“That’s my roommate!” Which I yelled because I was so excited and relieved, which was dumb because I shouldn’t draw curious eyes. I take a closer look at the guy: yep. Just Joanie’s type, dark reddish hair and light eyes—blue in his case—lean but not scrawny, tall, nice forearms. (It’s a whole thing with her and hilarious as fuck.) And it sounded like Joan was his type, given the sappy look on his face. “How d’you know her?”
“It has been my honor to assist her in her godly vocation.”
Oh yeah. This guy totally wants to fuck my roommate.
So in under five minutes I go from 20th century I.T.C.H. platform to a 16th century inn and meet a guy who’s really into my roommate and she not only isn’t crazy but, if anything, downplayed her activities over the past few days. I’m embarrassed to say ‘days’ because I don’t know when the shit-show started and didn’t bother getting a good timeline because I suck.
I hate apologizing. And I was gonna have to make it a good one. I never thought she was lying, but I did wonder if she’d inherited her family’s genetic tendency toward substance abuse and obsession.
“If you will allow me to arrange more appropriate attire for you, I will then take you to where she will shortly be.”
“You know that, don’t you? You know she’ll be along.”
“It is her calling,” he said simply.
“There’s not a doubt in your mind, huh?” I guess I kept asking him because it made me feel better to hear that yeah, there was a rescue plan.
He smiled and inclined his head. Good teeth, so scratch that 16th century truism. “Nor is there a doubt in yours, my lady …?”
“Lisa.” What harm, right? I decided not to mention my physician bona fides. That was probably a burning offense around here. “Just Lisa. I’m not a lady.”
“I thought perhaps you were not gentle, but that takes away none of your charm,” he said, just soooooo fuckin’ smooth. “It seems we both have the honor of knowing Lady Joan.”
Yeah. Corny as hell, but sure. Joan would come for me, the big beautiful dumbass, but that worked, ’cause I’d have come for her, too. “Guess so.”
“Allow me to introduce myself; my name is Thomas Wynter.” And he honest-to-God bows. Bet he holds doors open like a champ motherfucker.
“Are you getting my enunciation?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My accent.” Because I wasn’t having much trouble understanding him. And he didn’t seem to be having trouble understanding me. Which I couldn’t figure out.
“Ah! I hope I won’t offend if I say you and my lady have the same charming patois.”
“We sound like aggravated hillbillies with head colds.” Especially to ancient English ears. “It’s fine, I’m not offended.”
“That, ah, may be, but if you were to meet people who did not also know Lady Joan, they would have some trouble at first.”
“Got it. Say no more.” Literally, because I had to think. Joan was one of the most gifted natural mimics I’d ever met. So good she didn’t know she was doing it half the time. Which meant she was picking up modern London dialogue and English Renaissance dialogue while going about her daily life as an American part-time medical transcriptionist. All of which I damned well should have noticed weeks ago.
I’m the dumbest genius alive. In any century.
So we go inside and meet this nice pile of flour who goes by Lee, and this Thomas Wynter guy talks one of the maids out of her clothes, which are as gross as you’d imagine in a land without Tide pods. But I kept my gripe-hole shut; blending was good. And then I kinda had to laugh; wouldn’t Joan bust a gut to hear that coming out of my mouth?
They also thought I’d had a fever because short hair or something? So Thomas explains that a common treatment for patients presenting with febrile symptoms is to cut their hair.
“You know that has no basis in medical science, right?”
“Eh?”
“Thank God I dyed it dark this week!” If it was still green, would they have thought I was a leprechaun? These are the questions.
Gotta say I like how Lee was confused but didn’t treat me like a freak. Just smiled and nodded and tried to make us eat. No FDA? No government regs? Hard pass. This is no time to pick up an intestinal parasite. And Thomas is in a hurry, too, which makes me nervous.
Then I have to strap into this hellish contraption called a pillion saddle, which is basically a tiny chair attached to the back of a saddle because I was trapped in the fucking Dark Ages.
So Thomas hops on and I clamber up onto this stump and then onto the horse with a little help and before I got myself settled I’d shown half the yard my crotch but I gotta say, everyone was super classy about it.
