Their voices were fading now, as though they’d been walking by the stairs.
Jane slinked down the rest of the steps, her tiny heart racing. Edward had been poisoned? Dudley had poisoned Edward? And then Edward had . . . what? Escaped?
Her heart lifted at the idea. How easily, she thought, despair could turn to hope.
At the foot of the staircase, Jane looked around the corner. The hall was enormous, but empty for now. If she kept to the shadows, she wouldn’t be spotted. Hopefully. And then she could escape the Tower. Find Edward.
But first she had to rescue her horse.
EIGHTEEN
Gifford
Burned at the stake. A most unpleasant way to go, G thought. When he was just a boy of five, he’d witnessed a man being burned at the stake. It was 1538 and John Lambert had been outed as an E?ian when, after hearing Frederic Clarence had written a pamphlet denouncing E?ian magic, he turned into a dog and ate the papers, prompting Clarence to cry out, “That dog ate my scriptwork!”
Lambert was sentenced to be burned at the stake, and Lord Dudley had insisted that his children attend the execution. He later told G that nobody trusted those with the ancient magic, and the country would be safer if every E?ian suffered the same fate as Lambert. Which, at the time, G’s father had seemed to truly believe.
All G remembered of that day was the scream that seemed to go on for an eternity. That and the smell.
He glanced at the lone candle his captors allowed in his locked tower room, and then looked closer at the small flame on the wick. Never had something so innocuous seemed so ominous.
He held his hand over the flame.
“God’s teeth!” he exclaimed, pulling his hand back after a mere instant. He hadn’t felt so much pain in his entire life, which, in the next instant, he decided was a sad statement because what nineteen-year-old man has only ever felt the pain of a candle on his skin?
One who spends most of his nights attending plays and poetry readings.
He sighed. Usually he composed stanzas in his head to calm his anxiety, but at the moment G had no desire to find a phrase that rhymed with “charred flesh.”
He examined the palm of his right hand, expecting to see burned skin, but of course there was nothing. Not even a little red.
Now that the pain had subsided (not that there’d been very much of it to begin with) he turned his thoughts toward Jane, specifically the way she’d refused to denounce him as a heretic. He closed his eyes and remembered her confident posture as she stood by him, so sure in her decision, even though she could’ve easily sacrificed him to buy her own escape.
She wouldn’t betray him.
Foolish, loyal, beautiful girl. At least her death would come much quicker than his.
He looked out the window. From this vantage point, he could almost see the place where Jane would suffer her fate, inside the courtyard of the Tower. For G, though, he knew he would be executed on Tower Hill, where the rest of the common criminals and heretics took their last breaths. That’s where he’d be burned.
It was a sad day when he yearned for a nice, tidy beheading. Instead of trying to compose morbid poetry (to be, or not to be, that was the question . . . ), he decided to carve a name into the stone wall. Jane’s name, of course.
J
Jane. He wondered if she was thinking of him, too. If he would ever see her again.
A
He’d never see a lot of people again. He’d never kiss his mother on the cheek, or make fun of Stan (who wasn’t so bad, was he? Not really. It’d been unfair for him to resent Stan all this time, G thought). He’d never give Billingsly another ridiculous order, or make Tempie laugh, or try to irritate his father just to see the aggravation on the old man’s face.
N
His father. G chipped harder at the stone. His father. Who had orchestrated this entire mess. Who would undoubtedly be fine, so long as he could switch to the winning side.
E
Who’d let his own son burn if it would save his life.
G decided that he couldn’t think about it anymore. He put the finishing touches on the e of Jane’s name, and then paced around the room, looking for something, anything, to get his mind off burning flesh. He found a few books, skimmed through the first few pages of each, and then tossed them one by one to the side. Maybe this had been meant to be Jane’s room. She was probably locked somewhere with a barrel of apples.
A soft flutter at the door made him stop his pacing. Someone had slipped a piece of parchment underneath.
He hurried over and unfolded it and saw Jane’s familiar handwriting. His heart pounded. He’d never received a love letter before, and although he knew his letter would most likely also be a good-bye letter, he felt some wild hope that she would confess some depth of feeling for him.