Sent

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Jonah wasn’t sure what he expected Richard to do next. But as soon as everyone else was gone, he threw himself against the stone altar, completely apart from all the ghostly tracers.

  “Dear Father,” he moaned. “Thou knowest—”

  “God knoweth everything you’ve ever done!” Chip interrupted.

  “Please! I am a godly man!” Richard begged.

  “Do godly men kill children?” Chip sneered.

  Richard slowly raised his head, his brown hair splaying out on his shoulders.

  “I didn’t … it was not I who …” He was almost weeping now, deep in anguish. “What wouldst Thou have me do?”

  “Renounce the throne!” Chip commanded.

  Richard froze. When he spoke again, he sounded like he was trying very hard to control his voice.

  “Renounce it in whose favor?” he asked. “Who else could protect England so well as I? All I have done, I have done for the good of my country.”

  “That’s what traitors always tell themselves,” Chip said scornfully.

  Jonah was amazed that Chip could sound so strong and authoritative. Anytime Jonah tried to sound like that, his voice cracked. In a weird way Chip was even starting to seem less see-through.

  It makes sense, Jonah thought. If someone sounds strong, your brain and your eyes start thinking that they look strong too. A nearly transparent kid just couldn’t look that powerful.

  “But that is the truth!” Richard protested.

  “Your version of truth,” Chip scoffed. “God will judge you based on, uh, the true truth.”

  Jonah hoped that Richard wouldn’t notice that Chip had faltered. “True truth” didn’t sound authoritative. It just sounded stupid.

  But Richard was staring up, right at the place where Chip was standing. A look of horror was spreading over his face.

  “I see you,” he whispered.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was hard to tell who looked more stunned now, Richard or Chip.

  “I … I …,” Chip stammered, looking helplessly down at his hands.

  Katherine started to bolt toward Chip, almost knocking over one of the stone statues in her haste. Jonah reached out his arm to stop her.

  It’s just an illusion, he wanted to assure her. A trick of the eye. I thought I was seeing things too, just because Chip is doing such a great job. … Richard can’t see Chip. Chip’s invisible to everyone in the fifteenth century. Remember? So are we.

  But Richard’s eyes followed Katherine’s motion, and Jonah’s.

  “There are more of you?” he murmured. “Children? And in such strange garb …”

  Now it was Jonah’s turn to look down at himself. He wasn’t see-through anymore. He wasn’t translucent. His hands were flesh colored again, not crystal. He could even see that the H of the HARRIS MIDDLE SCHOOL on his sweatshirt was starting to peel off. A thread stuck out from a worn place on the knees of his blue jeans. The glow-in-the-dark green stripes on his tennis shoes gleamed.

  Jonah felt paralyzed.

  How could we not be invisible anymore? he wondered in agony. We shouldn’t be standing here in twenty-first-century clothes in the middle of the fifteenth century. It’s too dangerous to time. And … to us.

  Richard half turned, like he was about to call for his guards.

  But Katherine stepped forward, calmly now.

  “This is what people wear in heaven,” she said. “Don’t you … I mean, do you not recognize your own nephews?” She pointed first at Chip, then Alex, who was standing among the statues as still as if he, too, were made of stone. “They were changed by, uh, what they went through. Dying so tragically … they were transformed. That’s how it works.” She lowered her voice and glared at Richard. “Not that you’ll ever get to see heaven, after what you did.”

  Richard looked from Chip to Alex.

  “My nephews?” he murmured, his voice cracking. “Haunting me?”

  “And we plan to do a lot of it!” Chip threatened.

  Footsteps sounded at the back of the shrine.

  “Richard?” a voice called softly. “Everyone’s waiting.”

  “Buckingham,” Richard murmured. Determination gleamed in his eyes—maybe it was a determination not to believe in ghosts. “My lord,” he called back to his friend. “Wouldst thou …”

  Jonah didn’t want to stick around to see exactly what he was going to say.

  “Run!” Jonah cried.

  “This way!” Alex agreed.

