“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.
“Indeed,” the old monk agreed, sounding calmer now.
“Perhaps we should remove her from the cathedral during this sacred ceremony,” Alex said. “We apologize for any disruption we have caused.”
Still clutching Katherine’s arm, he bowed low and backed away, off to the side.
Jonah decided it was probably wise to follow. He grabbed Chip’s arm, just in case Chip was prepared to start arguing where Katherine had left off. But Chip came along dazedly.
Ahead of them Katherine struggled with Alex as he pulled her into the shadows.
“Come on,” Alex was murmuring. “Argue with me later. It isn’t safe here. …”
Jonah picked up his pace.
He threw a quick glance over his shoulder, to see if any of the monks were following them, but they’d already been engulfed by a whole new crowd of monks, coming up the same stairway that Jonah and the others had used. The man whose voice Jonah had heard before was calling out, “Move along! We are supposed to be taking our positions. …”
Alex was almost running now that he was out of sight of the monks. In the near darkness Jonah was having trouble keeping track of him.
“Wait for us!” Jonah hissed. “Where are you going, anyway?”
“I know this part of the cathedral,” Alex whispered back. “I just figured out where we are. I used to play here sometimes—I know a crypt where we can hide until the crowds clear out.”
A crypt. Great. That sounded like a wonderful place to go.
TWENTY
The crypt turned out to be just a dark space with pillars in the bowels of the church. Jonah couldn’t see any bones or dead bodies lying around, like he’d half expected. The dead bodies were probably tucked away behind the stone tablets on the walls, but Jonah was not going to ask about that.
He couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise anyway. Katherine, freed from the need to be careful around the monks, was all but screaming at Alex.
“How dare you!” she spit out. “Saying I’m feebleminded? Saying it’s because I’m ‘womenfolk’? ‘Womenfolk’—bleh! Just the word is sexist!”
“Katherine, calm down,” Alex said, sounding amazingly calm himself for someone getting his ears blistered. “I don’t think you’re feebleminded. I don’t think girls in general are feebleminded. That was just the only thing I could think of to say to keep them from stringing us all up as heretics. I knew that’s what those monks believed, anyway, that females are stupid.”
“And you think that makes it all right?” Katherine complained. “It’s okay to perpetuate a stereotype if the people you’re perpetuating it to are already idiots?”
Whoa—“perpetuate a stereotype”?—Katherine really was mad.
“I’m sorry, okay?” Alex said pleadingly. “It’s not my fault 1483 wasn’t a great time to be female. Those monks don’t really think of girls as human beings, exactly. Men in 1483 think of women more as just … uh …” His voice trailed off.
“What?” Katherine demanded.
“Uh … breeding stock,” Alex said apologetically.
Katherine kicked one of the tablets in the wall.
“I am so getting out of here,” she said. “I am not spending my whole life in this godforsaken time. And don’t any of you correct me! This is a godforsaken time if women are just treated like breeding stock.”
She kicked the wall again.
“It’s not really such a great time to be a male, either,” Chip said weakly. “Remember? Somebody tried to murder me and Alex last night. My own uncle cheated me out of my crown. And it sounds like the whole country’s letting him get away with it.”
Dimly, distantly from up above, they could hear the cheers of the huge crowd. Either Richard III had just had the crown placed on his head, or he’d just walked out in front of his subjects, or …
It didn’t really matter. Either way Chip wasn’t king anymore.
Chip kicked the wall just as angrily as Katherine had.
“I still don’t understand,” Jonah admitted. “What’s that whole story about your father being ‘pre-contracted’ to someone else before he got married? What’s that got to do with anything? Who cares?”
“It’s just a lie,” Chip said bitterly. “An excuse.”
“Well,” Alex said. “Maybe … knowing our father … maybe he was engaged to someone else before he married our mother.”
“So what?” Katherine said, still sounding angry. “Maybe the woman dumped him. Don’t tell me women aren’t allowed to do that in the fifteenth century!”
Even in the dim light of the crypt Jonah could tell that Alex was frowning.
“Um … kind of not,” Alex said. “For someone who’s the king of England, it’s not like getting married is a romantic thing. It’s strategic, all about uniting powerful families, getting the rights to land and titles. Except our father, Edward the Fourth, he did have this thing about falling for women. And he might have promised to marry someone that he never married. And making that promise, it would be legally binding.”
“So when he married our mother, it would be like bigamy,” Chip said gloomily. “Not a legal marriage. So we wouldn’t be legal, legitimate offspring of the king. So Alex and me—neither one of us could inherit the right to be king.”
Jonah thought about that. Being adopted, he’d always kind of figured that his birth parents weren’t married when he was born. He didn’t care. It wasn’t like it was his fault.