by Anna Kendall
No matter what they wore, these Dead behaved like all the others: sitting in circles, gazing at the grass or sky, doing nothing. I tripped over a soldier in peculiar copper-colored armor and went sprawling. He said nothing, just went on staring at the featureless gray clouds. Scrambling to my feet, I saw blood on my hand where I had just cut it on a stone, blood on my leggings from the knife I had thrust into my thigh. I was the only one here who could bleed. And yet I felt no pain. That would not recur until I went back.
Frantically I raced among the silent groups. I needed an old person, preferably a woman, or a newly arrived Dead—someone who would talk to me. “I will have the truth, and there are ways of obtaining it. They are not pleasant ways. . . .”
A man suddenly materialized a few yards away. One moment he was not there, and the next moment he was. He wore a long white nightshirt of rich cream-colored linen and a woolen nightcap, and on his shriveled finger was a ring set with three huge rubies in intricately wrought gold. He gazed at me wildly. “Where am I?”
I thought quickly. “You are safe, sir.”
“I died! I am dead!”
“Yes, sir. And I am your guide in this place, sent to greet you.”
“I am dead!”
“Yes. And I am your guide. You must come with me.”
I think it was the strange yellow dye on my face that convinced him. He stared at me, shuddered, and followed.
I led him to a little grove where no one else sat. He looked at his arm, withered but without pain, and said wonderingly, “My illness is gone.”
“It’s over, sir. And you must answer questions for me.”
He nodded, still too bemused to question my completely false authority. That state of mind would not last. I must move quickly.
“What is your name, sir?”
“Lord Joseph Deptford.”
“And your position at court?”
“A gentleman of the bedchamber to Prince Percy. Although since I became sick . . . Who are you, boy?”
“I told you, sir, I’m your guide in this place. For the sake of being judged fairly, you must answer just a few more questions. What was your last illness?”
“Weakness in the heart. I—”
“Is the young prince difficult to attend?”
“He—now, see here, boy—”
“I cannot take you to my master without this information! Is the prince difficult to attend?”
“He is impossible,” the old man said flatly. “He pulls my beard and whispers treason about his grandmother, anything his mother wishes to hear, and—enough! I will answer to your master in person! This impertinence is over!”
I left him among the trees, free now to discover that for him, all impertinence was over. In a moment he would lapse into the tranquility of the Dead. My little knife had been left behind in the queen’s chamber, but there were sharp stones enough by the river. I whacked one against a burn on my hand from a boiling laundry pot, and I crossed back over.
I lay on the hearth rug before the fire, the queen sitting on the rug beside me in a puddle of green silk skirts, in all her glorious unbound hair. Lord Robert still lounged at the table, drinking wine.
“That was quick,” the queen said. “Did it happen?”
“Yes, Your Grace.” I sat up, a little dizzy, and a part of my mind thought how weird it was to be sitting on the floor with a queen, like two children playing at dice.
Playing at death.
“Well, tell me,” she said. Then, more ominously, “Convince me.”
“I spoke to a Lord Joseph Deptford. He died just now, minutes ago, in a white nightshirt and blue woolen cap. He was a gentleman of the bedchamber to Prince Percy, and he told me”—Was this wise to say? Nothing was wise to say—“that the young prince is difficult to attend. He pulls the old lord’s beard.”
Lord Robert laughed and said, “True enough. But easy palace gossip, for all that. And even if that old fool Deptford did die tonight, that could be a lucky guess. The whole palace knows he is ill.”
“Lord Robert could be correct,” the queen said to me. “What else have you?”
“Only . . . only . . .”
“Out with it, Roger!”
To even utter the words might bring me death. To not utter them certainly would. I closed my eyes and said, “He told me that the prince whispers treason about his grandmother. Because it is what he believes that Your Grace would like to hear.”
Lord Robert’s goblet crashed to the floor, splashing wine onto the queen’s skirts. She breathed out slowly—aaaahhhhhhh—like a sigh. Then she leaned over and kissed my cheek, and it was a mother’s kiss, tender and gentle and terrifying as spring buds.
