Crossing Over

by Anna Kendall

  She punched me hard in the nose.

  “How dare you use me like that! Who are you? Guard! Guard!”

  “No, wait—please!” My nose was on fire, the agony bringing tears to my eyes. “I’m Roger Kilbourne the laundress! Please, don’t call the guard!”

  She paused, a safe distance from me. “A boy laundress?”

  “Yes, I—I’m sorry I kissed you, I was dreaming and—I’m sorry!”

  But I was not. It was the first time I had ever kissed a girl, and despite the pain in my nose—had she broken it?—I could still feel her soft lips under mine. She was Cat Starling, she was Lady Cecilia, she was a kitchen maid in a dark green gown and white apron, in the pearly dawn. Again my member was stiff. Was this going to go on the rest of my life, this madness about girls? How was I going to bear it?

  “What are you doing here?” the girl demanded. “If you’re a laundress, why aren’t you sleeping in the apprentice chamber?”

  “I was. They made me leave. I . . . I cry out in my sleep and it disturbs them. I meant you no harm!”

  Severely she studied me. There was about her none of Cat Starling’s simplicity of mind, none of Lady Cecilia’s flirtatious-ness. This was a girl used to hard work, with no nonsense about her. Well enough to look at but not beautiful, her fair hair bundled into a knot, her eyes a light, judgmental gray. Small burns and cuts covered her hands: kitchen injuries.

  “I believe you,” she said. “Now leave.”

  “I will. But my nose . . . I think you may have broken it. . . .”

  “You deserved it. Oh, all right, sit there and be still.”

  She brought me a cloth dampened with cool water. I held it to my nose, watching her as she fed the fire and began to knead bread left to rise overnight in the warmth of the banked fire. Other servants arrived, glanced at me, and ignored me. A few men drifted in from the stables and sat at the other end of the table, chatting idly and teasing the women, a full hour before breakfast. I realized that the palace held life beyond the laundry chambers.

  “I’m new here,” I said to the girl. Her strong arms, bare to the elbow, kneaded the bread. “I’m Roger Kilbourne.”

  “So you said.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Why should you care?”

  “So I will know to tell the queen who broke my nose. I understand she keeps careful record of all crimes.”

  The girl stopped kneading, stared at me, and laughed reluctantly. I was astonished at myself. Where had the courage come from to tease this girl, to tease any girls? With Cat Starling I had felt protectiveness, with Lady Cecilia I had been tongue-tied and oafish. The only quick wit I had ever shown was in dealings with the Dead.

  She said, “What do you know of the queen?”

  “I have never seen her.” I knew only what everyone knew, plus too much about the orderliness required by this exacting monarch. Endless clean linen from the laundry, to match the washed cobblestones, the spotless rooms, the careful record of shipwrecks. Endless clean clothing: green for the young queen’s household, blue for the old, brown for the stable, gray for those who gardened anywhere in the palace.

  The girl said, “May Her Grace live long,” and something moved behind her eyes, something that gave the commonplace words a meaning I did not understand. “Now let me work.”

  “All right—but will you tell me something first?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Maggie Hawthorne. Now go away!”

  Yet another person telling me to go away.

  “Maggie Hawthorne, if I sleep here under the table at night, will anyone beat me?”

  She gazed at me in surprise. “No, of course not. But I am first here in the morning, and if you misbehave again, I will beat you.”

  I didn’t doubt she could do it. I nodded gratefully, nursing my painful nose. And since she didn’t tell me a third time to go away, I stayed and waited for breakfast.

  The palace housed two rival queens.

  Not, of course, that I ever saw either of them. Queen Eleanor, the old queen, should have relinquished her throne to her daughter when the princess reached thirty-five. So had the custom always been in The Queendom. No one monarch should rule too long, lest power become too entrenched and so corrupt. Queens always abdicated when the heiress to the throne reached thirty-five.