So away we go! And I have to ask, because my God, a haircut? What other pure friggin’ insanity is out there masquerading as medical treatment? “What else d’you guys do for fevers?”
Thomas rattles off any number of fucking horrifying or hilarious “cures”, and then we moved on to epilepsy (the cure being licorice, roses, and cormorant blood!), sciatica (red ox gall bladder and the patient’s urine!), and burns (grab a live snail and rub it on your patient! okay, that last one I wanted to try …).
“What if you’re out of snails? And now that I think about it … maybe snail slime has properties similar to the aloe plant. Anti-inflammatory, maybe, and … collagen? Worth looking into.” I poked him in the back. “What else? Tell me something else that’s hilariously bad.”
Apparently if you’re afflicted with gout, the prescription is a dead owl you pluck, clean, salt, bake ‘til burnt, rub boar grease all over, and then rub it on your afflicted limbs. For strep throat? A cat, and not just any cat, a fat cat. And not just any fat cat, one you flay, gut, and then stuff with hedgehog grease, sage, and wax. Then you roast the fucker and rub it on your throat.
I shit you not: half the cures were killing an animal, stuffing it with another animal, and then rubbing it all over your patient. Malpractice insurance coverage here must be a bitch.
“You have a lovely laugh,” Thomas commented, and I had to give him props, since 1) I don’t, and 2) he had to think I was right off my fucking rocker. Or he put it down to the fever he thought I was getting over. But he’s not freaking out, which is cool.
Then he tells me the cure for smallpox: hang red curtains around the patient’s bed. Apparently the red light that comes through them will cure them.
“You know why most of you guys don’t live past forty? Stuff like that. Man, I wish we could swing by the local surgeon’s office. I know we can’t. Got a schedule to keep.” But fuck me, I sure wanted to. Unprecedented opp!
So Thomas twists around in the saddle to smile at me and says, “Lady Lisa, are you studying to be a surgeon in your land of Merka?”
So that raises about a dozen questions. Big number one being, am I gonna be able to stop myself from laughing my ass off? Merka? Is that how the introverted extrovert I live with explained away her accent, her ignorance of local customs, and anything else that could have gotten her in big, big trouble? Fucking genius.
“You bet!” Because what the hell else am I gonna say? “Merka’s … different.” Wow. Billions of words to choose from and I come up with ‘different’. Left half my brain in the I.T.C.H. lab, clearly. “And a long way away from here.”
Part of the problem was these borrowed clothes are driving me nuts. I keep scratching at my forearms and wriggling against Thomas and if he thought I was coming onto him, he was gonna get disabused of that notion very fucking quickly. “Itchy, why am I so itchy? Don’t answer that!” I commanded. Best case scenario: psychosomatic lice. Worst case? Actual lice. To distract myself, I cast about for something to say about, heh, Merka. “Yes, it’s a strange land far from here. But we like it. Y’know, most of the time.”
“So the Lady Joan has said. Not to impugn your bi
rthplace, but a land without kings sounds strange indeed.”
“Yeah, almost as dumb as giving absolute power to someone based solely on what vagina they came out of.” Then I got hold of myself. “Sorry. That wasn’t nice.”
Fortunately Thomas was laughing too hard to take offense. Hanging out with Joan clearly set him up to tolerate me. Which got me wondering. “When’d you meet her?”
“Several years ago, when I was yet a lad. Calais.”
“You met in France?” Holy shit, Joanie was time traveling all over Europe! Which she told me! Which I dismissed! Son of a bitch!
So while I’m beating the shit out of myself he’s talking about how she basically came out of nowhere and at first he thought she was a mummy—mummer?—and they got to talking and then he had to hide from a bird I guess? And later when he looked for her she’d vanished but he never forgot her and then he saw her years later but in England this time and ever since then he’s been mad crushin’ on her and keeps an eye out to help her with her ‘holiest of vocations’.
And all the while we’re clip-clopping through London, which smells exactly like you’d expect a burg without a proper plumbing system to smell, and fucking everyone needs a shower and a dentist and a round of amoxicillin and a case of Ensure.