13
THE QUEEN GAVE me two new suits of clothes, both green-and-yellow velvet with green ribbons at the knees. She gave me a place to sleep, a tiny alcove off her presence chamber, where no one could hear me cry out. “For I cannot have you closer, Roger,” the queen said. “You’re a boy, but a boy nearing manhood, and I am a widow. I don’t want to give my enemies food for scandal.”
I felt my ears burn. But she meant it, despite the whole court’s knowing that Sir Robert was her lover. He went openly in and out of her privy chamber, a little amused smile on his face, sometimes snapping his fingers at me or giving me a whistle, as you might a dog. Yet he was not unkind to me, not meaningfully.
“You must keep the yellow dye on your face,” Queen Caroline said. “It makes you different from other fools. And it’s a splendid joke on that stiff-necked prig my brother was forced to marry. Yellow—the color of her court!”
Her brother, Prince Rupert, and his plain bride had left court the day after the wedding. None of us would likely see them for several years.
“Your Grace,” I said desperately, “I haven’t wit enough to be a fool!” A fool must stay close to the queen, making sharp and funny comments on the personalities and doings of members of the court. I knew none of the members of the court. I could not make sharp and funny comments. I would fail.
“Of course you have wit enough to be a fool.”
“I do not! Could I . . . could I be a page?” A page’s duties I thought I could manage.
“Pages are highborn, like my Alroy. They are also ten years old. No, you must be my fool.”
“I am not funny enough to—”
“Then become funny,” she said sharply. “I need a reason to keep you close by, a reason that no one will question.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
I stayed in my alcove, sleeping off my laundress exhaustion, until the day after the wedding. Then, for the first time, and dressed in my new clothes, I accompanied the queen as she received in her presence chamber. I took the place she indicated, to the left and below the queen’s tall chair on its raised dais. Sitting at her feet.
“Listen to everything,” she whispered to me. “Learn, so that you will better know who to approach and what to ask when I send you to cross over.”
“It doesn’t happen like that, I can’t—” But she didn’t want to hear it. She waved her hand and the guards threw open the great doors.
I was terrified. Be funny.
The presence chamber was the first room of the queen’s suite, the largest and barest room, furnished with only her throne upon a dais and benches along the walls. Next came the outer chamber, where she was attended by her ladies. This, too, was of a good size, richly furnished with tables, chairs, space for dancing and the presentation of the masques that the court so loved. Then the privy chamber, where I had crossed over for her, with its heavily carved table and green hearth rug. Last was the queen’s bedchamber, which I would, of course, never see. The presence chamber was where her public events took place, because the palace’s real throne room was still in the control of the old queen. To my dazzled eyes, the presence chamber was intimidating enough—what must the throne room be like?
Queen Caroline’s advisors entered, a procession of three old men tottering behind Lord Robert. Women
, who create life, must rule. But men, who defend life, must advise. Thus is the balance of the world preserved. The queen’s green-clad advisors each bowed before her and then stood to the left and right of the throne. None of them so much as glanced at me, crouching at the foot of the steps to the dais in my yellow face dye and green-and-yellow velvets. I was just another piece of furniture, like the steps themselves, but less useful.
The queen said, “Let the petitioners come.”
There were not many. I thought that the wedding feast, the masques and dances, had tired everyone so that their business with the queen must have been postponed. Later, I learned that I was wrong. The petitioners were all in the palace throne room with the old queen.
Where the power resided.
Queen Caroline’s lips tightened. She barely opened them to say to the first man, “Why do you come before me?”
“Your Grace, I am in land dispute with my neighbor, Mistress Susannah Carville.”
“And what is the dispute?”
“We each claim the fields on the right bank of the River Ratten.”
I blurted out, “All lands are the queen’s, except when they are rotten!”
There was total silence. Then the petitioner said, “The right bank is, of course, Your Grace’s as well! But the use of it is in dispute between Mistress Carville and me.”
