“And now you!” Sara shouted.
“Yes, me, Jane the Fool! And cock-a-doodle-doo to you!” She made a huge sweeping bow and then began dancing in circles around them.
“You idiot, you! Follow me to the laundry,” Sara yelled to the guards.
Bettina and Jane exchanged nervous glances.
“God speed the child,” Jane whispered, taking Bettina’s hand and giving it a squeeze.
“Try not to worry,” Bettina said. “Rose has a knack for just disappearing.”
“That she does. Have never quite understood it. But she does have that knack.”
Finally Sara and the two guardsmen arrived at the laundry. Clouds of steam from the huge vats of boiling water hung in the air. A dozen red-faced women stood at scrub boards scouring clothes in basins. Another very hefty woman walked up to the trough into which fresh hot water was poured.
“Out o’ the way, lads, unless you want to get boiled like hams.”
“Where’s Rose?” she demanded.
“Rose?” asked one of the laundresses.
“Yes, Rose the seamstress,” Sara barked.
“I could have sworn she was here a minute ago with that fresh pile of diapers to be washed. But she vanished. Just vanished into thin air. Sweet girl,” one of the laundresses said, scratching her head.
“Hardly thin air in here,” said another. “Thick as fog off Ballyhoo Rock.”
Chapter 32
“Someone over There Misses You”
Marisol greeted Rose and her grandmother the next morning. She had a huge smile on her face.
“Welcome, Abuela.”
“Abuela!” Gran exclaimed. “Isn’t that the loveliest-sounding word for grandmother? Yes, I’m back, and I have a clock inside me.”
“It’s a pacemaker, Gran. Not really a clock.”
“No matter.” Gran waved her hand. “It keeps time for my heart. That’s how I think of it.”
“I’ll get Betty to help you upstairs.” Then Marisol burst out, “Mr. Gold says my papers might come today!”
“Oh!” Rose and her gran both exclaimed.
“Wonderful. Just wonderful, Marisol. I shall truly be your abuela.”
When Rose and Betty got her upstairs and tucked into bed, Rosalinda beckoned her granddaughter to come closer.
“I want to tell you something.” Rose bent over. Her gran began to whisper in her ear.
“You know, I think you’ve spent enough time with me. I do think you should be getting back, dear child.”
“Getting back, Gran?”
“You know where. It came upon me in a dream when I was in the hospital. I just have this feeling that someone over there misses you.”
“Okay, Gran. But it’s daytime.”
“What’s the difference? Day, night—whatever, as you youngsters say!”
“All right,” Rose said, and began heading downstairs toward the greenhouse.
“Where are you going?” Marisol asked.
“Uh, just to the greenhouse to check on something. Be right back.”
“I’m sure you will,” Marisol said with a sly smile.
Rose walked into the greenhouse. She stopped as always by the graftling.
“Lookin’ good!” she murmured. She swore it had grown an inch in the last couple of days.
It was June. No baby had yet appeared. But had expectations changed? Not a wit—at least not that Rose could see. Although everyone knew there was little history of a baby ever taking eleven months to be born, everyone was talking of its birth with as much certainty as before. In fact, the court goldsmith was said to have already arrived at Hampton Court. Bettina had told her, “Any minute he’ll be consulting with Her Majesty about the birth medals.” Rose was trying to figure out how she would explain all this to her father. She had to choose the moment carefully. Then, as she crossed an interior courtyard, she saw two men coming her way. Prince Felipe and—OMG, Dad! What could she do?
“Ah, the little seamstress!” the prince called out. She could see the color drain from her father’s face. Rose dipped into a deep curtsy. “Ah, my dear, you are a beam of sunshine on this rather dreary day. Now, I have completely forgotten your name . . . ?”
“Rose,” she whispered, and saw her dad’s lips barely moving around the sound of her name.
“Exactly. Yes, pardon me for not remembering,” the prince said. He turned to Nicholas Oliver. “Now, this young lady, good sir—she deserves a medal. She has sewn many of the garments for our expected child. Perhaps a rose medallion. A rose for a rose!”
“Indeed, Your Highness!” Rose could not believe this conversation. Her father’s eyes seemed to ignite with a glittering fury.
“But I believe, Your Highness,” Rose began to say, “that it is against the custom of the court for anybody except for a Tudor to wear such a rose—the Tudor Rose.”
The prince rolled his eyes. “By the blood of our savior, that is a stupid rule.”
“But so it is—a law,” Rose’s father said, regaining his calm.
“I must be off, Your Highness.” She paused. “Sir,” she added, nodding to her father. “I have an errand outside the palace. I must go to the apothecary for some herbs Dr. Calagila has ordered to be on hand for the birth.” She looked directly at her father as she spoke.
Half an hour later as Rose rounded a wooded corner on the high road to the village, Nicholas Oliver stepped out from behind a great oak. He looked different. He was not wearing his court clothes at all. The embroidered doublet was gone. Instead he wore a simple leather jerkin. Also replaced was the plush velvet bonnet. On his head her father wore a woven wide-brimmed hat to protect him from the sun. He was in the dress of a yeoman farmer.
“Dad! Oh, Dad, are you mad at me?!”
