The Queen Must Die Read online

  They tried to run her through time – literally – but Katie was so out of shape from her life under the bed that she passed out in the rose garden at two in the morning and had to be carried back inside. Another idea James read in a book was to starve her to bare bones, put her in a long box, filled with ice, and slide her under the sofa. ‘If we lessen the importance of the actual flesh and blood,’ James conjectured, ‘Katie’s soul will be able to travel more easily.’

  Both Alice and Katie shook their heads vehemently. ‘Sending me into hypothermic shock is your worst idea yet,’ Katie said.

  Alice agreed. ‘It would be too dangerous.’

  James thought for a moment. ‘You’re right. If we killed Katie it might cause a great deal of damage. If she is the child who brings peace, removing her from the world might lead to its destruction. I do like my shock idea, though. I’ve been reading about electric shock treatments and…’

  Katie sighed. James’s enthusiasm for science was turning to obsession – and a painful one as far as Katie was concerned. To him Katie had stopped being a person and had become a human test tube; his very own walking, talking experiment.

  After two weeks of bumps, jolts and shocks Katie threw in the towel, and they all had to admit defeat. One night, as they sat eating jam and biscuits from MacKenzie’s secret larder, Katie spoke up. ‘There is, of course, one person who can probably get me home: DuQuelle.’

  Alice looked at James. ‘We know,’ she said. ‘We’ve talked it over and decided it is too much of a risk. He might send you back, or he might kill you.’

  ‘Maybe we should take that gamble,’ Katie said.

  James shook his head. ‘You underestimate the duplicity of DuQuelle. You’ve seen him at work. You know what lurks beneath the smiles and the exaggerated courtesy. And we don’t even think he’s human now. Steer clear of DuQuelle. We’ll find another way.’

  A noise from the hallway ended the discussion. James blew out the candle. Their night-time movements were becoming restricted – as other activity increased throughout the Palace. MacKenzie’s London shop had become a success and, because of greed, he’d patched things up with his business partners. More and more provisions were being moved out of the Palace and on to the shelves of Belzen & Mackie. They noted with increasing anxiety that the Black Tide were in the Palace two to three nights a week. Katie was beginning to notice a pattern. They’d come in, take the goods for the shop and give MacKenzie several bottles of fine wine. Once he’d settled into a blurred stupor, they’d roam the Palace. MacKenzie had showed them hidden passages to reach the stolen goods. Now they used these passages for more sinister purposes.

  Sacks of papers, plans and blueprints were leaving the Palace with them. This was worrying Katie, but she had promised Alice to stay put, stay safe. She lay awake at night and listened to skittering and creaking in the walls around her, until one night she simply couldn’t take it any more. ‘They’ve spread everywhere,’ she thought. ‘Like a cancer in the Palace. And by protecting me, Alice is endangering others. I have to find out what they are up to.’

  Slipping out from under the bed, she tiptoed into the schoolroom and ducked into the secret passage. The stone was cold beneath her feet, the walls damp around her. Following the noises, she wondered, ‘What will I do when I find them?’ She turned the corner; there – directly in front of her – was a dark figure, hunched in the passage. She had the answer to her question. She panicked and, turning tail, fled back towards the schoolroom. Footsteps pounded behind her, the figure was too close. She darted down a side passage, heading for a ladder and an escape to the outdoors, but the dark figure gained on her; a hand grabbed her nightdress, her shoulder, and pushed her against the wall. She squeezed her eyes shut, thinking, ‘If they’d try to kill a baby like Riordan, they won’t hesitate to murder me.’ She forced herself to open her eyes, to look directly at – James O’Reilly.

  ‘Blast you, girl,’ James hissed, ‘what are you doing here? You promised the Princess.’

  ‘I know,’ Katie gasped, ‘but I can’t lie under a bed while those cloaked devils invade the Palace. Something very bad is going to happen. I’ve got to stop it.’

  ‘Well, you needn’t worry,’ James snapped. ‘Every night after we’re done trying to transport you out of here I’ve been following them.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say something?’

