Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [30]
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!”
But that drunken remark, which I did not understand, silenced a few of the courtiers, and all of the servants. The servants’ faces twisted with disgust, or fear, and then immediately stiffened again. No one, not even the kitchen steward, knew what we should do. The fiddling and dancing and laughter and shouting went on.
“Give Hal some more ale!”
“Give him a kitchen wench!”
“Ale! Ale!”
“The queen!”
Instantly the musicians stopped playing. Courtiers and servants alike sank to their knees. Silence descended like hard rain, and the old queen came into the hall.
She was alone, save for her personal guard of two Blues. Queen Eleanor, sixty years old, had ruled for forty-one years, since the death of her mother in a hunting accident. She wore a gown of pale blue silk embroidered with darker blue at the hem. The gown, like her simple silver crown, was austere and quiet and expensive. Her face was deeply lined, her hair white as an egret’s wing. But she stood straight and tall, and power emanated from her like steady heat.
No one moved or spoke.
When the old queen did so, it was in a low voice that carried into every corner of the hall, into every apprehensive ear. Her gaze swept over the courtiers. “None of you belongs here.”
I realized then that I was still standing, frozen beside the vegetable crates. I tried to sink to the floor without calling attention to myself.
The queen’s voice rang out imperiously. “Caroline.”
The rustle of skirts moving forward; this lady had not knelt. She removed her mask of green feathers over cloth of gold. “Yes.”
So this was the young queen!
Her mother said, “You especially do not belong here.”
“This is my palace. And this is my merriment, before my brother must leave us.”
Queen Caroline, thirty-seven years old, was beautiful. Also dangerous, in some way I could feel but not understand. Her body curved lusciously under a tight green bodice, but so did many others among the ladies. The difference lay in her eyes, black with silver glints, as if something shining were submerged in dark water. The difference lay in the set of her white shoulders, the thrust of her lovely breasts, the very intricacy of her coiffure, black as her eyes, braided and puffed and set with jewels in contrast to the old queen’s smooth white hair.
The two women stared at each other. I could see both their faces clearly. The old monarch stared at her daughter. Although neither