He began detailing a play-by-play about arrests and burnings and beheadings…the words right out of a textbook about Nicholas the Ironheart. His hands balled into fists so tight that his knuckles whitened. I wanted to calm him down—to talk him out of this merciless spiral—but my lips wouldn’t open. Not only did I need Nick to continue being honest with me, but I was no longer sure that kindness and mercy were the best ways to govern a sixteenth-century country. Norfolk’s allies had just tried to assassinate me, nearly killing Alice in the process. I had to stop acting like we were living in the twenty-first century. If this fight came down to Henry Howard, the traitor, or Nicholas Tudor, the reigning King of England, I would support my husband, regardless of how much blood was spilled.
“Please be careful,” I whispered, my body weak at the thought of losing him. For all I knew, harming the king was part of Henry Howard’s plan to get back at me.
Nick caught the fear in my face and tried to hug it away, a tingling heat coursing through our connected bodies. When we parted, he twisted the blue-diamond ring off his finger and slid it onto my thumb.
“What are you doing? I uttered.
He pressed his lips together, steadying himself. “My dearest love, it is time for you to make me a most important promise.”
I froze, hanging on every word that Nick struggled to say.
“Emmie, if your life is in danger—at any moment—you will wear this ring and do everything in your power to use it. Wait not for me. Do you hear me? If your life is at stake, you will go home to your time without hesitation. I must have your word.”
I couldn’t grasp my whirring thoughts. The enchanted ring had acted strangely for so long now that I wasn’t sure how many time travel trips were left in it. What if I did what Nick asked, and then I could never get back here to him? I’d made my choice—it was to stay here with Nick. We were married now, and I wasn’t going anywhere.
A sheen of tears glazed his restless eyes as they searched mine.
“I don’t want to use the ring any more without you,” I said. “When I went back to my time to get Susanna Grey, the ring was struggling to work again. I woke up in Massachusetts, like, four times. Now that we’re married…now that we’ve been together…I–I can’t be that far away from you. We have to figure something else out.”
He stepped forward, threading our hands together. “Let us then make one more vow. Should your life be at stake, you will use this ring to journey home without me. I beseech you to give me your word on that. But for any reason other, we will use this ring only together.”
I squeezed his fingers. “Only together,” I affirmed. “I’m never leaving you again unless it’s to literally save my life.”
“Only together,” he repeated in a strained voice. “We will swear it.”
We sealed the vow with a prolonged, distraught kiss, and I cried into his chest, dreading letting go.
Our goodbye was quick and heavy with despair. We couldn’t even look at each other for fear of it being the last time we ever would.
Tears streamed down my face while I watched from the upstairs window as my husband climbed aboard his coach. It careened away from the house in a fog of dust.
My back slid down the stone wall until my bottom hit the floorboards. I rested there for a while, listening to the reassuring sound of the guards’ footsteps pacing the manor downstairs. A scary number of people wanted my head on a stick, and I was pretty sure that Robin House didn’t have a panic room. I had to come up with a hiding place where I could fall asleep in case the assassins figured out where I was and stormed the house—if the enchanted ring even worked properly. I slid it onto my thumb and curled my fingers over the smooth stone.
So much had changed in a handful of months. I’d gone from arguing with Nick over my right to use the blue-diamond ring whenever I wanted to hating the idea of traveling to my time without him. Things had become worse here than I could have imagined, but what mattered most to me now was that we stayed together.
Only together.
As long as Henry Howard doesn’t jam Nick’s head onto a pike and parade it through the city of London.
A descending curtain of dread sent me to my feet. I had to dig myself out of my grisly thoughts before they buried me alive. I moved to the cloudy standing mirror and sized up my appearance, straightening my lacy sleeves. After dragging an ivory comb through my knotted hair, I braided the unruly waves and pinned a hood over the top. Despite being under glorified house arrest, I was still the wife of the King of England.
My young maidservant Clemence entered with a buttery-smelling custard tart and a bowl of winter berries. I wanted her to stay and chat with me, but she didn’t dare impose, and I was too slow to request it. The door shut behind her, and I ate in gloomy silence except for the soft slurps of my lips savoring creamed sugar.
Those sounds—alongside the clink of pewter plates, the thud of oak doors closing, and the shuffling boots of guards on patrol—became my life for the next few weeks. I stopped counting how long I’d been at Robin House after seven days because time was moving agonizingly slowly and keeping track only made it worse.
During our breathless farewell, Nick had explained that we couldn’t write to each other and risk the letters being intercepted. He kept to his word, and no news came. Knowing nothing about his efforts to capture Henry Howard was like living in purgatory. One minute I’d be dusting the bookcase and imagining the former duke spearing Nick with a ten-foot sword; the next, I’d be perked up by a vision of my king in a parade of victory. Which one was it to be?
To release some of the nervous energy bubbling up inside me, I asked the chief guard, Joseph Blackburn, if I could jog along some of the wild pathways around the house if I took a bodyguard with me. He agreed with visible reluctance, and I set off in my leather boots down the slope to the birch trees and back again, with four plain-clothes guards trailing me. On day two, a painful blister had formed where the knot of my garter held up my woolen hose. Without any gym shoes, I was going to have to make do with brisk walks instead of jogging. I fell into a favorite route that ended atop the grassy hill overlooking the hamlet, where chirping birds rollicked in the rustling trees. I’d sit there for a while and watch the villagers tending to their winter gardens, taken by the simplicity of their lives. I ached to go down there, not only to see a sixteenth-century farming settlement up close, but to feel less alone here. Aside from Clemence and the guards, I hadn’t seen a human face in weeks.
When I asked Mister Blackburn if I could visit the village, he declined with a physical recoil. Later that night, I overheard him arguing with one of the younger guards. The kid warned Blackburn that refusing the queen’s request could be a shortcut to the Tower of London—or worse—if the king learned of it. The next morning, Mister Blackburn apologized and offered to take me to the hamlet himself if I agreed to avoid the villagers, in case any of them had been in the city for my coronation—as unlikely as that was—and recognized me. Shadows circled his bloodshot eyes. The poor guy hadn’t slept a wink over this thing.
I borrowed some clothes from a confused Clemence, noting the relief that blew across Mister Blackburn’s face. No one would guess that I was the persecuted queen in a tawny woolen kirtle and a plain apron and coif. I wore no jewelry but kept the blue-diamond ring close to me, hiding it on my thumb inside a pair of woolen gloves.