  James shook his head. ‘It’s not good news – and I didn’t want to further alarm the Princess until I had a plan of action. I’ve been eavesdropping and they’ve confirmed everything we’ve ever thought. They are a violent and fanatical branch of the Black Tide. They want to change everything, let the people rule themselves. To do this, they need to wipe the slate clean. They attempted to kidnap Princess Alice and were hoping to kill Prince Albert at the Crystal Palace. They won’t stop until they’ve succeeded in murdering one of their targets.’

  ‘What about MacKenzie?’ Katie asked. ‘He can’t possibly be their ringleader?’

  James laughed. ‘MacKenzie has never recovered from his encounter with Mr Belzen. He’s so drunk these days he couldn’t lead himself out of his own rooms and into the courtyard. No, they’ve used MacKenzie – terrified him and played on his greed and gluttony. Even now he’s closed his eyes to their true ambitions and given them the keys to secret rooms and knowledge of secret passages. When they ply him with drink he tells them everything they need to know about the comings and goings of the Royal Family. There are two of them in the Palace right now. They’ve been searching methodically, room by room. And tonight they’ve reached fever-pitch. Something big is going to happen, and I’m missing it, standing in the cold, babysitting you.’

  Katie was astonished. This was a lot to take in, but she wouldn’t stand around in the cold being babysat by James either. ‘Well then, let’s go,’ she said. ‘And no buts – I’m sorry to break my promise to Alice, but you need a brain with some historical perspective working on this.’ A few weeks earlier Katie would have been undermined by James’s tirade. But fear and friendship had changed her. She simply smiled at James’s annoyance. ‘I think the noise is coming from Prince Albert’s private study,’ she added. ‘Don’t just stand there looking annoyed, come on!’

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Queen Must Die

  The door of the secret passage opened into a deep alcove containing a stuffed owl in a glass dome. Peering over the owl they could see two men masked and cloaked. They were moving through the Prince’s study quietly and rapidly. They were looking for something. ‘Yes,’ said one, taking a red box from amongst the Prince’s private papers. Katie recognized the dark hair and glinting eyes, peering fiercely through the mask. He deftly undid the red tape surrounding the box and peered inside. ‘We have it. If the Prince did not walk in the night we could have got in here sooner – hey?’

  Tucking the red box under his cloak, he swung around, bumping into the replica of the Crystal Palace, back on display in the Prince’s study. ‘You are a folly, a silly building,’ he said, addressing the miniature structure. ‘But you are going to be more important than even the Prince might think!’

  Turning to his comrade, he added, ‘Thank God for the clockwork mentality of the Prince. The project is running on time. The completion of the Crystal Palace will mean the completion of our plan. We shall shatter the Royal Family as one… might… break… glass.’ With each word he cocked his finger and thumb in the shape of a pistol and took aim at the Crystal Palace. ‘The Queen must die,’ he said softly. ‘And with her will die the inequality of mankind.’

  ‘The Queen must die.’ Suddenly a vision flashed before Katie, one that she had seen before. The small woman in a pink satin dress, silver lace and diamonds. Her laughing happy face turning to shock and pain as blood spread across the bodice of her gown. But of course, Katie now understood. The final vision she’d had in New York – it was the Queen. Katie’s teeth began to chatter. ‘James,’ she whispered.

  ‘Shhhh,’ he hissed fur
iously. But Katie knew, he was frightened too. A sound in the hall made them both jump further back into the alcove.

  The cloaked men were startled as well. ‘Damn the Prince,’ their leader exclaimed. ‘Does he not sleep? He will be back in here in the moment to check once more on the state of the nation. Well, come on,’ he exclaimed to his cohort. ‘Our entrance ticket should be within these papers.’ And bowing mockingly towards the Crystal Palace, he stepped into the large fireplace. The marble along its side slipped inwards with a scrape and the men pushed through the narrow opening and were gone.

  James and Katie stood very still, while their minds raced ahead. Trying to subdue the panic rising within her, Katie made an effort to speak lightly. James hadn’t wanted to take her along, and being a hysterical girl would only prove him right. ‘Now that was a cool exit – and a whole new passage we know nothing about,’ she said. Her night vision wasn’t that good, but she knew James was shooting her a killer look. His breathing was jagged.

