“We haven’t had the Industrial Revolution yet. No mechanical looms or sewing machines,” Alex contributed before going back to muttering, “And I know it’s not ‘Et tu, Brute?’ because that’s Julius Caesar. …”
“Oh,” Jonah said. He thought it had been only about twelve hours since the mysterious intruders tried to throw Chip and Alex out the window. Maybe a team of seamstresses, sewing through the night, could produce eight yards of velvet cape that quickly. But Jonah couldn’t quite imagine the murderers coming back from their job, rushing into a roomful of seamstresses, and announcing, “Okay! That job’s done! Get to sewing!”
And coronation clothes made to fit Chip definitely wouldn’t have fit his uncle. Chip’s uncle—the guy Jonah had seen in a purple cape, anyway—was taller than Chip, more muscular.
More grown-up.
“You think he had everything planned and arranged ahead of time?” Jonah asked.
“He must have!” Chip snapped. “But how did he convince everyone to go along with him? All the knights and nobles in that procession with him … all those people cheering in the crowd …”
It was pain and sorrow that filled his expression now, not just hurt pride and outrage.
“No wonder you wanted to grab his crown,” Jonah said grudgingly.
“Yeah. Probably not the best idea, right? Not in front of hundreds of people, anyway,” Chip said. “I don’t know what came over me. I felt different again, kind of like I did when I was around the tracers last night. I wasn’t thinking like myself at all.”
“That’s weird,” Alex said, finally giving up on Shakespeare. “I wasn’t feeling like myself either when we were standing outside. But for me it just felt like I, uh, missed my mother.”
He sounded embarrassed.
“Fifteenth-century mother the queen, or twenty-first-century mother the Shakespeare teacher?” Katherine asked.
Alex didn’t have time to answer because the coronation procession had arrived at the threshold of the cathedral now. The royal horns were almost deafening; the cheers of the crowd overwhelming.
“You said you had a plan?” Chip said.
Jonah leaned over to whisper it in his ear.
Chip smiled.
“I’ll really enjoy that,” he said.
SEVENTEEN
Jonah barely had time to whisper his plan to Alex and Katherine, too, before the procession was streaming toward their dark hallway.
“This is perfect!” Chip said. “They’ll go to the shrine of the saints first. It’s right over there. Come on!”
He began rushing toward an opening between pillars, several yards down. It was lucky that Jonah, Katherine, and Alex followed him quickly, because seconds later royal pages were shaking out wide swaths of finely woven cloth for the royal party to walk on. One bolt of the cloth landed right where the four kids had been standing.
“They take their shoes off to be respectful to the saints,” Chip explained. “Crazy, isn’t it?”
He walked on through the opening into the saints’ shrine, a grottolike enclosure with a row of statues and an altar at the front.
“We can stand by the statues while they’re coming in,” Chip said. “Richard will come to the front and kneel, and everyone else will stay behind him.”
Jonah moved back between two statues with equally fierce expressions on their stone faces. He thought they looked more like soldiers than saints.
“Hi. How you doing?” Jonah muttered to the statues. “Do you know you’re missing a nose?”
Katherine shot him a look that clearly said, How can you make jokes at a time like this? Jonah shrugged.
The royal procession began entering the shrine. Richard—Duke of Gloucester, King of England, whichever he was—did indeed have the most luxurious clothes. Even in the dim candlelight everything about him shimmered. Only a small number of the noblemen followed him into the shrine—probably the highest-ranking ones. The man carrying the crown on the pillow was one of them.
“That’s Buckingham,” Chip whispered. “His good friend. And fellow traitor.”
A woman came into the shrine too, followed by another nobleman with a smaller crown on a pillow.
“Richard’s having his wife crowned today too?” Chip muttered. “That’s different.”
The queen—or queen-to-be—was a frail, sickly-looking woman with thinning hair and deep lines in her face. But the way she smiled at her husband almost made Jonah feel bad about what they were about to do to him.
Some guys in robes—priests?—began chanting, and then Richard and his wife went to kneel at the altar.
“Maybe you shouldn’t …,” Jonah began in a soft voice.
Chip flashed him a dirty look and went to crouch beside Richard. From his position by the statues Jonah could hear every word Chip said.
“You do not deserve to be king,” Chip hissed directly into his uncle’s ear. “After what you had done to your nephews, you don’t deserve to live. All this pomp and ceremony—bah! It is for naught. The crowd may cheer you now, but they will jeer when they know your sins. …”
Richard stayed on his knees, but he jerked to attention. Separating from a calm, devout-looking tracer, he peered around, something like panic on his face.
“Oh, yes, you will be found out,” Chip murmured. “And then … then you will die a terrible death, as terrible as the death you gave your nephews.”
“Begone!” Richard muttered through clenched teeth, glancing around again. “Plague me not!”
“I will plague you anytime I want!” Chip said, his voice rising.
Jonah thought maybe a few of the priests had heard him too, because they stopped in the middle of their chanting, creating more tracers.
Richard looked back at them.
“Leave me,” he commanded. “I require time to pray. Alone.”
The priests and the nobles exchanged baffled glances. This was evidently an unusual request.
“I … I am adding a new part to the coronation ceremony,” Richard said. “I was inspired, kneeling here, to know that a king needs time alone in communion with God.”
“But—,” a priest ventured timidly.
“Go!” Richard ordered.