“Y’know, I met her in kind of a funny way, too.”
And he’s all over that: “Do tell, I pray you!”
So I tell him. All of it, a story I’ve never once said out loud. But who was this guy gonna tell? “Her parents died when she was still a girl. And her mom had been a ward—you know ward?” At his nod, I go on. “Well, she was a ward of the state, and they did a shit job of taking care of her. So then Joan’s father dies of canc—of a growth in his lungs. And then, a year later, her mom dies. Accidental asphyxiation. By which I mean carbon monoxide pois—uh, there was a deadly odor in their house and it killed her mom. Joan got home from a slumber party and found the body.”
“Oh, my poor lady,” Thomas says, all mournful.
“Save your tears for the end, cuz it gets worse. So she sees her mom’s body and knows she’s alone and every terrible thing her mother said about the system is rushing through her mind, so Joan cleans out their freez—their storage space and keeps the body there. And goes to school the next day like nothing happened. Her dad’s insurance paid off their house the year before, her folks had savings, and her mom even had a cash stash, but Joan still had to come up with a budget, pay bills, keep herself fed, go to school, and keep up the charade that she’s not an orphan on her own. And this started when she was twelve. And went on until she was eighteen.
“And the only reason I know about any of it was, I met her at the market while she was sick with the flu, high fever, vomiting, dehydration, seriously screwed electrolyte balance, girl was a mess. She’d been too scared to go to the doctor.”
“Oh yes! She told me about the fever and how it brought you together.”
“She did?” So I file that away, because Joan never talks about her childhood. With anybody and it doesn’t matter how sexy their forearms are. “Okay, so there she is, pouring ice cubes all over the floor, she basically makes a bed of ice and lies down in it and it was the cutest and silliest thing ever. So I calm down the store manager.” Actually I told him to go fuck himself and said I’d pay for the ice if he didn’t call the cops like a whiney little bitch, which he didn’t, which is irrelevant to the story.
“And I get her home and she basically babbles out the whole story and I didn’t believe her until I saw her mom’s body in the freezer.”
So I tell him about how exhausted she was back then, how scared. How lonely, and how she’d been living with this unthinkable burden for over a year. How she had to reconcile her mother’s wishes with her responsibility for that same mother’s body and estate. How even something as simple as going to the clinic for a check-up was terrifying, because at the first slip, any mandated reporter could bring it all down. How many times can you use the “my mom’s sick but it’s okay that I’m here alone” excuse? How she was breaking any number of laws, starting with abuse of a corpse. And how she still had years to go.
So I helped her. I treated her flu—I was used to taking care of my mom anyway. And speaking of Mom, I got her to pose as Joan’s mom now and again—my mother felt so guilty about never getting clean, she’d do anything else I asked, which came in handy when I wanted booze or to help my friend commit fraud and improper storage of a corpse. I helped Joan get a part-time job since her parents’ savings were almost used up by then. I even helped her get rid of the body. (God, that was the weirdest Labor Day weekend.)
“This explains much,” Thomas said, and to his credit, he was more sympathetic than horrified. “I have noted the dichotomy of her traits.”
“Nailed it.” Joan was brave, but always behind the scenes. She liked positive attention—don’t we all?—but it made her nervous. She loved exploring but didn’t like being seen. She hated living alone but didn’t mind solitude. I always knew she’d follow me to the United Kingdom. Never a doubt in my mind. Too bad I was too busy patting myself on the back to realize it wasn’t timidity, it was loyalty.
“She divides her life into two phases: Before—when her folks were alive, when she had a normal life—and The After. Twice now she’s told me something wild and I didn’t believe her.” Stupid fucking dust on this stupid fucking road aggravating my stupid fucking allergies.
“So then, make amends.”
“No shit, Thomas. Sorry.”
“You honor me with your confidence,” he said simply. “If not your profanity. And my Lady Joan is fortunate in her choice of friends.”
“Did you just compliment yourself?”
“Not just myself. And we need not speak of it further if it distresses you.”
