by Renee Duke
“He’s heading for the secret passage,” Dane cried. “Jack, stop. Wait for us.”
Jack did not as much as pause. A few seconds later, the storeroom that gave access to the passage suddenly blazed with light. By the time Dane and Paige got to it, Jack had unbolted the passage door and was standing inside the passage reciting the connecting rhyme.
“Ancient portal, hear this plea,
Open for thy golden key.
Feel its power,
Know its might,
Put the Mists of Time to flight.”
The mist began to form around him. Confused and alarmed, Dane and Paige leapt forward, each grabbing him by an arm. Moments later, all three were standing in the passage as it had been when it was first constructed.
As the mist cleared, Jack swayed in Paige and Dane’s grasp. He had been too distraught to remember his wrist bands and was feeling the full effects of the time transfer. Dane kept hold of him while he took a few deep breaths, but Paige let go so that she could wriggle into the dressing gown she had scooped up before leaving her room. Once Jack had recovered, he shook Dane off and headed for the section of the passage going up into the house. Exchanging exasperated looks, his cousins followed.
They caught up with him by the stairs, where he had stopped to watch a dim light moving up above. The person holding what they assumed to be a lantern paused before starting his descent and was halfway down the stairs before they could make out his features.
“Ned!” Dane cried, running up to join him. Dickon was there too, his hand on Ned’s arm. Both were wearing nightgowns and looked very frightened.
“It is you,” said Ned, sounding relieved. “I prayed the bright lights beneath us were made by your torches of the future.”
The princes followed Dane down to Paige and Jack.
“Your garments are most strange,” said Dickon, staring. “Are they of your time?”
“They’re what we wear at night,” Dane told him. “We came in too much of a hurry to change. What’s been happening since we left you in London? How did you get here?”
“We met with treachery, just as you foretold,” said Ned. “’Twas just after we had seen our mother. Our escort was set upon not far from Lady Stanley’s house. They fought most valiantly but were greatly outnumbered. We could do naught but cower in the shadows.”
“’Twas then that Miles and Will appeared,” said Dickon. “In all the confusion, they were able to seize us and flee.”
“And they brought you here?” said Dane.
“With men scouring all of London for us, they did not want to risk seeking out our uncle of Buckingham,” Ned told him. “They thought Windsor would be a safer refuge. We arrived in the early hours of yesterday morning.”
“Wasn’t the Duke of Buckingham with you when you were attacked?” Dane asked.
“Nay, only his men. He was to join us when we began our journey north.”
“So you don’t hold him responsible?”
“Only of being a fool,” Ned replied with a snort of contempt. “He does not credit women with the wit to play him false. It did not occur to him that the Tudor’s agents might strike at us through Lady Stanley. She has proved herself a ruthless dame, a mother determined to serve the interests of her son. Other mothers’ sons are of no consequence. ’Twas doubtless our own mother’s desire to see us that caused her to forget that. For she, too, was completely taken in by Lady Stanley’s sweet words.”
“Uncle Richard is not likely to blame her,” said Dickon, “but methinks he will be less charitable toward Uncle Henry.”
“We started to suspect Lady Stanley after we got home,” Dane went on. “We would have warned you, but we couldn’t get up to London. We didn’t think about making a connection with you here. What are you doing in the secret passage?”
The frightened look returned to the princes’ faces. “Alas, Will must have been intercepted, or mayhap simply overheard, when he returned to London to inform Uncle Henry of our whereabouts,” said Ned. “However it came about, Tudor’s agents know we are here. Some rough fellows entered the house this night intent on making an end of us.”
“They doubtless believed us to be asleep when they crept up to our chamber,” said Dickon. “By good fortune, we were not. With Miles and a servant of the Wolverton’s on guard outside our door, we heard cries of warning. But I fear the knaves soon overpowered them. We fled into the passage as they burst through the door.”
“Did they see you go into the passage?” Dane asked anxiously.
“I…I believe so,” said Ned. “But we managed to close it behind us, and they know not how to open it.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re not going to try,” said Paige. “And they just might get lucky. We’d better get you out of here.”
Trying to combine speed with caution, they moved back along the passage throwing fearful glances behind them as they went. Once or twice Dane was sure he could hear footsteps, and prayed they were merely an echo of their own.
When they got to the hidden exit leading out into the woods, he pulled a section of the bushes apart and then hastily replaced it.
“There’s a couple of guys out there with lanterns,” he whispered, turning to the others.
“Maybe the house has been alerted, and the Wolvertons’ servants are trying to find the princes before the assassins do,” said Jack.
“I don’t think so,” said Dane. “They’re beating the bushes with clubs.”
“If the rogues be searching the woods for us, we dare not go outside,” Ned declared.
“No. We’ll have to go back to the cellar and get into the main part of the house from there,” said Dane.
“The door into the cellar doesn’t exist yet,” Jack reminded him. “The only access to the house is from Ned and Dickon’s room.”
“The men who are after them probably aren’t there now. If they’re looking for them out in woods, they must have quit looking for the passage.”
“Suppose they haven’t?” said Paige. “What if those guys out there are other members of the gang, and the first ones are still inside?”
