Out of the Blue (A Regency Time Travel Romance) (2 page)

“Dub yer mummer, Green, ye sniveling dolt.
We’ve got the keys from Brackenbury, bloodless coward that he is,
and all the guards have been pulled away fer the night. I’ve
already gots the chest fer stuffin’ ’em in. Besides, we’re actin’
in the name of wot’s right. We’ll makes it quick and easy. Now
fetch me a torch. It’s too demmed dark in here.”

Edward, who had slunk back against the wall
and crawled to his brother’s pallet, placing a hand over the boy’s
mouth, now quietly motioned for Richard to drop to his knees and
follow him. Crawling their way out of a prison might not be noble,
but it could only be considered highly preferable to the fate Green
and Forest had in store for them.

Just as Green reentered the chamber with a
torch held high over his head, Edward and Richard scampered out the
door, heading for the staircase. Fear lent wings to their feet,
fear and the sound of the two men hurtling down the steps behind
them.

Having reached the ground floor, the brothers
barreled out the unguarded doorway and turned right, heading toward
the royal apartments, a plan already forming in Edward’s head. It
wouldn’t do to try for any of the gates, for a dumb brute like
Forest would expect them to do just that. The Tower was large, and
filled with marvelous hiding places. They would find one and hide
in it until Edward could think of another plan.

By fits and starts the boys made their way
past the royal apartments, until they reached the steep,
once-impregnable walls of the White Tower that William the
Conqueror had ordered built to intimidate his not-so-loyal
subjects. But the years had brought numerous changes to the White
Tower, the most important being the addition of many wooden
shelters and booths that leaned against its walls, clinging to its
strength.

With Richard close behind him, one shoe
already lost but no longer sniffling, Edward climbed from wooden
building to rooftop, from stall to stall, until at last he and his
brother had succeeded in gaining entrance to one of the lesser
towers and, finally, the White Tower itself.

Their backs against the cold stone wall,
their thin chests heaving from their exertion, the boys strained to
catch their breath as they looked around the small chamber that
appeared to house pieces of rusty armor and a few dozen broken
lances.

“Now what, Ned?” Richard stood and looked
around, spreading his arms. “We’ve naught but changed one prison
for another. We should have made directly for the Watergate.”

Edward shook his head. “It’s a good thing I’m
king then, Dickon, rather than a silly child like you. The
Watergate has been shut up tight for the night. Besides, neither of
us can swim a stroke. We only got this far because the guards have
been pulled. No, we’ll stay here while the hue and cry is raised,
then slip out in the morning when everyone searches for us outside
the walls.”

Richard cocked his head to one side, as if
considering this strategy. “But I’m hungry,” he complained at last,
heading for the door. “Come on, Ned, the guards are gone or asleep,
and we can’t be far from the kitchens.”

Before Edward could tell Richard that an army
might move on its belly but a king chose his movements only with
his head, his brother had thrown open the door to the hall and
stepped outside, and there remained nothing left for Edward to do
but follow.

For a few minutes it seemed Richard had been
right. From squire to servant, those in the White Tower appeared to
be tucked in their beds, and no one challenged the boys’ passage.
But try as the royal princes might they could not locate the
kitchens. Soon it would be dawn and the White Tower would come
alive, and if they had not found another hidey-hole by then they
would be captured once more. Edward pointed this out to his
brother, but the boy just ran ahead, heading for a small hallway
that seemed to have been sliced into the stone wall rather than
built.

A curving staircase appeared at the end of
the hallway, cut in a tight circle, with no arrow slits or lighted
torches hanging from its bare walls. The terrible blackness was
off-putting, but just then Richard’s stomach growled demandingly,
and he stepped forward fearlessly, into the dark.

Edward hesitated, sure that they would not
find the kitchens buried deep in the bowels of the White Tower.
Just as he opened his mouth to call to his brother, he heard the
sound of heavy footsteps approaching behind him.

The ugly, pockmarked face of Miles Forest
appeared around the corner of the hallway. “Green! Green! I found
’em! Oi told ye they’d be here somewheres.”

