“Let me show you something.” Franny held the pendant. She pushed a small, nearly invisible pin, and the rose popped open. On each side, there was a picture. A photograph.

Rose gasped. “That’s me! Me at the beach with my mom. Me when I was six years old.”

“Why are you dressed that way?”

“Oh, Franny, it’s so hard to explain.”

Franny looked into her eyes sympathetically. “I understand,” she replied in barely a whisper. “And who’s that man?” Franny asked.

“I have no idea.” The man had a ruff—a type of large, round, and frilly collar—and a neatly trimmed beard. He wore a funny little hat.

“He ain’t noble ’cause he’d have ermine on his cloak if he was. Only royals are allowed to wear ermine. Sumptuary laws, you know.”

“Sump-cha what?”

“Clothing rules, how you dress. Certain people are allowed to wear certain things depending on their rank and birth.”

“That’s terrible. It . . . it must be unconstitutional.”

“Un-concha-what?” Franny asked.

“Never mind, it’s just not fair.” Rose wanted to wear a dress, make a dress like Princess Elizabeth’s.

“Well, forget if it’s fair or not, Rose. This gentleman, he looks quite a bit like you. Could he be related to you?”

“I have no family left,” she whispered, and remembered the mist in her mother’s eyes.

Rose sank her fingers into the grassy bank of the river. And just as she did, she felt something pulling her back, back to a newer century, back to where she’d come from. Every fiber in her body resisted. No!

The Locket

Chapter 7

Ambush!

Rose wasn’t sure how she’d gotten back from that grassy bank. She had dug in her fingers, trying to hang on for all she was worth, but it hadn’t worked. She had to find out how the picture of her and her mom had shown up in sixteenth-century England! When she returned and looked at the time on her cell phone, only five minutes had passed since that dreadful text about her mother’s accident had come in at 9:55 p.m. It was now ten o’clock. But it felt as if she had been gone for an entire day in that other world of Hatfield, in that other time out of time.

It seemed impossible. It had been early morning when she had arrived in Hatfield, met Franny, been taken up to the palace, met Princess Elizabeth, cleaned Princess Mary’s chamber, then gone swimming. The sun was slipping down by the time they had swum ashore and Franny had shown her the locket.