Castaways in Time by Adams Robert

Put in all my handkerchiefs, four bath towels, a big pair of scissors, two ballpoint pens, a couple of the black market pens, and a pack of the 8 x 11 bond. There is a brass police whistle and chain in the bottom drawer of my gun cabinet; that too.

If I said that I love you, Krystal, I’d be lying, but I do miss you and I wish I could be with you. However, we—all of us—are irrevocably committed to His Majesty and his cause, like it or not, so it is sure to be some time before I can return to Whyffler Hall. .. and to you.

As,for the BIG QUESTION, where we are is assuredly England, when is a little trickier as these people (those to whom I’ve spoken, at least) reckon time according to the individual kings or popes. This is the ninth year since the crowning of Arthur III of England and Wales, the fourth year since the ascension of Pope Boniface XI. I don’t know all that much history, but I never heard of an English king named Arthur III.

The present King is a Tudor, and his great-grandfather was Henry VII, but the only reference I can find to the Henry VIII of our history is the memory of the King’s great-uncle, Henry, who was killed on some European field more than eighty years ago. Arthur III was preceded by his elder brother, Richard IV, who died suddenly and mysteriously (it is widely believed that he was poisoned at the instigation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but that may well be just anticlerical propaganda). His wife bore a son seven months later, but by then Arthur had already been crowned.

Richard’s widow, Angela, is the niece of the previous Pope. As such, her son is the favorite of the Church and Rome has turned all the screws they can to force Arthur to abdicate in his nephew’s favor; everything else failing, they excommunicated him. But a wave of anticlerical feeling has been building up in England for generations so that now Arthur has the full support of at least sixty percent of his nobles and closer to eighty percent of the common people. And the more foreign armies and raiders the Church sends into England, the wider and stronger becomes the open, public support.

The center of pro-Church sentiment is in and around London. When the King marched his army north at the news of the then-imminent invasion of the Scots, a strong force of Crusaders sailed over from the Continent and garrisoned the capital. The Archbishop of Canterbury and certain pro-Church nobles acclaimed and crowned Angela’s son as Richard V, proclaiming his mother his regent.

So that’s how matters stand.

As for Arthur, from the little I’ve seen of him, he seems a personable man of thirty years. He seems intelligent; they say he speaks seven or eight languages fluently. He’s strong as the proverbial ox and has been a soldier since his early teens (but that’s par for the course among noblemen); he has a build that probably will run to fat as he gets older, but now he’s all big bones and sinew.

He had a wife (a daughter of Lothair HI, Emperor of what I surmise is the Holy Roman Empire, although its boundaries seem different from what I can recall of my European history), two young sons, and an infant daughter, but they were butchered at the order of the Regent, Angela, soon after her son was crowned.

I think, all things considered, we’re definitely on the right side in this conflict, Krystal. For all that the King’s people can be rather crude and barbaric, the Church people strike me as mercilessly savage, not my kind at alL

There was more, additional little items Bass requested for his health or comfort, instructions for turning on the heating system in his house—he clearly assumed that she still was living in his trilevel, but she had long ago moved into Whyffler Hall, to be near her many patients, and turned the anachronistic house nestled among Sir Francis’ specimen shrubs over to Pete Fairley and Carey Carr. Dave Atkins moved in with them whenever he and Susan had a tiff, which was why Krystal had dumped everything resembling a drug into a cardboard box and locked it into the big, heavy antique safe, along with the rest of the coin collection, the silverware, Bass’s jewelry, and the remainder of the liquor.