My Lady Jane (20 page)

If she slept, she'd waste them.

For another hour—or some amount of time she had no way to judge—she thought about Gifford and what he must be doing now. Likely he wasn't still in the stables, but moved somewhere more secure, now that it was night. She thought about his laugh and his jokes, the charming way he found humor in everything. Would he find humor in this situation? Tomorrow morning?

If only she could see him now. She'd apologize for the last week and a half. She'd name him king. She'd kiss him and say she trusted him. She'd— She'd—

Maybe Gifford wasn't safe to think about right now.

Jane shifted her thoughts to Edward, wondering if he'd felt
this deep unease in the face of his own death. Anxiety. Trepidation. Horror.

She tried to conjure up more synonyms, but a dim, orange light flickered beneath the door. Footfalls echoed on the steps, and a moment later the door creaked open.

Firelight shone in, blinding her. She squeaked and buried her face in the hollow of her arms and knees. Then, squinting, she looked up.

“Jane?” Lady Frances rushed in, holding a torch, which she quickly set into a holder on the wall. “The guards let me in. We have a few minutes at best. I came to ask you to reconsider Mary's offer.” She knelt in front of Jane, her expression almost maternal in its concern. “I wanted you to know I'm sorry I wasn't more . . . supportive back there. Please forgive me.”

Jane stared at her mother. She'd never heard an apology from Lady Frances's lips before, and she wasn't sure what to do with it.

“It doesn't matter,” she said at last. “The throne changed hands very quickly, didn't it? No one resisted.”

Lady Frances bowed her head. “The Privy Council turned on you. Dudley betrayed us as well. The moment Mary arrived, he declared his allegiance to her—even though it means he's not the Lord President anymore—and his loathing of E∂ians. He declared himself a Verity. He made it sound like all along he was actually clearing a path for Mary to take power. But forget about Dudley for now. This is about you. Take Mary's offer. It's not too late. A life in exile is better than this.”

“No.”

“Jane, this is no time to display your stubbornness.”

“It's not stubbornness. It's a matter of honor. I will not denounce Gifford or E∂ians—you included, Mother.” Jane coughed at the dryness in her throat.

Lady Frances' eyes flickered toward the door, like she was afraid someone would overhear. “Ungrateful girl. You have no idea what you're talking about. I'm no E∂ian.”

“I know you are. I heard you and Father discussing it years ago.”

Her mother shook her head like she might deny it, but then she sighed. “And I hate it,” she whispered. “I never change, not if I can help it. I push that part of me down until it's buried. It's unnatural.”

“And yet it's part of you,” Jane implored her. “In one of my books about E∂ians, the author said that long ago, in ancient times, all people were able to change into an animal form. Everyone was E∂ian. It was considered their true nature. It was considered divine.”

“Nonsense.” Her mother's expression grew cold. “All those books fill your head with such drivel. I should have burned them all, and then maybe we wouldn't be in this mess.”

Jane closed her eyes for a moment. Then she pushed her stiff muscles until she was able to stand up. “Do not ask me to forsake E∂ians again, Mother. You will not change my mind.”

There were voices in the hall. Lady Frances glanced over her
shoulder toward the door.

“Our time is almost up,” Jane said. “I suppose we should say good-bye now.”

“Please, Jane.” Her mother grabbed her arm. “You don't have to die. It will bring ruin on the family. On me. I'll lose Bradgate. I'll lose everything.”

“I'm sorry, I can't help that,” Jane replied, and she meant it. She, too, loved Bradgate, but it wasn't worth her honor. “Do you know where Gifford is being held?”

“They took him to Beauchamp Tower after night fell. That's all I know.”

“I want to see him. Can you ask for me?”

Lady Grey shook her head. “The only way to see him will be to denounce him, and then you would only see him burn.”

The guards arrived. They escorted Lady Frances from the room, without another word between them, and Jane was alone again.