Edward saw the shoe in Forest’s hand and
recognized it as Richard’s. Sure he could only delay the
inevitable, and wishing he’d had the foresight to arm himself with
one of the broken lances so that he could at least give a good
accounting of himself in a fight, the young king plunged into the
darkness, his hands outstretched to balance himself against the
narrow, curving walls as he followed where his younger brother had
led.

He could hear Forest cursing as the heavy man
struggled to negotiate the narrow, winding staircase, and he called
out to his brother to hurry, for their capture was imminent. His
feet all but flying, Edward ran forward, his palms scraped raw by
the rough-cut ragstone, until he nearly overran Richard in his
haste.

Grabbing the younger boy’s hand, Edward
pushed on, Forest and Green in close pursuit, the damnable, dark
staircase seeming to have no end, until at last a small bluish
light appeared below them.

“We’re in the basket now,” Edward told his
brother, sure that the strange blue light came from torches held by
soldiers loyal to his uncle.

Yet they continued down the staircase, for
any fate had to be better than one to be found at the hands of
Miles Forest, and they would much rather throw themselves on the
swords of the king’s guards than have their last sight on earth be
the toothless grin of that same horrible man.

They reached the end of the staircase at
last, to find themselves in a small, odd-shaped room that had no
windows or doors. The light grew bluer and seemed to rise to meet
them, swirling around their ankles like morning mist on a country
pond, and Richard clung to his brother, his young eyes alight with
unanswerable questions.

There were no windows, and yet there was
light. There were no torches, no soldiers. They were alone in the
strange chamber. Alone, safe from Green and Forest, who now stood
frozen on the bottom step just outside the mist, watching, their
mouths agape.

The blue mist swirled faster, rising to the
boys’ knees, past their waists, over their heads. They were
enveloped by the cool mist, sheltered by it, comforted by it.
Nothing existed beyond the mist, no stone walls, no gaolers, no
thin gruel or straw pallets. The world outside the mist had ceased
to exist.

Edward looked down at his brother, holding
him as tight as he dared, for he could barely see him. Did Richard
feel the peace that he felt? Did he feel the sense of adventure,
adventure such as they had never known, growing deep in his chest?
Fear fled, to be replaced by the sure knowledge that God, or their
father, or some sorceress like Jane Shore, their father’s beautiful
mistress, had come to save them, to whisk them away to a better
place.

“Feel it, Dickon. Feel it! We’re safe
now—safe at last!” Edward declared with all assurance, and then he
threw back his head and laughed.

London, 1992

“L
adies and
gentlemen, good afternoon, and may I welcome you to Her Majesty’s
Royal Palace and Fortress, the Tower of London. If you will just
step to your right and form a queue, a tour guide will join you
presently.” Bowing in dismissal, the plump, brightly dressed guard,
who looked much like a red Delicious apple in a fuzzy top hat,
turned to greet a group of camera-carrying Japanese tourists that
was just straggling through the gate. “Ladies and gentlemen, good
afternoon, and may I welcome you to Her Majesty’s—”

Cassandra Kelley took her place in line
behind Miss Smithers—a talkative, nearly oppressively cheerful
retired librarian from Omaha currently on her third tour of
England—careful to avoid the sharp point of the lady’s umbrella, an
accessory she herself had shunned in favor of optimism, which might
not keep her dry if the unseasonably warm March day turned soggy,
but at least did not have to be lugged from place to place in her
already heavy bag.

Looking around the large yard at the
sharp-eyed Tower ravens that seemed as numerous as molting pigeons
in a Manhattan park, Cassandra grimaced, struck yet again by the
curious English penchant for hanging starkly printed signs on
everything from cannons to trees. DUNGEONS, she read on a
forbidding looking building off to her left. Beside it could be
seen a similarly constructed sign that pointed the way to the
public rest rooms. The Tower might once have been a forbidding
fortress and terrible prison, but the signs sure took a lot of the
romance out of the place.

