A Contemporary Asshat at the Court of Henry VIII Read online

  “Oh, sure.” I patted the horse’s broad velvety nose and smiled. Horses were growing on me.

  “Why are you traveling alone?”

  I was ready for that one. “I’m not. My husband is just up the road.”

  “Take every care.” His mild curiosity satisfied, he tipped me a casual salute, and in next to no time was boosting me into the saddle on a pretty roan mare with a back like a dining room table. Oooh, sore thighs tonight. Guaranteed.

  I had been surprised to find that riding a horse isn’t just work for the horse. Your arms, hands, legs, back—they’re all in play. It’s not like the movies, where everyone effortlessly rides for hours while having a good time. At worst, once they climb down, they stretch a bit and then they’re back in business.

  Nuh-uh. Being in the saddle for any length of time is exhausting; soon I would be able to crack golf balls with my thighs. But short of renting a carriage complete with a team and driver, my options were limited. My kingdom for a moped.

  I got lucky again. My Lostie had stumbled across one of the few people from this time who wouldn’t be horrified by someone popping out of nowhere dressed in never-seen-anything-like-it clothing and talking crazy: Thomas Wynter. I hadn’t been riding two minutes before he loped (he was a human-shaped gazelle; 85% of him was legs) out of The Gray Horse and waved me over.

  I grinned at him, I couldn’t help it. It was always nice to see Thomas Wynter, and not just because I liked redheads with great forearms.

  “And here you are again! And as lovely as ever, if you will allow me, Lady Joan. As always, you seem not to age a single day.”

  I’d aged weeks, actually, but Thomas thought we’d known each other for years, ever since the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

  “You need a husband,” he reminded me. It was a recurring theme. The smith would have been shocked to learn I’d lied, was in fact single and ready to mingle. “You spend too much time on your own, unless you are shepherding one of your lambs.”

  Lambs. Ha! Bewildered hair-trigger feral cats was a little closer to the truth. “You’re the one lying in wait for me outside nondescript taverns,” I teased. “You need a wife.”

  “Aye, I do.”

  “So you loitered to wait for me?” I’d pulled up by now, and Thomas caught my steed pro-tem by the bridle and held on, petting the horse’s nose.

  “Aye,” he admitted cheerfully. “You’re drawn to people like this, no need to deny it. Once I saw this poor lass, I knew you would be along directly.”

  “The poor lass” was accurate. She’d crept out of the inn a few feet behind him, swathed head to toe in a heavy dark wool blanket. That likely elicited comment, as it was August, but not as much comment as her clothes would have: shorts, probably—her legs were bare. Maybe a t-shirt. Flip-flops?

  She blinked up at me with light brown eyes, squinted a little against the summer sunshine and rubbed her earlobe, which was bloody and torn where someone had yanked her earring. She had dirt on her forehead and her hair was a messy blonde cloud. Her hands were fisted in the blanket, holding it tightly around her like a fuzzy shield. “I’m having the weirdest dream.”

  “It’s all right, I’m here to take you home.”

  She was already shaking her head. “You don’t understand. I’m not supposed to be here. I have to wake up.”

  “Amazon. Tablets. iPhone.”

  “Oh thank God!” Yes, that always did the trick. And Thomas, bless his gingery heart, thought it was part of my charm.

  “Your words soothe them, as when the monks chant,” he observed.

  Sure. Exactly like that. “Thomas, give her a boost, would you?”

  “Of course, my lady.” And he did, lifting my Lostie almost as easily as the blacksmith had tossed me. Thomas was in excellent shape for a man who self-identified as a scholar and spent most of his time reading. In addition to those nice long legs, he had agreeably broad shoulders (if you were into that), and his hair was a deep, rich auburn, so dark in some lights it was the color of grenadine and Coke. (Mmmmm. Cherry Coke.) His bright blue gaze never left my face.

