowing the words were inadequate, but there was nothing else I could give him. “I know there would’ve been trouble if your father had seen you.”

  “To put it mildly.” He grinned, pulled his cap off, and raked his fingers through that wonderful auburn hair, then clapped the cap back on. “But how could I leave a lady in distress?” He smiled at the dentist. “Two ladies.”

  “You’re spinning this—”

  “Spinning?”

  “It’s slang from the odd place I come from that you’ve never heard of.” Of course! Sounded legitimate. No dissembling here. “You’re talking like you weren’t much more than an escort, but you helped me with Cromwell, and the story you told the king, that was bril—” I cut myself off as the realization hit. “It … wasn’t a story. You really think that. That I have, uh, heavenly visions.”

  “I apologize for sharing your secret,” he said earnestly. “But our king is most learned in matters of theology, and I felt certain he would respect your gift.”

  Cripes, was there no end to my luck? So far I’d only run across people who were either helpful, indifferent, inclined to overlook my 21st century oddities, and/or who assumed the best instead of the worst.

  And if I came back—not that I would—but if I came back to find another Lostie, I was less likely to be accused of witchcraft if people thought I was a holy fool. Or even a run-of-the-mill fool. Plus the King of England owed me his life.

  And to think when I woke up I thought it’d be a regular Wednesday: transcribing someone’s bursitis and sneaking avocado into the brownie batter so Lisa ate something green that wasn’t an apple Jolly Rancher.

  I ignored the odd-yet-compelling urge to tell Thomas the truth. “Well, thank you again. For keeping my secret until you didn’t. Which is not a judgment! And this will sound mysterious and odd, but you need to go away now so the dent—so my friend and I can go home. The angels. Um. Are telling me to tell you that.”

  “Of course,” he said at once, and bowed. “Until our next meeting, my lady.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Do not dash my hopes, I beg you!”

  Adorable. “Right. I withdraw the hope dashing.” I turned to the dentist and pointed to the small rise in the road in front of us. “Home is yonder.” Then, to Thomas, “It was wonderful to—ack!” Not only did the woman have a grip like an angry octopus, she could move when she wanted, which she demonstrated by dragging me up the hill. “Goodbye!”

  “Farewell, my lady!”

  Now came the tricky part. Once the rise was behind us, we stepped off the road after making sure no one could see us, and then I led her to the willow tree.

  And then we had to wait.

  Which did not go over well.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “I mean I don’t know.” I shrugged and tried to project confidence, but I think it came across as helplessness. Which wasn’t wrong. There were so many things I didn’t know. Why did one jump drop me in 1520, and the next in 1529, for starters? Why was I in Calais for one jump and London the next? Bad enough I didn’t know; nobody knew.

  None of which I could share with this poor woman. “Look, I’m sorry. This is new tech—no one was doing this a month ago.” I was pretty sure. “The techs will explain everything. Well. They’ll explain what they can. And maybe I can fill in the blanks. And there might be some paperwork for you to sign.”

  “Paperwork! Are you shitting me?”

  “They use a really small font, too.” Might as well give her all the bad news at once. “It’s bound to bring on a headache.”

  “I get enough headaches,” she snapped. “Bad ones, the kind that make me throw up. I should have just left it alone, I should have just assumed I was having a breakdown and let that asshole keep smacking the kid.”

  “Can you narrow that down? What asshole and what kid?”

  She described an older, arrogant man, most likely a nobleman from how she described the man’s outfit and coat of arms: a white lion with an arrow in its mouth (Who thinks these things up? Yuck.) and three yellow lions, and what looked like a yellow and blue checkerboard. Apparently she had seen the “noble” kicking the crap out of one of his servants, intervened, and was taken into custody for her pains.

  “If it makes you feel better, you did the right thing. From a moral standpoint, I mean.” From the glare she sent my way, it wasn’t comforting. “Look, I’m sorry, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’ve got no control … well, over any of it, really, but especially the time it takes to get back. It could be another five minutes, it could be hours. Everyone is figuring this out as we go along. But there’s simply no way to—oh, hey, there it is!”

  “There what is?”

  That was disconcerting. “You don’t see a ton of sparkling lights which are helpfully ga
te-shaped?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Nothing.” No need to take her hand; she hadn’t let go of mine once. So it was simplicity itself to walk around the trunk and over to the sparkling gate and take her through it.