Cassandra shifted her weight onto her right
foot, silently cursing herself for thinking she could tramp across
London all day in high heels. She bent to rub her left ankle,
thankful the tour’s next stop would be King’s Road, where she
should be able to find a shoe store somewhere among the trendy
dress shops and sidewalks littered with unisex creatures sporting
spiked pink hair and safety pins in their cheeks.

Cassandra, who hadn’t been part of a group
since she’d daringly walked out on the National Honor Society in
her sophomore year of high school, felt uncomfortable being a
member of this rigidly organized tour. She would have preferred to
investigate the city on her own if only she had more time, probably
giving the Tower a miss, but she was in England for the London Book
Fair, and only for the weekend.

As the only editor from Wilmont at the Fair,
she assumed Sam Baxter had thought he was giving her a plum
assignment—though he was also killing two birds with one rock.
Cassandra had been given the trip as a bonus for landing a hot
prospect for a three-book contract, but now she had to man their
booth at the Book Fair. She was smart enough to know that she’d
better have her happy, smiling face on show in front of the company
banner every minute the Fair was open. If she didn’t, she’d be sure
to find herself Wilmont’s representative at the next writers’
conference in Podunk, Kansas—population eighty-three.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen. May I have
your attention, please? My name is Olivia Hammond, and I shall be
your tour guide as we take a stroll through the Tower, the shining
bastion of nine hundred years of English history. Please step
lively, as we have a good deal of territory to cover.”

Cassandra peered around Miss Smithers and saw
a pert, rosy-cheeked teenager—the sort that could have peddled
three hundred boxes of Girl Scout cookies without breaking a
sweat—moving toward a wide flight of steps leading to, if she had
heard correctly, the White Tower, an immense stone building that
wasn’t white at all. Adjusting the strap on her large canvas
shoulder bag, Cassandra took a deep breath, fought back the urge to
quit the tour, and followed.

Miss Hammond’s staccato speech that sounded
almost canned was nevertheless interesting, beginning with a stop
at the base of a nondescript stone staircase, at which time she
told of the renovation in the late 1600s that had yielded a large
trunk containing the remains of two boys thought to be the Royal
Princes, who had perished in the Garden Tower—now aptly dubbed the
Bloody Tower—some centuries earlier.

The chest and bones were gone, of course, the
bodies transferred to Westminster to be reinterred in the Chapel of
King Henry VII, so there was little to see—except the prerequisite
sign, of course.

A squat little woman at the back of the line
could be heard lamenting the sad demise of the Royal Princes as her
husband grunted, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Alice. They’ve been dead
for five hundred years. Who cares anymore? I want to see those
damned jewels you’ve been hollering about.” Cassandra smiled and
shook her head, pitying Alice for having married the original ugly
American.

The guide’s declaration that the princes
supposedly had been murdered on the orders of King Richard III
sparked a lively debate headed by Miss Smithers, who obviously did
care. She championed Shakespeare’s version of the king as a
hunchbacked monster. Her initial declaration had prompted an
immediate rebuttal from Stosh Polanski, a plumbing contractor from
Pittsburgh. Stosh’s money was on Henry Tudor as the man behind the
deaths.

Cassandra, disliking the feeling that she was
agreeing with Alice’s husband, really couldn’t have cared less
either way. Medieval history, with all its various competing kings
and beheadings, had always confused her. She had learned it all by
rote for her college exams and then promptly forgotten it. All she
really knew or cared about now was that there were a hell of a lot
of steps inside the White Tower.

“If you will please follow me?” Miss Hammond
chirped as the group began showing signs of becoming a mob.
“There’s much more to see, I promise you.” The group set off once
more, Alice’s husband hanging behind, grumbling under his
breath.

A half hour later, at the sight of yet
another staircase, this one leading to an ancient chapel, Cassandra
leaned against a sign calling attention to a particularly
unappealing Elizabethan chair, waving Miss Smithers on her way as
the woman looked back at her in question. “I’ll just rest here a
moment and then I’ll join you when you come back down,” Cassandra
lied with a smile. She was not about to tell the librarian that she
planned to desert the tour and go on the hunt for some Reeboks—half
afraid that the energetic woman might volunteer to carry her on her
back for the remainder of the tour.