  He led the others behind the statues to a small door in the wall at the back of the shrine. He yanked on it, hard, and it swung open—Maybe they don’t have door locks yet, Jonah thought disjointedly. And then he couldn’t think anything else because he was concentrating so hard on scrambling down dark, winding stairs. And he was listening so hard for footsteps behind him—footsteps of people who weren’t wearing tennis shoes. He could hear only Chip’s Nikes pounding on the stone steps, Katherine’s panicked panting. …

  The stairway opened into a long, dark hallway lit solely by intermittent torches propped on the wall.

  “Is anyone following us?” Alex stopped to ask.

  “I can’t hear anything but Katherine breathing,” Jonah complained, breathing hard himself. “Hold your breath!”

  She gasped and puffed out her cheeks, silently. Jonah did the same. Now he could hear only his own pulse pounding in his ears. He gave up.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” he said, looking around frantically.

  “Not looking like this, we can’t,” Katherine countered.

  “Calm down,” Chip said. “Richard isn’t going to send his guards after ghosts.”

  “Do you think he really believed we were ghosts?” Jonah asked.

  “Well, once he saw us, he wasn’t going to believe it was just his conscience speaking to him,” Chip said disgustedly.

  Jonah leaned back against a damp wall. Since no guards had shown up yet, he was inclined to believe that they were safe. For the moment.

  “But why did we stop being invisible?” Alex asked. “What changed? I would have thought it’d be like Newton’s first law of motion—anything in motion will remain in motion, anything at rest will remain at rest, anything invisible will remain invisible. … Jonah, let me see that Elucidator.”

  Jonah dug the rocklike object out of his pocket. Now that it was visible too, he could make out a screen full of glowing words: RESTORATION COMPLETE. ALL SYSTEMS RETURNED TO ORIGINAL SETTINGS.

  “Oh,” Jonah mumbled, holding the Elucidator out to Alex so he could see the screen too. “Great timing.”

  Alex shook his head.

  “We should study this,” Alex said, peering down at the Elucidator. “See if we can find some instructions for using it …”

  “Don’t you think we should hide first?” Katherine asked. She paused. “Is someone coming?”

  Jonah tilted his head back into the stairwell, but the footsteps he heard weren’t coming from above. They were far down the hall, in the shadows.

  “Hurry!” Jonah said, pointing in the opposite direction. “That way!”

  It was ridiculous to try to combine tiptoeing and running, but that’s what they all attempted as they scurried away. When they’d gone several yards, the hallway branched. Jonah peeked around the corner into the new corridor, which was equally dark and shadowed.

  Er—no. Some of those shadows were men in dark robes.

  “Hasten your steps!” a voice called far down the hallway. “The king wishes you monks to line his path through the church.”

  Jonah threw a glance over his shoulder at the men advancing behind them, then looked down the other corridor again.

  “We’re trapped!” Jonah whispered. “We can’t walk past this hallway without those monks seeing us. And we can’t go back. …”

  Chip surprised him by dropping down to the ground and half crawling, half wriggling forward.

  “Come on!” he whispered. “It’s darker down on the floor. They won’t se
e us here.”

  Jonah, Katherine, and Alex followed his example. None of the monks cried out, “Wait! Who’s that crawling on the floor? And why are they wearing such strange clothes?”

  When they were safely on the other side of the corridor, and back on their feet, Jonah leaned over and whispered in Chip’s ear, “How’d you figure that out so quickly?”

  Chip snorted.

  “Used to do it all the time sneaking out of the nursery when I was a little boy, back at Ludlow Castle,” he muttered. “There are some advantages to bad lighting.”

  It was so hard to understand how Chip could have memories of two completely different childhoods, separated by more than five hundred years. Jonah was just as glad that there wasn’t time to think about it. They had to keep rushing forward, turning shadowy corners, advancing from one flickering pool of torchlight to the next.

  And then they ran out of hallway.

  Stairs lay before them, as dark and winding as the ones they’d used before.

  “Should we …?” Katherine asked.

  Jonah could hear the footsteps approaching behind them: closer and closer and closer. …

  “It’s our only choice,” he decided.

