Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [47]
“Yes, Your Grace.” Relief flooded me, so strong that for a shameful moment I thought I might cry.
All at once the queen came toward me, took both my hands in hers. She stared deeply into my eyes, her voice low and soft. “In the coming days I will need you, Roger. No one else can do for me what you can, and your gift makes you a treasure beyond price. The Queendom is in grave danger. I am determined to protect it, and to someday hand the realm intact to my daughter. I will do whatever I must to protect my realm. Do you believe that?”
And I did. Her dark eyes so earnestly searching mine . . . The queen was beautiful, but I knew I was not responding to her beauty. Cecilia filled all that part of my mind. The queen was a skilled actress, but I didn’t think she was play-acting about this. She was genuinely concerned about the future of The Queendom she was not being allowed to rule, and she would do whatever was necessary to protect it. She would flay me alive if that would help. She would even do the same to Lord Robert, if she had to. . . . Did he know that?
In one night, my mind had traveled over too far a distance. I was bewildered, frightened, weary. The world was not as I had thought it.
“Yes, Your Grace,” I said. “I believe you care for The Queendom.”
She dropped my hands. “Good. Robin, give him some wine, search him, and send him to bed. This is a tired lad.”
Lord Robert rose. The queen walked toward her bedchamber, but in the doorway she turned and looked back over her shoulder at me. “Your kitchen maid—was this your first time?”
“Yes,” I said, and she smiled at me roguishly and shut the door.
Lord Robert’s search was swift, not gentle, and very thorough. Somewhere during its course, I realized that he—a lord of The Queendom, the queen’s advisor and lover—was afraid of me, because of what the queen had called “my gift.” She was not afraid, but he was.
No, the world was not as I had thought it.
Lord Robert found nothing in my clothing, on my person. “Go to bed,” he said roughly, “and don’t ever do this again.”
The next afternoon Cecilia came with the queen’s other ladies to the outer chamber. Queen Caroline had spent the morning closeted in her inner chamber with Lord Robert and a series of couriers, all of whom looked as if they had ridden hard to arrive at the palace. Some of their clothing looked strange, and no one knew where they had come from. She sent word early that her ladies need not attend her and so they had not. Nor did I, and I spent the whole long morning alone in the vast presence chamber or the deserted outer chamber, staring out the open window at the courtyard. Sometime during the night the cold had finally released its grasp, and it was spring. But the soft air and sweet scents didn’t move me.
Not even hunger moved me. I didn’t dare go to the kitchen for anything to eat—not after the queen’s warning—and nothing was brought to me, so my stomach clenched and growled. Breakfast and dinner were carried in to the queen. The smells of roasted meat and steaming soup filled my mouth with hopeless water.
I made myself a vow, during those long hours at the window. I had been uninterested in the larger life at court for too long; I would be so no longer. If I could not choose my fate, I could at least meet it with less ignorant eyes. I would observe, I would ask questions, I would learn.
Finally when the afternoon was nearly gone and the shadows were long in the courtyard, the ladies-in-waiting and their courtiers burst into the outer chamber in a great flock, chattering and tired and happy. “We rode as far as the mountains, Fool!” Cecilia called cheerfully to me. “A wonderful ride!”
“Yes, my lady,” I said. She was smiling, her skin warmed from the sun, her hair still damp from a bath. Never had I seen her look more beautiful. Hysteria shone in her green eyes like fever. My stomach