Donna didn’t know there were so many ways to be cold. Her upper teeth chattered with each wave, her toes were numb blocks packed in wet wool, and her stomach… the less said about her stomach, the better.

​

She braced herself on the slick rail, the Channel wind trying to peel her open. She breathed through her nose the way the internet had once told her to, in a life that felt, at this moment, on this stretch of gray churning water, entirely theoretical. The Channel in 1496 did not care about breathing techniques.

​

George found her minutes before she could retch or give in to self-pity. He made a show of fixing her hood, smoothing the sopping mess of her veil. He was trying to distract her from her roiling stomach.

​

“Once more,” he said, as if they were rehearsing lines for a school play and not preparing for a life-or-death masquerade. “My father’s name?”

She gritted it out. “Sir John de Malet, of Faversham.”

​

“Year of exile?”

​

“1487.”

​

“Reason?”

​

“Loyalty to the white rose.”

​

“His title?”

​

“He didn’t have one. He was…” She hesitated. Minor gentry. Not titled. “He held land. In Kent. The manor at…” The name slid away from her as her stomach revolted. She knew it so well; she’d had it an hour ago.

“Malethurst.” He said it the way he said most corrections: pleasantly, without emphasis, not like it was the thing that was going to keep them both alive.

​

“Malethurst, of course.” She filed it again. “He was loyal to the House of York, which is why we are…” She shut her mouth and waited for the sickness to pass. “Which is why we are here.”

​

He stood beside her at the rail, his familiar nearness doing nothing to settle her sickness. There was no romance in the Channel, not in this century, and certainly not as Lady Donna de Malet leaned out over the splintery rail to release what little remained of her breakfast, praying her hood would be spared. Salt stung her lips and the inside of her nose. The wind off the sea came so cold and hard it felt like a sharp slap against her cheek.

​

She closed her eyes until the next lurch passed, then opened them on the receding coast, England’s chalky outline shrinking by increments of nausea and fog. The ship’s deck rolled underfoot. Managing not to lose her balance felt like a triumph. Donna did not want to disgrace herself in front of the crew, as well as George, who seemed immune to motion.

He was her shadow, always making himself useful. Now he circled behind, steadying her with a hand at the small of her back, a proper, husbandly touch, and bent to murmur in her ear, “That was better. But they may want to know if you remember the full lineage.”

​

She rolled her head, lips pressed together, refusing to answer. They’d rehearsed this. George had drilled her on every name and date until she could parrot the whole pageant of family connections and exile as easily as a catechism.

​

The ship pitched, and George’s hand held fast, the grip of his fingers firm through her wool. Today, the way he watched her was almost infuriating—scientific, the same look he gave his students when he suspected they might, with encouragement, amount to something.

“I am sorry to be quizzing you so rigorously, my love, but if you have enough voice to vomit, you have enough to endure these drills.” His mouth twitched at the corner. “Otherwise, I will have to tell everyone you died on the crossing and find another wife on the other side.”

​

She wanted to spit, but had nothing left to spit with. “You would have to teach her the whole story again. You don’t have the patience. And,” she added, “you would miss me.”

​

He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “I would,” he said. “More than you know.”

​

Then his smile faded. “The world is not kind to exiles, especially English ones. But you know that already.” He stepped back, and for an instant her back felt cold where his hand had been.

​

The time machine is in England now, she reminded herself. No jumping aboard it to avoid what’s ahead. The monks at Faversham had taken the crate without question; George had paid them well, signed his own name, George Ellis, and walked away without looking back. The Tower of London had still been burning when they boarded the ship, the sky behind them orange, a fisherman on the road crying, “The treasure’s gone, the treasure’s gone!”

​

Their treasure too, gone, secure in a monastery cellar under an assumed name, and the coast it sat on was already behind the horizon.

Before they sailed, her grandmother, Eleanor, had left a note in the Stone Chapel at Faversham confirming that the relic, the Hand of Maud, and the pretender were at Margaret of Burgundy’s court. Eleanor had already been to Bruges, where they were headed, and found a niche at the base of a tomb in a church where future notes could be passed between centuries, a church that was standing now and would still stand in the present. She thought of her grandmother, an ocean and five centuries forward, carrying her own impossible knowledge through the streets of a foreign city.