  But Queen Eleanor had refused. Princess Caroline was not fit to rule, she said. The queen’s duty to her country made it impossible to pass the Crown of Glory to a daughter who was—what?

  Unstable in her mind, said some rumors.

  A witch, whispered others.

  A poisoner, said still others. The princess’s consort, dead right after the birth of her youngest child and heir, and he died so suddenly in the bloom of health . . . a poisoner and a whore.

  No, said those loyal to Caroline. It’s all the old queen’s vanity and love of power. She merely seeks excuses to hold the throne longer.

  And so she had, since the army had backed her against her daughter. Queen Eleanor controlled the Blues. That had not stopped the princess from having herself crowned, although not with the Crown of Glory, which her mother kept in her own possession. The old queen could have had Queen Caroline removed from the palace, but she had not. And so both queens lived in separate areas of the vast structure, each with her own guards and servants and loyal courtiers.

  Rumors continued to fly, and in the inns and taverns and farmhouses across The Queendom, the common people argued, or snickered, or just waited, shocked and fascinated to learn what might happen next. As good as a masque, said the irreverent and bold. The harvest had been good for several years, the land at peace, barns and larders and still rooms crammed with stores for the winter. Who ruled in Glory mattered little compared to a full belly and snug cottage and warm fire. Let the two queens skirmish over who sat on which elaborately carved chair.

  But within the palace, it meant everything.

  “You here again?” Maggie said, as she said every morning.

  “Why did you wake me?” I crawled, frowsy and irritable, from under the trestle table in the kitchen.

  “You cried out in your sleep, Roger. You were afraid of a bat.”

  Bat. The simpleminded sailor who did not realize he was dead, whom I had left to wait for his lost captain at the top of the cliff above the sea. Again I felt the terror of that night, saw the yellow-haired youth die in his noose, choking and kicking the air. Saw my aunt’s skull crack open as Hartah hit her with the brassbound wooden chest. Felt the knife slide into Hartah’s flesh, easy as a bird wing slicing the air.

  “What is it, Roger? You look . . . I don’t know.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “You always say that. Bats can’t hurt you, you know. You needn’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid of bats!”

  “But you said—”

  “Don’t you have work to do?”

  “I was doing it,” she pointed out, “until you called ‘Bat! Bat!’ like some half-wit.”

  “Can this half-wit have some breakfast?”

  She brought me bread, hot and crusty from the oven, with new butter and stewed apples, and I lingered as long as I could in the fragrant warmth of the kitchen.

  In the laundry the backbreaking work went on, but I saw that my body was filling out, getting stronger and bulkier. The good food and hard work added muscle and bone. Joan Campford, kind under her slave-driving severity, made me new trousers and small clothes. I never saw Lady Cecilia, nor any of the nobility, in my round of laundry chambers, servants’ kitchen, servants’ baths. I was on an endless narrow track, like a donkey treading his small circle to turn a millstone.

  Maggie and I became friends, talking and laughing in the early morning kitchen. She told me of her older sister, married and sharp-tongued and bitter, and of her brother, Richard, a soldier with the Blues. I said, “But you are with Queen Caroline and the Green—”

  “Hush,” Maggie said,
glancing quickly around. However much the rival queens were discussed in the countryside, people were more discreet within the palace. I could easily imagine that each camp informed on the other. Maggie continued, “I was glad to get any place in the palace. Otherwise I must have lived with my sister.”

  “Can I have more cheese, Maggie?”

  “You’re always so hungry.”

  “True enough,” I said humbly. “But it’s partly because you make such good cheese.”

  “Katherine made this cheese.”

  “But yours is better.”

  “I don’t make cheese. Don’t you know the difference between a cook and a dairymaid?” But she was smiling, and she brought me a meat pie, rich and spicy, which I devoured in four bites.

  But the other side of Maggie’s friendship was her intense desire to know everything I did, thought, was.

  “Who is Mistress Conyers?” she asked one morning.

  “No one.”

  “Everyone is someone, Roger. You called her name in your sleep. Who is she?”

