Jenny sat in the uncomfortable, rigid bus seat with her head leaning against the cold window pane that vibrated annoyingly as she tried to rest her forehead against it. 
She had been hoping to get a good nap in on the journey to Hampton Court Palace after having such a poor sleep the night before, but no such luck.
The rest of the kids on the bus chattered loudly in the excitement of at least one day away from that same old building with it’s same old halls, same old classrooms and same old teachers trying to teach them things that they were not even sure they wanted to learn. 
The bus jerked as it hit a pothole in the road and her forehead was knocked against the glass of the window. Jenny swore quietly and checked to see that there were no teachers listening nearby. Mr Hunt and Ms Ross were at the front of the bus where teachers always sat on school outings. They were deep in conversation but also keeping an eye on the unruly teenagers that were under their care for the day.
Jenny tried sitting back and resting her head in the head rest. The raucous voices of her classmates continued, but as Jenny’s head lolled in the bus seat they became an ambience and her consciousness drifted into a semi-restful haze.
“Jenny…..” 
She thought she heard a voice calling to her through a misty haze. The same voice that had haunted her dreams for as long as she could remember...or was it? 
“Jenny…”
...Jenny….”
“JENNY!!” 
It's her pretty, blonde best friend Margot was trying to get her attention. 
“What is with you this morning? You're so spaced out!!” 
Margot huffed and turned her attention to the not so spaced out girls sitting behind them and chatted brightly with them instead. 
Jenny sighed. She wasn’t normally so out of it but strange dreams all through the night had robbed her of a good nights rest. 
She was a child again, visiting Hampton Court Palace and there was a man in costume who was really a ghost...
She drifted back into a sleepy fog trying to piece the fragments of the dream that lingered on the edge of her consciousness when out of the corner of her eye she saw the great red brick palace come into view of the bus. She felt her body shudder and then came a surge of annoyance with herself for being such a baby. Everyone knows that there is no such thing as ghosts.  
The bus pulled to a stop and Ms. Ross and Mr. Hunt jumped out, ready to organize the students as soon as they were all off the bus. 
Mr. Hunt comments to Jenny that the day should be a breeze for her & gives her a friendly little wink. It's their little secret that Jenny is a history nerd. Mr. Hunt tutors her in it after school and he gets it because he's been picked on for liking history too. 
Once they have been sorted into groups they enter the palace and begin their tours. Jenny listens to the headset on her tapes and finds herself in a very familiar place. She stops and stares around. For years this place had back to her in dreams. Dreams that told of a ghost and a long forgotten promise...
She squeezed her eyes shut to rid herself of memories of the strange dreams and hears the same voice “Jenny…” but it's even stronger and closer this time. 
She snapped her eyes open and looks around wildly, unwilling to believe in the impossibility even when it meant distrusting her own senses. She felt a tap on her arm and looked around to see Margot again, this time with a look of mild concern on her face. 
“Jenny, are you okay?” she asked “I'm starting to get worried here…”
Jenny laughed in relief. 
“I'm fine, I think this place is just getting to me,” she said. 
“Oh Jenny I thought you were over all that!!’ Margot exclaimed “That imagination stuff is for kids!!” 
Jenny felt irked by Margot’s offhand remark about a past that had been very trying for Jenny herself. 
“I am over all that!! Look I just didn't sleep well last night and I'm tired,” she said “Can we please just drop it now?” 
Jenny turned on her heel and stormed off from her insensitive friend. She ranted internally about people and their inability to understand something as simple as a bad night’s sleep, all the while the thoughts of ghosts and disembodied stayed uncomfortably on the edges of her awareness. 
Lost in a maze of her own thoughts, Jenny wound up getting frustratingly lost in the real life warren of corridors in Hampton Court Palace. She was cursing her idiocy for not taking one of the maps they had been handing out at the entrance when she heard muffled sobs coming from one of the rooms behind her. She turned and saw the old arched door was standing ajar. She wondered had another visitor to the palace like her gotten lost here...she opened the door to find herself in an ante-chamber. She heard the sobs again, they were coming from a bigger arched doorway.  
