Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [38]
“Where is everyone tonight?” Lady Cecilia said impatiently. “The chamber is half empty!”
“I don’t know, my lady.” I, too, had noticed the room’s emptiness. Each week there were fewer courtiers in the queen’s rooms. They had gone, I guessed, to the old queen’s chambers in that part of the palace I had never seen. Did the deserters dare to attend Queen Eleanor while wearing the young queen’s green? Or did they change their clothes with their loyalties?
Cecilia said, “We have barely enough people to dance! I want to dance!”
“But you must wait for the queen to command dancing.”
“Of course, of course!” Restlessly she shifted on her stool. It was right after dinner, early in the evening. Bright fires burned in the two great hearths at either end of the chamber. Lady Cecilia and I, with two other of the youngest ladies, Lady Sarah and Lady Jane, sat on cushioned stools close by the fire. The others stood in clumps around the room, talking to the courtiers, waiting for the queen to declare the evening’s entertainment. Lady Margaret sat on the other side of the hearth, reading a book. Cecilia stuck out her pink tongue at the heavy volume, slid her eyes sideways to meet mine, and giggled.
The queen sat in a far corner with a sour-looking man I had never seen before. He was dressed well enough, in black velvet with a black satin sash, but his face was weather-battered and his hair unfashionably short. He didn’t look like a soldier, nor an advisor, nor a courtier, and I had never seen anyone at court wear black. He and the queen leaned close to each other in earnest conversation. Lord Robert occasionally glanced at them from his own conversation with Lord Dearborn.
Lady Sarah said, “Cecilia, there are other things in life besides dancing.”
“I think she knows that,” Lady Jane said slyly, and Lady Sarah gave a bark of laughter. I didn’t understand the jest, nor Cecilia’s sharp reply.
“Hold your foolish tongue, Jane Sedley! And you, too, Sarah!”
“And who shall make me? Your yellow cavalier?”
I said, trying to be witty, “Green wood burns hotter than yellow.”
Lady Jane and Lady Sarah looked at each other and burst into more laughter, which grew wilder and wilder. They held their sides and roared. Tears sprang to Cecilia’s eyes. She jumped to her feet and rushed off.
She had nowhere to go except to the other side of the room. I followed her, bewildered about what I had said to make the others laugh like that. Cecilia stood in an empty window embrasure, leaning out over the velvet-covered seat, her face pressed to the thick glass. Outside, a few flakes of unseasonably late snow fell into the empty courtyard.
“Lady Cecilia—”
“Oh, leave me alone!”
“If I said something to offend you—”
“Of course not! What do you mean? Why should I be offended?” She whirled so suddenly to face me that I had to step back. “I have no cavalier, green or yellow or bright orange!”
“I know you don’t,” I said. A memory came to me: Prince Rupert scowling in a doorway, demanding Cecilia’s presence.
“Then why did you say I do?”
“I didn’t! I was making a jest . . . green wood . . . it was but a jest.”
“It wasn’t funny.”
“I know,” I said humbly. “Please forgive me.” I started to go down on one knee. She grabbed my hand and pulled me up.
“Stop! You can’t kneel to me while the queen is in the room! But you didn’t think about that, did you?” She peered at me. “You really are just an ignorant savage.”
All at once her mood changed with that quicksilver speed that now, I belatedly realized, had in it something of hysteria. “I know! I shall be your teacher! I shall teach you to be a courtier—to play the lute, and gamble, and . . . oh, all sorts of things! It will be the greatest