​

At her side, a gull, white-tailed, ugly, and gray, wheeled down to scrape some morsel off the deck. She envied its stomach. A cluster of men in straw-colored hoods hunched near the mainmast, heads together, a conversation pitched low. One looked her up and down with an expression that didn’t need translation. She made herself match his gaze, not challenge, exactly, but an unblinking, sharp-edged indifference.

​

“Tell me about the jewels,” she said to George when she trusted her voice again. “The ones we’re carrying. The de Malet ones.”

​

She had memorized them, but saying them aloud helped, the same way drilling the names helped. It made the fiction feel real.

​

George tilted his head slightly. “A set of rings, a gold collar bearing the de Malet crest, and a brooch in the shape of a lily, which was your mother’s and which you wear on special occasions.” He paused. “And then the piece we’re presenting to Lady Margaret.”

​

“The ewer.”

​

She had not seen the silver ewer that bore the de Malet emblem. It was packed with the rest of their things below, and she had not been below since the crossing began, on the grounds that below was worse.

​

The de Malet lineage was real, to a point. It was her own ancestral line, not George’s, through her grandfather in Kent. If Margaret’s people didn’t probe too deeply, they’d find only the truth: a minor noble family of the right era with the right loyalties.

​

George was speaking again. “We have to be the best exiles on the best behavior, and you,” a glance, not unkind, but unsparing, “will have to convince them of where your sympathies lie.”

​

She shuddered, a tremor that had as much to do with the masquerade as the cold. It was one thing to wear the clothes of nobility, another to let the fiction settle into her bones until she forgot which parts were real. “I will,” she said, “as will you,” because it was easier than admitting she didn’t know how to make her face believe in the white rose, the Yorkist cause, or any rose for that matter, or how to hide the truth from a woman like Margaret of Burgundy.

​

A bell on the quarterdeck rang, and the ship began to yaw into a long, sliding turn. She forced herself to stand and walk, slow and careful, to the waist of the deck. Her legs wobbled. It was humiliating. On the windward side, a coil of hemp made a seat of sorts, and she took it, resting until the ache in her feet, squeezed into boots over too many layers of wool, faded to background pain.

​

If there was a single reason Donna had agreed to this, to this bottomless masquerade, it was her grandmother’s voice, a steady hum beneath the wind’s howl. “Find the relic,” Eleanor had said. “Find the Hand of Maud, but remember who you are. Don’t underestimate any of them.”

​

Her gaze slid past the huddled men and fixed on the hem of her own skirts, crusted with dried salt. She was surprised that George, ever fastidious, had let it pass inspection.

​

The wind shifted, bringing with it a briny reek that reminded Donna, inconveniently, of a summer spent picking crabs off the coast with Eleanor. She allowed the memory—sometimes it helped to let the wrong century in, if only for a heartbeat—then stuffed it away.

She tried to remember the order of events she’d just passed through: Faversham first, Eleanor’s nervous handwriting left at the chapel there letting Donna know where to leave notes in Bruges, then the leap to 1496, and now the Channel crossing. All of it, except the crossing, behind her now.

​

She wondered if the sensation of time travel would ever leave her, or if she’d only traded one kind of discomfort for another. George had said the first days would be the hardest, that time travel was not a magic leap but a series of small humiliations. He wasn’t wrong about the last part.

​

The pitch and toss of the deck shifted, the rhythm of the water changing to something ordinary. She could see, finally, the coastal haze ahead, stitched low to the water. Flanders. No mistaking it now.

She thought about what was ahead: Lady Margaret, another exile, sister to a dead king, a woman who had been keeping the Yorkist cause alive through sheer force of will for years. Then the pretender to the English throne with the unlikely name of Perkin Warbeck, possibly the boy she’d read about in history books, standing in a court that had been built around the question of whether he was real.

​

And the Hand of Maud. Somewhere in that court, in Margaret’s keeping, the thing they’d come for.

​

George said, very softly: “We’ve arrived.”

​

She didn’t smile. But she thought, with the part of her that was still and always going to be from the twenty-first century: Well, this is gonna happen, then.

​

A shudder passed through the hull; somewhere below, the anchor chain began its grind. The ship moved toward the dock, and Lady Donna de Malet, straightening her spine, prepared to disembark.