Crossing Over (27 page)

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Authors: Anna Kendall

BOOK: Crossing Over
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“There is much that cannot be told, these days.”
“Yes.”
She leaned close to me and lowered her voice to a whisper. “You have been ill for two days,” she said, “and so you don’t know what has happened. I’m going to tell you, Roger, but only because I think it important that you know the truth and not the rumors swirling around the palace. And because I think you already know more about the truth of Lady Cecilia than does anyone else.”
“Lady Cecilia?” Now I was truly bewildered. I thought we had been talking about the queen.
“You were on the tower roof helping the queen look for the messenger from Queen Isabelle, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“He arrived while you were in your fit.”
“He arrived? He’s here?” Not among the Dead.
“He was here, but no longer. Nor is Isabelle’s army, which will never come to the queen’s aid.”
I was staggered. Queen Isabelle
must
come to the aid of her sister-in-law; that’s what queens did. There was a marriage pact. And any daughter of Isabelle and Rupert would be second in line for the Crown of Glory. Queen Isabelle could not have refused to send her army.
“Why?” The word burst from me like the explosion from a savage’s
gun
. And Lady Margaret had mentioned Cecilia. . . .
All at once I knew, and the world turned sick around me.
“Yes,” Lady Margaret said, looking at my face. “Queen Isabelle had a bout of the crawls. Her physicians say it has scarred her inside, so that she may never bear a child. She caught the crawls from Prince Rupert, who said he caught it from Cecilia.”
“It was the other way around! Cecilia caught the disease from him!”
“That is not what Queen Isabelle believes,” Lady Margaret said wearily, “nor Queen Caroline, either. Rupert is her brother. She believes as she wishes—and so do you, Roger. You believe Cecilia, that foolish child, because you want her to be the victim. But the truth is more complex than that.”
“As if anyone here cared for truth!”
“Everyone here cares for truth,” Lady Margaret said, “just not the same truth. And yours is this: You helped Cecilia obtain medicine for the crawls early in her infection, and she sent you for the milady posset because she knew what she was experiencing. Queen Isabelle did not know, and waited too long, and has paid the terrible price. There will be no heir to her throne. Queen Caroline will gain no help from her, and is practically a prisoner in her own palace. The messenger with the news arrived while you were in your fit, and the queen rushed away from the tower. Somehow the door must have become locked behind you.”
“And Lady Cecilia ...” I could barely get out the words. All those men who had refused to swear fealty to the queen, vanished to who-knew-where, dead, tortured . . .
“Cecilia escaped.”
“
Escaped
? How?”
“I don’t know. No one knows. Someone warned her, just before the queen sent for her. I was with Her Grace; her other attendants had been sent to bed. I was there when the messenger arrived and the queen received him. She had only minutes before Lord Solek was alerted and joined us, and in those minutes the queen . . . I have never seen her that bad,” Lady Margaret finished simply.
I had. I could picture the scene: the queen raging, Lady Margaret trying to calm her, the messenger terrified for his life. Then Lord Solek striding into the room, so that the two women and the messenger must pretend that all was well, that this was a routine message from her brother. And as soon as possible, the queen would have given the order to arrest Cecilia, and take her . . . where? To what punishment? I shuddered.
“My lady, did
you
warn Lady Cecilia?”
“No. I remained with the queen. So did Lord Solek, for some hours. Whoever warned Cecilia had time to do so. Cecilia has so many admirers; it could have been any misguided Sam Slip-Lip.”
“But who else would have known what the messenger said?”
“I don’t know. But I think you understand what the palace is. Spies, spy holes—still, it
is
strange that someone knew to warn Cecilia. There has always been something strange about Cecilia. But it is the queen I am afraid for. As are we all, with our supposed savior as the gaoler. The savages have their fire-sticks, their poison-tipped knives, their brutality. I am afraid for the queen, and I cannot forgive him his treachery.”
