Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [49]
She ignored him. “Caroline, what have you done?”
“I have done nothing.” As much ice as in her mother’s voice, and much more rage.
“I think you have,” Queen Eleanor said. “Your couriers come and go from the harbor at Carlyle Bay, and other strange couriers ride in from the west. And your lover here”—it was impossible to convey the contempt in those three words—“ has called upon the lord high admiral himself.”
Queen Caroline said, “I would know what happens in my queendom.”
“My queendom, Caroline. You are not fit to hold it, and could not hold it if you had it.”
“I was crowned well over a year ago!”
“A sham without my presence, and without the Crown of Glory, and you know it. I would give you The Queendom if I thought you could hold it, but you cannot.”
“Because you have turned the army against me. You know I could rule, but you want to keep all power for yourself!”
“And so I shall, for the good of The Queendom. I will not see it descend to civil war. And you will keep your fingers—all eleven of them—off my navy. Do I make myself understood?”
The young queen said levelly, “Mother, are you planning to send both the new navy and the army to attack Benilles? To take The Queendom into war?”
Dead silence.
I had heard of Benilles—where? Then it came to me: Bat’s voice in the country of the Dead, about the Frances Ormund: “Gold from Benilles and cloth from ... I forget where.” Had Captain James Conyers’s cargo included information, as well? So perhaps it had not been by mere chance that the old queen’s Blues had interrupted Hartah’s wreckers. The soldiers had been waiting in that desolate place, for something that did not happen because my uncle’s wreckers foundered the ship and Captain Conyers drowned.
Queen Eleanor said, “Caroline, if you interfere in matters that do not concern you, you will regret it.”
“If you plunge The Queendom into a war we cannot win, you will regret it.”
I wondered, cowering under my table, which of the two women had the greater capacity for hatred.
The old queen said, “Keep to your music, daughter, and your wild young court, and your powerless lover. As of tonight, you will receive no visitors except these. I will have guards at the doors of your presence chamber. Since it was not enough to restrict you to the palace, I will also restrict those you may see. I have spoken.”
A swish of the blue gown as she turned, a slam of the door behind her soldiers.
The young queen said, “I will—”
“Hush, Caro,” Lord Robert said, in a tone that would have silenced an earthquake. “The first thing you will do is dismiss your fool before he hears even more than he has. Roger, go.”
I crawled out from under the table, just as I had done so many times in Hartah’s faire booth. And, like those times, I held information I did not want. But I made a rapid decision. “Your Grace ...”
“I said go!” Lord Robert thundered.
“Your Grace, I know something more of Captain Conyers and the Frances Ormund and Benilles. I learned it from a sailor of the crew and from the captain’s widow.”
She stared at me, white-faced, her mouth still twisted with anger at her mother. I knelt before her and told her that Bat had said “somebody important” had been on board the ship, someone “with medals on his chest.” Mistress Conyers had mentioned passenger money from a nobleman, suggesting a sum large enough to make a difference to her husband’s fortunes. And Queen Eleanor’s soldiers, a large number of them, had already been gathered in this remote corner of The Queendom.
When I finished, she said, “Roger.”
“Your Grace?”
“Rise and look at me.” Lord Robert watched us closely from across the room.
“Do you realize you have just confessed to participating in a deliberate wreck?”