“Pardon?”
“If I’m ever in a position to help her, I will.” That wasn’t likely to come back and bite me in the ass, right?
“Thank you, Joan,” the Queen of England said, and let go of my hand, and thank goodness, because Anne Boleyn had a grip like a beautifully garbed dark-eyed pit bull. “And God bless you.”
“Goodbye,” I replied, and left.
And I didn’t cry for her. Not even a little. Tower’s dusty. That’s all it was.
Chapter Seventy-Five
I was exhausted, though I’d spent less than an hour with Anne Boleyn. And I wasn’t done. But at least Lisa and Thomas were in the hall where I’d left them, and since I’d fulfilled the queen’s request, nobody was bothering me. In fact, they were going out of their way to avoid me.
Lisa and Thomas had managed to form a little group of two in the far corner, studiously pretending they were calm and at ease, and when she saw me, Lisa perked right up. “How’d it go?”
“Another day, another one of Henry’s sorrowful queens.”
Thomas shook his head. “Poor lady.”
Lisa took that in, and then asked, “Plural? You’ve met the first one? Catherine? What’m I saying, of course you did. Okay, when we get back, I’m gonna need you to tell me the whole story again and this time I promise to keep an open mind and if I feel the urge to laugh at you I’ll do my best to squash it.”
“That’s more than I could reasonably ask for.”
“Damn right.”
“Can I give you the really quick Cliff Notes version? Anne knew about Merka. Where we’re from and how we travel.”
“No shit?”
“That’s what I thought! I’ll tell you the rest later.” And I had to hand it to the queen. She knew about time travel, but had no curiosity about it beyond culling whatever information she could use. No “how did you get here?” or “is it a job or a hobby?” or “how is any of this possible?” or “what’s the future like?” or “did you bring something from the future that I could look at?” You had to admire the focus. She couldn’t do anything about time traveling weirdos, so she focused on what little she did have control over.
“And we should drink a lot when you’re regaling me. So much—like when you wake up crying because the hangover’s that bad. But that’s for when we get back. And speaking of that glorious time in what I hope is in the very near future, now what?”
“Now we find Eleanor and I try very, very hard not to strangle her. And then we go home.” Piece of cake! Or humble pie. I stifled a belch; those deer lungs did not go down easy.
“And what’s the best way to do that?”
“There isn’t one,” I admitted, because it was nothing but the truth. It wasn’t like I could track the sneaky wench’s whereabouts on social media. “And I have to warn you, the thing with these trips is, nothing is ever easy.”
“Nooooo.” Lisa somehow formed her face into the most limpid expression that was ever on a face. “But whyever not?”
“Shut up. A lot of times to get one thing done I have to agree to three other things. So I don’t know how we’re going to track her down, but it’s definitely … not … going to …”
An unmistakable voice rang out. “What have you meddled in now, you inconvenient bitch?”
“… be easy.” I blinked hard but she didn’t waver or disappear. In fact, Lady Eleanor, Warren’s soulmate/Gorgon, was striding toward us, the perfect picture of wrath, and suddenly the great hall seemed a lot smaller. “Nice to see you again, Eleanor. All right, I’m lying.”
“Lady Eleanor.” Thomas did the not-really-a-bow burn, but she had no eyes for him.
“What did you do this time?” She was dressed in vibrant yellow, an unfortunate shade that made her look like an angry sunflower. “Did you talk to the queen? You did!”
“Of course I did.”
“Of course you did! I should have put an end to your meddling years ago.”
“That’s your second use of ‘meddle’ in twenty seconds. You know you sound like a cartoon villain, yes?”
“Joan, what is—”
“Not now, Thomas,” Lisa hissed. In fact, she seized Thomas by the sleeve and guided him a few inches to the left so she could step forward and level a full-on glare at Eleanor. “We’re here to take you home, you ungrateful troublesome assmunch, so how about you shut your yap hole and come with us?”
“You know, Lisa, I couldn’t have put that any better myself.”
