A Contemporary Asshat at the Court of Henry VIII
Page 36
“Goodbye, Thomas.” Then I unceremoniously walked away and took my place beside Lisa under the willow.
“That was super tender and sweet and all, but what if it takes an hour for a goddamned gate to open?” Lisa waved at Thomas, who was standing beside the horses, watching over us. “It’s just gonna get more and more awkward while you two gaze longingly at each other and I try not to exsanguinate.”
“Incorrect.” I closed my eyes. I need a gate. I want to open my eyes and see a gate. Because they’re always there, it’s just most people can’t see them. I can, though. I’m the only one so I will open my eyes and I will see a gate RIGHT NOW.
And I did, I opened my eyes and there it was, wavering like a shimmering picture frame.
I took Lisa’s hand. We stepped through and Lisa glanced back for a last look.
Not me, though.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
“Miss Howe. Dr. Harris.” Instead of Warren, there was a tall, dark-skinned, gray-haired woman standing a few feet back from the platform. In her tailored tweed, pulled-back hair, and crisp pressed lab coat, she looked like she was answering a casting call for ‘classy older female scientist’. “Welcome back to the 23rd century.”
“What?” (What do you know? Lisa and I had now yelled the same thing four times in a decade.)
“Sorry, sorry.” She snickered and pushed her glasses up. “Time travel humor.”
“Jesus Christ!”
She stepped forward and held out her hand, which I shook out of reflex, then smirked to see Lisa spitefully shaking with her bloodiest hand. “My name is Cheryl Tennen—yuck, let’s have someone take a look at that, Dr. Harris—of the department of Quantum Temporal Investigation. And I have an ungodly number of questions for the two of you.”
“Department of Quantum Temporal Investigation? Please tell me you don’t pronounce that acronym as ‘cutie’.” When she didn’t say anything, I groaned. “That’s almost as bad as I.T.C.H.!”
“I have a number of questions about I.T.C.H. as well.” When I opened my mouth she anticipated and added, “Dr. Warren is in government custody with a number of his colleagues.”
“Cavalry’s here fucking finally.”
“Yes, Dr. Harris. And as it’s only the two of you, is it safe to inform Dr. Warren he is a widower?”
“Wait, you know about—yes. Safe bet.”
Three things. One: After a brief discussion about whether or not we should lug Eleanor’s corpse back with us to fool Warren, we had decided that there had been enough lies and misdirection. That regardless of the consequences we would tell the truth about Dr. Lady Eleanor Warren: after several attempts to reason with her, I had been forced to kill her in self-defense.
Two: We also decided Warren was too gutless to strand us.
And three: If you need to stash a body before time traveling five hundred years to face an unknown future, the Tower of London is uniquely suited to that.
“I’m going to have to see so much I.D.,” I told Dr. Tennen, helping Lisa down from the launching pad. “And references. And possibly a fingerprint match and a DNA test before I believe you are who you say you are. And all that only after my friend gets her face fixed.” Also, you’re doomed to disappointment since I don’t know a thing about anything: how it works, why it works, why you can be dumped in Calais in 1520 and in London almost a decade later. But first: Lisa’s face.
“Of course.” She must have pushed a secret button or everyone’s coffee break was over at the same time, because several people were streaming in, and I could already hear one of them calling for an ambulance. Another had grabbed a first aid kit the size of a Samsonite and was trying to coax Lisa into sitting down and letting him take a look. Several others were taking pictures of the equipment, consulting with each other, then taking more pictures.
“Cheryl, have you seen the calibration on some of these instruments? And don’t get me started on the radiation.” One of the picture-takers looked simultaneously horrified and intrigued. “Were they trying to kill everybody?”
“Document everything, Paul.” To me: “Sorry. Listen, we owe you a debt, Miss Howe.”
“And me! You’re in my debt, too, don’t forget—ow, goddammit! Give it up, fuckhead, butterfly plasters aren’t gonna cut it!”
“And we might have to ask still more of you.”
“Much has already been asked of me,” I deadpanned as the unmistakable sound of Lisa hitting someone over and over with a pack of gauze filled the air.
“I can only imagine.” Tennen, who’d been staring at Lisa with not a little interest, wrenched her attention back to me. “To be blunt, Miss Howe, you’re not only my new best friend, but I need to keep you on my side.”
“Start working on your list of demands right fucking now,” Lisa called, wrestling a hemostat clamp away from the tech trying to help her. “That’s my advice.”
Yes. And it was good advice, because I think we all knew the experiments would continue. Certainly Lisa didn’t seem at all surprised, and I couldn’t imagine department QTI had any interest in unringing the bell. And there were still Losties back in TudorTime. Presumably ones I hadn’t kissed. Or shot.
In fact, there was one in particular who, it seemed, had been right: our story wasn’t over.
“Miss Howe, are you all right?”
“I know she looks like the Before picture in an antacid commercial,” Lisa said, who had by now thoroughly cowed the tech trying to help her, “but that’s her biggest, happiest smile.”
“Are you sure?” Dr. Tanner didn’t seem reassured. “Do you need something to drink?”
“No, no. C’mon, Lisa, the paramedics will be here soon. I’ll go with you.”
“To eat, then?” Dr. Tanner persisted.
“Oh. Well … now that you mention it …”
Epilogue
Before my parents died, I journaled almost every day. But in The After, I didn’t think it was a good idea to write anything down. April 28. Got an A on the vocab test and got the rest of the lightbulbs in the attic changed. Mom’s still in the freezer. Years ago, Lisa pointed out that I had cleaved my life in two: the years Before my parents died, and the years After. But now I was starting to see a third section: Before the Before. What better way to describe my TudorTime adventures?
And maybe it was still a bad idea to write down my adventures, but I no longer gave a wide shit.