“Thanks.” I rubbed my eyes and sniffed and told myself to get the fuck over myself. “When are we gonna get where we’re going?”
“Nearly there,” he said, pointing. And there it was, looming large, stupid that I hadn’t noticed it ‘til now, the thing I saw a couple times a week: the Tower of London, circa whenever-the-fuck-we-were. Only it wasn’t a pathetic tourist trap now. It was a pathetic prison and torture chamber. And because everything was screwed, I was headed there with a random 16th century guy who had a crush on my roommate, who was risking more brain damage to come for me because I.T.C.H. panicked when they ran out of funding.
Fuck.
I’d been here before; Joan and I both took the tour about a month after we moved. It was okay—history wasn’t my bag, baby. And I didn’t say anything about how the day she randomly picked happened to be the anniversary of her mother’s death. What would’ve been the point?
So this isn’t entirely new to me, though seeing it without gaggles of annoying tourists but with a working staff and multiple guards was intimidating. I keep my gaze down and try not to crowd Thomas, though I stick close and the urge to wring my hands is very fucking strong. And I’m doubly grateful to Thomas for arranging my access to socially and culturally appropriate clothing. Even if it meant I smelled like a sweaty ball of bacon grease.
Thomas was a townie for sure; most people seemed to know him and even the ones who didn’t were polite. Even better, I don’t get so much as a first glance never mind a second one because of their stupid-ass class system; being a scullery maid or whatever was as good as an invisibility cloak. And it takes me a few minutes to relax enough to notice that everyone’s keeping their head down. Nobody was kidding around, hardly anyone was even smiling.
He brings me in through the south side of the White Tower, past the king’s jewel house, crammed with gobs of shiny things I can’t linger to examine. We end up cooling our heels in the great hall, where the staff’s quiet scurrying is even more noticeable.
And ‘great hall’ barely begins to describe it. Like using ‘big river’ to describe the Mississippi. It�
��s like an indoor stadium, all echoey and fancy, with the beams up on the ceiling looking like exposed ribs, and because the room’s so big and the air circulation’s better, it doesn’t smell completely shitty.
“This is where they feasted her for the queen’s coronation,” Thomas says because I guess he’s a tour guide now? Yeah, I get it, like sands in the fucking hourglass these are the days of our lives. Everything ends, pal. No exceptions to that one.
At first I’m plenty occupied just looking around, like I’d been doing since we got here—Thomas takes me through a number of corridors and galleries that don’t exist anymore in my time. I see at least three people who could use a trip to the optometrist, another one who needed a buttload of Vitamin C, and a few candidates for a hypertension study. But after a while the tension gets to me.
“What’s wrong?” I murmur, rubbing my arms in a futile attempt to soothe the goose bumps. We’re bio creatures, we’ve kept some pack instincts. And right now my thalamus was yelling at me that everyone was very fucking tense and it might be time to book.
“The queen has been found guilty of treason,” Thomas murmured back. “She is to be executed. The swordsman has been delayed.”
I let out a breath. It could only be Anne Boleyn. “That’s why we’re here,” I realize. “She wants to talk to the holy jester. Joan. Before they kill her. Anne.”
Just then I hear a ruckus outside and I instantly tense up like a dog on point because I can’t imagine this is a good thing. Thomas doesn’t like it, either, because he puts his hand on his hip and I realize he’s reaching for a sword. But he told me earlier he didn’t bring one because 16th century London wasn’t a fan of open carry or whatever.
But then I hear perfectly clear like she’s standing right next to me. “My name is Lady Joan Howe. I am a holy fool here on His Grace the king’s business, now step back.”
Which naturally blows me away because back home? Somebody jostles Joan in line and she apologizes. (Makes me nuts.) Now here she comes into the hall, sort of sweeping in and her dark blue gown fits in all the right places and her hair’s all sleek and pulled back under her hat—hood?—and her head’s held high and her long sleeves are sort of majestically flapping as she strides and only I know her pomander is jammed with goddamned children’s chewable vitamins and she just looks legit as fuck.
A Contemporary Asshat at the Court of Henry VIII Page 31