Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [28]
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.