  I’d only seen him wearing a hat once, the day we met. Today he was hatless, dressed in black, and his wonderful dark mop made him easy to spot. Sixteenth century clothing, like clothing from any time period, was a code people in the know could crack. Thomas’ black doublet, full sleeves, venetian hose, and ankle boots all said, “I spend most of my days reading and writing; I don’t have to do manual labor in order to eat, though sometimes I do for fun”.

  I blinked and decided it was time to get back to business. “I’ll take her to the doctor.”

  “Or a priest,” he suggested, still absently patting my Hertz horse’s neck.

  Oh. Yes. Yes, that will fix her right up.

  I found a smile. “You’re going to get a reputation. Soon everyone will think you only come to stay at the inn to catch strays.”

  “You are the only stray I wish to catch,” he declared.

  Aww. Sweet! Probably. “It was nice seeing you again.”

  “I quite agree! Dare I ask if once you have tended to your charge, you might—”

  “I apologize, I can’t. Next time,” I lied (again).

  He quirked half a smile at me. “No need to tease, my lady. If you keep to your pattern, I won’t see you again for months, perhaps years.”

  It bothered me to turn him down, partly because he was always helpful and I owed him a lot more than a tankard of ale. Plus, he was gorgeous, single, liked me, probably didn’t think I was a witch, watched for me, and thought my essential weirdness was charming. The irony: I couldn’t get a second date in the 21st century, but I was catnip in the Tudor era.

  But it was safer for both of us to turn him down. Nothing could ever come of it. Every minute I was here, I was exposed. Lingering for the 16th century equivalent of a tall double foam wasn’t just indulgent, it was dangerous.

  “I’m sorry,” I began, hating how halting my tone was. “But—”

  Steel fingers seized me by the upper arm.

  “Ye-ow!”

  “Will you shut up with the fucking chit-chat and get me the fuck out of here?” The Lostie had hissed this into my ear so rapidly, all I heard was, shupfuckchitchatgetfuckouttafhere.

  Annnnnd my cue. “Goodbye.”

  He swept me a graceful bow. “Farewell, Lady Joan.”

  I didn’t look back as we trotted back to the smith.

  I never do.

  Chapter Two

  Sixteenth century Hertz was delighted to see me. I was delighted, too. I hadn’t been here more than an hour, my Lostie was (relatively) safe, and I wouldn’t be saddle sore in the morning. It didn’t take long to nag the smith into giving me back all but one of the coins I’d paid him.

  “But milady, you bought her!”

  “No, I rented her. Like I told you. Now you can sell her again.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me.”

  Then I took my Lostie by the hand, gave Hi-yo Silver a goodbye pat, and set off for the entry window.

  My Lostie (real name Sarah Watkins) told me a now-familiar tale: minding her own business, realized she didn’t feel well, saw something bright, next thing she knew, her phone couldn’t get wi-fi and her apps didn’t work. Everyone looked weird. Everyone sounded weird. She was yelled at and grabbed and had no idea why. Etcetera.

  “I know it sounds crazy—”

  “Not to me.” I got a watery smile for that one. “Don’t fret, I’ll have you back in no time.” Probably.

  This was often the most stressful part of the ordeal. We were seconds from making our escape, but it could take a few minutes to spot the gate. And of course the more time it took, the higher our risk of discovery. It was like playing Beat the Clock, except if you lost, you risked being messily murdered. If we had to linger longer, I was going t
o get her to stand beneath the willow with me. The fronds were so thick we’d be difficult to see from the road, and the locals didn’t care for the salix alba in their midst. They thought it was haunted.

  Today, like everything with this Lostie, it was easy. I spotted the shimmering gold squiggle after thirty seconds. Squinting at it made me dizzy and nauseated, because the gate looked exactly like my migraine aura, and the aura always meant hours of pain were on the way. I walked straight toward it, tugging Sarah with me.

  “Time to wake up, time to wake up,” she chanted, which was off-putting. “Timetowakeup oh God pleaseletmewake—huh?”

  That ‘huh?’ because we were back in the lab. Which in its own way was probably just as startling to poor Sarah, but at least …

  “Oh thank God!” She was staring down at her phone as if it held the answers to every question in the universe. “My feed’s back!”

