First of all, there’s the food. Get this: they eat swan. Yes, they had roasted at least a dozen or more swans, and they reattached the wings to the poor creatures when they served them on platters. Next I saw them bring in what I thought were just pies. But then I got a glimpse of little heads poking out of the crust! They were heads. Eel heads! It was eel pie. I thought I was going to barf right there on the balcony.

Soon the “entertainment” started. This is what these royal people and their courtiers consider funny: poop and fart jokes, and Jane the Bald shrieking like a banshee. There was another fool, Will Somers, running around pinching people’s butts. It was disgusting. Any kid in the twenty-first century who did this would have been sent from the table. And these weren’t kids! Oh, and they even have a special horn that makes fart noises. They sneak up on unsuspecting people and blow a blast near their butts. The higher the ranking, the louder King Henry laughs. But actually, he’s a pretty good sport. Even when they sneak up on him with the horn, he laughs. A monarch with a sense of humor is admirable, but this doesn’t change the fact that he chopped off the heads of two of his wives!

So, there you have it! Sixteenth-century entertainment is disgusting. It’s vile and bizarre and guess what—I want to go back! I have to go back. I don’t feel whole anymore. My mom died a horrible death. And my father is lost in time and I feel as if something has been amputated from me. A limb is missing. The pain from missing both my parents is excruciating. I read about this thing once called phantom limb pain. It’s about people who have real pain coming from a limb that is no longer there. That’s me. I’m not just an orphan. I’m a double amputee. I want to find my father. He’s there someplace. I just feel it. Feel it in my bones, as Mom used to say. Was he a courtier? Or a crafter of fine things? Did he live in Hatfield or maybe Greenwich? England is not a big country. Minuscule next to America, but where in that small country might he be?