Her prison seemed to shrink around her. The despair she'd known earlier became a drop to an ocean. One star to the entire universe. Her mother had abandoned her, no matter what she claimed. There was only one person left in the world to think about, and that was Gifford, locked away in Beauchamp Tower, so close to the Queen's House, but it might as well have been the other side of the world.

Jane sank to the floor again, drowning in grief and misery and wretchedness and despondency and . . .

A brilliant white light flared about her, making her blink back stars.

When she could see again, everything was different. The room was bigger, for one, and she felt . . . funny. Shorter, which was saying something, but oddly long. Her spine felt strange and hunchy, and she was on all fours. And her sense of smell! There was something sour—unbathed human, probably—and musky.

The sound of voices below, the feel of the stone floor under her paws—it was incredible.

She'd changed into . . . something.

She was an E∂ian.

She was an E∂ian!

Jane hopped around the room in a crazy little dance, thrashing her head from side to side so hard she bashed into a wall. Unfazed, she made a soft clucky sound and danced again, an overpowering sense of joy filling her. She was an E∂ian, just as she'd always hoped. What was she? It didn't matter. She was small and furry (she could easily twist herself around to see her body, but it was hard to get an idea of a whole based on just a few too-close views) and she had the best sense of smell and the best sense of hearing and the best dancing skills she'd ever possessed in her life, even if dancing sometimes meant she ran into walls. Wouldn't Gifford be so amused when he saw her?

Gifford.

The sense of elation faded as she remembered her predicament and now that she was . . . a something . . . she would likely be
burned at the stake as well.

But her animal self was small, she knew that, and maybe she could do something useful now.

She hopped over to the door. There was a large crack beneath it, not quite big enough for a human fist to fit underneath. But maybe she could fit?

Jane shoved her face into the crack beneath the door. Her head went right under, followed by her shoulders, but the rest of her body stuck a little.

That was embarrassing.

She squeezed and scrambled and pushed until she popped out of the other side.

There was more light in the corridor. Twilight to her human self, but she could see quite easily now, at least within a few feet. Everything beyond that seemed fuzzy and oddly flat. Everything was shades of gray, too, except a faint red cast to some things, like the light of a lantern on the wall.

So her vision wasn't that great, but she was small and close to the floor, so what did she need with fantastic distance vision, anyway? She had other senses. Better senses.

Jane scurried to the edge of the first stair and paused, looking down. What was nothing particularly difficult in her human form suddenly appeared quite challenging. She couldn't just step down.

She pressed her belly to the stone floor and pushed her front paws ahead of her, sliding down the first stair until her paws touched the next. The rest of her body followed with an awkward
flop. She repeated this process a few more times until she found a better way to control her rogue hindquarters and moved down the stairs at a quicker pace.

At the first landing, she found the guards. She was the size of their boots. She resisted the urge to smell all their interesting, earthy aromas, and instead streaked past them so quickly they didn't notice her.

Other voices below grew louder as she descended the stairs, too distant for the guards on the landing to hear, but her ears were fantastic. Amazing. Probably very cute.

One of the speakers was Dudley, she was sure of it, though in this form, the sound was overwhelming and held qualities she'd never heard as a human.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I've obtained a body,” another man said. His voice was familiar, too. The royal physician? She couldn't remember his name.

“Very good.” Dudley sneezed and sniffed. “Drape a shroud over it and no one will know it isn't Edward.”

Jane stopped moving. It felt like all the fur on her body was standing up.

They didn't have Edward's body?

“They haven't found him yet?” asked the doctor. “The poison would have killed him by now. There's no way he could survive without an antidote.”

Dudley sighed. “He was sick. Wounded. Starved. He had to have left some kind of trail.”

Their voices were fading now, as though they'd been walking by the stairs.

Jane slinked down the rest of the steps, her tiny heart racing. Edward had been poisoned? Dudley had poisoned Edward? And then Edward had . . . what? Escaped?

Her heart lifted at the idea. How easily, she thought, despair could turn to hope.