  He began scrambling up the stairs tripping on the uneven stones. He fell. He got up. He fell again. He got up again.

  “Speed it up!” Alex hissed from the back of the line. “Those monks are moving fast!”

  At the top of the stairs Jonah spun around the corner. …

  And slammed right into yet another monk.

  NINETEEN

  “Oof,” the monk said.

  He was a large man with a distended belly. Jonah practically bounced back.

  “Sorry,” Jonah muttered. He thought that maybe if he kept his head down and brushed on by as quickly as possible, the monk wouldn’t notice his twenty-first-century clothes. It was almost dim enough by the stairs. The monk wouldn’t be able to see the glow of the tracer moving past them, and who could tell, maybe the monk was nearsighted, maybe they hadn’t invented glasses yet. …

  Then Jonah saw that there were four other monks behind the first one, all also stopped in their tracks while their tracers glided forward. And all of them were staring, openmouthed, at Jonah.

  So much for the possible benefits of myopia.

  Alex, Katherine, and Chip rounded the last corner of the stairs behind Jonah and slammed to a halt, each one bumping into the next. The combined forward motion of all three of them shoved Alex against Jonah’s back. Jonah lurched forward and back, trying to keep his balance.

  Incredibly enough, the five monks were capable of letting their jaws drop even farther toward the floor.

  For a moment everyone just stared at one another. Then Katherine stepped out past Jonah and Alex.

  “Hi!” she said, as perky as a beauty contestant. “Uh, greetings! Nice to meet you!”

  Five pairs of medieval monk eyes blinked incredulously.

  Jonah hadn’t given much thought to what his sister was wearing. It wasn’t something he usually paid attention to, and he’d been a little preoccupied lately. But he noticed now. She was wearing blue jeans with some sort of weird stitching near the bottom, with shiny red thread. She had a sweatshirt knotted around her waist, and a T-shirt with sparkly beading on the front that spelled out CHEER!

  She looked completely and utterly wrong next to all those black-robed monks. Jonah still knew almost nothing about the fifteenth century, but even he could tell that not a single part of her outfit would have been possible in 1483.

  “Ah …” The big-bellied monk had to clear his throat and try again. “Art thou a female creature or a male creature?” he asked Katherine.

  Katherine giggled.

  All the monks must have had younger sisters who giggled in the same way, because they seemed to relax a little bit.

  “Oh, I’m a girl,” Katherine said. She looked down at her clothes. “I just … uh …”

  “We’re travelers from a foreign land,” Jonah said quickly. He felt like grinning at his own brilliance. “That’s why we’re dressed so strangely. We must look really freaky to you.”

  All five monks looked at him blankly. “Freaky” must not be a fifteenth-century word.

  Jonah went on, trying to cover his mistake.

  “We came to London for the coronation,” he said. He had another flash of brilliance. “But we were surprised when we arrived this morning. …” He tried to make his voice sound innocently confused. “We had heard that the new king was a young boy, Edward the Fifth? But now we hear the crowds cheering for Richard the Third. Who is this Richard? What happened to Edward?”

  The big-bellied monk narrowed his eyes.

  “You are a foreigner and you dare to question our ways?” he asked.

  Jonah took a step back, bumping into Chip and Alex again.

  “Oh, we’re not questioning anything,” Katherine said quickly. “You can have whoever you want as king.”

  The monks continued to look at her as if she’d suddenly appeared from Mars. Jonah realized they wouldn’t take anything she said seriously.

  “It’s just … it’s just …,” he began. But he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Alex shoved Jonah aside.

  “We’re just attempting to comprehend your ways,” he said, holding his hands out in front of him, like someone trying to show he wasn’t carrying any weapons. “’Tis humility to know one’s own ignorance, is it not? ‘The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.’”

  “So true,” one of the monks murmured. “So true.”

  “Well, you know, that’s a quote from Shakesp …” A panicked look spread over Alex’s face. “Uh, never mind,” he muttered.