“Oh, stop it,” she replied, waving me off with faux modesty.
“Sheer poetry.”
“’Twas nothing.”
“Stop clacking and get your servant in line,” Mrs. Dr. Warren managed through gritted teeth.
“Given all the meals I’ve prepared for her,” I replied, “and the times I’ve cleaned up after her experiments and the occasional explosions—”
“That was maybe four times! In sixteen months!”
“—you could make the case that I’m actually her servant.”
“No way,” Lisa insisted. “Partners.”
“Come with me,” Lady Mrs. Dr. Warren hissed, which was impressive given the lack of sibilants in that sentence. “Not you, bastard.”
“First of all, Eleanor, his name is Wolsey’s bastard. Second—”
“Forgive the interruption, my Joan, but I should like to answer that one myself.” To Eleanor, “I am charged to protect Lady Joan and her companion. Which means wherever they go, so too do I.”
“It’s true,” Lisa marveled. “Chivalry isn’t dead. Well. Now.”
“Fine!” Eleanor snapped, and motioned to the two guards I only just realized she’d brought with her, because I am dumb sometimes. “All of you come along then. We must talk.”
I opened my mouth to throw sand in her gears because obeying Eleanor in anything was a terrible idea, then held off. I’d gotten to Anne relatively quickly, Joan and Thomas were all right, Eleanor had found us (which was a rather large timesaver), and going somewhere private to hash all this out was an excellent idea. Especially since I suspected Eleanor was a yeller.
“She’s right,” I decided, and fell into step behind the odious wretch. The guards, dressed in identical livery with gold and blue checkerboards emblazoned on their chests, were right behind us. Everyone kept out of the way. No one wanted to so much as make eye contact. I’m guessing Henry’s new mistress was just as volatile and capable of vengeance as the last one.
Or perhaps they were all sick of the drama and wanted to keep their heads down. When I thought of all the upheaval they’d suffered over the last few years, I couldn’t blame them.
Eleanor stomped her way out of the Great Hall, into a covered walkway that ran parallel to the Queen’s garden, then along the curtain wall until we got to a square-ish tower on the southern rampart. (I still couldn’t get over how strange the Tower seemed without tour guides and souvenir shops.) She led us inside through the lower chamber, which was quite nice—I found out later that the infamous Princes of the Tower had been lodged there before they disappeared (*cough* were murdered *cough cough*). And the tower she led us to was the Bloody Tower, which also should have tipped me off.
We followed her down a claustrophobic hallway lined with stone to spiral stairs that led to the basement, and from there into a large chamber that was chilly even on a sunny May day. In terms of privacy, it was first-rate. There was even a display of knives and short swords on a nearby table—was this a satellite of the royal armory?
Eleanor seemed satisfied, too, because she nodded to her guards and before I could move, or even think, one of them clubbed Thomas on the back of the head hard enough to send the poor guy right to the floor, out cold.
“Jesus Christ!”
(I can count on one hand how often Lisa and I have screamed the same thing in unison. This was number thre
e.)
“Oh, are you silly twats religious? Don’t worry; you’ll be with Him directly.”
If that was supposed to soothe us, it had the opposite effect.
Chapter Seventy-Six
“You’re making a terrible impression on my roommate!” In terms of thundering denouncements, it wasn’t great. But I had something more important to worry about, and turned to Lisa. “In retrospect, I should have seen this coming. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe. But you’ve had a tough month. I should’ve been paying more attention, too. And not just today.”
I threw my arms around her in a hug of mutual respect and forgiveness, which she tolerated four seconds longer than usual, then wriggled free.
“Pay attention!” This from Dr. Lady Eleanor Warren, whose guard had taken up position between us and the door. The table of knives was closer to him than to us, a silent, glittering rebuke to my naiveté in following someone I knew to be unstable into a room full of knives.
She’d ordered the other guard to remove poor conked Thomas (I hoped ‘remove’ just meant ‘remove’ as opposed to ‘dump the body in the Thames’), so it was down to the four of us. “You’re in trouble, if you American simpletons haven’t realized, and pardon the redundancy.”
