TIME LORD OF NIBIRU ~ The Queen’s Ward ~ Chapter Three
Oct 15, 2026 · by Janet Kira Lessin
The Fever Week
Shelton Hall, Norfolk — November 1558
Mary Shelton is up in the apple loft when she hears her father cough.
It isn’t a big cough. Just one, down in the stable yard, the kind a man makes when the cold gets into his chest. But the grooms stop talking. Old Walter sets down his bucket. Her mother, crossing the yard with a basket of linens, stops dead and turns to look at her husband with a face Mary has never seen before.
Everyone knows about the new ague. It has been going around for two winters now. It came to Norwich, and the bells rang every day for a month. It came to the Parker cousins at Hallingbury and took the steward and both his boys. People say the Queen herself has it, up in London.
By supper her father is shaking so hard his cup rattles against his teeth.
By morning her mother is shaking too.
Janet comes to awareness in the hay, eight years old, smelling apples. How did she get here? One moment, Maui and the rain on the roof. The next, small hands, straw in her hair, a cough in a stable yard. She doesn’t know this child’s name. She doesn’t know the year. She only knows the dread rising in the girl’s chest because it rises in hers too. She is a passenger, riding inside a child who doesn’t know yet.
Her mother sends her away. Mary stands in the doorway of the great chamber, and her mother, gray-faced in the big bed beside her father, won’t let her come in.
“No closer, sweetie. Stay there.”
“I want to sit with you.”
“I know.” Her mother’s eyes are too bright. “Go with Nurse to the gatehouse. You’ll sleep there till we’re well. Be good. Say your prayers.”
“When will you be well?”
Her mother looks at her for a long moment. Then she does something strange. She raises one hand from the coverlet and makes the sign of the cross in the air toward Mary, the way the priest does. The way you do for someone you won’t see again.
“Go on, Mary.”
The gatehouse is small, smoky, and smells of Nurse’s tallow candles. Mary sleeps on a pallet by the fire. Every morning she presses her face to the cold window and looks across the yard at the great chamber’s shuttered windows. Every morning the physician’s horse is tied outside. Every morning fewer servants cross the yard.
She doesn’t get sick. Nurse says it’s because she’s young and God has a use for her. The nurse says it with her lips tight, as if she isn’t sure God’s use is a kind one.
On the fifth morning, the church bell rings.
Nine strokes for a man. Then a pause. Then the strokes for his years.
Mary counts them, her forehead against the glass.
In the afternoon, it rings again. Six strokes this time, for a woman.
Nurse doesn’t say anything. She just pulls Mary away from the window and holds her, and Mary lets her, and doesn’t cry. Something inside her has shrunk to something small and hard, like a seed.
Janet knows that seed. She carried it once down a long hall at Hampton Court, screaming. Here it is again, planted in a new body before the old grief has even cooled.
Two days later, the bells ring again.
They ring in the village, then the next, and the next, until the whole county is ringing, and it goes on and on until Mary has to cover her ears. A rider gallops through the gate in the queen’s colors and shouts something in the yard that makes the grooms pull off their caps.
“What is it?” Mary asks. “Who died now?”
Nurse stands very still at the window.
“The Queen is dead,” she says slowly. “Queen Mary. And the Lady Elizabeth is Queen now.”
The name means nothing to Mary.
But Nurse turns from the window and looks at her, really looks, the way grown-ups look when they are working something out. Then she crosses herself and says, so quietly Mary almost doesn’t hear:
“Well. God has His uses after all.”
The letter arrives nine days later, sealed with red wax and a crowned rose. Mary Shelton, an orphan, is to be brought to London.
To the Queen.
The Arrival
Whitehall Palace, London — December 1558
The carriage lurches and Mary Shelton’s teeth knock together.
She has been cold for four days. Cold in the inn at Thetford, cold in the inn at Newmarket, cold in this box on wheels that smells of wet wool and horse. Her black gown is too big. Someone cut it down from her mother’s in a single night, and the hem drags in the mud whenever they make her get out.
Three weeks ago she had a mother and a father. Then the new plague, the fever killing people all over England, came through Shelton, and the bells rang twice in one day for both of them. Two days later every bell in England rang again, for something else. A new queen.