  … she knew she was back in the present.

  “Ta-dah! Or something.” I waved at the assembled techs, who loved playing it like time travel was no big deal and fooled no one. “Hi, guys.”

  “Dammit, Joan! I bet it would take you another forty-five minutes. I owe Warren twenty pounds.”

  “I hate you, Karen,” I said sweetly.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Sarah screamed, because that’s what Losties do.

  “Have fun, you crazy kids,” I told them, and left, because that’s what I do. When I wasn’t wishing for a swift death while in the grip of a migraine, but that’s another topic for another time.

  Chapter Three

  (And that time is now!)

  I’ve been having migraines since I was fourteen.

  It hasn’t been fun.

  It’s not just the headache and the nausea. It’s the bag of hell that comes with it:

  sensitivity to light (“Turn off that light before I throw—too late.”)

  sensitivity to sound (“Turn off the TV before I throw—too late.”)

  aphasia (“Turn up that beaver before you jump—now later.”)

  and a crushing pain that feels like someone is jabbing a pencil an inch deep into the side of my skull over and over and over and over and over.

  People used to kill themselves to be rid of them back in the day. Most of them were women, who had been soothed by their “doctors” into thinking the problem was in their head, no pun intended.

  If you suffer through them, you know how bad the pain can get. And if you’re willing to medicate the problem, you’ll try damned near anything. Imitrex. Stadol. Zomig. Frova. Axert.

  And Maxipan (which I definitely didn’t first mispronounce as Maxipad). It was a new drug, neither an opiate nor a triptan nor an ergotamine. It was plodding its way through human testing, and the reason I was able to try it was because my best friend, Lisa Harris, M.D., had won the Online Poker Series when she was eighteen.

  Lisa was a prodigy, those children you read about who are composing sonnets at age four and graduating college at thirteen. As she herself would describe her life, “I was born of a long and distinguished line of trailer-dwelling substance abusers.” She never knew her father, and took care of her mother until the lady overdosed on a diabolical cocktail of methamphetamine and Oxycontin. We met as kids when we were both desperately ashamed of our home lives and desperately determined to hide the details from the world; to say we clicked is to say Godiva makes chocolate.

  Long story short: once her mother was in the ground, Lisa took some of the money she’d won online and bought a ticket to Vegas. Six months after that, she was using those winnings to pay for the number one medical school in the world, Oxford University.

  Do I have to tell you she sailed through? And graduated at the top of her class, then went straight into a Neuro residency? And kidnapped me, sort of?

  She wanted to study the effects of addiction on the brain, which was understandable. And then fix the brain in question, which sounded impossible. She was, essentially, determined to find the cure for addiction. Along the way, she learned quite a bit about migraines. (She also frequently repelled me with casual chit-chat about teratomas, echinococcis, and naegleria fowleri, all terms I wish I hadn’t Googled.)

  All that to say she had great sympathy for my suffering and got me into the Maxipan study as soon as she heard about it. “This is the most promising drug in thirty years,” she promised, “and the friggin’ NIH is still holding it up. Pre-clinical’s been done for years, buncha bureaucratic cockheads.”

  “I don’t understand anything you just said.”

  “Don’t sweat it. I’ll get you into the group that isn’t snarfing down sugar pills.”

  “But I love sugar pills.”

  “Shut up and sign this.”

  Lisa could be, um, abrupt. But that was fine. We weren’t the type of friends who went shopping together, or gossiped about our love lives, or indulged in other stereotypical chick pal behavior. We clicked at once, and bonded over our very different but equally strange childhoods. When she found out she was Oxford-bound, she arranged for me to join her. Typical of Lisa, she didn’t ask. Just bought my ticket and e-mailed me the receipt. That’s how I found out I was headed to Oxfordshire, population 175,021, sixty miles from London.

