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I did my best in this book not to fudge or change any facts that are irrefutable. Chip’s description of what happened to Edward V during the spring of 1483 is as historically accurate as I could make it. (So are his and Alex’s
descriptions of Edward IV’s eating habits—and I bet you thought bulimia was only a modern problem!) Fortunately for my job as a fiction writer, the historical record regarding Edward and Richard is full of gaps and disputed details, so that left me lots of room to fill in with my own imagination.

Historians studying an event like the disappearance of Edward and Richard look for accounts written by people living at the same time, who were close enough to the action to know what they were talking about, but not so close that they were overly biased and might be lying. In this case, the perfect account just doesn’t exist—or hasn’t been found. When I was researching this book, I had to laugh at the many, many times I would read, “
The Croyland Chronicle
was surely right about this detail, but probably wrong about …,” or, “Though Sir Thomas More was accurate about this part of the story, he must have been confused about …” And then I’d put down that research book, pick up another one, and discover that the author of the second book totally reversed which details of which versions were surely or probably right or wrong.

For centuries Richard III was painted as the villain of the story. One notable account says that, years later, a man who’d worked for Richard III confessed to killing the boys on Richard’s orders. But that account rather conveniently
came out during the reign of Henry VII—a.k.a., Henry Tudor, the man who defeated Richard and took the Crown at the Battle of Bosworth. And Henry had every reason to want to discredit Richard as much as possible to make his own claim to the throne look stronger. (By then Henry was also married to Edward V’s sister—yes, this is a very tangled tale—and so it also helped him to make sure everyone believed Edward V had deserved to be king but was very certainly dead.) Almost a century later William Shakespeare—writing when Henry’s granddaughter Elizabeth I was on the throne—based his play about Richard III on the earlier account. In Shakespeare’s version Richard III is a complete monster, the kind of villain audiences love to hate.

More than three hundred years later a group of Richard supporters began trying fervently to change Richard’s reputation. The Richard III Society, founded in 1924, now claims nearly 3,500 members worldwide. Richard’s defenders offer very different views of history. Some blame Richard’s onetime friend the Duke of Buckingham or even Henry VII for killing Edward V and his brother. Others give credence to accounts that say the boys survived, in hiding or in exile in another country. In the 1490s a man showed up in England claiming to be the younger brother, Richard, seeking the throne for himself. His claim was convincing
enough (or useful enough) that other European rulers supported him, and he raised a rebel army to fight Henry. His efforts failed, though, and he was eventually hanged for plotting against the king.

One piece of evidence that is almost always cited in this story is the fact that workmen renovating the Tower of London in 1674 found skeletons in a spot that could fit a description of where the boys’ bodies were once buried. (However, the same account that describes that burial place also says a priest later dug them up and moved them.) The skeletons were assumed to be Edward’s and Richard’s; they were moved to Westminster Abbey. In 1933 scientists got permission to unearth the skeletons again to study them closely. Even though the scientists couldn’t actually be sure if the bones belonged to males or females, they concluded that the bones were the right size and age to belong to Edward and Richard if they had been killed in 1483. Everything I read about that study made me wonder what the scientists would have concluded if they hadn’t known ahead of time whose skeletons they were supposedly looking at. And I wonder what scientists now would be able to discover examining the same bones with more-modern techniques—especially DNA testing. (So far, no one’s been allowed to do such tests.) But even if scientists could prove conclusively that those skeletons
were Edward’s and Richard’s, we still wouldn’t know how they died.

That pretty much leaves time travel as the only way to completely solve the mystery. And if we could travel back in time to begin solving all the mysteries of history, how could we resist wanting to save all the victims?