Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [35]
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