The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [9]
A chamberlain met me at the monastery gate. Not the monks' porter; this was one of the Queen's own servants, a royal chamberlain I recognized from Cornwall. He knew who I was, of course, and bowed very low, but I could see that he did not recall our last meeting. It was the same man, grown greyer and more bent, who had admitted me to the Queen's presence some three months before Arthur's birth, when she had promised to confide the child to my care. I had been disguised then, for fear of Uther's enmity, and it was plain that the chamberlain did not recognize, in the tall prince at the gate, the humble bearded "doctor" who had called to consult with the Queen.
He led me across the weedy courtyard toward the big thatched building where the Queen was lodged. Cressets burned outside the door and here and there along the wall, so that the poverty of the place showed starkly. After the wet summer weeds had sprouted freely among the cobbles, and the corners of the yard were waist-high in nettles. Among these the wooden ploughs and mattocks of the working brothers stood, wrapped in sacking. Near one doorway was an anvil, and on a nail driven into the jamb hung a line of horse-shoes. A litter of thin black piglings tumbled, squealing, out of our way, and were called by a sow's anxious grunting through the broken planks of a half-door. The holy men and women of Amesbury were simple folk. I wondered how the Queen was faring.
I need not have feared for her. Ygraine had always been a lady who knew her own mind, and since her marriage to Uther she had kept a most queenly state, urged to this, possibly, by the very irregularity of that marriage. I remembered the Abbot's house as a humble dwelling, clean and dry, but boasting no comfort. Now in a few short hours the Queen's people had seen to it that it was luxurious. The walls, of undressed stone, had been hidden by hangings of scarlet and green and peacock blue, and one beautiful Eastern carpet that I had brought for her from Byzantium. The wooden floor was scrubbed white, and the benches that stood along the walls were piled with furs and cushions. A great fire of logs burned on the hearth. To one side of this was set a tall chair of gilded wood, cushioned in embroidered wool, with a footstool fringed with gold. Across from this stood another chair with a high back, and arms carved with dragons' heads. The lamp was a five-headed dragon in bronze. The door to the Abbot's austere sleeping chamber stood open, and beyond it I caught a glimpse of a bed hung with blue, and the sheen of a silver fringe. Three or four women -- two of them no more than girls -- were busying themselves in the bedchamber and over the table, which, at the end of the room away from the fire, stood ready for supper. Pages dressed in blue ran with dishes and flagons. Three white greyhounds lay as near to the fire as they dared go.
As I entered, there was a pause in the bustle and chatter. All eyes turned to the doorway. A page bearing a wine-jar, caught within a yard of the door, checked, swerved, and stared, showing the whites of his eyes. Someone at the table dropped a wooden trencher, and the greyhounds pounced on the fallen cakes. The scrabbling of their claws and their munching were the only sounds in the room to be heard through the rustling of the fire.
"Good evening," I said pleasantly. I answered the women's reverences, watched gravely while a boy picked up the fallen trencher and kicked the dogs out of the way, then allowed myself to be ushered by the chamberlain toward the hearthplace.
"The Queen -- " he was beginning, when the eyes turned from me to the inner door, and the greyhounds, arched and wagging, danced to meet the woman who came through it.
But for the hounds and the curtsying women, a stranger might have thought