“Never.” She ran into his arms. “Come, child, let us walk as a father and daughter should, hand in hand down this road.” He paused as if he had just thought of something. “Oh God’s toes, I nearly forgot. I have something to show you. Come with me.” He walked toward the enormous old oak tree. At the back there was a patch of bare trunk where the bark had fallen or been scraped away.
“So you see it?” he asked. She looked up to where he was pointing. There was a heart, and within the heart were the initials N.O. + R.A.
Rose lifted her hand and touched the letters. She felt a tingling run down her spine. “My mom touched this and carved her name.”
“Indeed. I know what you’re thinking. Tree hugger!”
It surprised Rose that he knew this expression, but her mom was a big environmentalist. She wouldn’t have liked the idea of carving anything into a tree.
“But,” continued her father, “the bark had already been stripped away. I told her many people declared their love this way. Why not us? And she asked me how old I thought the tree is. I said maybe five hundred years or so. And all of a sudden she said, ‘Give me your dagger, Nick.’ And she is the one who carved it.”
“Why? Why do you suppose she did this?”
Her father waited a long time to reply. “I think she was already feeling she might have to leave for good. I think it was a kind of goodbye to me.” His eyes filled with tears. “But look, here you are, saying hello to me.”
“So, Dad, you’re really not mad at me for coming back?” He shook his head. “Dad, I want you to come back with me to my home in Indiana, and Franny too.”
A pained look crossed his face. “Franny is in danger, grave danger. Through my . . . my contacts, I know her name is on a list.”
Rose gasped. “No! No!”
“I’m trying to get her out.”
“Out to where?”
“But that’s not all, Rose. I just found out this afternoon from Jane.”
“Jane the Bald?” So Jane was a spy as well! Rose had suspected that.
“Yes, Jane the Fool, who is no fool at all. Jane feels that your name might be on a list as well.”
“Mine? Why me?”
“Has the queen asked you to sew
any clothes for the baby of late?”
Come to think of it, she hadn’t worked on any clothes. Perhaps some muslin diapers, but that was all. Sara had been called back into service as the principal seamstress. And Rose had successfully avoided crossing paths with her. But she had sewn nothing since the gowns with the bunnies.
“She thinks the baby is cursed because you are not a true Catholic.”
There was only one person who could have told the queen something like that—Sara!
“It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. When she gets an idea in her head, she pays no heed to anything else.”
“Sara Morton put that thought in her head.”
“Never mind who did it. It’s why I came. I wasn’t sure you were back. But I had a feeling.”
“You must be the only one.”
“The only one what?” he asked.
“The only one who knew I had left. No one ever seems to notice. It’s as if I leave a shadow behind that just carries on.”
“That was the way it was with your mum. But when you truly love someone, as I loved your mother, you begin to sense when she is not here. When you are simply dealing with . . . a specter, a ghost of that person.”
“It’s all so strange, Dad. In my world, my century, the twenty-first, I could die in a car crash like Mom, or some awful accident.” At this moment she thought of Brianna in the intensive care unit, having a machine breathe for her. “Or just die of old age. But here . . . here . . .”
“Here you could die very young, tied to a chair with kindling piled about your legs and set afire with a torch.”
“I have to get out.”
“And leave no shadows behind. You must get out forever, Rose. Forever!”
“How?”
“I have a plan. There is a ship leaving from Southampton.”
“But Southampton is far from here.”
“We’ll leave tonight. But do not go back to the palace. I’ll come on a horse and bring another as soon as it’s dark. Meet me at the split in the Blackheath Road. There’s a grove of trees on the left side. I’ll also bring clothes. Boy’s clothes. We’ll ride there. It will take two days.”
“And Franny?”
“Franny is already there.”
“But will I be missed by the palace?”
“No, Jane will cover for you.”
“Jane?”
“Jane and Bettina.”
“But where are we going?”
“Across the channel to France.”
“France!”
“Yes, the court of King Henri, but more important, you will serve the Little Queen.”
“Little Queen?”
“Mary, Queen of Scots, the queen without a country.”
Chapter 33
Welcome to America
The light lingered during the long June day. It would not grow dark for another two hours or so. Her father had said he would not come until dark. Rose sat down beneath the oak tree—just under the heart carved by her mother, the tree hugger. Rose giggled a bit when she thought of those two words coming out of her dad’s mouth. How strange this all was. But now under the spreading branches of the oak she felt not just safe but happy. But should she feel safe? Oh, give me this moment, just this moment, she thought, for it was almost as if both her parents were right there embracing her, wrapping their arms around her in the leafy shade of the tree. She drifted off to sleep—or was it a dream? But someone was struggling—struggling for breath. Then she heard the sound of laughter, celebration—and there was a balloon bouquet. I want to go back . . . just for a bit.
And she was back, standing in the greenhouse. The graftling had grown now perhaps three inches and she saw the swell of buds forming on the stem, but from the entry hall there were raucous, joyful sounds. She rushed out of the greenhouse. Susan Gold, her father, and his wife, Eleanor, were all there, and Marisol was holding a bouquet of red, white, and blue balloons.