  “A woman of quality who was kind to me once.”

  “A woman of quality? Were you born on her lands?”

  “No, no. She has no lands.”

  Maggie eyed me suspiciously. “Quality without lands?”

  “They were lost.”

  “How? When?”

  “You ask too many questions.”

  She flared. “Who usually talks to me first? Almost every single morning?”

  “I do, Maggie,” I said humbly. “But I can’t help what I say in my sleep. All I can do is ask you to not tell anyone else.”

  She said slowly, “Sometimes, Roger, I think you are not what you seem to be.”

  To that I had no answer.

  So I said the one thing I probably shouldn’t, but the question had been on my lips a dozen times these past weeks. “Maggie, what is Soulvine Moor?”

  Quickly her gaze raked the kitchen. The other servants, busy with their work, paid us no attention. “Don’t say that aloud here! What’s wrong with you?”

  “I—”

  “Be quiet!”

  I had never seen Maggie frightened before. Always she was calm, competent, relentlessly in charge. I whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m so ignorant. But please tell me . . . I need to know!”

  “Why?”

  “My mother died there.”

  Maggie went stiff, and then her whole body shuddered, a long spasm from her neck clear down her spine. She gazed at me with horror in which was mixed a kind of sadness.

  “Roger—never ever tell anyone that. You did not say it to me. I did not hear it.”

  “But—”

  “I did not hear it! ”

  She turned and walked away from me, leaving her bread half kneaded on the table—Maggie, who never left a task without finishing it. I caught her arm. “Maggie, don’t go!”

  She jerked her arm free and glared at me but said nothing.

  “You have to talk to me!”

  “I don’t have to do anything.”

  People were starting to look at us. Again Maggie turned away, but something brought her back. Her tone didn’t soften, but a strange note crept into it. “Roger, you can’t help your ignorance, I know that. You can’t even read, can you? Just try to stay silent and do your work.”

  My work. Pressing irons, dye vats, buckets and buckets and buckets of water. That’s all she thought I was: Roger the laundress. All at once I couldn’t bear Maggie’s low opinion of me. She was my only friend in the palace, and to her I was an oafish laundress, my hands often green with dye. And she would not tell me what I needed to know about Soulvine Moor. I had to make her tell me more. Anger, shame, desperate craving to make her talk all churned in my mind, turning it to mush, the mush flavored with my instinct that Maggie could be trusted.

  I moved very close and whispered in her ear. “I can cross over into the country of the Dead.”

  Maggie jerked away from me. She stared, incredulous, and then disgust settled over her features. She shook her head.

  “I had not figured you, Roger, for a liar. Ignorant, but not a liar.”

  Again she shook her head, and walked away from me, her back very straight. The rest of the day she stayed away from me, and when she entered the kitchen the next morning, she had another maid with her. And all the mornings after.

  I was more alone than ever before, alone in the palace nested inside the teeming city nested inside the vast village nested inside the circle of fields and plain and hills and mountains. Winter gave way to the sharp freshness of early spring. I had been at court for six months, scrubbing and boiling and ironing and dyeing and hauling. And I might have gone on like that forever, except that the prince’s wedding, once again, changed all.

  11

  “MORE WATER! More water, boy!”

  I had hauled water since dawn, until my shoulders felt as if they would fall off, and it was now almost dusk, and still Joan Campford wanted more water. The open courtyard of the laundry chambers seemed a solid mass of rushing women, skirts hiked up to keep them off the wet stone floor.

  “More water! We need more water!”

  Pots boiled, cloths flapped in a fitful wind, and I had never been so tired in my life. To make it all worse, spring had given way to a sudden, unseasonably late cold. Water I hauled from the river to the boiling vats was near freezing, the courtyard fiery near the boiling pots, and the roofed ironing chambers steaming like wet wood on a new fire. I was always too cold, too hot, too achingly weary.

  “More water!”

