It became so dense that Blanche had a hard time penetrating it. She couldn’t have said when she went from being a laundry maid of some distinction to the Queen’s last handmaid, but when she understood what Edmund and the apprentices planned, she had slipped out of Master Pye’s house in her plainest clothes-her hair covered in an old wimple. She’d watched older women often enough to pass for one, although it hurt her pride. She bent her back a little, and waddled a little, and bound her breasts so that they were flat against her, wrapped her blaze of bright blond hair in a piece of clean old linen, and was transformed from the magnet of every male’s attention into an old thing of no interest to anyone. It troubled her how quickly she could be ignored, as an old woman.
She spent Easter night in a shed next to the palace. She made it into the laundry without being questioned because most of the Guard was away fighting the Occitans, and it was from Goodwife Ross that she learned that some of the King’s Guard seemed… different.
Twice now she’d visited the Queen-she’d become a poor creature who seemed broken into madness, except when you looked into her eyes.
So-at any rate-on Tuesday morning, Blanche was pushing through the press of the commons with a basket on her head. The press was so thick she might never have gotten to the ring around the Queen except that one of the King’s Guard saw her and smiled.
“Let her through!” he called in a Hillman accent. “Here’s a woman come to serve the Queen. Let her through, with God’s good grace.”
And the commons moved aside like the parting of the Dark Sea, and Blanche slipped past them to the barrier around the Queen’s seat-ducked under it and came to the Queen.
She bobbed a deep curtsey. “Your grace?” she asked.
The Queen turned her head. Her eyes focused.
She smiled. “Blanche,” she said.
Blanche hadn’t been sure until then that the Queen even knew her name. She curtsied again. “Your grace, I’ve brought you soap, water and some food.”
“She hasn’t eaten in four days,” one of the King’s men muttered.
The Queen put a hand to her throat. “I might try… to eat,” she said huskily. “The sun-has been so kind-”
The guardsmen muttered among themselves. She looked so… crazy, Blanche thought.
She looked even worse as she began to eat, seizing a loaf of bread and ripping pieces from it. Blanche had eight thick slices of bacon from a guardsman’s fire and a slice of very questionable pie that had cost her a copper and a kiss. The kiss had been greasy, too.
The Queen tore through it with wolfish intensity, glancing up from time to time-like a dog, Blanche thought. Or something that feared a predator.
Blanche had a soldier’s canteen over her shoulder-a heavy object of fired clay. She’d stolen it, in the first outright theft of her life. She handed it to the Queen, who drank off the entire contents without seeming to breathe.
She looked at Blanche and her eyes narrowed a fraction. “You should run,” she said. “You’ve been seen.”
Blanche curtsied. “Your grace, I am here for you. You should know that-”
“Run,” said the Queen. “I will not have your blood on my head. Now.”
Blanche ducked under the barrier, abandoning the basket and the canteen. The Queen’s intensity communicated itself to her.
But the press was still thick-and there was shouting. Men were moving, and suddenly she had a lane, and like a flash-
She was caught. There were four of them, big men in the archbishop’s purple livery. They knocked her down.
One said something, and the other three laughed, showing a mouth full of blackened stumps of teeth.
She expected help from the crowd, and when the men in purple reached for her, she screamed, but the peasants were cowed by the armour and the spears. Black Teeth slammed the top of his head into her forehead, so that the world spun. He laughed and pushed her again.
Her wimple came off, her glorious yellow-gold hair blowing in the wind.
There were fifty of them, the purple spearmen. They’d killed a man, and the crowd fled them, leaving them alone like an island of stone in a rising tide. A woman was screaming, and another man was trying to hold his guts in with his hands.
Her head hurt so much she wanted to throw up.
“It’s the Queen’s little bitch!” laughed a Gallish voice. “I’d know that hair anytime.”
“It’s been on every pillow in the Guard’s hall, or so I hear,” said another.
Hard hands closed on her arms.
She screamed again.
“Secure the person of the so-called Queen,” ordered a new voice. “Who is this tall slut?”
“One of the Queen’s women-”
“So-called Queen’s women. A lady?” asked the voice. She got her eyes open. It was de Rohan-she knew him from the corridors. “I think not.” He nodded. “Bring her.”
“Why?” asked the archbishop. Blanche knew him, too. She’d never heard him speak, but there he was, young and fat as a capon, with short-cropped hair almost exactly the colour of her own. “What do we want with the slut?”
De Rohan sighed as if he was surrounded by fools. “Your excellency, in an hour or so, when we lead the so-called Queen to the stake…” He paused. “We may experience some difficulties with her, and with the canaille. I would love to have a lever with which to move the so-called Queen.”
Blanche was pushed along. Hands fondled her-she was bruised by a vise-like grip on one of her breasts as a dozen soldiers pushed her to where de Rohan stood. They laughed.
He laughed.
He was standing at the gate to the barriers around the Queen. Two rather sorry-looking guardsmen stood there-not, she would have thought, the men who had been there a few minutes before. Both were slack-jawed and slack-eyed-possibly drunk.
The Queen, on the other hand, looked considerably better.
“Madame,” de Rohan said. “Are you prepared to meet your fate?”
“Is it not rather the fate that you have made me, my lord?” she asked. “Nor is it yet noon-the hour appointed for my Champion.”
“Any time from the first hour after matins until the middle of the day, madame.” His arm suddenly shot out and he took Blanche by her ear-the pain was incredible. She screeched.
“Do you know this pretty slip, Desiderata?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the Queen, sadly.
“Good. If you’d like her to live out the day-and not be the bedfellow of my servants for the next few weeks, until her spirit is a little less brazen-then you will obey me.” He shrugged.
The Queen’s eyes were gentle pools of brown looking at Blanche’s. “This is low even for you, de Rohan,” she said. “And I suspect that no matter what I promise you will inflict your child-like will on poor Blanche, who is guilty of no crime but loyalty to me.” To Blanche she said, “You should have run, child.”
Blanche found that she was crying. She wanted to be strong-as strong as she’d been for a week-but she felt helpless and abandoned and she knew what was to come. She knew it, as every woman feared it, and she couldn’t keep her tears and despair at bay.
“How I hate you,” she managed to say to de Rohan.
He didn’t even turn his head. “I expect-” His warm hand found her jaw and his thumb was suddenly under her chin, probing deeply into the side of her neck until the pain made her rise on her toes and scream. “I expect you’ll hate me more later,” he said, dropping her. “To much the same effect, really.” He looked at Desiderata. “Women are too weak for any purpose but to make babies,” he added.
“And even when we do that, you kill us,” the Queen said. “You might want to look, my lord. Your doom is nigh.”
For the last half hour, the fog had been reduced to a blinding glare of haze. Now, with nonnes not far away, there was a sudden flash of metal and scarlet in the middle distance.