  Jonah guessed that meant Shakespeare wasn’t famous yet. Maybe he hadn’t even been born.

  The oldest-looking monk—a bald man with bushy eyebrows—stepped forward.

  “I’ll give you some advice, since you appear to be innocent fools,” he said. “It’s never wise to question the circumstances of a king’s ascension whilst he yet sits on the throne. A short memory can be a gift.”

  Now, what did that mean? Jonah really needed a better translator. “Ascension” means … what? “Rising”? What’s that got to do with kings? Oh. Rising to become king?

  “But Edward the Fifth was king,” Chip said in a hard, unyielding voice. “What happened to Edward the Fifth? Does he not yet live?”

  Okay, so now I need a translator for Chip, too, Jonah thought. “Does he not yet live?” would be the same as … uh, let’s see … “Isn’t he still alive?”

  The old monk glanced over his shoulder, as if afraid of being overheard.

  “Dead or alive, it matters not,” he said softly. “He is king no more.”

  “‘It matters not’? ‘It matters not’?” Chip repeated. His face was so red suddenly he looked like he might explode. “How can it not matter if a king is alive or dead?”

  One of the younger monks let out a snort of laughter.

  “That’s like one of those riddles they ask us,” he said in an overly loud bumpkin’s voice. “Even I know the answer to that one. Being alive or dead don’t matter if he’s not going to be king, neither way.” He chuckled again, at the apparently stunning possibility that he might be wiser than the strangely dressed “foreigners.” Then he stopped and looked back anxiously at the older monk. “Of course, his soul would be in heaven if he was dead.”

  One of the other monks, a tall, thin man with ears that stuck out like jug handles, leaned in conspiratorially.

  “See, what happened was, they found out the boy’s parents hadn’t even been married,” he said, whispering gleefully, like this was the juiciest gossip he’d ever heard.

  “They were too!” Chip retorted instantly. He sprang forward, his hands balled up into fists, like he intended to start throwing punches at the monks. Jonah grabbed his arms, trying to hold him back.

  “How would you know, if yo
u are foreigners who only arrived this morning?” the old monk asked, pursing his lips thoughtfully.

  “It’s … it’s what we heard,” Jonah said, struggling with Chip.

  Katherine began tugging on Chip’s arm too, and that helped some. Jonah wished that Alex would help as well, but he was just standing there muttering, “Not married? Not married?”

  “Well,” the jug-eared monk said, lowering his voice again. “I don’t know when you heard that, but Dr. Ralph Shaw preached on June twenty-second, two whole weeks ago, that Edward the Fourth was pre-contracted with another woman before he married Elizabeth Woodville. So none of their children are legitimate. So of course Edward the Fifth couldn’t inherit the throne.”

  Chip stopped struggling. His face instantly went from furious red to ghostly pale.

  “People heard this?” he whispered. “People believe this?”

  Katherine stopped tugging on Chip’s arm and began patting it comfortingly.

  “That’s crazy,” she said. “Even if, uh, Edward’s father thought about marrying someone else first, that shouldn’t change anything about who he ended up marrying. Or about Edward being king.”

  The old monk frowned at Katherine.

  “I don’t know what it’s like where you’re from,” he said in a tone that implied that she must be from someplace awful. “But here marriage is a sacred rite. Do you take the sacraments lightly? Do you mock the sanctity of holy matrimony?” His voice was getting louder and louder, more enraged. “Are you even Christian?”

  How had it come to this? Jonah wondered. One minute they were listening to gossip about people getting engaged and married, and now this old monk was towering over them, glaring, shaking his finger at them.

  “I’ll have you know I—,” Katherine began indignantly. She was standing on her tiptoes, like she was ready to face off with the old monk, nose to nose, glaring eye to glaring eye.

  “Womenfolk,” Alex interrupted her, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. He gripped her arm warningly. “You know how their feeble minds fail to grasp the subtleties of proper doctrine. She’s a little weak minded anyway, as you can tell from her choice of apparel.”

  Now Katherine’s jaw dropped. Her eyes bugged out. She seemed stunned beyond words.