  That was fine with me. Does that sound passive? I can see how it could be construed that way. But I’d been drifting for the last few years, my studies were stalled, my parents were gone, there was nothing keeping me home. I was more than ready to leave Wisconsin and see a bit more of the world. England sounded swell.

  And it was. Twenty-first century England, I mean. Sixteenth century England, not so much. Although, I have to say … the food is amazing.

  Chapter Four

  Renaissance Festivals are equal parts wonderful and terrible.

  Nothing embodies those dichotomies better than what I was wearing (stifling, period-appropriate clothing) and what I was craving (a turkey leg).

  “I’m not following the math,” Lisa said, which was a lie (she aced college trig in 7th grade). “Letting your boobs hang out = turkey drumstick?”

  I examined said boobs in the mirror. The corset was pushing them a little high; they were yanked so far up, my chin could give them shade. “It sounds silly when you say it like that.”

  “That’s the only time it sounds silly, huh?”

  I ignored the sarcasm, left my room and searched for my purse. I found it in the kitchen, which was not okay, since it belonged in the bathroom. “First, stop snacking out of my purse.”

  Lisa actually pulled off looking wounded, like I was the junk food craving roommate with low impulse control. “But you’ve always got something defuckingliscious in there.”

  “Second, stop making up words. Third, this is very simple. If I’m in costume, I get a discount. Turkey drumsticks are almost ten dollars apiece. I would also like to wash them down with a few Cokes, and then perhaps a hot fudge sundae for dessert.”

  “How medieval!”

  “And I’m on a budget.”

  “If you’re on a budget, why spend three hundred bucks on … oh my God.” An expression of vague horror was creeping across Lisa’s face. That was rare; in medical school, Lisa had occasionally showed up at my place with brains on her clothing. And once, memorably, a foreskin.

  “You already had it!” she was saying. “You … you brought it with you. You only brought two suitcases to the other side of the world and one of them had that dress!”

  “My mother,” I replied. That was all I said, and all I had to say. She’d never met my folks—she couldn’t have, we met during The After—but we talked. Of course we talked. Complaining about our weird childhoods was our favorite thing. “I have to go. Thanks again for the car.”

  Lisa waved me away. Her thoughts on money were the same now as when she didn’t have any: it was a tool. The more you had, the better. If you didn’t have much
, make do. There were professional chefs who didn’t have her gift with ramen noodles and leftover pizza.

  One of the first things she’d done when we moved here was buy a car (she’d found us a house to share before she bought my ticket) and she was generous with it. I never even had to ask; she didn’t care if I drove as long as I filled the gas tank when I was finished. It was a side of her she tried to keep hidden.

  The niceties over, I headed for the U.K.’s version of the American Renaissance Festival: the Medieval Festival at Herstmonceux Castle. For some reason, the unofficial weather rule at these venues was always one of two choices: too hot, or too chilly and muddy. Today, too hot had won the coin toss. Given that I had heavy cloth touching every part of my body from neck to toes, that was unfortunate. But a tall Coke with lots of crushed ice would fix that in no time. Go to Hell, authenticity.

  But I’d no sooner started sipping (after enduring the authentic barmaid behind the counter shout the de rigueur, non-authentic “Ten pounds for the king!”) when it started. And I know it’s a cliché, but it’s also accurate: my stomach sank.

  As always, at first there was no pain, just disorientation, because out of nowhere I’d see squiggly lines on the edge of my vision. Those opaque lines would eventually grow and crowd each other until I could barely see out of my right eye. The sun instantly seemed several million miles closer. And sounds instantly seemed several million decibels louder. Which meant the aphasia was en route.

  I didn’t always suffer the aphasia phase, thank God, because in a way, that was the most maddening symptom. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, I could even picture the words in my mind, but the only thing that made it out of my mouth was gibberish. And the harder I tried to focus and speak coherently, the worse it got. It was like downing three tequila shots and then trying to sober up with daiquiris: doomed to failure.

  I had about half an hour before I was doomed to incoherence and could not be trusted behind a wheel. Any wheel. Under any circumstances. The phrase “do not operate heavy machinery” more than applied.