“Continue,” the queen said. She shot me a disgusted glance. I had not been funny. I had failed.
Almost I wished myself in the country of the Dead.
Over time, I became a little better at being a fool. Sometimes, someone would laugh at my jest. A very small laugh. The queen, however, became no better at being sought out for anything important. Minor land disputes, minor points of law, minor appropriations of money for minor building. Queen Caroline settled them all with justice and knowledge. This was a side of her I had not seen before, much different from the woman who had threatened me with torture, or the one who each morning asked sweetly how I had slept. She was a just and equitable queen to her subjects beyond the palace.
Nonetheless, it seemed to me that she was hardly a queen at all. The palace teemed with the old queen’s Blues. Queen Caroline had her own Green guard, but it was tiny in comparison. And no one ever petitioned her for anything to do with the army. Courtiers’ gossip whispered about the new navy—The Queendom’s first—being built in Carlyle Bay, at the mouth of the Thymar River. However, in the presence chamber I heard nothing of any ships. I listened and I learned, but the truth is that I did not really care about the ships, or the army, or the endless land disputes.
I had enough to eat, enough sleep, sometimes ale or wine to drink.
The queen did not send me on any more journeys to the country of the Dead.
My jests as fool were becoming sharper, more knowing.
But most of all, when the day’s work—which did not look like “work” at all to one who had labored for Hartah, had sweated in Joan Campford’s laundry—ended, I was with the queen’s ladies. With Lady Cecilia.
“Are you here again, Roger? I see that you are. And yellow as ever!” And then her pealing laugh, always brighter and higher than the laughter of the young queen’s other ladies. Always Lady Cecilia walked more quickly, danced more animatedly, smiled more widely, played the lute more passionately before tiring of it and tossing it aside. Her very needle, as the ladies sewed, darted faster in and out of the rich cloth, although the results often left much to be desired.
That’s how they spent their days of attendance upon the queen: sewing or reading aloud or playing music or following her in walks around the various courtyards within the vast palace. When the queen was about her “business of state” in the presence chamber—the meager amount of business the old queen allowed her—I don’t know what the ladies did. I sat at the foot of the queen’s throne, making my feeble jokes while the time dragged by.
The nights were another matter entirely.
Then the men, the courtiers in their green silks and velvets and slashed satins studded with jewels, joined the ladies. Queen Caroline was there, too, in the outer chamber lit by candles in great branching candelabra. They all gambled at cards and dice; they danced to lute and pipes and flute; they rehearsed and presented masques. They drank wine and ate sugared cakes. They flirted—how they all flirted! Nominally the ladies were under the charge of Lady Margaret, an older woman with a long, horselike face and sad, intelligent eyes. But Lady Margaret could not keep the bevy of young, pretty, richly dressed girls from their endless romantic gossip. While the queen was sometimes serious, talking alone in a window embrasure or beside a warm fire with Lord Robert or one of the older men, the ladies were never serious. And Lady Cecilia least of all.
“Yes, my lady, I am still yellow.” How I longed to appear before her dressed in something other than my fool’s cap and crazy green-and-yellow tunic!
“And still a fool?”
“A fool to follow you around, my lady.”
“That you are!” She gave her high trill of laughter, only there was something wrong with it. It was too high, too trilling. Her eyes were too bright.
“Is something wrong, my lady?”
“Why should anything be wrong?” she said, her smile vanishing. A second later it was back, too wide. “Don’t be impertinent! ”
“I’m sorry, my lady.”
“You should be!” She tossed her head, her huge green eyes glittering at me, her small chin raised. I knew she wasn’t really angry. She was flirting, as she would have flirted with anything male that sat beside her, from a fishmonger to Sir Robert himself. And she was so beautiful! The candlelight flickered over her hair and it shone in so many shades of brown that I couldn’t count them: nutmeg, molasses, bronze, cinnamon, almost-but-not-quite gold. But her face was too pale.
