Skittles! Somehow Rose sensed she was not talking about the candy that was in her pocket. She reached for her pocket, but there was no pocket. There was no jacket. Gone too were her jeans. She was wearing a long voluminous skirt of a coarse brown fabric. Instead of a T-shirt, she wore a loose blouse tucked in, with generous sleeves. There were little tucks around the wrists of the sleeves. Nicely made! Rose thought. Hand stitched. A machine could never do such work, not even the Millennium Falcon.
“Go on, Rose, fetch the milk pail. I’ll try to show you as much as I can. Course, I’m a tad lower than scullery, and I think I heard they were looking for someone to serve upstairs in the princess’s chambers. You should do.”
“Me? Why me?”
“They say that the princess thought she saw someone t’other day who she felt might suit.”
Then it hadn’t been a dream, Rose realized. The girl she had seen with the blue dress and the pointy red shoes had been the Royal Princess Elizabeth and they had each seen the other. But that princess, all those people, had lived almost five hundred years ago! How could this be? How had she jumped backward in time nearly five centuries?
“Now run along and get that milk.” Franny said this merrily, as if she were inviting her to join a game.
Rose walked off in a daze. The pail of milk was right where Franny had said it would be. She picked it up and walked back to where Franny was waiting.
“Thank you. It’ll make it so much easier for me. You know, my leg. Well, I guess you can only see my foot.” She smiled, and a dimple flashed in her cheek.
“What happened to your leg?”
“Got the fever when I was a baby. I don’t always need my crutch, but the weather’s been bothering it lately. Then I took a tumble yesterday and that didn’t help any.”
“What kind of fever did you have?”
“The midwife called it infant apoplexy. Your muscles seize up. Lots of children die from it. But it just twisted up my leg and weakened it. So I can’t complain.”
Franny struck Rose as having an unusually sunny disposition. She liked her a lot, but she could still not begin to understand what had happened and how she had arrived in this place, walking with this girl, Franny. One moment she had been looking at that horrible newspaper picture of her mother’s fatal car crash, and the next she was here in this new place. Hatfield, Franny had called it. And where was September?
“You know, Franny, I can carry both pails. It’s not a problem for me.”
“Oh, that would be very good, because then we could stop at the henhouse and I could collect some eggs for Cook. Saves me another walk.”
“I’m happy to help you.”
Rose paused a moment. “Have you seen a cat around here?”
“I thought I saw one the other day. And you know, it’s funny, but I think Princess Elizabeth saw the cat too. She sent out a guard looking for it.”
“Really? Was it by any chance orange?”
“Yes. Rather like a maple leaf. And thank you for helping with the pails.”
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
Franny stopped and looked at her. “But it is something, Rose. You’ll probably be a house servant. That’s way above me. I can’t think of one house servant, and there are almost fifty, who would pick up a milk pail, let alone go to the henhouse. You will go to the henhouse with me, won’t you?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. You’re a bit odd, Rose.”
Rose was tempted to say, “So are you,” but refrained. They continued on the path.
Rose scanned the countryside. If she just looked at the gently sloping hills, the grand old trees that swept green expanses, it might have been any fancy country estate in the America of her time, or like the country club where her mom often played golf with a friend of hers who belonged. But this was no country club. No golf courses visible. Rose knew she was not in her time. She was not going to come across a putting green or a reenactment of some episode in history where twenty-first-century people were dressed up in old-fashioned clothes to give a lesson on how life was in those olden times. This was the real deal!
She glanced discreetly at Franny. Her stockings were torn. The clogs she wore were wooden, good for mud. In fact, they looked as if they had animal poop stuck to them. Not dog poop either. Cowpats, undoubtedly, as there were some pieces of straw mixed in. Her skirt hadn’t been washed in a long time. There were stains on it. And then of course there was Franny’s odd way of speaking, not simply her accent but these outlandish expressions—God’s kneecaps! The most fun swear ever, Rose thought. She pictured God sitting on a throne of cumulous clouds. His flowing celestial garments hiked up a bit, exposing knobby old knees crowning skinny, slightly hairy legs. Maybe God would be groaning a bit—“Oh, lamentations! My arthritis is kicking up again.” To the left of the wide drive they were walking on was a vast lawn. A wonderful scent of freshly mowed grass swirled through the air, and beneath an oak tree was the hunched figure of a girl. Rose couldn’t see her clearly, as her face was buried in her hands, and her shoulders shook.
“That girl over there. She’s crying. Who is she?”
“That’s her, poor thing.” Franny sighed.
“Her? You mean the . . .”
“Yes, Her Royal Highness. Princess Elizabeth.”
“Of course,” Rose whispered, because it made sense to her now that everything she thought to be true could change in an instant. Her mom’s life had ended in an instant. Her own life had changed in that same instant. So why should anything surprise Rose now? And though nothing seemed quite real to her, she kept looking to test reality, scouring this scene for certain touchstones of reality like the stains on Franny’s skirts or the poop on the clogs. But nevertheless, she was surprised. And now she had been told that the weeping girl beneath the tree was royal. She could hardly ask to see her blue blood. Wasn’t that the color that flowed through royal veins? And what proof could she offer them, offer to Franny or possibly this princess, of her own identity? Would they believe that she, Rose Ashley, had slipped from her grandmother Rosalinda’s greenhouse in Indianapolis in the twenty-first century, and now she was here in England in what must be the sixteenth century?
“If they take you on, Rose, it’s a fine job. I think she’ll like you.”
Rose was only half listening, as she had spotted September peeking around the immense trunk of the oak tree. Her tilting green eyes were fastened on the princess.
“I . . . I . . . hope so . . . but why is the princess crying?”
“Banished.”
“Banished?”
“Banished from court by her father.”
“Her own father banished her?”
“Well, he’s king, you know. He can do that.”
“But she’s his daughter!”
“He’s not just any king. He’s King Henry the Eighth. He can do whatever he wants. He chopped off her mother’s head.”
Rose gasped. She knew this, of course, from history books, from televisions shows, from movies. But now she knew this because she was actually here. Had she slipped through some crack in time? She wavered a bit and set down the pail.
“Are you all right, Rose?”