One of the guards smiled. “It is evening, fool.”
I looked amazed. “Are you sure? No, it’s eight o’clock of a morning! I heard a cock crow!”
“Then you ears are full of candle wax.”
“The better for noises to slip inside!”
He laughed and gave me a mock kick, his boot just connecting with my ass. The other guard watched sourly. “Get away from me, fool. I have no liking for half-wits.”
“Ah, but I am but a quarter-wit, so you must like me! Shall I bring you breakfast from the kitchen?”
“I mean it, get away with you.”
I skipped out of his boot reach in mock fear, pantomimed extreme hunger, and scampered off.
Immediately I was lost in the intricate maze of the palace. I couldn’t remember the route by which Kit Beale had brought me, and I had not left the queen’s chambers in weeks. Now that I thought of it, neither had she. Did she never go beyond the palace, outside to the city or the countryside? Was that her mother’s doing?
By asking servants, I found my way to the kitchens. Now I knew where I was; the laundry was in this part of the palace, as was my old apprentices’ chamber. Dinner was long over and only a few kitchen maids remained, scrubbing pots or preparing for tomorrow. Among them, mixing loaves of bread to rise overnight for breakfast, was Maggie.
“Roger! ”
“Hello, Maggie.”
“You did indeed become the queen’s fool! I had heard that.” Her tone was not entirely approving. The other girls stared at us, and Maggie snapped at them, “Get back to work!” They did. Maggie was in charge here, just as she had once taken charge of me. Fed me, befriended me, laughed with me. It was good to see her, despite her disapproving look at my yellow face and bizarre clothing.
She pushed a lock of hair off her sweaty face. The kitchen was very warm. “What brings you here, Roger?”
I kept my voice low. “I need to go out of the door where the kitchen barges bring food from the farms.”
“Why?”
“I just do.”
“Is this queen’s business?” Her voice, too, was low, but she kept her face calm and her strong arms busy mixing bread.
“Yes, but I cannot say what. And you must not, either.”
A pause in mixing, soon over. “Oh, Roger, what have you got yourself involved in now?”
I didn’t answer. Let her think my errand was an important matter on behalf of the queen. Maggie would help me all the sooner. Cecilia’s sad face filled my mind.
She said, “It’s not connected with the navy, is it? Please say you are not involved in that mess!”
What mess? What about the navy? How could a kitchen maid know more than I about matters of state? But I already knew the answer to that. Queen Eleanor kept all military matters away from her daughter’s side of the palace. And lords and ladies did not gossip about weighty matters, lest they be overheard and misinterpreted. They could trust no one. Lower servants, however, could gossip about anything, as long as they did so in whispers, because no one in power cared what they said or thought. The palace servants—all except me—often knew everything.
I said, “It is not about the navy. But I must go soon, and I must change first and go unseen.”
She sighed. “Wait a short while. Sit there and eat, as if hunger alone had driven you here.” She went to the hearth and poured me a bowl of soup left over from the servants’ dinner. It had cooled and I was already full, but I ate it with a great show of famine.
When Maggie had dismissed the other girls, I went into the larder and changed into my old clothes. They were far too tight; I had filled out since becoming the queen’s fool. I put the piece of blanket over my face, my eyes and mouth at the crude holes. When I emerged from the larder, Maggie made a choking noise somewhere between a scream of laughter and a grunt of exasperation. I pulled my hood up over my head so that it hung over my forehead.
“This way,” she said, shaking her head. Another small courtyard open to the sky, this one stacked with empty crates and jars and smelling of old vegetables. After the warm kitchen, its coolness was welcome. Maggie unlocked a door set into the wall and the scent of the river rushed in. The water flowed lazily just a few feet away, and stone stairs led down to poles at which to tie up barges. No barges floated there now. Between the river and the palace wall, a narrow path curved away in both directions.
“You can go either left or right,” Maggie said.
“Which way to Mother Chilton?”
She grabbed my arm, pulled me back inside, and slammed the door. “Why are you going to
Mother Chilton
?”
“I cannot tell you that,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster, which wasn’t much.
“The queen would not have business with that witch!”
“She is a witch?”
