Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [44]
“I can pay!” Desperately I fumbled in my pockets until I found the gold piece. I held it out to her.
“A milady posset,” she repeated. “And I asked you—well, why not. All right. Sometimes none of us know where we are. Or who. Sit there.”
I did, afraid to disobey. She moved briskly about the tent, taking things from bags, putting vials and bowls upon the table. Her body shielded whatever she was doing. Presently there was a crisp odor, like apples combined with something else, and she handed me a vial stoppered with wax.
“Have her drink this all at once, then eat nothing for a day. She will feel no sickness. And I don’t have to tell you, do I, that she should lie with no one for at least a week?”
My ears grew warm. My lady Cecilia did not lie with men; she had proudly refused to play the court’s bed-wagering game. Mother Chilton gazed at me with amusement and handed me the vial. But there was speculation in her amusement, and I got out as fast as I could.
Maggie let me back in by the kitchen-barge door and locked it behind her.
“Did you get what you needed?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I suppose. Roger—be careful. These are strange times.”
She seemed less angry at me than before, less impatient. She was glad I was back safe, which made a little warm fire in my heart. I risked questions. “How are they strange times, Maggie?”
“Wouldn’t you know better than I? I only know what I hear of gossip, or am told by my brother, the soldier with the Blues. You’re the one beside the queen.”
I said slowly, “I sit at her feet. I make jokes about matters I don’t understand. I hope desperately that my joke will fit its subject, at least a little. And that it will be funny, at least a little. I dye my face yellow. I make inane movements like dancing backward and pretending to fall down. And all the while I’m afraid that I will do something wrong, something that will displease the queen. Always I’m afraid, Maggie. Sometimes I wish I were back here, carrying water in the laundry, sleeping under the trestle table.”
She took my hand. Hers was warm, rough with work. “We are the same age, and yet sometimes I think I am much older than you.”
She would not think that if she had known the things I had seen and done. The wreck of the Frances Ormund, the knife sliding into Hartah’s flesh . . . I had not trusted Maggie with my past, however much I trusted her in the present. I said, “I need to know as much as I can learn in order to merely survive, and yet I know nothing. You hear more in the kitchen, from the servants who wait at table and the bargemen who come from outside, than I do among the courtiers. They must guard their tongues around the queen, and I am always around the queen. So please please tell me—how are these strange times?”
“The two rival courts in the palace cannot go on forever,” Maggie said, her voice low. “There are whispers . . . well, there always were. But my brother tells me that the rumors grow more intense, both in the army and in the villages. The old rumors.”
I remembered Cat Starling’s flat words: The queen is a whore. “Why do the rumors grow more intense now? Because of Lord Robert? ”
“No. Well, maybe a little. Consort Will was much beloved, you know. He was so generous to the poor, and he traveled all about the countryside, listening to people. I was not yet working at court when he died, but I remember villagers whispering that the queen had him poisoned.”
“Poisoned? Her own husband? I don’t believe it. He was no threat to her rule.” I realized all at once that we were talking treason. If anyone overheard . . . But we were two young servants in a cold and deserted kitchen courtyard, beside a pile of vegetable crates and slop buckets, and there was no one else around.
“Some say,” Maggie continued, “that she had already taken up again with Lord Robert, and so wished her husband gone.”
“Why does she not marry Lord Robert now?”
Maggie shrugged. “Perhaps she does not wish to share power, not even with a consort. Some say she waits for a better alliance through marriage, a foreign prince, after the old queen