“Do not give yourself airs,” Lady Genevieve said. “You are a wife taken in adultery, bearing another man’s bastard, and the sign of your shame is on you every instant.” She remained seated. “My lord de Vrailly has sent me to attend you, and I shall. But do not pretend with me.”
Desiderata nodded slowly. “So you refuse my command,” she said.
Lady Genevieve was the widow of a southern lord. She knew how to make herself obeyed. “I will accept any reasonable command,” she said sweetly. “Let me read to you from the Life of Saint Catherine.”
“What if I do not wish you to read?” the Queen asked, already weary.
“You are unwomanly in your striving,” Lady Genevieve said. “A woman’s role is passive acceptance, as I told my husband on many occasions. Indeed, I was a byword for passive acceptance.” She snapped her fingers. “If your woman is to remain, she may as well be useful. I’ll have a cup of sweet cider, Diota.” She turned back to the queen. “Where was I? Ah yes-passive acceptance.”
Diota slipped out and found Blanche, one of the queen’s laundry maids, in the outer solar.
The nurse took a cup and poured cider from a jug, and then, catching Blanche’s eye, she reached under her skirts and wiped her hand there and then used it to stir the cider.
Blanche stifled a cackle and handed the nurse a slip of parchment that had been pinned to a shift.
Another of the queen’s “new ladies” came in the outer door without knocking, but by the time she came in, Blanche was folding shifts and putting them into the press.
Lady Agnes Wilkes, twenty-nine, unmarried, and with a face capable of curdling milk, stalked in and looked sullenly at the serving girl. “What are you about, slut?” she asked.
Blanche kept working. “Folding, milady.”
Lady Agnes frowned. “Do this sort of thing at night,” she said. “I don’t need to see your kind in these rooms by day, and neither does the queen. What if the King were to come?”
Diota slipped away with her cup of cider and gave it with a sketchy curtsy to Lady Genevieve, who didn’t acknowledge her at all. She took the cup and drank from it. “Tart and sweet,” she said.
Diota smiled happily. “A pleasure to serve you, my lady,” she said.
“Well,” Lady Genevieve said. “A change for the better, then. I see Lady Agnes has come in and I’ll exchange a word with her.” The older woman rose and set her cup down with a click.
She went out, and they could hear her in the outer chamber.
Diota handed the Queen the slip of parchment. The Queen seized it, read it-and then put it in her mouth and began to chew.
Diota collected cups and a shift and began to tidy the queen’s private chamber.
The two ladies came in. “Your Lady Rebecca has deserted you,” Lady Agnes said with real satisfaction. “Lord de Rohan sent for her this morning, but she’s fled. Many things are missing-she was a thief as well as a heretic. I am here to make an inventory.”
“Lady Rebecca had no need to steal,” the Queen said. “She was the lord chancellor for half a year.”
Lady Agnes made a face, and Lady Genevieve made a rude noise. “Perhaps the King pretended that she was the chancellor,” she said. “No woman could ever hold such an office.” She spoke as if she relished the low estate of women. “What foolishness. Women have no aptitude for such things. When I was with my husband, I cultivated a becoming passivity. I never put myself forward.”
“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.