At the foot of the staircase, Jane looked around the corner. The hall was enormous, but empty for now. If she kept to the shadows, she wouldn't be spotted. Hopefully. And then she could escape the Tower. Find Edward.

But first she had to rescue her horse.

EIGHTEEN

Gifford

Burned at the stake. A most unpleasant way to go, G thought. When he was just a boy of five, he'd witnessed a man being burned at the stake. It was 1538 and John Lambert had been outed as an E∂ian when, after hearing Frederic Clarence had written a pamphlet denouncing E∂ian magic, he turned into a dog and ate the papers, prompting Clarence to cry out, “That dog ate my scriptwork!”

Lambert was sentenced to be burned at the stake, and Lord Dudley had insisted that his children attend the execution. He later told G that nobody trusted those with the ancient magic, and the country would be safer if every E∂ian suffered the same fate as Lambert. Which, at the time, G's father had seemed to truly believe.

All G remembered of that day was the scream that seemed to go on for an eternity. That and the smell.

He glanced at the lone candle his captors allowed in his locked tower room, and then looked closer at the small flame on the wick. Never had something so innocuous seemed so ominous.

He held his hand over the flame.

“God's teeth!” he exclaimed, pulling his hand back after a mere instant. He hadn't felt so much pain in his entire life, which, in the next instant, he decided was a sad statement because what nineteen-year-old man has only ever felt the pain of a candle on his skin?

One who spends most of his nights attending plays and poetry readings.

He sighed. Usually he composed stanzas in his head to calm his anxiety, but at the moment G had no desire to find a phrase that rhymed with “charred flesh.”

He examined the palm of his right hand, expecting to see burned skin, but of course there was nothing. Not even a little red.

Now that the pain had subsided (not that there'd been very much of it to begin with) he turned his thoughts toward Jane, specifically the way she'd refused to denounce him as a heretic. He closed his eyes and remembered her confident posture as she stood by him, so sure in her decision, even though she could've easily sacrificed him to buy her own escape.

She wouldn't betray him.

Foolish, loyal, beautiful girl. At least her death would come much quicker than his.

He looked out the window. From this vantage point, he could
almost see the place where Jane would suffer her fate, inside the courtyard of the Tower. For G, though, he knew he would be executed on Tower Hill, where the rest of the common criminals and heretics took their last breaths. That's where he'd be burned.

It was a sad day when he yearned for a nice, tidy beheading. Instead of trying to compose morbid poetry (
to be, or not to be, that was the question . . .
), he decided to carve a name into the stone wall. Jane's name, of course.

J

Jane. He wondered if she was thinking of him, too. If he would ever see her again.

A

He'd never see a lot of people again. He'd never kiss his mother on the cheek, or make fun of Stan (who wasn't so bad, was he? Not really. It'd been unfair for him to resent Stan all this time, G thought). He'd never give Billingsly another ridiculous order, or make Tempie laugh, or try to irritate his father just to see the aggravation on the old man's face.

N

His father. G chipped harder at the stone. His father. Who had orchestrated this entire mess. Who would undoubtedly be fine, so long as he could switch to the winning side.

E

Who'd let his own son burn if it would save his life.

G decided that he couldn't think about it anymore. He put the finishing touches on the
e
of Jane's name, and then paced around
the room, looking for something, anything, to get his mind off burning flesh. He found a few books, skimmed through the first few pages of each, and then tossed them one by one to the side. Maybe this had been meant to be Jane's room. She was probably locked somewhere with a barrel of apples.

A soft flutter at the door made him stop his pacing. Someone had slipped a piece of parchment underneath.

He hurried over and unfolded it and saw Jane's familiar handwriting. His heart pounded. He'd never received a love letter before, and although he knew his letter would most likely also be a good-bye letter, he felt some wild hope that she would confess some depth of feeling for him.