With some trepidation she walked over to the massive oak doors and pushed them open. The room inside was gloomy, the glass window panes had clearly not been cleaned in a long time and not much light got penetrated their murkiness. The walls seemed to be of a dark wood paneling and below Jenny’s feet was a dark and dusty carpet. She could make out a great canopied bed on a raised platform in the center of the room. 
Uneasy with the gloom and the sense of a place that was forgotten to time, Jenny abandoned her pursuit of an ally in finding her way back to civilisation and made to leave this tomb.
‘Is it you? I thought you would never return...’ said a familiar voice from behind her just as she had turned away. 
She froze. That voice, that voice that had haunted her dreams since she was a little girl...it was like it had been calling to her all along, all through the years. 
She turned and could dimly see the shape of him sitting on the dais at the far end of the room. Standing mute and facing the phantom who had graced her thoughts and dreams all her life she wondered what she could possibly say to him after all this time. She had broken a promise she made to him, did she apologize for it? Did she explain how she had begged and pleaded with her parents to let her come back? How school teachers had written letters to them telling them that they were worried about her, that she kept writing her essays on Tudor history and drawing what she told them was the ghost of King Henry VIII? How the child therapist had told her that she needed to make real friends and stop imagining the ghosts of long dead English kings? 
She opened her mouth to begin, but when nothing came out let her jaw snap shut again and continued wrestling internally in the face of an impossible dilemma.
The divan creaked as the great figure rose from it and made it’s way over to Jenny, limping up until the light from the open doorway illuminated his face somewhat. Every detail was the same as Jenny remembered from when she was a little girl. The wide brimmed feather cap, the doublet and hose and the fat, bearded face with it’s small grey eyes looking back into hers. 
She felt a slight shock when looking into those small grey eyes she saw some warmth and maybe even...affection?
Had he been waiting for her patiently? Never feeling betrayed by the broken promise in the past? Perhaps knowing that you have an eternity to spend in one place takes the edge off of waiting for anything, even the fulfillment of a promise made by a child. 
“I...I’m sorry…” she stuttered. 
He held up his hand in the regal manner that only someone born into royalty could. 
‘Do not concern yourself with me, young one,’ he said grandly ‘Your mortal existence is far more important than my damned eternity.’
Jenny felt as though a great weight was lifted from her. As a child the thought of the old king roaming the halls of this great palace as punishment for his deeds in life tormented her and, for a while, stopped her from enjoying her life as a kid. 
She realised now that as painful as it had been to be trying to do something good, the adults around her who had seemed so cruel back then had in fact been trying to give her a chance to have a happy childhood, and not one dominated by ghosts or damnation. She felt as light as a feather and nearly even burst into a carefree laugh. 
She turned to the old ghost king who was smiling at her, again with a warm affection in his eyes. 
Just as her feeling of elation had reached it’s peak, the sobs that had drawn her to the room began again. 
She looked around wildly, trying to place the source of the crying when it stopped as suddenly as it started.
She looked to Old King Harry and he stared back at her with a gaunt look on his face and a haunted gaze. 
‘Who was that?’ Jenny asked him quietly, as she felt her eyes turn into small saucers taking in his face and what had just occurred. 
He squeezed his eyes shut and looked so weary and so old that Jenny’s heart bled for him. 
‘’Tis yet another part of my punishment, child,’ he sighed heavily, he made his way to the great canopied bed on the dais and sank down on it wearily. Jenny followed.
He regarded her with a wistful look in his eyes. 
‘She was your age, when we were wed,’ he said in almost a whisper. ‘I, the happy and proud new husband of a beautiful, young wife. I hoped so much that she would get me another heir, a Duke of York to ensure the legacy of the Tudors but alas in a jealous rage I did the worst.’ 
At this, all the sympathy Jenny had been feeling for him suddenly evaporated and were replaced with a hardness that Jenny had not ever really felt before.
Harry took in her expression and on seeing the judgment there buried his face in his great hands. 
He sat there, shaking with great sobs of remorse. All Jenny felt was that a kind of justice was being served in the old man’s suffering. The phrase her mother frequently used when she felt that someone was getting punished for wrongdoing ‘it serves him right’ sprang to Jenny’s mind then.
