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there be one less demon!”
     

     
    Lambert slipped from her monitor to run down the corridor. Culhane flew from the room; behind him the sound of something heavy struck the door. Culhane slumped against it, his face pasty around his cheek dye. Lambert could almost find it in herself to pity him. Almost.
    She said softly, “I told you so.”
    “She’s like a wild thing.”
    “You knew she could be. It’s documented enough, Culhane. I’ve put a suicide watch on her.”
    “Yes. Good. I…she was like a wild thing.”
    Lambert peered at him. “You still want her! After that!”
    That sobered him; he straightened and looked at her coldly. “She is a holy hostage, Lambert.”
    “I remember that. Do you?”
    “Don’t insult me, intern.”
    He moved angrily away; she caught his sleeve. “Culhane—don’t be angry. I only meant that the sixteenth century was so different from our own, but—”
    “Do you think I don’t know that? I was doing historical research while you were learning to read, Lambert. Don’t instruct me.”
    He stalked off. Lambert bit down hard on her own fury and stared at Anne Boleyn’s closed door. No sound came from behind it. To the soundless door she finished her sentence: “—but some traps don’t change.”
    The door didn’t answer. Lambert shrugged. It had nothing to do with her. She didn’t care what happened to Anne Boleyn, in this century or that other one. Or to Culhane, either. Why should she? There were other men. She was no Henry VIII, to bring down her world for passion. What was the good of being a time researcher if you could not even learn from times past?
    She leaned thoughtfully against the door, trying to remember the name of the beautiful boy in her orientation lecture, the one with the violet eyes.
    She was still there, thinking, when Toshio Brill called a staff meeting to announce, his voice stiff with anger, that Her Holiness of the Church of the Holy Hostage had filed a motion with the All-World Forum that the Time Research Institute, because of the essentially reverent nature of the time rescue program, be removed from administration by the Forum and placed instead under the direct control of the Church.
     

     
    She had to think. It was important to think, as she had thought through her denial of Henry’s ardor, and her actions when that ardor waned. Thought was all.
    She could not return to her London, to Elizabeth. They had told her that. But did she know beyond doubt that it was true?
    Anne left her apartments. At the top of the stairs she usually took to the garden, she instead turned and opened another door. It opened easily. She walked along a different corridor. Apparently even now no one was going to stop her.
    And if they did, what could they do to her? They did not use the scaffold or the rack; she had determined this from talking to that oaf Culhane and that huge ungainly woman, Lady Mary Lambert. They did not believe in violence, in punishment, in death. (How could you not believe in death? Even they must one day die.) The most they could do to her was shut her up in her rooms, and there the female pope would come to see she was well treated.
    Essentially they were powerless.
    The corridor was lined with doors, most set with small windows. She peered in: rooms with desks and machines, rooms without desks and machines, rooms with people seated around a table talking, kitchens, still rooms. No one stopped her. At the end of the corridor she came to a room without a window and tried the door. It was locked, but as she stood there, her hand still on the knob, the door opened from within.
    “Lady Anne! Oh!”
    Could no one in this accursed place get her name right? The woman who stood there was clearly a servant, although she wore the same ugly gray-green tunic as everyone else. Perhaps, like Lady Mary, she was really an apprentice. She was of no interest, but behind her was the last thing Anne expected to see in this place: a child.
    She pushed past