She stood with her back to the fire and gazed at me from hard eyes. On the other side of the door, Lord Robert called urgently, “Your Grace!” I was near fainting from fear. To be run through with his blade, or burned alive, or . . . I knew there were deaths even worse. And I had failed her.
She said softly, “Did you
really
go there? To the country of the Dead?”
“Yes!” I stabbed about in my mind for something to convince her. “I saw the old queen!”
Swiftly she crossed the room and seized my arm. “What did she say?”
“I . . . nothing that ...”
“Don’t lie to me, Roger! What did the old hag say?”
My life balanced on my next words. Only honesty would convince her—she was so good at detecting evasions—might even implying that she had committed murder be construed as treason? Done if I spoke truth, done if I did not. Despairing, I choked out, “She . . .
she
said you . . . poisoned her. That she felt it in her belly and clutched her belly and died. She cursed you.”
The queen laughed, a high hysterical peal that, horribly, reminded me of Lady Cecilia. But this was no Cecilia. In half a moment she had herself back in control, and into another of her lightning changes of mood.
“You
were
there. I am sorry I doubted you. Those are exactly the lies my mother would utter, the old bitch. There, don’t look so scared, Roger, no one will hurt you. You did your best, I know, and in the future there will be more for you to do, and you will succeed. There now, little fool, it’s all right. Come along, and I shall allow you to see me take back my palace.” She gave my arm a quick caress, smiled at me. Then she opened the door to Lord Robert and forgot me.
And so, not daring to do anything else, I followed behind the young queen, who was now the only queen, into the part of the palace where lay the power of the living.
The palace had been secured. There seemed to be more Greens than the queen had commanded formerly, and this puzzled me until I studied their tunics. Some looked very new; others seemed ill-fitting. These soldiers must be former Blues, either recruited secretly ahead of Queen Eleanor’s death or else newly turncoat this afternoon.
For the first time, I saw the palace throne room. It was no more lavish than Queen Caroline’s former presence chamber, and just as bare. However, it was so much vaster that I wondered how the palace could contain it. This, then, was why the city outside the palace walls had been squeezed into a narrow circle of jammed alleys and temporary tents. This enormous expanse of polished stone floor, vaulted ceiling two stories above us, walls hung with so many candelabra that the windowless room seemed full of light. Despite the change in the weather, the throne room was cold; no fireplaces could take the chill off such a vast space. The only furnishing was a raised dais at one end, holding a carved throne. The queen, a white fur cape thrown over her dress of jeweled green velvet, sat on the throne and received her new subjects.
Queen Caroline’s ladies watched, wide-eyed and pale, from the left of the throne, her courtiers from the right. One by one, the old queen’s advisors came before her in the huge empty space, knelt, and removed their blue robes. Each said, “I swear fealty to Queen Caroline, and to her alone, unto death.” Then each, shivering with cold, was handed a new robe of green to put on over his undertunic. There were not very many advisors. Those who had refused the oath must have been imprisoned. By tomorrow, I guessed, they would be dead.
At a gesture from the queen, Lord Robert mounted the dais and knelt. She smiled at him, but her face was very pale, and only I overheard the words she whispered to him. “The army?”
“No,” he said.
Her face did not change, by what effort of will I could only imagine. Lord Robert resumed his place and the procession of advisors continued.
“I swear fealty to Queen Caroline, and to her alone, unto death.”
No loyalty from the Blue army
. I realized what that meant. The word the captain had spoken—
poisoner
—was what the army believed of Queen Caroline. The Blues did not see her as the natural successor to Eleanor; they saw her as the unnatural murderer of their queen. And they would fight to avenge that murder. The Greens had been able to secure the palace only because the main part of the old queen’s army was housed outside the city. The great gates to both the island and the palace had been shut and bolted and archers set on the ramparts. No one could either enter or leave.
We were at war, and under siege.
The procession seemed endless. After the advisors came Queen Eleanor’s ladies and courtiers. These, too, were far fewer than I guessed they had once been. Some seemed to choke on their words. Then the physicians, musicians, stewards, couriers, pages. The boys, some as young as eight, knelt before the queen, who wore on her head only a simple circlet of gold. Tomorrow the safe would be broken open through hours of patient labor and the Crown of Glory claimed, but tonight the oaths went forward without it. Loyalty, like the palace itself, was being secured. And perhaps as precariously.
“I swear fealty to Queen Caroline, and to her alone, unto death.”
The serving men, the ladies’ maids, the gardeners. How long could the Green guard hold the capital against the entire Blue army? But for tonight the queen sat on the throne and heard everyone in the palace promise to die with her if necessary.
“I swear fealty to Queen Caroline, and to her alone, unto death.”
Last came the cooks, the laundresses, the seamstresses, the stable boys and grooms, the kitchen maids, all kneeling in batches to swear. I saw Joan Campford, her rough red hands swollen with winter chilblains. And later it was Maggie, who sank to her knees with a grace and dignity that might almost have matched the queen’s own. She did not glance at me. I wondered about her brother Richard, soldier of the Blues, but I could tell nothing from Maggie’s face.
“I swear fealty to Queen Caroline, and to her alone, unto death.”
And then it was over, and nearly midnight. The queen’s court moved their possessions into the rooms beside the throne room, the rooms that had been the old queen’s. Everything was bustle and confusion. I found Cecilia in tears as she followed the harassed steward to her new chambers.
“Oh, Roger, it’s all so different! I don’t know what to do! I wish the old queen hadn’t—”
“Hush,” I said quickly. “It’s all right, my lady.”
