The light died before it finished arriving.
One moment Alice Alderman was standing in Samuel's laboratory, the cold hum of the modified Chronos buzzing against her palm and the worried faces of the team blurring into a smear of color — and then the world simply ended.
No transition, no corridor of light like the ones she had read about in the old science fiction novels stacked in her office. Just an erasure, and then a new world dropping down over her like a curtain.
She gasped.
The air hit her first. It smelled of woodsmoke and something floral and spoiling — rosewater, she realized, thrown over rushes on the floor to mask the rot beneath. The rushes crunched softly under her feet as she steadied herself against a carved wooden post, and her hands came back to her draped in silk so fine she could feel the individual threads. She looked down.
She was wearing a gown the color of a winter sky — pale silver-blue, cut with a square neckline and puffed sleeves pinched with pearl buttons. Her hair was enclosed in a hood, a gabled English hood, not the French style. Of course. Jane Seymour always wore the English hood. Alice had written a thirty-page paper about it at Cambridge.
She straightened up and looked around.
The room was long and low-ceilinged, lit by tall windows that let in a cold, grey light. A fire crackled at one end beneath a carved stone mantle bearing the royal arms.
Tapestries covered every wall — hunting scenes, angels, the Virgin in blue — and two ladies-in-waiting sat near the fire with their embroidery, both of them watching Alice with expressions of polite, birdlike attention.
She had arrived in the body of Jane Seymour, and from the look of the court dress and the particular richness of the room, she had arrived somewhere inside the Palace of Whitehall.
"My lady?" One of the ladies-in-waiting — a young woman with a narrow face and careful eyes — rose from her stool. "You went pale as a sheet. Are you unwell?"
Alice opened her mouth, and for one terrible second she was afraid nothing would come out. Then habit took over — the habit of every lecture theatre and every academic conference where she had stood in front of three hundred people and performed certainty.
"I am well, thank you, Dorothy." She had no idea if the woman's name was Dorothy. She prayed it was close enough.
The young woman gave a small, uncertain curtsy and sat back down. Alice breathed.
She needed information. She needed to know what day it was, where the court was in the sequence of events, and most urgently, she needed to find Eleanor.
But she could not ask what day it was without sounding insane, and she could not ask where Anne Boleyn was being held without arousing suspicion, because Jane Seymour had every reason in the world not to draw attention to Anne Boleyn's existence.
She crossed to the window and looked out over a courtyard. Below, guards in the royal livery moved in pairs. A priest hurried across the stones with his head down. A boy led a horse, its breath steaming in the cold air.
The door at the far end of the room opened with a boom, and the ladies scattered from their stools like startled birds.
He filled the doorway. That was the only honest way to describe it.
Henry VIII was not yet the bloated figure that later portraits would record. He was heavy, yes — broad through the chest and thick in the neck — but he carried it with the force of a man who had been told since birth that the world existed to accommodate him. His doublet was cloth-of-gold.
His eyes were small and very blue, and they found Jane Seymour across the room with the single-mindedness of a hawk that has already chosen its prey.
"Jane." His voice was a low rumble that filled the room. He crossed to her in four strides and took her hands in both of his. His hands were enormous, ringed in gold, and they were warm. "I had word you were here. I came directly."
Alice felt the full weight of the situation press down on her. She was standing inside the body of the woman who would become Henry's third wife. She was holding the hands of one of the most dangerous men who had ever sat on the English throne. And somewhere across this palace complex, in the Tower of London not three miles away, her friend Eleanor Caldwell was counting down the days to an execution.
She made herself smile — gentle, modest, Jane's particular quality of dovelike stillness.
"Your Majesty is too kind," she said softly. "I did not expect such an honor."
Henry's eyes moved over her face with an expression that was not quite tenderness — it was closer to satisfaction, the look of a man examining a jewel he intends to acquire. "There is no kindness in it," he said. "Only the truth. You are a comfort to me, Jane, in difficult times."
Alice understood. The trial had already happened. Anne Boleyn had already been condemned. Henry was doing what Henry always did — moving forward, looking ahead, arranging his emotional landscape to suit the future he intended to have.
She lowered her eyes in the way that portraits of Jane always suggested — modest, yielding — and said nothing. Which was, she understood, exactly right.
Henry released her hands and crossed to the window, looking out at the courtyard below. The lines of his face were set hard.
"The matter of the Queen," he said, after a long silence, "will be concluded within the fortnight."
Alice's heart seized. Within the fortnight. That was less time than she'd hoped.
"Your Majesty," she began carefully, choosing each word as though crossing a frozen river, feeling for ice that would hold, "I pray that justice is tempered with mercy, as God commands of those He sets above others."
The king turned. His small blue eyes fixed on her with sudden sharpness, and for a moment Alice felt the specific, gut-dropping fear of having miscalculated.
Then something in his face shifted — not softened, exactly, but considered. He looked at her for a long moment, and then he said: "You are a good woman, Jane. A godly woman." He crossed back to her and cupped her face briefly in one vast hand. "Leave it to me."
He left. The door closed. The ladies-in-waiting exhaled collectively.
Alice stood at the window and made herself breathe slowly, counting the guards below. She had planted a seed. She had approximately fourteen days to make it grow before Eleanor Caldwell lost her head.
* * *
That night, while the court slept, Alice sat by a single candle with a piece of parchment and a quill she had found in the writing desk, and composed the most careful letter of her life.
She could not write in modern English. She could not use names that would make sense to a twenty-first century reader. She had to write in a language that would mean nothing to anyone who intercepted it, but would mean everything to Eleanor.
She dipped the quill and began.
*To the Lady held within the Tower. The friend you last drank coffee with sends greetings. The other friend is working. Be ready when the white bird comes. Do not press anything. Wait.*
She sealed it with a plain wax seal — no crest, no identifying mark — and slipped it to Dorothy's counterpart, whose name turned out to be Cecily, with a small coin and a murmured instruction about a guard she had seen in the courtyard who owed a favor to Jane Seymour's household.
It was not a good plan. It was the only plan she had.
She blew out the candle and lay in the darkness, listening to the sound of the Thames somewhere below the walls, and thought about Eleanor alone in the Tower, and about Samuel alone in the laboratory, and about all the different kinds of imprisonment that a person could find themselves inside.