Mary was in the garden throwing stones into the moat when the messenger rode in. Nobody told her what the bells meant. Nobody tells her anything.
Janet is in there with her. Not watching from above this time. Inside. She feels the ache in her small fingers, the hunger nobody has noticed, the hard little knot in her chest that won’t let her cry. She knows this knot. She carried it once to a chopping block. And here it is again, eight years old, wrapped in a dead woman’s gown.
The carriage stops. A man in green-and-white livery opens the door, and the cold pours in, bringing the smell of the river. Torches. Stone. More windows than Mary has ever seen in one wall.
“Mistress Shelton.” He doesn’t smile. “Her Majesty will see you now.”
Now. Not tomorrow, after a bath and sleep. Now, with mud on her hem.
They walk. The corridors go on forever, each one warmer than the last, each one lined with people who stop talking as she passes. A gentleman bows to the air above her head. Two ladies in velvet whisper behind their hands. Mary hears one word: Boleyn.
She doesn’t know what it means, only that they say it the way you’d say plague.
The doors at the end are tall and gilded, and a woman with a plain, kind face waits beside them. She kneels without being asked and tugs Mary’s collar straight.
“I’m Mistress Ashley,” she says softly. “Don’t be frightened. She was a little girl alone once too.”
The doors open.
The room is all firelight and red hangings, with a smell like oranges steeped in cloves. At the far end, by the hearth, a young woman stands with her back to the door. She is tall and thin as a candle, her red-gold hair pinned under a small black cap. When she turns, Mary sees she is still in mourning: black silk, a white ruff, a pearl at her throat.
She is twenty-five, and she has been Queen of England for twenty-four days.
Mary remembers what her mother taught her and sinks into a curtsy so low her knees shake.
The Queen doesn’t speak. She crosses the room in long strides, her skirts whispering, and stops so close Mary can see the tiny scar near her eyebrow. Then she does something no one has told Mary a queen would ever do.
She kneels.
Right there on the rushes, in black silk, until their eyes are level. She takes Mary’s chin in long cold fingers and turns her face toward the fire.
She looks for a long time. Too long.
Janet feels it before she understands it. The way the Queen’s breath catches. Her thumb moves once along the line of the jaw, as if she’s checking it against something she remembers. Janet knows that look. She has seen it on her own face in mirrors, searching old photographs for a resemblance.
“You have your grandmother’s eyes,” the Queen says at last. Her voice is lower than Mary expected. “Do you know who your grandmother was?”
“Lady Anne Shelton, Your Majesty.”
“She kept me when I was smaller than you. When no one else would.” The Queen’s mouth twitches, not quite a smile. “So now I keep you. That is fair, don’t you think?”
Mary doesn’t know if she is meant to answer. She nods.
“Are you hungry?”
Mary nods again. And then, to her horror, the knot in her chest breaks open. Four days of cold, two coffins, and every whispering face in every corridor pour out of her at once, and she cries in front of the Queen of England with mud on her hem.
She waits to be sent away.
Instead, the Queen gathers her up, black silk and pearls and all, and holds her. Not the stiff way strangers hold children. Hard, the way you hold something you thought you’d lost.
“Kat,” the Queen says over Mary’s head, and her voice is not quite steady. “Bread and warm milk. And have them bring the little bed in here.”
“In here, Madam? To your own chamber?”
“In here.”
That night the trundle bed sits at the foot of the great bed with its curtains of crimson and gold. Mary lies in it with a full belly and clean feet, unable to sleep. The fire pops. The palace creaks. Somewhere far off a guard calls the hour.
She dreams of the moat at Shelton, and the water is black, and her mother is under it.
She wakes with a cry.
The curtains of the great bed part. A pale hand reaches down in the dark.
“Come,” the Queen whispers. “Come up here.”
Mary climbs up into the warm feather mountain, and the Queen pulls her close, tucking the small head under her chin. Mary can feel her heart beating fast, as if she’s the frightened one.
“No one will take you from me,” the Queen murmurs into her hair. “No one. Do you hear?”
Mary is already falling asleep. She doesn’t hear the last part, spoken so softly it might be a prayer.
“Not again.”
Janet hears it. And four hundred years away, in a dark house in the Maui jungle, her eyes fly open.