“You’re wearing a dress the color of an unhealthy urine sample, you don’t give a shit about the timeline, you’re making the worst mistake of your life—which is really saying something—and you’re tedious in your bitchiness.” Lisa shrugged. “We’re focused.”
“I told you before, get your servant—”
“Cut the shit, Ellie.”
“Don’t call me that!”
“Cut the shit, fuckface. You know I’m not her servant, just like you know she’s not Lady Joan. I didn’t get the whole story out of your piece-of-shit spouse before he booted me here, but I got most of it.”
“You talked to my husband?”
“He talked at me.”
“Yeah, he does that,” I muttered.
“Three of the four people in this cell have no business being here,” Lisa continued, arms crossed over her chest. Her hood was crooked, but it didn’t take away from her natural authority. Much. “Joan’s here to help you go home to your shitpoke spouse, and you sic your dog on her ally? Lock us in a room with your goon? What the fuck is the matter with you?”
“She is the matter with me!” I’d been studying the other guard and noting his weapons—and wondering if we should be talking so freely in front of him—but assumed without looking that she meant me. He was only about an inch taller than me, looked to be in good shape, wiry rather than bulky, and I counted one sword and one knife. No mail. If I could get on him without telegraphing my movement, I might disarm him. But I had to pick my moment. “She’s been getting in my way for years! Since Blackfriars!”
“Been here a while, havencha?” Lisa smirked. “I noticed you picked up some gray hairs and crow’s feet. It’s been … what? Fifteen years or so?”
Wait. What? A decade and a half? Lisa accurately read my expression as ‘huh?’ and elaborated. “There was a picture of her in the lobby the first time I went to I.T.C.H.” I nodded—I’d seen the same pictures in Warren’s hotel room.
“You glanced at a wall of framed group shots and recognized me?” Because she was awful and vain, she was actually smoothing her hair and rubbing her eyes, like that had ever worked on crow’s feet.
“Lisa’s got a near-eidetic memory. She ruined every grading curve. And she was never sorry. Not once.”
“Fuck you, do your homework.”
“Don’t you dare speak to me about ruin!” Eleanor shrieked.
“Is Warren into older women?” Lisa was giving her a critical once-over. “You’d better hope so. I mean, you could get work done, sure, but even modern medical science has limits.”
“Shut up. Do you think my man here won’t hurt you if I order it? He will.”
“Sorry,” I said to the guard, who was doing a remarkable impersonation of a statue, “but I’m going to do that thing where I talk about you like you’re not in the room. Eleanor, should we be talking like this in front of him?”
“He doesn’t speak English,” she snapped.
“Vous savez la vieille femme en juane est un voyageur du temps, oui?” Lisa asked. To me, she added, “I just asked him if he knew the crone in yellow was a time traveler.”
“Shut up!” the crone shouted. “Even if he understood you, he couldn’t understand you.”
“Huh?” From me. (I’ll admit it, I was having a hard time keeping up.)
“Because we sound like hillbillies with head colds,” Lisa reminded me.
“Oh. Point. Now what were you on about, Eleanor?”
She whirled on me, flushed to the eyebrows. “How could my husband come to me with your constant interference?”
“Why didn’t you tell me who you were?” I countered. “I would’ve brought you back after Calais. You could have had a passionate reunion and gone back to destroying each other instead of the timeline.”
“He needed to come to me.”
“That makes no sense, but even so, if you’d explained who you were, I could have given Warren a message, told him you were okay.”
“I didn’t need a messenger, I needed my husband! I knew they were getting close to being able to see through the gates. I thought if he observed the lengths I was willing to go to in order to get his attention, he’d come through—he would fix the problem I created and—”
“Fix you,” Lisa finished.
“Exactly! Except there’s nothing wrong with me.”
(Our silence was eloquent.)