“Where is everyone tonight?” Lady Cecilia said impatiently. “The chamber is half empty!”
“I don’t know, my lady.” I, too, had noticed the room’s emptiness. Each week there were fewer courtiers in the queen’s rooms. They had gone, I guessed, to the old queen’s chambers in that part of the palace I had never seen. Did the deserters dare to attend Queen Eleanor while wearing the young queen’s green? Or did they change their clothes with their loyalties?
Cecilia said, “We have barely enough people to dance! I want to dance!”
“But you must wait for the queen to command dancing.”
“Of course, of course!” Restlessly she shifted on her stool. It was right after dinner, early in the evening. Bright fires burned in the two great hearths at either end of the chamber. Lady Cecilia and I, with two other of the youngest ladies, Lady Sarah and Lady Jane, sat on cushioned stools close by the fire. The others stood in clumps around the room, talking to the courtiers, waiting for the queen to declare the evening’s entertainment. Lady Margaret sat on the other side of the hearth, reading a book. Cecilia stuck out her pink tongue at the heavy volume, slid her eyes sideways to meet mine, and giggled.
The queen sat in a far corner with a sour-looking man I had never seen before. He was dressed well enough, in black velvet with a black satin sash, but his face was weather-battered and his hair unfashionably short. He didn’t look like a soldier, nor an advisor, nor a courtier, and I had never seen anyone at court wear black. He and the queen leaned close to each other in earnest conversation. Lord Robert occasionally glanced at them from his own conversation with Lord Dearborn.
Lady Sarah said, “Cecilia, there are other things in life besides dancing.”
“I think she knows that,” Lady Jane said slyly, and Lady Sarah gave a bark of laughter. I didn’t understand the jest, nor Cecilia’s sharp reply.
“Hold your foolish tongue, Jane Sedley! And you, too, Sarah!”
“And who shall make me? Your yellow cavalier?”
I said, trying to be witty, “Green wood burns hotter than yellow.”
Lady Jane and Lady Sarah looked at each other and burst into more laughter, which grew wilder and wilder. The
y held their sides and roared. Tears sprang to Cecilia’s eyes. She jumped to her feet and rushed off.
She had nowhere to go except to the other side of the room. I followed her, bewildered about what I had said to make the others laugh like that. Cecilia stood in an empty window embrasure, leaning out over the velvet-covered seat, her face pressed to the thick glass. Outside, a few flakes of unseasonably late snow fell into the empty courtyard.
“Lady Cecilia—”
“Oh, leave me alone!”
“If I said something to offend you—”
“Of course not! What do you mean? Why should I be offended?” She whirled so suddenly to face me that I had to step back. “I have no cavalier, green or yellow or bright orange!”
“I know you don’t,” I said. A memory came to me: Prince Rupert scowling in a doorway, demanding Cecilia’s presence.
“Then why did you say I do?”
“I didn’t! I was making a jest . . . green wood . . . it was but a jest.”
“It wasn’t funny.”
“I know,” I said humbly. “Please forgive me.” I started to go down on one knee. She grabbed my hand and pulled me up.
“Stop! You can’t kneel to me while the queen is in the room! But you didn’t think about that, did you?” She peered at me. “You really are just an ignorant savage.”
All at once her mood changed with that quicksilver speed that now, I belatedly realized, had in it something of hysteria. “I know! I shall be your teacher! I shall teach you to be a courtier—to play the lute, and gamble, and . . . oh, all sorts of things! It will be the greatest amusement!”
“My lady . . .”
“And we shall start now! With the lute! Come!”
“We can’t now,” I said with enormous relief. “The queen is calling for dancing.”
Queen Caroline had just raised her hand to the musicians who waited obediently in a corner of the room. “The jereian!” she called. Ladies began to form one line, gentlemen another facing them. Those not dancing crowded back to the walls, I among them. The queen’s fool did not dance; not even Lady Cecilia was mad enough to think that. She skipped away to join the line of ladies, and the dance began.