The Time Duchess (The Time Mistress Book 4) Read online

  “Yes. I’m not even sure I left him alive.”

  “You killed him? You killed William Shakespeare?”

  “No, I don’t think he killed him,” Carver cut in, reading his palm-link. “All possible timelines show the plays still exist. I skimmed over the major works. Every word is there. Nothing has changed.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” James exclaimed with a wince. “If the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays, they’d still exist, even if I killed Shakespeare before he was supposed to have died.”

  “Let me think,” Cassandra cried, “let me think!”

  “Nope, the date of his death is the same as it’s always been,” Professor Carver said to James, still looking at the device that was almost as much a part of his hand as his own skin. “So, even if you changed some other outcome, at least you didn’t kill him today. Regardless, you’ve got to go back and make amends for whatever damage you may have done.”

  “But,” Cassandra blurted, her heartbeat quickening, “he could be arrested.” She still had nightmares from the prison ordeal they’d gone through on their first time travel escapade. “He could be charged with assault. Or Shakespeare’s friends might want revenge.”

  “Maybe not,” offered James. “One thing I’ve managed to do is to get the fellows in the acting company to like me: Burbage, Kempt, Pope, and all the rest of them. I think they prefer me to him, frankly. He’s such an ass.”

  Her son always did have a quick temper and an inability to hide his dislike for people whom he didn’t respect—not the handiest qualities in a time traveler.

  “But I’m having a major problem getting any traction proving, or disproving, whether Shakespeare actually wrote the plays,” continued James rapidly, “other than the fact that he hardly seems capable.” He sat forward in his chair. “I’ve spent endless hours in his company, and that of his acting troupe, but I’ve had no real breakthrough.” He took in the expectant faces of his mother and his boss, then related the story of going to see Hamlet, and Shakespeare’s revenge at the Bear Garden. “If I could have met Oxford,” he concluded, “it would have changed everything. But now, I don’t know how I’ll ever get to him.”

  “You have to make peace with Shakespeare. Pay for his doctor bills. Bring him chicken soup.”

  James ignored her joke. “I need a different tactic. I need to dangle something under his nose that he really wants. Not money; that’s not doing it. Not friendship, he doesn’t welcome it. I tell you, if I were a woman, I’d have a far easier time of this.” He gazed at his mother, and a look came over his face as if he were seeing her for the first time. “What if―”

  “Oh no,” she cried. “Absolutely not!”

  He somehow made his brown eyes appear larger in his face, and his lower lip jutted out just a bit. How many times had she fallen for that look? “No, no, no, no, no. I’m not going anywhere!”

  “Well,” Professor Carver interjected, “he does have a point.”

  James glanced at the professor, a hint of a smile forming on his lips.

  “You want me to seduce Shakespeare?” Cassandra exclaimed. “You’re pimping me out?”

  Carver’s face exploded in mirth and he laughed in his loud, infectious way, breaking the tension in the holographic room.

  “No, no,” James hurried on, ignoring his boss’s outburst. “It’s just that…if you came back with me and I introduced you to Shakespeare, he’d probably be very taken with you. I mean, you’re not bad looking.”

  This was the greatest compliment she was likely to receive from her son. “Oh, thank you,” she said drily.

  “And then you could get us the introduction to Lord Oxford.”

  She had no desire to journey to Elizabethan England. It was dangerous, it was filthy, and right now, in February, it was cold.

  “You know,” said Carver thoughtfully, “James may be right about this.”

  “You’re siding with him?”

  Carver held up a placating hand. “In an era when people are ancient by the time they’re forty, disfigured by pock marks, and lucky to have a full set of teeth, you’ll be considered even more beautiful than you are now. Beauty can open all kinds of doors.”

  She slowly shook her head. “Give me a minute,” she growled. She examined the grain on the wood of her kitchen table and tapped her fingers for a moment. Time traveling was the last thing she wanted to do right now.

  “Cassie,” Carver said firmly.