“Yes. No. No, of course not, there is no such thing. Mother Chilton is a healer. But Roger . . . what have you done now?”
“I have done nothing.”
“Then who has?”
Her gray eyes looked steadily into mine. I didn’t answer. Finally she said, “Turn left. Go three alleys over and turn right. Look for the tent with a picture of two black swans drawn near the bottom. Wait, you’ll need a lantern.”
When she’d given it to me, I said humbly, “Thank you, Maggie. I could not do this without you.”
“I suspect you should not be doing it at all. I’ll wait here to let you back in. Don’t be long!”
“I won’t.” How could I promise that? I couldn’t know how long I would be. I went out through the open door, holding my lantern.
In the autumn, Kit Beale had told me that the city was mostly deserted at night, the keepers of the shops and booths having gone back home to the surrounding villages. In this cold spring, it seemed completely deserted. Tents provide little shield from cold. But within a few of the cloth buildings, lanterns gleamed, and I heard laughter from what seemed to be an alehouse. Still, I would not like to be here, with the kinds of people who stayed late at night. My teeth chattered as I scurried along, and not with cold. In the third alley, I had to stoop to find the two black swans drawn at the very bottom of a tent. A crude drawing, pretending to be the mischief of a child. Cecilia had blithely assumed that I could easily carry out her wishes, because she was used to people carrying out her wishes. But without Maggie, I would never have found this place. Never.
A bellpull hung outside, and I pulled it. After a few minutes of bone-rattling chill, the tent flap was pushed aside and a voice said, “Come in, then.”
I went inside.
An open fire burned in a brazier in the center of the tent, sending its smoke through a hole in the roof and its light flickering on canvas walls. Dozens of poles stood against the walls, their butts jammed into the bare earth, and each pole dripped objects tied with string to big nails. Bottles, plants, feathers, hides, bits of wood, bulging cloth bags of all sizes, things I could not name. Besides the poles, there was room for only the brazier, a pallet of straw and blankets, and a table with a single chair. On the chair sat not the crone I’d expected but a woman neither young nor old, fat nor thin, pretty nor ugly. She wore a gray dress and gray cap. No one would ever glance at her twice; in fact, I had the sensation that I was not really seeing her at all. And yet she was solid enough, sitting there in her unadorned chair, her face pale in the dim light.
“What do you want?” she said, not unkindly.
“I’m looking for Mother Chilton.”
“I am Mother Chilton.”
“You?”
A faint smile. “Me. What are you after, lad? Unmask.”
“I cannot.” And then, inanely, “I’m sorry.”
She stood and moved close to me. Now the fire was behind her and her face in shadow. With one firm hand she turned my chin to the fire and stared through the blanket holes and into my eyes. Her own eyes were colorless, an even light gleam that seemed to reflect all light, keeping none. Her breath drew in sharply. “Who are you?”
“I told you, I cannot—”
“Do you come from Soulvine Moor?”
The question completely undid me. Soulvine Moor, which Maggie had chided me for even mentioning? Soulvine Moor, where my mother had died? I gasped, “What . . . what of Soulvine Moor?”
“Are they ready, then?”
“Ready for what? Mistress, I come for . . . for a milady posset! ”
A long moment, and then she laughed, forced and bitter. “I see. A milady posset.” Her hand dropped from my chin and she moved away. “Get out!”
“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 dies. Some say—” Maggie raised the lantern, looked fearfully around, and put her mouth close to my ear. “Some say she is a witch.”
All at once pieces fell into place in my mind, like tumblers clicking into a lock. The queen’s readiness to believe that I could cross over, in the face of Lord Robert’s amused disbelief. Maggie’s horror that time in the kitchen when I asked where Soulvine Moor lay. Mistress Conyers, telling me to avoid the notice of the queen . . . But I knew that there were no witches. I alone knew this with certainty. I had crossed over to the country of the Dead, had talked to the Dead, had even talked to old women burned as witches. They had not been that. But common people believed in witches, and were terrified of them, and an army was made of common soldiers. No one was more superstitious than a soldier—I had seen it again and again at faires. And I knew all too well that a statement need have very little truth in it to be believed.