  ‘Alice slides The Times under your bed every day. What is the date today?’ he finally asked in a strangled voice.

  ‘Well, it’s long past midnight, but yesterday’s paper was dated April 16th.’

  ‘And what day does Alice say the Crystal Palace will open?’

  ‘The Queen is due to open the Great Exhibition to the nation on the first of May,’ Katie told him.

  James thought hard for a moment, and then turned to Katie. ‘Don’t you see what all this means? We only have two weeks to put a stop to this. The first of May. That is the day they will strike. The Crystal Palace – that is the location of the attack. And the object of the attack is…’ James could barely bring himself to say it. ‘The object of the attack is… the Queen.’

  ‘We can stop them, James. We have all this information now, so we can.’

  James interrupted her. ‘We still don’t know enough. We know why, and when, and where, and who. But we don’t know how – how do they plan to kill the Queen? And without that we cannot stop them.’ James gave Katie a little shake. ‘Now, don’t yelp at me. I know we all agreed it was too dangerous for you to tell us the future – but Katie, do you know what happens in the Crystal Palace? Could you possibly know that the Queen will be killed and you haven’t told us?’

  Katie didn’t yelp. She stopped to think. The next words she said could change the shape of history. ‘I know things both sad and terrible,’ she finally said. ‘But I haven’t kept the murder of the Queen of England from you. In my history books the Queen lives on to reign all the way into another century. And I might have been brought to this time precisely to make sure that is what happens. But we know now that the future can change. Look at young Felix. He died when I first read those letters but now he lives. And James, I know something even worse. One of those visions I started having in my own time… it was a vision of Queen Victoria… Queen Victoria, being shot. I might return to my own time and find the entire British Royal Family was assassinated by the Black Tide in the name of equality. I can’t foretell the future, because time itself has become too slippery.’

  James had to agree. ‘We’ll have to postpone all attempts to send you back for now,’ he added. ‘We’ve only two weeks to figure out what the Black Tide’s plan is, and how to stop it. We will need at least some of your knowledge of the future – you’re the only one who has that.’

  ‘Except DuQuelle,’ Katie said, ‘he—’

  Just then the door to the study was pushed open. They had a new night visitor, Prince Albert. He was dressed in a nightshirt, cap and slippers. Tying his robe more firmly about him, he went to his desk and unwound the tape from several red boxes. Finding a specific batch of papers, he reread them carefully. ‘Ah, yes,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Here is the letter from the Duke of Wellington. But will his answer to the question suffice? A military man is not necessarily a naturalist, and his ideas, though firm, often lack subtle detail. I will have to cross-check against my own ornithological works…’ Moving across the room he clambered up the library steps to a top shelf and began to rummage through some large leather-bound books.

  The door opened again – and this time it was the Queen, night-gowned and robed, her hair in curl papers. Katie remembered the advice Mimi had once given her when she was in a school play: ‘If you’re frightened to go onstage, imagine everyone in the audience in their pyjamas, that will make you laugh.’ Well, here was Victoria Regina – Queen of England, Scotland and Wales – in her nightie. And she was the one who was laughing.

  She ran across the room and, coming to her husband on the top rung of the ladder, gave his foot a playful tap. ‘When I came looking for you liebchen, I didn’t expect to be looking up your nightshirt.’

  Prince Albert came down the ladder and said something in German. While Katie didn’t speak the language, she had a good idea from the way he tugged his wife’s curl papers and kissed her round cheek of what he was saying. Katie stepped further back into the alcove. Next to her, James was stiff with embarrassment. Prince Albert was talking baby talk with the Queen of England and James O’Reilly was about to fall down dead from the mortification of witnessing it. Though Katie had been exposed to many a worse scene during Mimi’s romantic escapades, she still felt fairly awkward. A horrible thought occurred to her: ‘They wouldn’t, I mean, they wouldn’t…’

  Finally, after a great deal of cooing, the Queen began to talk some sense. ‘I woke up and you were gone, and here you are working. You give so much to this country; couldn’t you reserve three in the morning for me?’