Jenny stood there, staring at the space beside Harry, determined not to show him any sympathy anymore. If a man who had killed a girl like her for wanting to be young and happy and carefree then he deserved his eternity here. 
His had sobs stopped. 
She still did not look at him. 
A horrible banging on the great oaken doors made her fall onto the musty carpet in fright. She stared at the doors and the banging continued. She heard a girl wailing and screaming.
‘YOUR MAJESTY, PLEASE!! HAVE MERCY ON MY SOUL!!’ came the agonized cries from the other side of the door. 
“YOUR MAJESTY, PLEASE!! SPARE MY LIFE!! SPARE MY POOR SOUL!! PLEASE!!” the screams continued. 
Jenny looked to Harry, the old ghosts face was crumpled with guilt and sadness. 
The banging subsided but a girls sobbing continued in the hall outside. 
Henry’s head bowed. 
“I am sorry, my love,” he said in a wretched, remorseful tone. “I am sorry, my sweetheart. I did a terrible thing to you, please forgive me.”
The sobs crescendoed into more agonized wails at this. 
Jenny, still lying on the floor, stunned by the events playing out before her tried to rise to her feet as Catherine Howard’s sobs subsided outside the oaken doors.
She straightened herself and looked towards the spectre of the medieval king. 
He was crouched over with his massive face buried in his equally massive hands.
So this was it. This was his punishment. 
He did not merely roam the halls of his old palace as penance for his mortal crimes, he roamed them alongside the spirits of his victims. The harsh feeling of judgement left her. 
She looked at the pitiful figure of the obese old man before her and felt some of that old compassion return, accompanied this time by a sense of horror at such a terrible fate. 
She walked over and hunkered down before him. She looked up into his haggard face and took one of his great hands, which was surprisingly sturdy for a ghost. 
He looked into her eyes and down at his hand in hers and back in surprise. 
‘Dear child,’ he said, simply. 
They stayed like that for some time then, just in a moment of bonding because of the shared experience of his fourth wifes ghostly screams. 
The sobbing returned not too long after, but even closer still. 
Jenny whirled around but could see nobody. 
The sobbing started now right by her ear. 
‘No!!’ Henry cried, his eyes widening in horror ‘Leave her alone! It is me you want...leave her alone!!’ 
The sobbing stopped abruptly and Jenny thought she felt the air in the room get considerably colder, although it had never been quite warm.
It felt as though her insides had turned to icicles. She could barely bring herself to move, even breathing had become difficult now.
She stared wide-eyed at the ghost king sitting on the bed and he returned her gaze with a mixed look of horror and dread. 
She heard a whispering in her ear. She looked wildly around but to no avail, there was nothing to be seen. The whispering grew into a menacing hiss.The air seemed to have left the room. She thought she could hear Harry yelling again. She gasped and fell to her knees. She could not breathe. Her head started to hurt as she gasped and gasped and gasped for oxygen that simply was not there. 
Even in the midst of all this her mind dredged up what she had learned in biology class some weeks ago about what happened to humans who were in an environment with no oxygen. She would keep gasping for breath until dark spots appeared in her vision, she would be in an incredible amount of physical pain and then pass out until death took her. 
She heard the screams of Catherine Howard as her chest started hurting. She crumpled to the floor and gasped and gasped for air. The black spots appeared and she knew what was coming next. She thought she heard roars of the old king as it her vision was overtaken with more and more black spots:
‘NOOOO!! YOU CANNOT TAKE HER!! YOU HAVE ME, TAKE ME INSTEAD!!’ 
Finally, lying there on the musty old carpet of the great old bedroom in Hampton Court Palace, she lost consciousness as her faithful biology textbook had let her know weeks before, though the part where it was due to a ghost attack from the spirit of one of Henry VIII’s long dead queens it had left out.  

‘Jenny! Jenny! Jenny!!’ she heard a voice call. She felt some surprise then. She had gasped for air, she had seen black spots and lost consciousness...but if she was hearing something then death had never taken her at all.
‘JENNY!!’ now it was a scream. 
