Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [33]
“I have brought him,” Lord Robert said. “Although I still don’t believe any of it.”
“Thank you, Robin,” the queen said. I dropped clumsily to one knee. “Rise,” she said. “Are you frightened, boy?”
“Of course he’s frightened,” Lord Robert said, grinning. “For one thing, he’s dyed yellow. No man can be at ease when dyed yellow.”
“But he can’t help that,” she said sweetly. This midnight she was all sweetness, a different woman from the one I had seen crackling with hatred for her regal mother. “He must do whatever work the laundresses demand of him. Is that right, Roger? ”
“Y-yes, Your Grace.” She knew my name.
“But you have no reason to be nervous here. No one will hurt you.”
How many times had I heard that sentence from Hartah, always followed by “if you do as I say”? But she had no need to utter the rest of the sentence aloud. She was a queen. Everyone did as she said.
“Well, since he is here, give him some wine,” Lord Robert said, pouring himself a goblet.
“No, not yet,” she said. “Roger, how old are you?”
“Fourteen, Your Grace.”
“Just a little older than my oldest son,” Queen Caroline said. “Percy is eleven. Can you read, Roger?”
“No, Your Grace.”
“And where is your family?”
“All dead, Your Grace.”
“Like the crew of the Frances Ormund.”
I almost staggered and fell, held upright only by my hand on the corner of the table. She knew. Somehow she knew about the wreck . . . and what else?
“You talk in your sleep,” she said gently, but her eyes raked my face. “And I have people who report to me everything that happens in my palace. Did you know that, Roger?”
“N-no, Your Grace.” I had guessed that she had spies, but not that they would report on lowly laundresses. Maggie? Joan? No, it would have been one of the other apprentices, whose sleep I had disturbed night after night. What else had I said? Lord Robert lounged in a chair, his expression somewhere between disapproval and amusement.
“Ordinarily, of course, I would not find it interesting that a laundress—even a boy laundress—called out the name of a ship foundered by wreckers. It was a public event, after all, and word spreads. But you have called out other things, too, Roger. ‘Soulvine Moor.’ ‘Hygryll.’ ‘Lord Digby.’”
Lord Robert looked up sharply from his wine. The amusement disappeared.
“What do you know of Lord Digby, Roger?”
Old Mrs. Humphries, sitting under a tree by a river in the country of the Dead, prattling of her childhood. I said desperately, “Your Grace, I know only that he once rode through the village of Stonegreen and gave a gold coin to a child.”
Robin said, “Bruce Digby never gave anything to anyone.”
“Lord William Digby!” In my agitation I scarcely knew what I said. All sweetness had vanished from the queen’s face. She had so many faces, this queen; she was changeable as weather. Now neither firelight nor candlelight brought warmth to her chill marble.
She said, “The grandfather? And how could you know that, Roger? He died long before you were born.”
“The child told me! When she was an old lady! It was a family story!”
“And is Soulvine Moor, too, a family story?”
I could only gaze at her in despair.
“I think, Roger, that it was not Lord William Digby whose name you called out, but that of Lord Bruce. And—”
“No, no, it was not! ”
“You dare to interrupt me? And I think that calling out ‘Soulvine Moor’ and ‘Frances Ormund’ was not by happenchance, either. Nor was calling out ‘my lady Frahyll.’”
I remembered Lady Frahyll. Another talkative old woman, another country faire with Hartah’s booth. But that town had boasted a manor house, and the lord’s mother had recently died. A harmless, babbling old dame, too old and too dead to preserve the distinctions of rank. She had told me happily about the people of the countryside, and I had saved myself a beating from Hartah.
“Frahyll is not a common name,” the queen said. “It bears the tortured syllables