  Easy money.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It took the I.T.C.H. gang several seconds to notice my triumphant return with the dentist. This was irritating for several reasons, not least of which was it was the second time they didn’t notice my groundbreaking unprecedented amazing return.

  “For scientists, your attention to detail sucks.” Still nothing. “Really, lab cretins?”

  “OhmyGod.” She’d finally let go of my hand, and I worked on massaging the feeling (and blood flow) back into my fingers. “Whatevenisthisplace?”

  The boss, Dr. Holt, paused in mid-scurry to blink at me. “Huh.”

  (Huh is the definition of anti-climax.)

  “Hey, you’re not dead!” This from Warren, who was wresting paperwork away from Karen. He let go and she clutched the paperwork to her chest with a crow of triumph. Then, to Karen, “You know you’re not going to read it, so why grab it? And that’s ten bucks, Karen.”

  “Shit.”

  “You bet on me to die?”

  “Not all of us!” Karen said quickly.

  “OhmyGod ohmyGod you’reallytotallycrazy.”

  “Hey!” I replied, stung. “Don’t lump me in with these heartless dolts who have to wager on matters of life and death in order to feel something.” I turned back to the dolts. “And you’d better have my check.”

  Oh, and don’t point out the irony. I’m aware.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I love rain, and I love fires.

  But mostly I love them together. Which is why I was so pleased to get home and find Lisa had kindled a blaze in the living room fireplace (she used a can of compressed air as a bellows, and could coax flames out of damp wood like some kind of grizzled woodsman), and was currently lolling in front of it like a grumpy-but-comfy cat.

  “Hey, this is nice.”

  “Leave it to you to decide the fourth straight day of rain is ‘nice’.” She yawned and flopped over on her belly. “Why didn’t I research this place before I moved us here?”

  I could only snort, because she had. Cost. Visa requirements. Local customs. Economy. Political stability. Crime rate. Gun control laws. Expat etiquette. (Okay, Lisa didn’t research that last one. That was all me. Then she ignored the memo I wrote her about it, because you can’t tell geniuses anything.) She even got her hands on topographical maps of the area, for God’s sake.

  All that to say she was bitching simply for the joy of it, as opposed to it being a warning that someone was about to be verbally eviscerated.

  I trotted back to the kitchen, kicked my shoes into the Shoe Hump, grabbed a Coke, grabbed my laptop. In seconds, I was sprawled on the couch and researching that wacky Tudor clan.

  Well, no. I was buying a shitload of books on Amazon. And also Grether’s blackcurrant pastilles, an addiction I had been unsuccessfully fighting for three years. And I was doing those things because the check for £10,000 was burning a hole in my wallet. I’d bank it in the morning; all I wanted to do until bedtime was loll on the couch, indulge in capitalism, and congratulate myself on 1) not dying, and 2) saving the dentist. And saving King Henry, I guess.

  It had been a satisfying afternoon, not least because of the debriefing at I.T.C.H. Because you know the old saying: one woman’s time travel debriefing is another woman’s tea and scones.

  Something like that, anyway.

  Chapter Twenty

  Two hours earlier

  21st century

  “This is incredible! You met them. You actually went out and met Henry Tudor and Catherine of Aragon, holy shit!”

  “Don’t forget Thomas Cromwell,” I prompted, not boasting at all.

  “Holy shit!”

  “Mm-hmm.” I swallowed the bite of chocolate chip scone—so tender and studded with just the right number of chips, just delightful, who made these wonderful tidbits?—so I wouldn’t spray crumbs all over Warren’s terrific forearms. “It was amazing.” Meaning me. I was the amazing one. Me.

  Yes, I was a praise-hungry tart. But it was nice to relax in the break room with Warren, knowing I’d saved a life and lived to tell the tale, and had someone almost literally hanging on what came out of my mouth (he was leaning so far forward, I was worried he’d topple my cup of tea).

  And the praise. I’ll be honest: I liked that, too. Some people are the stars in the movie of their lives. I was a guest star in mine, and had been since The After. Some juicy scenes, sure. But mostly the background noise.

  “So how did Queen Catherine look?”

  “A hundred years old. And sad.” Since describing the sadness was sad, I added, “She was dressed like a queen, though. You should have seen all the brocade!”

  “And the king?”

