Crossing Over (12 page)

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Authors: Anna Kendall

BOOK: Crossing Over
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We went all the way to the courtyard of the young queen.
It was magnificent: bright with torchlight, tiled with green mosaics, set about with gilded branches of red berries in tall, exquisite green urns. Soldiers dressed in green tunics stood guard. They flung open doors for Lord Robert and we passed through a large, dark room empty save for benches against the wall. Then another large room, also dark, but this one furnished and hung with tapestries. Finally a much smaller room where candles and fire burned brightly, and the queen sat alone at a heavily carved table set with wine and cakes.
She still wore her masquing gown, low cut and sumptuous. Her white breasts gleamed in the firelight. But she had taken down her hair, and it fell in rich dark coils around her face and shoulders.
“I have brought him,” Lord Robert said. “Although I still don’t believe any of it.”
“Thank you, Robin,” the queen said. I dropped clumsily to one knee. “Rise,” she said. “Are you frightened, boy?”
“Of course he’s frightened,” Lord Robert said, grinning. “For one thing, he’s dyed yellow. No man can be at ease when dyed yellow.”
“But he can’t help that,” she said sweetly. This midnight she was all sweetness, a different woman from the one I had seen crackling with hatred for her regal mother. “He must do whatever work the laundresses demand of him. Is that right, Roger? ”
“Y-yes, Your Grace.” She knew my name.
“But you have no reason to be nervous here. No one will hurt you.”
How many times had I heard that sentence from Hartah, always followed by “
if you do as I say”
? But she had no need to utter the rest of the sentence aloud. She was a queen. Everyone did as she said.
“Well, since he is here, give him some wine,” Lord Robert said, pouring himself a goblet.
“No, not yet,” she said. “Roger, how old are you?”
“Fourteen, Your Grace.”
“Just a little older than my oldest son,” Queen Caroline said. “Percy is eleven. Can you read, Roger?”
“No, Your Grace.”
“And where is your family?”
“All dead, Your Grace.”
“Like the crew of the
Frances Ormund
.”
I almost staggered and fell, held upright only by my hand on the corner of the table. She knew. Somehow she knew about the wreck . . . and
what else
?
“You talk in your sleep,” she said gently, but her eyes raked my face. “And I have people who report to me everything that happens in my palace. Did you know that, Roger?”
“N-no, Your Grace.” I had guessed that she had spies, but not that they would report on lowly laundresses. Maggie? Joan? No, it would have been one of the other apprentices, whose sleep I had disturbed night after night. What else had I said? Lord Robert lounged in a chair, his expression somewhere between disapproval and amusement.
“Ordinarily, of course, I would not find it interesting that a laundress—even a boy laundress—called out the name of a ship foundered by wreckers. It was a public event, after all, and word spreads. But you have called out other things, too, Roger. ‘Soulvine Moor.’ ‘Hygryll.’ ‘Lord Digby.’”
Lord Robert looked up sharply from his wine. The amusement disappeared.
“What do you know of Lord Digby, Roger?”
Old Mrs. Humphries, sitting under a tree by a river in the country of the Dead, prattling of her childhood. I said desperately, “Your Grace, I know only that he once rode through the village of Stonegreen and gave a gold coin to a child.”
Robin said, “Bruce Digby never gave anything to anyone.”
“Lord
William
Digby!” In my agitation I scarcely knew what I said. All sweetness had vanished from the queen’s face. She had so many faces, this queen; she was changeable as weather. Now neither firelight nor candlelight brought warmth to her chill marble.
She said, “The grandfather? And how could you know that, Roger? He died long before you were born.”
“The child told me! When she was an old lady! It was a family story!”
“And is Soulvine Moor, too, a family story?”
I could only gaze at her in despair.
“I think, Roger, that it was not Lord William Digby whose name you called out, but that of Lord Bruce. And—”
“No, no, it was not! ”
“You dare to interrupt me? And I think that calling out ‘Soulvine Moor’ and ‘
Frances Ormund
’ was not by happenchance, either. Nor was calling out ‘my lady Frahyll.’”
I remembered Lady Frahyll. Another talkative old woman, another country faire with Hartah’s booth. But that town had boasted a manor house, and the lord’s mother had recently died. A harmless, babbling old dame, too old and too dead to preserve the distinctions of rank. She had told me happily about the people of the countryside, and I had saved myself a beating from Hartah.
“Frahyll is not a common name,” the queen said. “It bears the tortured syllables of southern names, names from the Unclaimed Lands or even from Soulvine Moor. Names like ‘Hygryll.’ Like ‘Hartah.’ You call out ‘Hartah’ often, Roger. Is he, too, dead?”
I was mute with terror.
“Roger, can you cross over to the country of the Dead?”
Lord Robert said impatiently, “That is impossible. I have told you and told you, Caro—crossing over is a superstition. A belief among the ignorant country folk, who still believe that spitting at frogs at midnight causes thunderstorms.”
The queen ignored him. Her gaze, black flecked with submerged silver, never left mine. Terror held me mute. She could torture me, burn me for a witch. . . .
“Think carefully, Roger, before you answer me. I will have the truth, and there are ways of obtaining it. They are not pleasant ways. I don’t want to have to use them on you but—”
“For sweet sake, Caro, he’s just a boy!”
“—but I will if necessary. I am not a cruel woman, Roger. I am a woman who wants to rule my country well. Who faces obstacles to my rule, obstacles you cannot begin to imagine. Who will do whatever is necessary to rule well, for the greater good and for the sake of my daughter, who must rule after me. Do you understand me?”
“Y-yes.”
“Then I will ask you one more time. Answer truthfully, and answer with full awareness of the consequences. You are not stupid. I can see that you are not stupid. Roger, can you cross over to the country of the Dead?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Show me.”
“Caro—” Lord Robert began.
“Show me now. Here.”
I said wildly, “I must have . . .” I couldn’t say it, but I had to say it. “I must have pain. I can do it myself.”
“Then do so.”
I laid my little bundle on the polished table and unwrapped it. Lord Robert, now looking elaborately bored, smiled condescendingly at the plain nightshirt made from a bedsheet. I took my shaving knife and plunged it into my thigh. Pain burned along my nerves. Even as I made the necessary effort of will, I heard the queen cry out as my body toppled, and dimly I felt Lord Robert, cat-fast, catch me as I fell.
Darkness
—
Cold
—
Dirt in my mouth
—
Worms in my eyes
—
Earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs
—
For the first time in half a year, I crossed over.
 
