Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [27]
“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