“Henry should have died at Blackfriars,” Lady Loon went on. “I salted his meal with enough poison to kill an ox.”
“Oh, Christ.” I rubbed my forehead. “The poison made him choke—”
“And you Heimliched it out of him before he could die!”
“See?” Lisa asked. “I told you taking that class would come in handy. Nice work.”
“Thanks, actually it was horrible, the entire experience was horrible. I’m lucky he didn’t crack a rib when he took me down.” I snapped my fingers and pointed at Eleanor. “You were at The More, too! Catherine of Aragon said she’d seen you twice in the same month. You talked Catherine into getting the Emperor involved and making war.”
I could see how she’d done it, too. All sympathy, all kindness, visiting the exiled and lonely Catherine of Aragon and telling her exactly what the queen wanted to hear: that she was in the right, that England was with her, that Henry was headed for Hell but she could save him and protect her daughter’s inheritance. That she could be like her esteemed mother, the warlike Isabella, who had waged war and presided over empires and made it look easy.
“Emperor Charles was going to bring 30,000 troops and put Mary Tudor on the throne at sword point.”
“Holy shit.” From Lisa. “You were willing to consign thousands to death to get your husband’s attention? The gate’s not the latest tech toy for you to play with, for fuck’s sake. Anything could have happened!”
“Nothing happened, because of her.”
I smiled. “Thanks.”
“So then,” Eleanor continued, aggrieved, “I had to waste time befriending Anne—”
“But you turned on her. You gave evidence against her; you’re one of the reasons Cromwell was able to bring her to trial so fast. And now you’re pregnant with Henry’s baby because … you think that’ll make Warren come for you after nothing else worked?” That couldn’t be the plan. Was that the plan? No way was that the plan.
Lisa was starting to snicker. “Wait, Catherine nixed the army, so—ha!—so next up was Operation Bang Henry? Because you thought not having to fuck Henry punished Anne? How does your mind even work? Is it like one of those old Bugs Bunny cartoons? Is your mind just
a whirl of dust and fury like the Tasmanian Devil?”
“Warren is not supposed to come for me.” She paused, probably for effect, but really, it just made everything take longer. “He’s supposed to come to me.”
Silence. I even glanced at the guard, who was po-faced. No help there. “Sorry, what?”
“He comes to me and sees what a fine life I’ve made for us here and stays with me and we’re happy here! It’s not complicated!” Eleanor threw her hands in the air. “What is so hard to understand?”
“All of it. From beginning to end—so you got pregnant—”
“I, um.” She was still flushing, but wouldn’t make eye contact. Accessory to assault and kidnapping? Meh. Attempted regicide? No biggie. An unplanned pregnancy? Huge social faux pas. “I didn’t plan that, actually. I wasn’t able to, with Warren …”
Ha! Even Warren’s wife called him Warren. Did she even remember his first name anymore?
“… but Henry is over the moon, which protects me.”
“Protects you? You might want to check with Queen Anne on that one.”
She ignored me. “He loves me. Not that I want him.” Eleanor waved away the king of England: shoo! “But I like to have a reserve. And it might be a boy—think of that.”
We were; Lisa’s appalled expression mirrored how I felt.
“What a clusterfuck.”
“Well put, Lisa.” To Eleanor: “So you never wanted to be rescued?”
“From what? TudorTime is wonderful.”
“You can’t use that!” I shouted. “That’s mine! I’m trademarking it and everything!”
“Whoa. Joanie.” Lisa patted my arm. “That’s a weird thing to get mad about. Simmer.”
“Do you know how far gold goes here, you insipid wankers? How low the cost of living is? The rich can get away with quite a lot in our time, but in the 16th century? You can be a queen in all but name,” Eleanor declared. “They don’t have all those tiresome government regulations here. You can own people, or as good as, you can do anything, say anything … provided you can buy anything. Did you think I ingratiated myself with the Tudor regime out of boredom? This is a far less complicated time, we can be happy here.”
A Contemporary Asshat at the Court of Henry VIII Page 34