  Her eyes rose from the table to the hologram of his handsome, brown face.

  “Can you get on a plane and come to London? Today?” His expression was stern now. He ran his hand over his graying, close-cropped hair. Though he was never truly flustered, that was a clear sign he was feeling anxious. “We need you here. We’ve got to get this figured out. James has to go back and he’s got to go within a few days or his acquaintances in 1598 will wonder why he’s simply disappeared. I’m not saying you necessarily have to go back with him, but we need your input, and better in person.”

  She mentally crossed off all the things she’d have to let go by the wayside if she took a trip to London. More so if she went to the past with James: her period dance classes—darn it, she was really starting to get good at those swing era dances; not to mention the Italian and French classes she liked to keep up with. And then there was the documenting of her journey to Renaissance Italy. Admittedly, that process was slow going because of the man she’d met there, artist, scientist, and inventor Lauro Sampieri. The intense longing to be with him again was still so palpable. Documenting that experience, including the weeks Lauro had spent in the present, reminded her of all the mistakes she’d made, and of the regret she’d felt in sending him from 2124, back to 1604. James had taken him to London of that year, the point in time her son had originally chosen to meet the most famous writer of all time. He had sent Lauro on to Italy shortly thereafter, the idea being that Lauro would seek out Galileo and offer to work with him, supplying occasional insight as the renowned astronomer made his world-changing discoveries.

  That part of the plan had gone much as expected, while James’s work had hit a wall. Shakespeare and company were not in London when he arrived. The theatres had closed the year before because of a plague epidemic, sending the city’s actors out touring the provinces. About the same time of the installation of James Stuart as king, most of the theatres were in the process of reopening, but Shakespeare and his men had not yet returned, and wouldn’t until winter set in and the plague officially receded, a small but vital fact historical records had neglected to mention. James had thereupon decided to return to the present to reset his journey for six years earlier, while Queen Elizabeth, a cousin of the Earl of Oxford, still reigned, and Shakespeare’s company was still The Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

  But now, this mess. “I’ll book my flight,” Cassandra sighed. “I’ll see you both in a few hours.”

  “Thanks mom, really, thanks so much.” James threw her his most winning smile. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”

  “I didn’t say I’d go back with you. But I will come to London to talk about things before you go back.”

  “Mom, really, I need....” His voice trailed off as he saw the look on her face. “Well anyway, I―”

  “Let her get going, James,” Carver cut in. “Cassandra, get the fastest flight you can.”

  “If there are seats, I’ll be on the express.”

  “Wonderful. I’ll put the kettle on for you.” He flashed his own gorgeous smile.

  Her boss: what a charmer. She could never say no to him. And her son, a troublemaker, but a sweet one. She couldn’t resist him either. “Bye Elton, bye James.”

  She disconnected, and booked the next express flight out of Boston into Heathrow. The coming journey into the past was, of course, already a foregone conclusion.

  Chapter Two

  Activity swirled around Cassandra as Shannon, the MIT Chronology team’s clothing designer, and her assistants worked on
Elizabethan clothing, and selected jewelry and accessories from those they’d gathered in the past day. Cassandra sat watching them in the lab, listening to a recording of actors speaking in Early Modern English, the way she would be expected to talk. It wouldn’t be hard to master the accent, she already had her standard British down, but the terms and the expressions people used in those days would be impossible to learn in the one remaining day before she and James went back through the portal. One more reason this was a bad idea. She paused the recording and the voices filtering into her head abruptly stopped. “James, Elton, I need to talk to you.”

  Carver stood from where he’d been seated at the consul and came to sit by her, while James looked up from the material he was reading.

  “There’s no way I can convincingly sound like an Elizabethan woman in just two days.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to,” her son responded quickly, his eyes sparking with intensity. “I’ve been figuring out your identity. We’re going to say you’re Austrian.”

  “You do know that I don’t speak German, right?”

