“Oh, yeah,” JB said. “Which made it a big problem that Gary and Hodge did some rather incomplete historical research and yanked them out of time shortly before the—shall we call them window-throwers, for lack of a better term?—before the window-throwers stepped into the Tower of London. It turns out that you four kids arrived almost exactly at the same moment that Edward and Richard vanished, the first time around.”
Jonah was trying to picture this in his mind. Gary and Hodge, the unethical time travelers from the future, had probably arrived in the same dark room that Jonah and his friends had landed in. They’d probably been very gleeful when they snatched Edward/Chip and Richard/Alex, because they had two famous members of British royalty to carry off to the future, to be adopted by families who could then brag about their children’s lineage. Gary and Hodge just hadn’t known how far JB and his friends would go to stop them.
“So if Chip and Alex hadn’t come back, the … the window-throwers would have rushed into an empty room? They wouldn’t have found anyone to throw?” Katherine asked, grimacing.
“Exactly,” JB said.
“So what?” Jonah said.
JB and Katherine both whirled on him, mouths agape, brows furrowed. Jonah wondered if he sounded heartless or just stupid.
“I mean,” Jonah hurried to explain, “if Chip and Alex were going to disappear either way, why does it matter if they disappeared from their room or from the courtyard down below?”
“Ah,” JB said. “That’s a very good question.”
Katherine rolled her eyes.
“You have to understand how complicated everything was in the room that night, and in the courtyard down below,” JB said. “There were five or six different layers of plots being carried out simultaneously—you’d practically need a graph to map out all the conflicting interests.”
Jonah sincerely hoped JB wasn’t going to produce a graph. Or a map.
“Shall I just give you the headlines?” JB asked.
Jonah and Katherine both nodded.
“It was about a week ago,” JB began, “when the queen heard that Richard had been proclaimed king and was planning his coronation—”
“What?” Jonah interrupted. “You told us last night that Chip was king—I mean, that Edward was. You told us!”
“Were you lying to us?” Katherine accused.
JB held his hands up in a show of innocence.
“Would you let me explain?” he asked. “I told you what Edward would have believed about his own identity, at that point in time, the first time through history. It wasn’t exactly a lie—things were very much in flux. Edward didn’t know what Richard was saying out in public. And Edward/Chip still believes he’s king, don’t you think, even now, even though Richard is wearing the crown?”
Jonah glanced at the screen, at the superior expression on Chip/Edward’s face, even as he tossed strawberries in his mouth.
“But the guards last night said they were looking for princes, as if Chip and Alex had the same rank,” Katherine said. Jonah was impressed that she’d noticed that, since she’d been dodging flames at the time.
“The serving girl this morning said ‘princes’ too,” Jonah added. He’d been too distracted to really think about that before. “Does that mean even the servants were on Richard’s side?”
“That means they thought it was safest to act like they were,” JB said grimly. “Now, can I please get back to my story?”
Jonah shrugged. Katherine nodded.
“When the queen heard that Richard had claimed the throne for himself, she knew that her sons’ lives were in danger,” JB said. He pointed to the regal woman in the scene before them, her head held high and proud. “Queen Elizabeth Woodville—now, there’s another person whose talents were never fully appreciated by history! To think what she could have done in a time when women had equal rights …”
“What did she do?” Jonah asked quickly, before Katherine could get started on this topic. “In real history?”
JB seemed to shake himself back from gazing adoringly at the queen, who was, now that Jonah thought about it, much prettier than anyone else he’d seen in the fifteenth century. For a mom, anyway.
“Oh, yes … she had her people infiltrate the plot against her sons’ lives,” JB said. “In the room that night, those men you saw? The window-throwers? One of them thought there was another man on the ground waiting to bash the boys’ brains in, to make it look like they died trying to escape.”
“I knew it!” Katherine said, sounding much too triumphant about such a grisly theory.
“The other window-thrower thought that there was a man waiting below to spirit the boys away to safety,” JB said. “But he knew he had to act like a murderer, to convince his partner.”
“And were there men on the ground?” Jonah asked.
JB nodded grimly.
“Two were there, planning to catch the boys, if they could, or bind up their broken limbs and carry them off if they hit the ground and were injured,” JB said. “You see how desperate the queen was, that she would agree to such a dangerous plot?”
“I guess it’s better than letting your sons be killed,” Katherine muttered.
“But there were other men on the ground whose job it was to claim that they’d seen the boys jump and innocently discovered the bodies afterward,” JB said. “They were the ones who mistakenly called out, ‘Where are the bodies?’ when they didn’t see the boys—they were so stunned they forgot that that wasn’t information they should broadcast.”
“So in the original version of history …?” Jonah asked.
JB chuckled.
“In the original version of history both boys landed in bushes and took off running before any of the men on the ground saw them, friend or foe,” he said. “This left both sides in confusion. The officials in the tower pretended for quite some time that the princes were still there—but they were also systematically interviewing everyone who might have heard or seen anything. So, as you can imagine, rumors began to fly.”