“Why does your voice sound like that?”
“I bit my tongue.”
“I can barely understand you. Oh, what will I do now?”
“You will go where you are told and serve Her Grace as you always have.”
“Yes.” Her eyes darted wildly around. “I’m to share a room with Jane Sedley. The ladies on . . . on this side of the palace shared, because there were so many. And now we have with us the Blue ladies as well as the Green.”
“They are all Green now,” I reminded her.
“Yes, of course. Only it’s so . . . so strange!”
“My lady,” said Cecilia’s serving woman, the young and timid girl who had replaced Emma Cartwright. Her arms were full of gowns. “Where shall I put these?”
“I don’t care! Roger, what will happen? They say the old queen’s army is outside the gates and they will starve us out! Or worse!”
“Go to bed, my lady. Her Grace will need you in the morning.”
“I—”
“Good night, my lady.”
“Good night.” She went, and it was only later that I realized I had been giving orders to a lady. I, the queen’s fool.
No one had thought to assign me a place to sleep. I found the queen’s new presence chamber, which actually looked small after the throne room. I knew the single guard posted in the room. He looked grim and would answer none of my questions, but he admitted me to the deserted outer chamber. No guard here—I guessed they were needed to defend the palace if the Blues should attack. There was no curtained alcove off these rooms, but a great fire had burned in the fireplace at some point during this terrible day, and the embers still gave off a faint warmth. I curled up beside the ashes. My tongue hurt. My arm hurt. My heart hurt.
It was a long time before I could sleep. When I did, I dreamed I journeyed to Soulvine Moor. It looked exactly like the country of the Dead, and my mother sat there in her lavender dress, silent and unmoving, beside the old, dead queen.
17
“WE WILL RUN
out of food.”
“The army has seized all the horses.”
“They will burn us all at once, in a huge fire, where all the villagers can see.”
“The servants will hide the food from us.”
“We will have to eat rats. They did that in the old times during sieges.”
“They will take the city and burn us as traitors—”
The ladies and courtiers whispered among themselves. Now there was no dancing, no gaming, no flirting. The Blue army was camped along both banks of the river. Or so I was told by those who had climbed the stairs to the windy ramparts atop the city walls. Below, I attended the queen. She spent all morning with her advisors, and all afternoon moving around the palace.
“There is no meat left in the kitchens,” the people whispered to each other.
“The servants are hoarding the food somewhere.”
“My mother will be desperate for news of me; she’s all alone in the country house—”
“My father—”
“My son and his family—”
“Burn us alive—”
“No fruit left—”
Only the queen remained serene. She did not ration the food left in the larders, the wheat stores, the cellars. No barges came to the kitchen docks, and in spring food always ran low, consumed over the winter. By the fifth day of the siege, we ate bread and cheese and ale, but we ate fully. No one understood this, least of all me. Why didn’t the queen count and ration the remaining food? We would run out soon enough, because of course the servants must be hiding some of it against starvation. I would have. I hoped Maggie was.
This was when I saw the cellars for the first time, along with everywhere else in the palace. I accompanied her every afternoon. “Keep your eyes open, Roger,” the Queen told me. “Remember everything. I don’t know what I may need you to do in the future.” She had dropped all requirements that I act the fool, or that I make witty comments. This was good, because all wit had deserted me.
Everywhere we went, the queen, magnificently dressed and accompanied by a guard of tall, handsome Greens, smiled at her new subjects and studied them and let them wordlessly know that she ruled here now. To the stillrooms. The laundries. The kitchens. The guardrooms and stables and servants’ halls, of which there were more than I had known. The courtiers’ chambers. Despite the siege, masons had been set to work in the palace, tearing up the blue tiles in the royal courtyards and replacing them with green. When they ran low on green tiles, they interspersed them with white or cream, creating intricate patterns. In the laundries, blue cloth was dyed green: bed hangings, table linen, livery, cushions, saddle blankets. Seamstresses worked feverishly to create enough emerald-colored tunics, gowns, doublets. In the royal dining hall, even the blue glass plates, imported from some distant land, had been packed away in straw, replaced by delicate white plates decorated with graceful green vines. The queen, gracious and smiling and tireless, oversaw it all, and I went with her.
We also went to the royal nursery, where for the first time I saw the queen’s heir, three-year-old Princess Stephanie, with her six-year-old brother. The queen’s older son, Prince Percy, had been sent away over the winter to be a page in the house of a Green noble, as was the custom. The little princess was thin and pale; she did not look strong. A grave, gray-eyed child without her mother’s beauty, she had her grandmother’s long face and wide jaw. In fact, she looked so much like a sickly, miniature version of the dead queen that I was startled. What did Queen Caroline think of that? I couldn’t tell. She kissed her children, held them, played with them, and I could not tell if it was genuine mother love, or the regard of a master chess player for her pawns.
I could not tell anything the queen might be thinking. She was as contradictory as ever: serene in the face of civil war, of siege, of starvation. Calculation in her eyes as she assessed her new realm. Kind to everyone in the palace, all those terrified servitors sinking into deep and reverential bows even as they believed, probably, that she had poisoned their monarch. The one place I did not go with Queen Caroline was the dungeons, if they existed. And if they did not, then where were all the advisors and soldiers who had refused to take the oath of fealty? Were they already in the country of the Dead?
No, I did not understand the queen. Beautiful, cruel, kind, ambitious—and most of all, unruffled. Even as the food ran out and the Blue army lined both banks of the river and the ladies-in-waiting whispered in terror.
“Starve us out—”
“Burn us all—”
“What is she
doing
?”