  “I can’t bring any more water! ”

  Words I hadn’t even known I was going to say: anguished words. Joan Campford stopped and looked at me, really looked. Her broad red face softened. “Aye, ye’ve done good work, boy. Did ye get anything to eat today?”

  “No.”

  “Go to the hall and eat. We can manage without ye for a bit.”

  “Thank you!”

  I stumbled through the corridors to the servants’ hall, which was even more frenzied than the laundry.

  Prince Rupert’s bride, Princess Isabelle, had arrived two days ago from her own queendom beyond the northern mountains. She brought with her an enormous train of soldiers, servants, courtiers, ladies. They all must be fed, housed, waited on, and their cloth—bed linen, towels, garments, horse blankets—kept clean. Naturally, I had seen none of the strangers, who did not visit the laundry. But all meals for our own servants had been suspended as all the kitchens raced to keep up with feeding Princess Isabelle’s retinue and entertaining her court. Everyone else snatched scraps of food as we could, and kept working. Nor had I been able to sleep in the servants’ kitchen. I’d lain on my old pallet with the apprentices, and hoped I was too exhausted for dreams that might make me cry out in what passed for sleep.

  By now, I wished the royal couple in the country of the Dead.

  But this madness would go on only two days more. Tomorrow was the wedding, and the next day Princess Isabelle would take her new consort back to her own queendom. The laundresses gossiped that the princess’s mother was dying, and very soon Princess Isabelle would be Queen Isabelle. It was a good alliance for Prince Rupert, even if his bride was a full six years older than he. Meanwhile, tonight was a great masque, which had required that endless bolts of cloth not only be ironed but also that they be dyed yellow, the color of the princess’s court. That had proved a messy business. My hands, face, hair were streaked with yellow. Even my feet had ended up bright yellow.

  The servants’ kitchen was frantic with dinner preparations. Maggie, her fair hair greasy and falling around a face smudged with flour, scowled at me. “Roger! Why are you here?”

  “I’m starving.”

  “Why are you yellow?”

  “Dye.”

  “Why are you swaying like that?”

  “I’m exhausted.”

  “We’re all exhausted.” But her tone softened, sounding almost as she had in the days before I had me
ntioned Soulvine Moor and so lost her prickly friendship. She snatched a meat pie from a table and thrust it at me. “Here. Don’t tell—these are for Her Plainness’s table.”

  “Is the princess very plain, then?”

  “I didn’t say that—no, I didn’t. Now go away, can’t you see we have enough people here already?”

  It looked like half the palace was here; the rushing, shouting cooks and maids and serving men were packed as thick as chickens in a crate, and just as agitated. It reminded me of my own brief glimpse of the city outside the palace walls, in the summer. How long ago that seemed.

  I gobbled my pie, too tired to savor the exquisite taste, and fell asleep in a corner piled with empty crates smelling of vegetables.

  Music woke me. I leapt to my feet and for a long moment I thought I must be dreaming. This did not happen in servants’ halls!

  Lords and ladies streamed into the hall, accompanied by their musicians. All save the musicians were masked, their faces covered with fantastic devisings of feathers, silver, jewels, cloth of gold, beads, and fur. Laughing, calling, dancing, staggering—they were clearly drunk. The few servants sitting at tables, eating dishes left over from dinner—what time was it? How long had I slept?—leapt to their feet and then sank into curtsies and bows.

  “So this is where that vile tart came from!” someone screamed. More calls, derision, laughter. Their bright silks and velvets and satins filled the hall with green. All green—this was the young queen’s household, then. A courtier seized one of the serving maids and swung her, terrified, into a dance to fiddle and flute.

  “Have you never seen a kitchen before, Hal?”

  “Hal sees only bedchambers!”

  “I have never seen a kitchen. I thought food grew . . . grew . . .” The man turned aside, tore off his mask, and vomited over a table piled high with fresh bread.

  “Ugh!”

  “Put him in one of those crates!”

  “Put him in the stew pot!”