Miles Cameron - The Dread Wyrm

“What happened after?” the queen asked sweetly.

“After what, my dear?” Lady Genevieve asked.

“After your husband died?” the Queen asked.

Diota almost choked, but Lady Genevieve frowned. “I have no idea what you are about, madame.”

The queen rose.

“You need to dress,” Lady Agnes said. The Queen was wearing only a shift, and her belly was magnificent-and very visible.

“I am more comfortable like this,” the queen said.

“You are lewd. Indecent.” Lady Agnes began to seize clothes from a cabinet.

“In my private solar?” the queen asked. “I think not.”

“I do not wish to gaze on your body,” Lady Agnes said. At odds with her words, her eyes were on the queen’s belly.

“You are very wanton,” Lady Genevieve said. “We will dress you. It is time you had the becoming clothes of a matron, and shed all this vanity.”

The queen smiled. Her smile was lazy and slow, and took its time, and in the end, she shocked Diota.

“You know, my ladies,” she said. “I think perhaps you have the right of it, and my baby has addled my wits. I will, indeed, cultivate a becoming passivity.”

Blanche took her laundry basket and went into the corridors below the Queen’s Tower, moving briskly. No one particularly wanted to see servants in the formal areas of the palace, not even trusted servants like Blanche, who wore the crisp red and blue livery of the winter. It had only changed ten days ago, and her sideless surcoat and matching kirtle marked her as “belonging.”

Of course, few were quite so rude about their wishes as the queen’s new “ladies.”

Ladies , Blanche thought to herself, and crossed the corridor that led to the King’s Tower after a careful glance in either direction. The Galles who now inundated the court like crabs at high tide were often present here, gathered in little knots with their cousins and brothers, looking for offices and sinecures.

They were the most determined rascals she’d ever known. None of them had tried outright rape-not yet-but she’d been offered every insult short, and various grasping hands and sweaty palms and scratchy moustaches had tried her virtue over the last few months.

Blanche’s contempt-the contempt of an attractive young woman-was absolute. She loathed them for their obvious contempt for women, she thought them weak for their ceaseless striving, and she cursed them with the worst derision she could offer because they appeared desperate. None of them had any idea how to approach a woman-all the servants said so. They were as aggressive-and mindless-as hungry wolves.

Blanche passed the king’s corridor with a feeling of relief, her mission nearly complete, and descended two winding stone staircases-servants’ stairs, and thus almost unfailingly safe. She passed one of the upper palace male servants-Robin le Grant, wine steward-who gave her a bow and a smile.

The servants were developing a whole language for the situation. That smile meant the stairs were clear.

Blanche slowed her pace and breathed a little easier. Her contempt for the Galles was not unmixed with fear.

She passed the kitchen corridor with a nod to three kitchen girls she knew.

“Laundress was askin’ for you,” said the nearest. She flashed a smile.

Blanche suspected that all three of them were malingering-loitering in corridors was not encouraged by the Butler, who was both a gentleman and a senior servant and ruled with a rod of iron. But she returned their smiles. “Stairs is clear,” she said as she swept past and turned again, walking down the familiar short flight of steps. To the right was the river gate, or at least the portions of the old fortifications and the corridors that led there. To the left lay the laundry, a kingdom-or rather, a queendom-entirely populated by women. There were laundresses who actually washed, and laundresses who only ironed, and laundresses who were really fine seamstresses for everything from repair to marking-every garment in the palace was marked with the owner’s initials in fine, neat cross-stitching. All in all, from twelve-year-old Celia who washed the dirtiest linens to ninety-year-old Mother Henk who could barely work but still had the finest embroidery stitches in Harndon, the laundry employed forty-five women all day, every day. The Laundress-Goodwife Ross-wore upper palace livery but never left her domain.

She was standing by the door to her alcove when Blanche came by. Blanche curtsied-the laundry was formal enough.

“I worry for you, lass,” Dame Ross said. She looked in the basket.

Blanche shook her head. “No mending for the queen.”

“Any trouble?” the Laundress asked.

“No Galles in the corridors. The queen’s new ladies were a treat though.” No palace servant ever spoke slightingly of any member of the upper classes-not directly. It was all tone and eye contact, nothing that could be reported or punished.

Goodwife Ross narrowed her eyes. “Anything I should know?”

“Lady Agnes suggested that I had no business in the queen’s chambers. And me in my livery!” Blanche spat her words with more vehemence than she’d intended.

The Laundress pursed her lips. “I see,” she said.

Blanche dropped a short curtsey-the bob of the working woman. “I’ll be about it then, ma’am,” she said.

Goodwife Ross dismissed her with a wave. The goodwife was aware-in the vaguest way-that Blanche “did something” for the queen. That was sufficient for her.

Blanche took her basket into the steamy main laundry. The moment she upended it on the sorting table, her life as the queen’s messenger vanished to be replaced by her usual life.

“Blanche! There you are! Be a sweet and fetch us a cup of water?” asked rheumy old Mother Henk.

“Blanche, you promised to teach me stem stitch!” begged young Alice.

“Blanche, there’s a mort of fine sewing waiting in your basket and I’ve all I can do keeping the King in braes,” snapped Ellen. Ellen was the other upper palace laundress who wore livery and was allowed to collect laundry in the public rooms of the palace. Like Blanche, she was young, pretty, and had worked in the palace since she’d been a young child.

By that point in her work day, Blanche was delighted to collapse onto one of the backed chairs that the fine sewers used while mending. From the pockets under her kirtle, Blanche fetched out her prize possession-her sewing kit, with a pair of steel scissors made by Master Pye himself, a pair of silver thimbles, a dozen fine horn thread winders full of threads-white linen, white silk, black linen, black silk, and this season, red and blue for the livery.

Ellen was putting thread on her winders. Thread came from the dyers in skeins, and sewing women and tailors had to wind it onto something of their own. Blanche owned two beautiful thread winders-a tiny one of ivory that had been her mother’s and another of mother of pearl from far off Ifriquy’a. Both were at home.

“If the King wears his hose any tighter,” Ellen said and shook her head. Laid across her lap were a fanciful pair of hose, one leg alternating diagonals of red and blue, the other leg solid scarlet with a patch of superb gold embroidery. The hose were in the latest style that joined at the top, and they had torn in the crotch.

“He’s too old for these tight things,” Ellen said. A year ago, open criticism of the king’s taste in clothes would never have been uttered. Blanche felt disloyal just listening.

Ellen frowned, aware of her transgression. “I only mean…” She paused. And looked down at her scarlet thread winder. She finished it off and then loaded her blue.

Her thought was unspoken, but they didn’t need to share it. Blanche knew that Ellen’s criticism was not for the King, but for his new lover, a red-headed girl of seventeen. Lady Jane Sable. Her name was never mentioned in the servants’ halls below. She seemed to inspire in the King a sort of ferocity to pretend he was young, and his pursuit of youth-hers, his own-had led to a loss of royal dignity that all the servants felt reflected on them.