The palace was gone. Only the river remained, wide and calm as in the land of the living, but the ring of jagged western mountains had vanished; they must be farther away here. Everything had stretched out. The island was so huge I could not see across it, and trees dotted the vast plain on the opposite bank, where there had been farms and fields. Trees and groves and ponds and the Dead.
There were many more of them than there had been in the countryside, but the huge plain didn’t seem crowded. Perhaps—and it wasn’t the first time I’d had this idea—the very earth expanded to accept however many died. More of the Dead were well-dressed than in the villages where Hartah had set up his booth. Silk gowns, burnished armor, old-fashioned farthingales, brocade cloaks and doublets, all alongside strange white robes or crudely stitched clothing of leather and fur. People had lived by this river for a very long time.
No matter what they wore, these Dead behaved like all the others: sitting in circles, gazing at the grass or sky, doing nothing. I tripped over a soldier in peculiar copper-colored armor and went sprawling. He said nothing, just went on staring at the featureless gray clouds. Scrambling to my feet, I saw blood on my hand where I had just cut it on a stone, blood on my leggings from the knife I had thrust into my thigh. I was the only one here who could bleed. And yet I felt no pain. That would not recur until I went back.
Frantically I raced among the silent groups. I needed an old person, preferably a woman, or a newly arrived Dead—someone who would talk to me.
“I will have the truth, and there are ways of obtaining it. They are not pleasant ways. . . .”
A man suddenly materialized a few yards away. One moment he was not there, and the next moment he was. He wore a long white nightshirt of rich cream-colored linen and a woolen nightcap, and on his shriveled finger was a ring set with three huge rubies in intricately wrought gold. He gazed at me wildly. “Where am I?”
I thought quickly. “You are safe, sir.”
“I died! I am dead!”
“Yes, sir. And I am your guide in this place, sent to greet you.”
“I am dead!”
“Yes. And I am your guide. You must come with me.”
I think it was the strange yellow dye on my face that convinced him. He stared at me, shuddered, and followed.
I led him to a little grove where no one else sat. He looked at his arm, withered but without pain, and said wonderingly, “My illness is gone.”
“It’s over, sir. And you must answer questions for me.”
He nodded, still too bemused to question my completely false authority. That state of mind would not last. I must move quickly.
“What is your name, sir?”
“Lord Joseph Deptford.”
“And your position at court?”
“A gentleman of the bedchamber to Prince Percy. Although since I became sick . . . Who are
you
, boy?”
“I told you, sir, I’m your guide in this place. For the sake of being judged fairly, you must answer just a few more questions. What was your last illness?”
“Weakness in the heart. I—”
“Is the young prince difficult to attend?”
“He—now, see here, boy—”
“I cannot take you to my master without this information! Is the prince difficult to attend?”
“He is impossible,” the old man said flatly. “He pulls my beard and whispers treason about his grandmother, anything his mother wishes to hear, and—enough! I will answer to your master in person! This impertinence is over!”
I left him among the trees, free now to discover that for him, all impertinence was over. In a moment he would lapse into the tranquility of the Dead. My little knife had been left behind in the queen’s chamber, but there were sharp stones enough by the river. I whacked one against a burn on my hand from a boiling laundry pot, and I crossed back over.
I lay on the hearth rug before the fire, the queen sitting on the rug beside me in a puddle of green silk skirts, in all her glorious unbound hair. Lord Robert still lounged at the table, drinking wine.
“That was quick,” the queen said. “Did it happen?”
“Yes, Your Grace.” I sat up, a little dizzy, and a part of my mind thought how weird it was to be sitting on the floor with a queen, like two children playing at dice.
Playing at death.
“Well, tell me,” she said. Then, more ominously, “Convince me.”
“I spoke to a Lord Joseph Deptford. He died just now, minutes ago, in a white nightshirt and blue woolen cap. He was a gentleman of the bedchamber to Prince Percy, and he told me”—Was this wise to say? Nothing was wise to say—“that the young prince is difficult to attend. He pulls the old lord’s beard.”

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