  “You won’t have to,” replied James as if he hadn’t heard the irritation in her voice. “Here’s the story,” he continued quickly. “You’re originally English, but you’ve been living in Austria for twenty years. You were married to Duke Hermann Von Schell of Austria. You married him at a young age and moved there. But, since most of the Austrian nobility could speak English, he always spoke your native tongue with you. Your English sounds different because you’ve been out of the country for twenty years, but you don’t speak German well because you never had to.”

  “You do seem to have it all planned out, but it simply doesn’t make sense that I never picked up German in the twenty years I supposedly lived in a country where that’s what they speak!”

  James shook his head. “You’re not getting it. No one is going to be speaking German with you. This is the only scenario that makes sense.” Cassandra tried to break in, but James continued in a rush, “You have to be some kind of nobility in order to impress Shakespeare enough to want to introduce you to Oxford. But you can’t be English nobility. We can’t just create a bloodline.”

  “I realize that. But what if we run into someone, especially if we end up at court, who knows of this Duke Von Schell?”

  “Thought about it already.” He grinned. “Nobody will. He lived near the border of Bavaria far from any major cities, and he almost never went to Vienna. He had a minor dukedom and wasn’t even true nobility. He was made a noble by Rudolf V. He wasn’t at all a well-known figure. Died in 1593 still unmarried, but no one in England will know that. You will pretend to be his widow.”

  “Naturally,” she groaned, knowing she had no way out. Every journey seemed to involve her posing as a widow because the guise allowed her considerably more freedom than any other possibility; and sadly, it was also the reality of her present life. Franklin had been gone nearly ten years. She sighed. “Well, alright, I guess the story makes a certain amount of sense. But how do we do this? You’re going to be just showing up out of the blue with your Austrian aunt?”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “You’re right about that, I’m sure my household staff, especially my housekeeper, is wondering where on earth I am,” he stroked his pointy, closely trimmed, beard. “So, when we get back, I’ll say I went to Cornwall, to where you had recently returned from Austria, to get you and bring you to London.”

  “Fine,” she sighed, “but I want you to know―”

  James gave a quick laugh, and held up a placating hand. “Relax Mom, you’ll like my place, it’s really nice, right on the other side of the river. I rented it from a baron who couldn’t afford it anymore.”

  “I don’t suppose it has a harpsichord, or…what was that other keyboard instrument they had back then?”

  “A Virginals. And no, there are neither in my house.”

  “Hmph,” she grumped. She’d have no access to music, the one thing that managed to keep her sane when all else failed.

  If only she could get out of this whole thing by having them reset the date so that James could go back a few days earlier, before the bear baiting incident, or even before he’d laughed at Shakespeare in the theatre. Yet, those events were already in motion. Shakespeare already hadn’t liked James so something else would likely have set the two of them off. Better to just resign herself and help James fix the damage that had already been done.

  It was two hours until they were to go. Cassandra was in the dressing room with Shannon. She wore a long smock made of soft linen, no bra, but a type of underpants resembling bloomers, which she’d insisted on. Shannon had told her women didn’t normally wear panties in Elizabethan England, but Cassandra would have none of that. It was just too icky to go around bottomless. She also wore a pair of wool stockings, held up with garters, that itched unbearably.

  Shannon held out a plain, long-sleeved, ankle-length dress for her to put on over the smock. A “kirtle” she’d called it. “Now, this is not something you have to wear every day, but since it’s so cold there, it will keep you warm.”

  It didn’t help that England, in the time of Elizabeth’s rule, was essentially going through a mini ice age. Cassandra yanked on the kirtle with considerable difficulty. “What women went through,” she muttered.

  Shannon only nodded in agreement and fitted her with a wool bodice, flat in the front, broad in the shoulders, and narrow in the waist, forming a V in the front. She fastened it up the back with hooks and eyes―an interminably long process.

  “I hope James has someone who can do this for me,” Cassandra said a little breathlessly.

  “If not, you’ll be sleeping in it tonight. Excuse me for a moment.” She reached down the front of the bodice, under the kirtle, and grabbed Cassandra’s breasts, giving them a quick tug upwards. “Sorry about that.”