“That’s a chance we’ll have to take. Come on.”
They hurried back along the passage intending to wake up the whole house once they were back inside. But as they rounded the corner, a shout echoed in the passage, and the flames of a torch threw flickering shadows on the walls.
“It’s them,” Dane yelped. “And they’ve seen our flashlights.”
He considered making a dash for the exit but knew they would run right into the arms of the men outside if they did, and the passage was too narrow for them to duck around the ones in front of them.
Frozen with fear, the children could only stand and await capture.
The two men barring their way were of average height for their time, which made them only a little taller than Paige, Dane, and Ned. One was heavy-set and clean-shaven, the other slight, with a dark beard and hard, penetrating eyes. As they moved, slowly and deliberately, toward them, Dane noticed Dickon clasping Ned’s hand for comfort and saw Jack take Paige’s.
“Methinks our friends were too quick to despair of gaining access to this passage,” the bearded man said to his companion. “And, as I surmised, our quarry is still within it.” He spoke in English, but sounded foreign.
“There be three more of ’em,” the other man observed.
“Wolverton brats. But we have a job to do. Interference cannot be tolerated.” He drew out a dagger and gave a thin, chilling smile.
The sight jolted Dane into action. Remembering the medallion, he seized Ned by the shoulder and gripped Paige’s free hand. Then he shouted, “The rhyme, Jack! Say the rhyme! Say it now.”
Jack did not hesitate. He clutched the medallion and began to gabble the words of the connecting rhyme. Dane held his breath, willing the medallion to, just this once, overlook the fact that the words were not being spoken in proper tone.
It did. Sparks lit up the passage before Jac
k even finished speaking. The strange spectacle caused the men to halt and look at one another uneasily. By the time the mist appeared they were both cursing, and one was crossing himself. Then came the familiar wave of nausea that always preceded the spinning sensation. Dane gave a sigh of relief and closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were back at the passage’s cellar entrance.
The two men were nowhere in sight.
“They’ve gone,” Dickon whispered.
“We’ve gone,” Paige corrected. “We’re in our time now. And so are you.”
Ned crumpled to the floor, moaning. But his reaction was not, as might be expected, a response to the news that he was no longer in the fifteenth century. As soon as Jack had restored colour to his own pale cheeks, he knelt down and advised Ned to try some deep breathing.
“He’s a bad traveller, just like me,” he said, looking up.
“If so, he is certain to make more ado about it,” said Dickon with a wry smile. “He is ever thus when ailing.”
Ned glared at him but did as Jack suggested. When he felt better, he stood up. “Though I cared not for the manner of it, I am most grateful to have been spirited away from those who would have murdered us. Are we truly in your time now?” he asked, turning to Dane.
Dane nodded. Intrigued, Ned began to look around. “What is that?” he said, pointing to the light-filled storeroom beside them. “’Tis a chamber, I know, but how can it be illuminated so? ’Tis brighter than day.” Stepping through, he continued to marvel. Dickon was also impressed.
“It’s electricity,” said Dane. “The same thing that works the flashlights. It just does it on a bigger scale.” He walked over to the switch and turned it off and on to demonstrate.
Pulling dustsheets off an armchair, a sofa, and a rocking chair, Paige and Jack invited the princes to sit down. Dickon chose the armchair, and Ned, after giving it a dubious look, the rocking chair. Once seated, he gingerly set it in motion, a slight smile coming to his lips as he decided he liked the sensation.
“What is this place?” he asked.
“A storeroom,” said Jack. “It was probably here in your day too, but there wasn’t any way into it from the passage.”
“I take it this curious furniture and all these other objects are also of your time?” said Ned, looking around at some of the things that were not hidden under dustsheets.
“Not exactly our time,” said Jack. “Grantie keeps things down here that she doesn’t want up in the house anymore. A lot of it was made in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. She didn’t like that era much. Rosebank’s furnished in a mixture of modern and Victorian styles these days.”
“Victorian style?” said Ned.
“Stuff that was made during the reign of Queen Victoria,” Dane explained.
Ned looked startled. “The reign of Queen Victoria? Can it be that England is to one day be ruled by a…a woman?”
“It’s been ruled by several women—and most of them did a better job than the men,” Paige informed him, settling down onto the sofa huffily. “If you really think women are so incompetent, why did you call the Duke of Buckingham a fool for not realizing they had brains?”
“A country cannot be ruled by intelligence alone,” Ned protested. “What of its protection? A woman cannot lead an army.”
“Boadicea did,” Paige pointed out. “So did Joan of Arc. You’ve heard of them, haven’t you? Or did your tutor skip over those little snippets of history?”
“Boadicea was a barbarian living in savage, uncultured times,” said Ned. “Joan of Arc was a heretic, and not in her right mind.”
“Yeah, well, scholars are still debating that,” said Paige. “The point is, women are capable of doing anything they want and nowadays most of them do. You’ll have to remember that while you’re in our time.”
“How long will we be in your time?” asked Dickon.
“Not too long. A day or two at most,” said Jack. “By then the medallion should take us back past the point we left your time from.”
