Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [48]
“Now we must have music! Music and dancing!”
The others took up the cry: Music! Dancing! Music! Only recently had the queen given permission for dancing to occur when she was not present. The ladies and courtiers were young, alive, oblivious to whatever the queen may have been doing all day, although they would leap to her service the second she required them. Although were they really so oblivious, so heedless and carefree as they seemed? All of them—everyone at court—were such skilled actors. Except me.
Musicians were sent for. Under cover of all the bustle, Cecilia said to me, “Roger?”
I said, “It is buried under the tree in the fish-fountain courtyard, on the side of the tree facing the fountain. Organize a game of hide-and-seek or hide-the-coin, and you can easily retrieve it. Drink it all at once, eat nothing for a day, and lie”—my voice faltered—“with no one for a week.”
“Oh, I thank you so—”
“Was it Prince Rupert?”
She stiffened beside me, then rose and flounced off, her satin skirts swishing. But a moment later she was back. Lips so close to my ear that I could smell the scented soap on her damp hair, she whispered, “Don’t think less of me, I could not bear it,” and again she was gone.
My chest contracted in on itself, held, had to be forced to breathe again. Why should Lady Cecilia care what I, the queen’s fool, thought of her?
I watched her move through the slow, sedate figures of the court dance, her restless charm confined to one step forward, two back, a slight dip of the head. Wrong, wrong. The wrong dance for her, the wrong man, the wrong contrast between these courtiers’ gaiety and the ominous absence of the queen.
Just as darkness fell, the door to the privy chamber opened and the queen stepped out. Instantly dancers and musicians fell into deep curtsies. The queen gazed at them bleakly. She wore a gown of such deep green it looked almost black, and the dark color turned her skin chalky white. It made her look older, unlike the woman who had questioned me at midnight, let alone the one who had roistered with her court in the kitchens on the day she had found me there. It occurred to me now that never since had I seen her join her courtiers with that same abandon.
Had she come to the kitchen that night only for me?
“Roger?” she said now. “Come, fool.”
I rose and moved among the kneeling courtiers, toward the privy chamber.
“Resume dancing, then,” Queen Caroline said, smiled at them all, and closed the door. She turned to me. “It occurred to me that you must have eaten nothing, Roger, since yesterday. Sit, eat.”
There it was again: kindness in the woman who had threatened me with torture, remembrance of the small amid whatever great concerns consumed her. Lord Robert sat at the other end of the table, now covered with a green-embroidered dinner cloth that hung to the floor, his face as bleak as hers. His fingers curled loosely around the stem of a wine goblet. When he raised the goblet to drink, the green stones of his rings flashed in the firelight.
I loaded a plate—it was a royal order, after all—with meat and fruit and bread and cheese, and devoured it all. I drank two goblets of wine. The queen and Lord Robert talked only of trivial things: the change in the weather, the shoe that his horse had thrown, Lady Margaret’s cold, a favorite hunting dog about to whelp. The fire burned low, throwing the room into shadow. After my heavy meal and heavier thoughts, I felt sleepy. When I slumped low in my chair on the far side of the table, the queen said, “Roger, you may go now and—”
The door was flung open with the force of a gale and soldiers burst in.
Blue soldiers, not the queen’s Green guard. Their sleeves above the armor were blue, the ribbons on their helmet blue, the arms on their shields . . . their short swords were drawn. Before I knew I was even going to move, I had slid down in the chair and slithered under the table, where the long cloth hid me.
Lord Robert leapt up, his hand going to his sword. But then a woman’s voice rang out.
“Caroline.”
I knew that icy voice, although