  “Fat.” Then I sighed. “No, that’s not fair. At this stage, he’s still in his prime and he hadn’t gone full-blown sociopath yet.” Wait. I was mixing tenses. The Tudor Court was definitely past-tense, though I’d been there half an hour ago. “In fact …”

  “Yes?”

  “I kind of liked him.” This in the tone of voice I’d use to admit I drank straight out of the milk jug. “He was so—you get the feeling you’re the only person in the world for him in that moment. It was … it was really something.” Ugh. I sounded like I was describing a satisfactory drive-thru experience. “And I have to say, he and the queen didn’t stink. I thought everyone back there would be various degrees of rank, but I’ve been in airport bathrooms that smelled worse.”

  “Glad your olfactory senses weren’t insulted.”

  “Me, too,” I said fervently. “Nothing worse than an insulted olfactory sense.”

  “I’m sending Dr. Inning home.” Dr. Holt, the head of the project, had rushed in and headed straight for the coffee. “She’s quite shaken, poor thing, but otherwise unharmed.”

  “I’ll bet she didn’t like all that paperwork.” Unspoken: I didn’t like all that paperwork.

  “Ah. Well, we’re streamlining the process a bit. We’ve got it down to a couple of pages, yeah?”

  “What? Boo. Dentists have all the luck.” Then the impact of his words sank in. “It almost sounds as if you’re anticipating this will keep happening and are doing what you can to make it easier and less time-consuming for everyone involved.”

  “We prefer to plan for the worst-case scenario,” Dr. Holt replied, taking a sip of terrible coffee. I wasn’t a coffee drinker, but even I could tell it was old and burned. And everyone still looked like fried hell. “Whenever possible.”

  “Uh-huh. At what point does the I.T.C.H. brigade give up?”

  “Never,” Warren said fiercely.

  Adorable! “Or ask for help?”

  Warren blinked at me. “Who would we ask?”

  “Uh.” A fine question. Googling “24/7 Same day time-travel repair” probably wouldn’t yield much. “Other scientists? The government? The people funding you? Or maybe tip off the police department in charge of missing persons? Or the—” I couldn’t think of the British iteration of the F.B.I. “—the law enforcement agency in charge of kidnapping?”

  “Nobody’s been kidnapped!” This from Karen, who had stuck her head in long enough to be horrible, then scampered off.

  “Well, not technically,” I began. “But—”

  “Everyone on this is working round the clock,” Dr. Holt cut in.

  “Yes, you keep telling me that like I don’t believe it. I do believe it.” The coffee breath alone was ample proof nobody had time for trivial matters like hygiene. “But what if you don’t figure it out? There’s a Plan B, right?”

  They both looked at me, and after a
few seconds, Dr. Holt said, “We will, though, lass, no need to fret.”

  All the assurances that I shouldn’t fret were making me fret.

  Warren jumped in. “But if by chance we can’t—”

  “We will.”

  “—then of course we’d have to notify the proper parties.”

  I wanted to ask who the proper parties were, but I didn’t think they knew any better than I did. And how would they even go about it? Who would they reach out to? If they tried the local cops, they’d be laughed at. Even if you dragged a detective inspector to the lab and showed him or her the equipment, what could they do? Would they have to coax a cop up onto the launch pad and send him back five hundred years? Seemed extreme.

  Or maybe a fed? “You know how people think so-and-so has been kidnapped? They actually fell through a time rift and are alive and well in the 16th century. Well, not really. They’re centuries dead now, of course. But now their families will have closure, so … you know. Carry on, and all that.”

  Or: “Queen Elizabeth? Help! We accidentally invented time travel, lost control of the tech, and random people are disappearing. Send someone!”

  “To that end, anything and everything you can tell us about your trip will be incredibly helpful.” Warren was almost leaning into my tea again. “You said you entered the old world beside an enormous willow tree?”

  The old world? Well, it was as good a name as any. “Yes, which was odd, because last time I appeared in Calais.”

  “Yes, we’ve been over that.” Holt waved Calais away, which was appropriate given what a waste of time The Field Of Cloth Of Etcetera had been.

  “Could someone go back further than 1520? Will one of these jumps plop me in the middle of the Wars of the Roses?” Christ, I hoped not. The only thing I had going for me in TudorTime is that I knew who the players were.

  “We don’t know,” was the simple, terrifying response. “Now, as you explained—you followed the crowd, because you deduced that’s what Dr. Inning would have done.”