“Will it?” said Paige, suddenly looking worried. “It’s always taken us back to the same time and place we came from. We won’t be going back to our own time on the next time transfer, but Ned and Dickon will. That could make a difference. We could wind up right back in front of those guys who were trying to kill us.”
“We could, but I doubt we will,” said Jack. “The medallion wanted us to get the princes out of danger. It adjusted the time jumps to fit in with the transfers we made, and it let the connecting rhyme work even though I was practically gibbering. I think that, next time, it’ll take us ahead a bit, to a point of safety.”
“What if it doesn’t?” Paige insisted.
“I suppose we will have to risk it,” said Ned, trying to sound brave. “You need not accompany us. Indeed, I forbid you to do so. You must not endanger yourselves a second time. Especially—”
“Especially me,” said Paige, jumping up angrily. “A mere female has to be protected from all possible harm, right? I’ve just got through telling you that in this day and age—”
“My being in your time does not alter the code of chivalry which Dickon and I have been taught. I will not cast it aside.”
“’Tis not that he holds you in low regard, Paige,” said Dickon, reaching up to pat her arm. “We both hold you in very high regard. We simply cannot allow the medallion to take you into danger. Or Dane and Jack, either.”
Watching him, Dane gave a start. “It’s not going to!” he exclaimed. “It’s not going to take any of us anywhere. It can’t.”
The others turned to him with bewildered expressions.
“The medallion has to connect to a Keeper Piece,” Dane said shakily. “And the Keeper Ring we were using is here—on Dickon’s finger.”
Chapter Seventeen
It was some time before anyone spoke. Ned and Dickon stared at the ring as though they had never seen it before. Even Paige and Jack were wide-eyed with dismay.
“Well, this presents a bit of a problem,” Paige said at last.
“Not necessarily,” said Jack. “No one knows what happened to the princes after they disappeared. Maybe this is what happened.”
“Somehow, I doubt it.”
“So do I,” said Dane. “But it’s happened now, and if we can’t get them back, they’ll just have to stay.”
“Stay where?” Dickon inquired, his voice quavering. “Here in this chamber? Forever?”
“Not forever. Just until we can figure out what to do with you.”
“Which might take forever,” said Paige.
Just then the lights came on in the rest of the cellar, and Mrs. Purdom called out to them. “Jack, Dane, Paige—are you all right? What’s going on down there?”
“We’re okay, Mrs. Purdom,” Dane called back from the storeroom door. “We’ll be up in a minute. We’d better go,” he said to the princes. “There’s an old mattress over in that corner. We’ll put it down for you, and you can use a couple of dustsheets for blankets. We’ll come back in the morning and bring you some breakfast.”
The princes’ faces took on worried expressions.
“You’ll be perfectly safe,” Jack said reassuringly. “No one in this time’s going to hurt you.”
As soon as the princes were settled, Dane and the others went up to the kitchen. A frowning Mrs. Purdom demanded to know what they thought they were doing charging around the house at all hours of the night. She greeted Jack’s explanation that he had been sleepwalking with a skeptical sniff and herded them back to their rooms.
Keyed up from the night’s activities, Dane was sure he would not be able to sleep. Nor did he for a time. Thoughts of the princes’ plight kept whirling around in his head. No solution presented itself, however, and eventually, he and Jack both dozed off.
They did not awaken until ten o’clock the next morning. Paige had slept in as well and was at the table having breakfast when they entered the kitchen. Mrs. Purdom put toast and cereal in front of them a
nd left the kitchen to attend to other duties.
“Did Grantie ask any questions after you got back to your room?” Dane asked his sister.
“Just if Jack was okay. I said he was, and gave her the sleepwalking story.”
“Did she buy it?”
“I’m not sure. She just looked at me for a minute and dropped the subject. It took her a while to go back to sleep, though. Me, too.”
“And me,” said Dane, pouring himself some tea. “Have you come up with any ideas on what we’re going to do with the princes?”
Paige sighed. “Not really. The world’s changed so much. How can they possibly fit into our time?”
“They’ll have to,” said Jack. “They’re stuck here. They’ll have to adjust to our time the same way we did to theirs. We managed to fit in there all right.”
“Only because the past’s something we know about,” Paige retorted. “Being in it wasn’t that much of a culture shock. They’re in what, for them, is the future—something completely unknown. If we went into the future, we’d have an understanding of technology to help us handle it. They don’t. Our time will freak them out.”
“We’ll have to teach them about it before we show it to them,” said Jack.
“Yeah? And then what? They might be able to adjust to our time, but they can’t just pop into it from out of nowhere. When we said we were related to Edward Wolverton, no one phoned him up to check. They just took our word for it. Things aren’t like that now. There are birth certificates, and medical files, and school records, and all kinds of ways to identify people.”
“They could say they’d been abandoned and pretend they’ve been through some awful experience that’s affected their ability to remember anything about themselves,” Dane suggested.
Paige rolled her eyes. “Both of them? Even if the child welfare workers believed them, they’d have people psycho-analyzing them for years. That’d be a lot of fun for them, wouldn’t it? So would the series of foster homes they’d wind up in.”