She found herself opening her eyes. 
To her great surprise she found she was lying on the great canopied bed of the room in which she had encountered far too many ghosts for comfort. 
Her best friend since childhood, the gorgeous and sweet Margot, was standing above her. 
She found she was breathing, although it still hurt. 
‘Jenny?’ she heard Margot say again ‘Jenny, are you okay? What happened?’
Jenny roused herself enough to look her friend in the eye and smile.
‘Nothing, I think I must have just got too tired and passed out,’ she said to her friend. 
Margot’s flawless brow creased with concern. 
‘Were you really that tired?’ she asked, sounding slightly guilty.
‘Yeah, kind of,’ Jenny replied as she pushed her torso upright with the palms of her hands. 
‘Jenny! Margot!’ came Mr. Hunt’s voice from the doorway then. 
Margot’s head spun round and Jenny scrambled up from the bed. 
‘Come on, I have been looking for you two for forever, the bus is leaving in five minutes!!’ he said sternly. 
They both rushed out the door at his command but as Jenny passed him by she could swear she saw him smothering a laugh as they did. 
Jenny and Margot exchanged a grin at this in the outside hall and Margot led the way back to Hampton Court Palace’s main hall where they saw their classmates just leaving through the door and ran to catch up.
When they were back on the bus and waiting as Mr Hunt jogged over and hopped in the door, Jenny took a good long look at the great red brick palace where she had nearly lost her life in that terrifying ordeal. 
Just when she thought of it, her chest started hurting again. She took a huge blessed gulp of air and leaned back into her seat with her eyes closed.
He had saved her. He had saved her from a terrible fate. 
Mr Hunt And Ms Ross finished counting heads. Everyone was there and accounted for. It was time to get them all home. The bus engine revved and drove away from the palace.
Jenny felt herself shaking. Tears leaked out of her eyes down her cheeks like hot rivers. Catherine Howard had tried to kill her. She had tried to kill Jenny because she could see that Jenny was important to Henry. And that was why Jenny could never return to this place. She would be in mortal danger of her life if she ever stepped foot in there again. 
Whatever torments the spirits in that palace could conceive of for Henry, the very worst one for him would be to end Jenny’s life as surely as he had ended theirs. 
She could not stop trembling. 
‘Jenny, are you alright?’ she heard Mr Hunts voice then. 
She looked up to see him standing in the aisle beside the seats in front of hers. 
She found it hard to find her voice.
‘I….I’m fine’ she managed weakly.
Mr Hunts face creased with concern. 
‘Hold on,’ he said to her.
He returned not a minute later with a bottle of water. 
Jenny took the bottle of water and took a big gulp. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried hard to let her body relax and stop shaking. 
When she looked up again Mr Hunt was looking at her with scrutiny.
Feeling uncomfortable under his gaze, she squirmed in her seat stared down at her lap.
‘Jenny, I am asking you this as a teacher who has become quite fond of you over the years, did something happen to you in that palace?’ he asked quietly.
Jenny felt herself begin to shake again. 
‘What is it? Jenny? Did someone try to hurt you in there? Another visitor?’ he asked intently.
Jenny contained a sob.
‘No...it...it wasn’t like that,’ she managed to stammer out ‘I just got lost and I was scared for a while, that’s all.’ 
He stared at her with narrowed eyes for a very uncomfortable minute.
Eventually he got up from the seat.
‘Try not to wander so far away from the group next outing, okay?’ he said to her. 
She nodded and he returned to the front of the bus where Ms Ross was seated. 
Jenny stared out the window and looked out onto the River Thames as it flew past, the bus speeding along the road.
Margot took the seat beside her, having spoken with some friends and stroked Jenny’s head in a nurturing fashion. 
Jenny turned and smiled, feeling comforted by her friends display of warmth.
Feeling restored in herself by the care of Mr Hunt and Margot, Jenny was able to face the memories of her ordeal that afternoon. 
Henry had sacrificed himself to his ghostly tormentor to save her. 
Jenny knew that she had to honour his sacrifice and never return to that place where she would surely join him in the ranks of the dead if she ever set foot there again.