Dearest Edward,

I hoped to visit you this morning, but when I arrived at the palace I was informed that you are not receiving visitors. I must confess my surprise and disappointment that you would not see even me, but I know there must be a good reason, and I suspect that this self-imposed isolation means that your illness is taking its toll. For this I am so very sorry, cousin, and I wish there was something I could do to make you well again.

I'm sure you must be wondering what it is I came to see you about this morning, mere hours after my wedding. My dear cousin, the wedding is precisely the topic I wanted to discuss with you. Or rather, my newly acquired husband.

Gifford is a horse.

I'm certain you knew this, what with your referrals to “his
condition” and assumptions that I would find it intriguing. What I cannot fathom is why you chose not to tell me. We've always told each other everything, have we not? I consider you to be my most trusted confidant, my dearest and most beloved friend. Why then, did you neglect this rather critical detail? It doesn't make sense.

But perhaps in this, too, I wonder now, you felt you had a good reason.

I hope that we will be able to speak more on this subject when I return from my honeymoon in the country.

All my love,

Jane

G refolded the letter, resisting the urge to crumple it up and toss it in the corner. He wasn't offended by her surprise at his condition, but did she need to sign it “all my love”?
All
her love seemed a little excessive.

It was abundantly clear to G that Jane loved Edward; he'd never forget the look on her face when she'd been told that the king was dead. But had she
loved him
loved him? Was she thinking about her cousin right now, preparing herself to join her beloved in death?

Not that it really mattered. G tried to shake his insecurity away and instead be grateful to whoever had given this to him. His wife's hand had written this letter. He could picture her face as she wrote it, her mouth pursing and brow furrowing the way it did when she concentrated. He was about to place the paper in his own coat pocket when he noticed something written in different handwriting near the corner of one of the folded edges.

It was one word.

Skunk

Well, that was a surprising word. No beauty in a word like
skunk
.

He didn't recognize the handwriting. But no matter who wrote it, it was his only connection to Jane. G placed it in his breast pocket and for a moment pressed it against his chest.

Some time later he heard a scratching coming from the door. G shook his head, chalking the noise up to random castle creaks and groans, but then he heard it again. A distinct scratching sound.

He raised the candle, which only had an inch of light left, and walked cautiously to the door, just in time to see two beady little eyes peeking in from underneath. He barely had time to register the eyes when an entire furry body snaked its way inside his chamber, flat against the ground.

G yelped and stepped back. (He definitely did not scream like a little girl.)

Once it passed the doorframe, the creature seemed to puff itself back into shape, just as G grabbed the nearest thing he could chuck at it. A pillow. He took aim and threw it, but the little rodent dodged.

It was too long to be a mouse, or a rat, but too short to be . . . what other kind of rodent was there? It looked like a cat and a snake had a baby together.

G stalked over to the thing and stomped his foot near it.

“Go away, you scruffy squirrel!”

The creature shied away from his foot, and he stomped again, in the direction of the door. “Shoo! There's nothing to see here! Go on out the way you came in.”

But the rodent made no move toward the door. Instead, it scurried over to the bed, and scampered up the hanging tassels to the bedcovers and then to the head of the bed, where it nestled itself down on top of one of the pillows.

“Get off, you nasty rat!” G grabbed one of the books he had discarded and raised it above his head.

At this, the rodent sprang to attention, on all fours, long tail fluffed out. G waved the book as a threatening move, and the rodent did the strangest thing. It moved its head in a side-to-side motion, mirroring the motion of the book, its beady eyes wide and fixated on the tome.

G jerked the book forward about an inch, and the rodent flinched.

“All right, let's come to an agreement.” G gently lowered the book to the bed, and that's when the rodent did something even stranger. It scurried over to the book and nestled on top of it, like a mama bird would nestle over her eggs.

“Wait. Jane?” G said.

The rodent made a nodding motion.

“
Jane?
” he said again.

The rodent nodded again, this time in a more exaggerated way.

“Jane. You're a . . . a . . . rat.”