  “I got used to the maid I had in Renaissance Italy rearranging my breasts whenever she dressed me. It’s no big deal.”

  Shannon next fitted a doublet over the bodice, a long-sleeved jacket that buttoned up the front.

  “This is pretty,” said Cassandra, admiring the fine, embroidered wool of dark red. She yanked at the high neck with the stiff ruffled border around the collar. “This, however, I hate.”

  Shannon admonished her with her jet-black eyes. “You have to get used to it. It’s the fashion. You’ll end up wearing those damn ruffs too. Trust me, what Elizabeth wears, all the ladies wear.”

  “Ugh.”

  “The good news is you’ll be nice and warm.”

  “I know, I’m getting hot.” She scratched at her leg.

  “Nothing to be done about that. You’ll be glad for it when you get there. And now, this lovely contraption. Karen!”

  Shannon’s blond, short-haired assistant came in carrying what looked like an enormous bird cage. The thing was too bulky to fit in the dressing room while they’d been putting on Cassandra’s other clothes.

  “Oh my god, I’ve been dreading this,” Cassandra uttered, screwing up her face. “A farthingale.”

  “Yep,” Shannon replied unsympathetically, her square jaw giving her face a certain authority no-one ever argued with.

  Karen tied it onto Cassandra’s waist from the back. “I’ve made it out of material that will be taken for willow, but is much more flexible so you can sit.”

  “It’s a nightmare.”

  “You don’t have to wear it when you’re at home, only out.”

  “Oh goodie.”

  Shannon then tied on a white, silk petticoat, embroidered with lace at the bottom, over the farthingale, which held it out stiffly at the sides, making Cassandra look like she had enormous hips. She finished it all off with a dark red, wool skirt to match the bodice.

  “Et voila!” Shannon declared. She turned Cassandra to look in the mirror, while she and Karen admired their handiwork. “Pretty impressive, right?”

  It was true. The colors complimented her auburn hair and gray-blue eyes
perfectly, and a bit of cleavage that she didn’t normally have could be detected where the front of the doublet came down over the bodice. That, in combination with the narrow waist and wide girth of the skirt, made her appear far curvier than she really was.

  “Now shoes…” Shannon bent down and slipped a pair of flat leather shoes with pointy toes onto Cassandra’s feet. They seemed unsubstantial for winter time, but it didn’t seem right to complain any further. After all, she really was appreciative of the wonderful efforts the designers had made.

  They worked on her hair for several minutes, sweeping it up and securing it with faux-ivory combs.

  “And jewelry…” Shannon attached garnet earrings to Cassandra’s ears, and a matching brooch at her throat. Karen placed glittering rings on her fingers.

  “Are they real?”

  “Oh, they’re real alright,” Karen said. “Diamonds, sapphires, and pearls, which is why you also have these.” She pulled brown leather gloves over them.

  “I have to admit, I do feel like a queen. But won’t I attract too much attention dressed like this? James and I have to get from the portal, which is in a sketchy neighborhood, to his house. Wouldn’t it be better for me to dress down a little?”

  “No,” Karen replied. “You have to arrive looking like a Duchess. However, you’ll be covered with a cloak, which will help.”

  “Let’s show everyone.” Shannon led her into the common room.

  James was sitting expectantly in a chair. Professor Carver was at the console, and one other team member, Suhan, was with him. James and Carver rose when Cassandra walked in, the manners of centuries ago second nature to the time travelers.

  “You look incredible, Cass,” her boss exclaimed.

  “Really, Cassie,” said Suhan, “absolutely gorgeous.”

  Cassandra was grateful Suhan was on James’s team. The thirty-something chronologist had assisted with all three of Cassandra’s previous time journeys, and was reliable and efficient. It would be her turn to travel soon. Being of Turkish descent, she had ambitions to go to Turkey in the 1920s, just after Ataturk had come into power and led the country into democracy.