Susan squealed. “The papers came through! They came through. Your grandmother is officially Marisol’s sponsor!”
“And,” Sam Gold said, “Marisol has taken her first step toward citizenship.”
“And,” Susan added, “certain Mean Queens are in deep doo-doo.”
Rose rushed toward Marisol and hugged her. She actually lifted her off her feet.
“Now I’ll drive you girls to school,” Susan’s father said.
“Wait a minute,” Rose said. She bit her lip lightly. “How is Brianna? If it hadn’t been for her . . .”
“We don’t know yet,” Sam Gold replied. “Her condition is still very precarious.”
“I wish there were some way to tell her that Marisol is safe.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Susan said. “At least not right now.”
Twenty minutes later, Rose and Susan, with Susan’s father, walked into Ms. Fuentes’s office. Mr. Ross was also there, looking very somber.
“And so we meet again!” Ms. Fuentes said, bitterly casting her eyes at the three girls—Carrie, Lisa, and Jenny—who were sitting in chairs against the wall. “I was telling the girls about my experiences coming to this country as a child, an unaccompanied minor. It is unbelievable to me that you three would do what you did. Steal into my office and call Immigration and Customs Enforcement to report Marisol from my telephone. First of all, that is breaking and entering.”
“It was all Brianna’s idea.”
“Brianna’s idea!” Rose roared. “That is a total lie. It was Brianna who warned us that you had done this. No! No! NO! You are all liars. And now Brianna might be dying.”
Rose felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Mr. Gold. She stopped talking.
He stepped closer to the three girls. “Carrie, Lisa, Jenny, look at me.” Reluctantly the girls shifted their gazes from the floor to Samuel Gold’s face. It was a long face with a somewhat gray cast. Rose felt as if she had never seen such a stern and serious face. It could have been carved in granite. “Ms. Fuentes and I have discussed appropriate measures to be taken for this behavior.”
Punishment, Rose thought. Why doesn’t he say that?
“We have concluded that every day after school, you must report to immigration court. You will be met there by some of our best lawyers as they represent young minors who have either arrived alone or been separated from a parent at the border. The first case on the docket today is that of Julieta Ariz. She is four years old. She was separated from her older brother at the border.” He paused as if to let that sink in. “She is four years old and will walk into a courtroom only accompanied by a lawyer she has just met. That lawyer is Louise Ryan, who will plead her case. Little Julieta is not a criminal. She is a child who came to this country like so many of us, or our parents or great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents. And they saw those words on the metal plaque at the Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
A quiet descended on the room as Mr. Gold turned to Marisol. “Marisol, welcome to America.”
That evening Marisol helped Rose in the greenhouse after they had finished their homework. “We need to thin out those love-lies-bleeding sproutlings.”
“What funny names for flowers.”
“Old English names, I think,” Rose said.
Marisol looked up at her. “Are you going back?” They had not talked about Rose’s trips, her time migrations, since that evening when Rose had tried to take Marisol with her.
“I think so. . . . There are still some . . . some unfinished things there. I won’t be long.”
Marisol leaned across the tray where she was starting to thin out the sprouts. “Can I . . .”
Rose gasped. “You want to come?”
“Oh, no. No, I’m here to stay, but I want to watch you go.”
“You do?” Marisol nodded. “Well, I suppose so.”
“How do you do it?”
“I’m not really sure how it happens. I sort of . . . well . . . you know . . . concentrate on something.” Rose’s hand went to her neck, where once for a brief moment in time she had worn the locket her father had made of the Tudor Rose.
Marisol watched, mesmerized, as a vaporous mist began to form around Rose and she slowly dissolved, leaving just a shadow behind. Then a whisper came from the mist. “I’ll be back in just a minute or two.”
Marisol nodded. “I know,” she said softly. “I know, amiga . . . hasta luego.”
Chapter 34
Another Mary, Another Queen
Rose recalled the swells beneath the ship—the Flying Sparrow. She remembered herself and Franny holding hands tightly as they saw the coast of France appearing like a sketchy line on the horizon at dawn. It was a memory she had not forgotten in the least, yet she had not directly experienced it. Her shadow had. Her ghostly counterpart that seemed to carry on without her. Perhaps what she remembered so clearly was the air, the wind—salt air brought on a brisk breeze that had scrubbed away the terrible scent of the burnings. By the time they had sailed out of the harbor of Southampton, over two hundred people had died at the stake. Rose’s father had not come. This of course had shocked her. She had assumed he would accompany her. “But someday,” he had promised. “Someday.” But did someday mean just to France or all the way to her home century and Indiana?
Franny had been in the scullery at Hatfield, but had advanced to become an assistant to the pastry chef on occasion. Mrs. Belson, the cook at Hatfield, had taught her well. By this time Rose and Franny had been in the French court for several months. And finally she had remembered to bring her iPhone! In addition, Rose had the diary she had started when she was at Hampton Court Palace during Queen Mary’s interminable pregnancy. She wasn’t sure how she happened to have it, but she found it in her pocket on the ship while crossing the Channel, along with her iPhone. A great export-import feat to have both. She hadn’t dared use the iPhone yet. But she would.
Tangled in Time 2 Page 19