Jane froze, and then darted frantically around the bed, then around the room, then scaled the bedpost and darted in and out of the tassels. G was worried she would do something crazy like hurl herself off the bed to her death.

“Wait! Wait. You're not a rat. I only said rat because . . . well, I wasn't thinking. But you're not a rat.”

She froze on top of the bedposts, waiting expectantly.

She wanted him to tell her what she was.

“You're a . . . a . . . well, it's actually something I've not seen maybe ever. But you have fur—beautiful fur,” he added when she started shaking. “And two lovely eyes, four strong, if tiny, legs—but not too tiny,” he added again. “Can you please come down from there before I continue?”

She stamped her foot before climbing down the poster. He could almost hear her huffing. Lord, it was so obvious she was Jane. How had he not known the second her beady eyes appeared under the door?

She settled herself on the bed and he sat down next to her. He was tempted to pet her as he would a dog, but he resisted. She might find that demeaning.

He faced her.

“Okay, so you are a . . . a . . . an E∂ian,” he said, opting for the safest reference to her appearance. “I don't suppose you're a typical E∂ian who can change back and forth at will; otherwise, you would've changed back to tell me who you were yourself.” He
paused. “I know that sounded very roundabout, but my meaning is, you can't control the change, can you?”

She nodded.

“Yes, you can't control the change? Or yes, you can?” He realized how stupid the questions were. “Never mind. I'll phrase it this way. Can you control the change?”

She shook her head.

“All right. We are getting somewhere. Although, very slowly, and I worry about how quickly the sun will soon be rising. So what are we going to do?” He sighed. “If only we had a horse.”

If hedgehogs or badgers could look exasperated, Jane did. She jumped off the bed and scurried to the door and went under it and out, then under it and back in.

G smacked his head. “Right! We have something better than a horse. We have a . . . weasel?”

Jane rolled over and played dead.

“Not a weasel, my lady, but whatever you are, I am catching your meaning. You can sneak in and out and around the tower. And possibly steal a key?”

She nodded.

“And bring the key here, and we'll unlock the door, descend the stairs, take the guard at the bottom by surprise, knock him out, steal his sword to dispatch any other guards we may come across, go to the stables, steal a horse, and head for the hills.”

She nodded again, and this time did a scurry about the bed that sort of resembled a happy dance.

“Well, why didn't you say so in the first place? The way you explain it, I must say, it sounds very convoluted.”

Jane didn't stick around to argue. She scampered out the door (which involved flattening herself in a move that defied physics) and left G pacing and waiting. And waiting and pacing. And then pacing and waiting some more. All the while, looking out the window for signs of dawn. If Jane didn't return in time, escape would be impossible. He wouldn't be able to fit out the door.

Maybe his captors didn't know about the daylight curse, and if Jane's plan didn't work, the sheer bulkiness of his physique would delay the whole burning-at-the-stake thing. Or maybe they did know, and they would come to fetch him sooner than the sunrise.

“Hurry, my lady,” he whispered as he paced and waited. “Please hurry.”

Eventually, he heard the soft clinging of metal far away, and it got closer and closer and G imagined a badger carrying a set of keys up a flight of stone stairs. He went and stood by the door, and soon enough, Jane appeared underneath.

She dropped a set of keys at his feet and nudged them as if she were in a hurry.

He snatched them up and wondered if her getaway wasn't exactly clean.

It wasn't. He heard footsteps charging up the stairwell.

Only, there were at least ten keys on the ring.

“Which one?” he muttered. He shoved the first one in the lock and jangled it about. No luck.

As he tried the second, Jane climbed up his pants and shirt and traversed across his arm as if to add urgency to the situation.

“I'm going as fast as I can!”

Third key. The lock didn't budge.

The footsteps got closer and closer.

Fourth key. Nothing.

Jane dug her tiny claws into his wrist.

“You're not helping,” G pointed out.

The guard was just outside the door. “Where are you, ye little rat!”

Jane dug her claws in again.

“Don't worry, my sweet. He didn't mean it.”