Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [37]
Almost I wished myself in the country of the Dead.
Over time, I became a little better at being a fool. Sometimes, someone would laugh at my jest. A very small laugh. The queen, however, became no better at being sought out for anything important. Minor land disputes, minor points of law, minor appropriations of money for minor building. Queen Caroline settled them all with justice and knowledge. This was a side of her I had not seen before, much different from the woman who had threatened me with torture, or the one who each morning asked sweetly how I had slept. She was a just and equitable queen to her subjects beyond the palace.
Nonetheless, it seemed to me that she was hardly a queen at all. The palace teemed with the old queen’s Blues. Queen Caroline had her own Green guard, but it was tiny in comparison. And no one ever petitioned her for anything to do with the army. Courtiers’ gossip whispered about the new navy—The Queendom’s first—being built in Carlyle Bay, at the mouth of the Thymar River. However, in the presence chamber I heard nothing of any ships. I listened and I learned, but the truth is that I did not really care about the ships, or the army, or the endless land disputes.
I had enough to eat, enough sleep, sometimes ale or wine to drink.
The queen did not send me on any more journeys to the country of the Dead.
My jests as fool were becoming sharper, more knowing.
But most of all, when the day’s work—which did not look like “work” at all to one who had labored for Hartah, had sweated in Joan Campford’s laundry—ended, I was with the queen’s ladies. With Lady Cecilia.
“Are you here again, Roger? I see that you are. And yellow as ever!” And then her pealing laugh, always brighter and higher than the laughter of the young queen’s other ladies. Always Lady Cecilia walked more quickly, danced more animatedly, smiled more widely, played the lute more passionately before tiring of it and tossing it aside. Her very needle, as the ladies sewed, darted faster in and out of the rich cloth, although the results often left much to be desired.
That’s how they spent their days of attendance upon the queen: sewing or reading aloud or playing music or following her in walks around the various courtyards within the vast palace. When the queen was about her “business of state” in the presence chamber—the meager amount of business the old queen allowed her—I don’t know what the ladies did. I sat at the foot of the queen’s throne, making my feeble jokes while the time dragged by.
The nights were another matter entirely.
Then the men, the courtiers in their green silks and velvets and slashed satins studded with jewels, joined the ladies. Queen Caroline was there, too, in the outer chamber lit by candles in great branching candelabra. They all gambled at cards and dice; they danced to lute and pipes and flute; they rehearsed and presented masques. They drank wine and ate sugared cakes. They flirted—how they all flirted! Nominally the ladies were under the charge of Lady Margaret, an older woman with a long, horselike face and sad, intelligent eyes. But Lady Margaret could not keep the bevy of young, pretty, richly dressed girls from their endless romantic gossip. While the queen was sometimes serious, talking alone in a window embrasure or beside a warm fire with Lord Robert or one of the older men, the ladies were never serious. And Lady Cecilia least of all.
“Yes, my lady, I am still yellow.” How I longed to appear before her dressed in something other than my fool’s cap and crazy green-and-yellow tunic!
“And still a fool?”
“A fool to follow you around, my lady.”
“That you are!” She gave her high trill of laughter, only there was something wrong with it. It was too high, too trilling. Her eyes were too bright.
“Is something wrong, my lady?”
“Why should anything be wrong?” she said, her smile vanishing. A second later it was back, too wide. “Don’t be impertinent! ”
“I’m sorry, my lady.”
“You should be!” She tossed her head, her huge green eyes glittering at me, her small chin