“So if the dog’s coming with us, we need to know his name,” Katherine said, speaking almost directly into the fur.
“It’s Dare,” JB said softly. “The dog’s name is Dare.”
Jonah knew he should be asking about the exact time period they were going to, and Andrea Crowell’s other identity, and his own identity and time period as well. But for a moment he just sat there in the grass peering around his neighborhood: at the peaked roofs of his neighbors’ houses, at the wide street where he’d ridden his bike so many times, at the mailboxes and garage doors and sewer drains. … If he didn’t stop himself, he’d start blubbering about how much he was going to miss the fire hydrant across the street.
It’s incredible how precious everything looks when you know you’re about to lose it, Jonah thought. He wondered if Richard III had felt that way in his last moments on the battlefield at Bosworth; he wondered if Chip and Alex had felt that way leaving their tracers behind, leaving their fifteenth-century lives forever. Someday he’d have to ask them. Someday after he’d met his own tracer. But for now …
“So, we’re going with Andrea Crowell, huh?” Jonah said, trying to sound cocksure and confident, like going back in time again was no big deal. “Does she know what we’re all getting into?”
“No,” JB said. “Nobody does, really. To quote a famous philosopher revered in my time, ‘But this is no different from regular life. When have you ever known what’s going to happen in the future?’”
Wait a minute, Jonah thought. I said that. Back at Westminster, with Katherine. Does that mean I’m going to be a famous philosopher in the future? Does that mean I’m going to be revered?
There wasn’t time to ask.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
People have been trying to figure out what really happened to Edward V and his brother Richard ever since the fifteenth century. Here are the facts that everyone seems to agree on:
Edward IV, the king of England, died on April 9, 1483, and his twelve-year-old son, Edward, was named as his successor. Edward V’s coronation was scheduled but never held. Instead, after accusations about the boy’s parents, his uncle was proclaimed king and crowned on July 6, 1483.
Edward and his younger brother were known to be in the Tower of London during the summer of 1483. Then they vanished.
And already, writing that last sentence—“Then they vanished”—I have to resort to extreme vagueness to avoid adding qualifiers like “and most people think that …” or “at some point within the next year or two …” Most people seem to think that the boys were murdered—but were they? If they were, who did it? When? How? Why?
I did my best in this book not to fudge or change any facts that are irrefutable. Chip’s description of what happened to Edward V during the spring of 1483 is as historically accurate as I could make it. (So are his and Alex’s descriptions of Edward IV’s eating habits—and I bet you thought bulimia was only a modern problem!) Fortunately for my job as a fiction writer, the historical record regarding Edward and Richard is full of gaps and disputed details, so that left me lots of room to fill in with my own imagination.
Historians studying an event like the disappearance of Edward and Richard look for accounts written by people living at the same time, who were close enough to the action to know what they were talking about, but not so close that they were overly biased and might be lying. In this case, the perfect account just doesn’t exist—or hasn’t been found. When I was researching this book, I had to laugh at the many, many times I would read, “The Croyland Chronicle was surely right about this detail, but probably wrong about …,” or, “Though Sir Thomas More was accurate about this part of the story, he must have been confused about …” And then I’d put down that research book, pick up another one, and discover that the author of the second book totally reversed which details of which versions were surely or probably right or wrong.
For centuries Richard III was painted as the villain of the story. One notable account says that, years later, a man who’d worked for Richard III confessed to killing the boys on Richard’s orders. But that account rather conveniently came out during the reign of Henry VII—a.k.a., Henry Tudor, the man who defeated Richard and took the Crown at the Battle of Bosworth. And Henry had every reason to want to discredit Richard as much as possible to make his own claim to the throne look stronger. (By then Henry was also married to Edward V’s sister—yes, this is a very tangled tale—and so it also helped him to make sure everyone believed Edward V had deserved to be king but was very certainly dead.) Almost a century later William Shakespeare—writing when Henry’s granddaughter Elizabeth I was on the throne—based his play about Richard III on the earlier account. In Shakespeare’s version Richard III is a complete monster, the kind of villain audiences love to hate.