I didn’t care what she could or could not forgive him, nor that Lady Margaret remained loyal to her queen, still. She was one of those who, having given her allegiance, would never change it. I cared only about Cecilia. “But . . . how could Lady Cecilia have escaped the palace that night? The gates were barred!”
“I don’t know. And neither do I greatly care. Cecilia brought this on herself, on all of us, and she deserves whatever she gets. But you should know the truth because it will help you to better serve Her Grace.”
Lady Margaret actually thought I was going to do that. I was not. But I bowed my head again and said, with sincerity, “Thank you for nursing me, my lady.”
“I didn’t do it for your sake,” she said irritably, rising from the table. “In truth, I didn’t do it at all. The nursing was done by my woman and by your friend from the kitchen, a Maggie Someone.”
“
Maggie
?”
“You called for her so insistently that I finally sent a page for her. She nursed you like a sister. But now you seem well enough, and I am glad to have both of you out of my rooms. The queen has been asking for you. Go serve her, fool, with whatever it is you do.”
“Yes, my lady.” I rose, fortified by the good food, and left the ladies’ chambers. But not to go to the queen.
I knew where Cecilia had gone, and where she might still be found.
 
 
The mid-morning kitchens bustled as if this were a normal day, a normal year. Stews bubbled in great pots over the fires. Bread baked in brick ovens. Chickens and rabbits turned on spits, dripping fat into the hot embers. No matter who held power, or who imprisoned whom, or who bedded whom, courtiers and soldiers and servants must be fed.
No one looked surprised to see me, who had so often been sent by the queen with orders for where and when food should be served. Only Maggie, trimming vegetables at one end of the long trestle table, raised glad eyes. “Roger! Are you feeling better? You’re wobbling a little.”
“I’m fine. Thank you for nursing me. Lady Margaret said that no true sister could have been more devoted.”
Maggie scowled at me; some people cannot stand praise. She snapped, “You need more yellow dye for your face. It faded while you were sick.”
“All right. Maggie—I need more of your help.” I said it in a whisper, but not the keenest of the queen’s spies, or Lord Solek’s spies, or anybody’s spies could have heard us over the din of the kitchen. “I need to get out of the palace.”
“Out?” She looked blank for a moment, and then began wielding her little peeling knife as if it were a sword and carrots were the direst of enemies. “You’re going after that titled little bitch!”
I was shocked at her language, her look. “Lady Cecilia is not—”
“Everyone knows she disappeared two days ago! Ran off with some man in heat, probably, and you’re going to—oh, why are men so stupid!” And she burst into tears.
Now people
were
looking at us. I was dumbfounded. Did Maggie, like Lady Margaret, know that Cecilia was the reason Queen Isabelle’s army would not arrive in The Queendom? There was no way Maggie could know that. But she was clearly in distress, and I put my hand on her arm. She shook it off so violently that I, still weak from my illness, staggered against the edge of the table.
“Don’t touch me!”
“All right, I will not, if that’s what you want. But I need to get out of the palace tonight without being seen, and you are my only—”
“No!”
“Maggie—”
“I won’t do it! It’s too dangerous! Go to her if that’s what you want, but leave me out of it!”
All at once anger swept me. No one but me cared that without help Cecilia could be captured, tortured, killed. My lady, so playful and lighthearted and laughing . . . unlike Maggie! I stalked out of the kitchen to the laundry, where amid the clouds of steam from the wash pots I stole a small packet of dye.
In the courtyard outside the ladies’ chambers I pretended to collapse again. Two Greens picked me up, not very gently: “You take his arms and I’ll take his legs—damn but the fool’s grown almost as heavy as a real man!” They dumped me back in Lady Margaret’s chamber, where her serving woman sighed, remade the nest of blankets by the hearth, and sent word to the queen that I was still unwell. I stayed there all day, pretending to sleep.