  ‘You are right, of course, mein liebling, but I could not sleep. There was yet one more problem, if I could just tease out the solution.’

  ‘Is it the Foreign Office? Is it Palmerston?’

  ‘No, for once the man is not a problem.’

  ‘Is it DuQuelle – such an unsuitable member of the Royal Household, far too exotic.’

  The Prince smiled and shook his head. ‘It is not DuQuelle. He has great knowledge and capabilities in so many fields, if only he weren’t always there, at one’s elbow, praising one to the skies.’

  The Queen laughed and Albert continued. ‘The problem is with the Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace.’

  ‘But everything is going so well,’ the Queen protested. ‘The design is magnificent, the building is on schedule, materials and exhibits from all over the world are arriving – even now, at this hour of the night.’

  The Prince sat down in one of the large, overstuffed armchairs, and took his little queen in his lap. ‘The problem is the elm trees,’ he explained. ‘Having built around them, we now discover the Crystal Palace is filled with sparrows, seeking refuge in their branches.’

  The Queen threw her head back and laughed: a loud hearty laugh for such a small woman. ‘Sparrows! Whatever will we do?’

  The Prince was laughing too. ‘I know it sounds silly,’ he admitted, ‘but they could be most distressing. Think of the, well, the mess they will make, the havoc they will wreak on the ladies’ bonnets. They will have to be captured or killed. The Duke of Wellington has suggested we can achieve this by the use of sparrow hawks.’

  The Queen was now shaking with laughter, tears running down her face. ‘So we shall release hawks to catch the sparrows and then cats to catch the hawks and then dogs to catch the cats…’

  The Prince gave her a little shake. ‘That is not helpful, mein Schatz. If you will just let me get on with my work, I believe I have several very helpful studies on the habits of predatory birds…’

  The Queen wiped her eyes and tried to look more serious. ‘I will help. Two pairs of eyes will take half the time. We will be back in our warm bed within the hour.’ The Prince began to protest, but she kissed him lightly on the lips and took a large volume from him. Soon they were sitting side by side at their matching desks, exchanging comments on what they read. ‘To shoot the sparrows would be too dangerous with all the glass… and poison with the crowds of people, no, that would never do… but how to co
ntrol the hawks once they had killed the sparrows…’

  James and Katie could do nothing but stand in the dark and watch this tableau of marital happiness and political dedication. The snatches of conversation grew less frequent, and then stopped. Queen Victoria’s eyes fluttered shut, her head drooped and soon she was asleep; her head resting on a coloured plate of a large bird devouring a water rat. Prince Albert tidied their desks and, picking up his small, plump, sleeping wife, he carried her from the room. ‘We need to tell Alice,’ was James’s only comment.

  *

  ‘The Queen,’ said Alice in a stunned voice. ‘Not my mother, not the Queen.’ Katie and James had dashed back to the nursery. News this big would not wait for sleep. Katie now wished she’d let her have a few more moments of peaceful slumber. Alice slumped in misery at the foot of her bed. Trying to rouse herself, she explained to her friends: ‘If it was me, or even Leopold, the country would go on – of course there would be great alarm and mourning and tributes paid in Parliament, but the damage would be limited. To attempt to…’ – she could hardly say it – ‘to kill the Queen would shake this country to its roots. No wonder this Belzen has chosen the Black Tide as his earthly envoys. For what they seek might mean the end of the monarchy for ever, and universal upheaval would ensue.’

  James tried to reassure her. ‘We know so much now, Alice. There are just a few more pieces of information we need. And then we can put a stop to it.’

  ‘Maybe you should go to the household guard with this,’ Katie suggested.

  Alice shook her head. ‘They’d go immediately to Mr MacKenzie, and he’ll deny the whole thing – think what’s at stake for him.’

  ‘Shall we try your father again?’

  ‘I will try to see him – but he’s so busy with the final preparations for the Crystal Palace. And we’ve seen that a note isn’t to be trusted.’

  Katie chewed the end of one of her nails. They were over their heads; if ever they needed an adult, this was the time. But as usual, the adults were failing them.