“Why are you talking like a narrator?”
I closed my tablet. “Shut up. I’m not. I can if I want to!”
“Wow.” Lisa plopped an armful of charts on the table. “Y’know what, I’m not gonna engage. On a totally unrelated topic, I’m taking you off the Maxipan study.”
“Well, yeah. I mean—the brain damage.”
Lisa, who had spent half the day immersed in lab reports, started sorting charts into an order that meant something to her and nothing to me. We were in the office/dining room and I’d just started thinking about the French Silk pie in the fridge. “No, that was never a problem, I told you. It was pre-existing, from when you had the flu as a kid.”
“Not that brain damage. I mean the damage caused by all the time travel.” How scary was it that I had to specify which brain damage?
Lisa didn’t say anything, which was wildly, insanely out of character.
“Uh—remember? You were super-pissed at I.T.C.H.? I figured out the reason I could see the gates was because I got aura migraines and was taking Maxipan?”
“Joan, I want you to sit down.”
“I am sitting down! ” Calm, sympathetic Lisa was terrifying. “If I’m dying, just tell me.”
“You’re not dying. But—about the study …”
“Listen, I’m not mad. I know you guys have to cover all the side-effects in the paperwork, but you couldn’t have known that an experimental medication would react with my mi
graines and help me see wormholes.”
“That’s the thing, Joanie. That was the first thing I checked after I got my stitches. You were in the control group getting the placebo. They’re sugar pills.”
I waited, but she was done. Oh. That indicated it was my turn to talk. Too bad I couldn’t think of anything.
“Joan? Do you get it? You’ve essentially been taking TicTacs for your migraines. It’s not the medication. It’s just you. And it’s not brain damage. It’s—damage was the wrong word. Change would have been more accurate.”
“I’m sorry, what are you saying? Other than I’ve been enjoying minty-fresh breath as part of this study?”
“I’m saying I don’t know why you’re the only one who can see and call the gates, and QTI doesn’t know, either. But it’s not the Maxipan, because you never took any.”
I blinked, thinking it over. “I don’t know how to feel about that.”
“Confused? Try confused. That’s what I’ve been going with the last two days. Your brain chemistry has changed in some significant way, the analysis of which requires further study and possibly booze. But you’re no more brain damaged than you were before the medical trial started. I wanted you to know that. And something else.” She opened one of the files and pulled out a little packet of papers, then handed it to me.
At first I had trouble understanding what I was looking at—it had been that kind of month. But then the words Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons jumped out at me.
“Aw, Lisa, you didn’t have to get me a gift card to—whoa.” On closer inspection, it was better than a gift card! “You got me in one of their cookery school classes. Secrets of Eggs! Not only will I get to cook eggs, I will learn all their secrets?” I rose and flung my arms around her bony shoulders. “Thank you thank you thank you!”
“Hands to yourself, dumbass.” By silent agreement, we weren’t going to talk about how she hugged me back with desperate strength. “Are you really gonna do it, by the way? I saw the brochures. You’re changing your major?”
“Yes, I can’t wait.”
“That’s more enthusiastic about school than I’ve ever seen you.”
“Well, before now I wasn’t studying to be a food historian. Well, a social historian of food culture.”
“Didn’t even know that was a thing.”
“It’s a wonderful thing. You should have eaten something when you were back in time; the food’s incredible.”
“Pass.”
“I’ll recreate some of the recipes here; they’ll be perfectly safe. You’ll love leeches, I promise.”
“Hard pass. But I’m glad you like your gift. Figured I owed you something nice after the shit I put you through.”
“What you put me through?” I drew back and looked at her. “Lisa, if anything it’s the other way around. You could have died back there. I put you in danger by telling you the whole story, and then it was compounded by Warren’s treachery, and you could have—I mean, you were almost—” I gestured to her face. Twenty-six stitches, but the doctors told her she’d have a full recovery and little to no scarring. But we’d been incredibly lucky, and no one knew that better than Lisa, who saw death in one form or another every week.
“I don’t regret bleeding for this,” she said, tapping her cheek. “Ow! That hurt, why did I do that? But seriously, I don’t regret any of it. I’m glad I went—I needed to, in order to get it. And I know Thomas doesn’t regret any of it, either. ‘Better to have loved and lost than to etcetera’. But he hasn’t lost you. Like he said, your story’s not done.”
“Why do you guys keep saying that?”
“Because we know you. Because your test results bear that out. Also, if I’d been paying attention I could have told you Thomas was a Lostie.”
“How?”
“He used the word patois. It bugged me until I looked it up—it’s French, but it wasn’t coined until 1643. Thomas was using it over a hundred years before anyone else. Stupid of me to miss that.”
“Being a little hard on yourself, don’t you think?” Though I made a mental note to tease Thomas Wyn—uh, MacRae—about it when I saw him. Because if the smartest person I knew was confident we’d meet again, and the man with the greatest forearms I’d ever seen also thought so, who was I to say otherwise?
It would be difficult, no question. But no one ever said long-distance space-time relationships were easy.
THE END
About the Author
MaryJanice Davidson is the bestselling author of many novels, including the UNDEAD series and the FOSTERWERE trilogy, and is published across multiple genres. Her books have been published in over a dozen languages and have been on bestseller lists all over the world, including USA Today and New York Times. She has published books, novellas, articles, short stories, recipes, reviews, and rants, and writes a column for USA Today. A former model and medical test subject, she lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her family.
You can reach her at contactmjd@comcast.net, follow her on Twitter (@MaryJaniceD) and Instagram, find her on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/maryjanicedavidson), and check out her website at https://www.maryjanicedavidson.org
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About the Publisher
This book is published on behalf of the author by the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency.
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