In the evening, while the ladies were attending the queen and Lord Solek at whatever revels he chose, I painted my face with the red dye I had stolen from the laundry. Into my hair I braided the twigs I had broken from the tree in the courtyard where I collapsed. From Lady Margaret’s chest I took a green velvet cloak lined in fur, and a white nightdress. I put them on, the nightdress fitting over my own fool’s outfit only because it was so billowy. I pulled the cloak tight around me, put up the hood, and made my way through the palace to the west gate. Two Greens guarded the gate. They had been Blues, had sworn the oath of fealty to Queen Caroline, and now served Lord Solek. They were the kind of men who would serve anyone for enough coins and enough ale. Unlike Solek’s savages, who were kept under such strict discipline that no girl of The Queendom had been molested by any of them, these two were avoided by every serving woman in the palace. That’s how I knew about them. Women talk, and ever since the night that Cecilia had sent me to Mother Chilton, I had been listening.
“Well, what comes
here
?” said the Green with the bristly beard.
The other nudged him, elbow hard in the ribs, and said uncertainly, “My lady—”
But Bristle Beard’s eyes were sharper. “Not a lady, Dick—look at them boots!” He grabbed for me and I danced away. I let the hood of my cloak fall back, then snatched it back up.
“It’s one of them fancy savage singers! In a shift!” Bristle whooped and grabbed for me again.
I said, trying to speak in a high-pitched version of the savages’ guttural accent, “I be—”
“We know what you be,” Bristle Beard said. Dick had abandoned his initial caution; he made kissing sounds in the air and grabbed me. To these rough idiots, all the savage singers looked alike, and I had used the red dye liberally. Dick pretended to kiss me, went “Faughhh!” and pushed me to the ground.
“Sing for us, boy!”
“Sing a pretty girl’s song or we’ll treat you like a girl!”
“You, but not me, I don’t fancy male meat.” He kicked me.
I cried, “I be go for Solek!”
That sobered them. Bristle Beard said, “Let me see your pass.”
I shook my head as if I didn’t understand and repeated, “I be go for Solek.”
Bristle Beard said, “He’s supposed to have a pass.”
Dick was quicker. “Yeah, but if he’s dressed like
that
for Solek . . . who knows what those savages do when they be by themselves? Those singers are all flower-boys anyway. I don’t want no part of this.”
“So we—”
“Go,” Dick said to me, scowling. “You can understand that, can’t you, you sick dog?
Go
.” He unbarred and opened the gate. I scuttled through into the city.
It was dark and cool, although summer wound through the night air like embroidery through cloth. I was nowhere near the kitchens, where the food barges drew up to deliver and Maggie had let me out of the palace once before. But if I stuck close to the palace wall and circled to the right, I thought I would arrive there. This proved to be harder than I expected. The alleys lined with tents twisted and turned, sometimes away from the wall, sometimes toward it. Also, many of the tents had been torn down, replaced with wooden structures in various stages of construction. It was the old queen who had decreed that, on the island of Glory, only the palace should be a permanent dwelling. Queen Caroline must have done away with that law, perhaps in an attempt to win her subjects’ favor. My way was frequently blocked by piles of lumber and brick, by raw-wood houses lighted from within, once by a sty full of nasty-looking boars that snorted at me in the darkness and bared their teeth.
I felt weak from illness and ridiculous in my green velvet cloak and lady’s nightdress. But I kept the hood drawn well down over my face, and few people were out on the streets to see me. Perhaps in the night my dark green cloak looked brown or black. No one stopped me, not even when I encountered two of Lord Solek’s savages. They passed me without a glance and went into an ale tent. As they drew aside the flap, warmth and light and laughter spilled out. The queen might be a virtual prisoner in her own palace, her throne all but usurped, but for the common people, there was peace and liberality.
Eventually I found the dim alley, and the tent with the picture of two black swans at its hem. I knocked on the doorjamb, did not wait for an answer, and pushed my way inside.

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