Lady Jane was herself not so bad. She was well-bred enough to be careful; she was cautious about the king’s reputation, and she was polite to the servants. But she had her own waiting woman, Sarah, and her laundry never came to the laundry. Sarah ate in her mistress’s rooms and never came into the great hall below stairs where the servants dined and many slept. The lady’s father was already the leader of the pro-Galle faction of Albans.

Blanche began to repair the queen’s shifts. She had patiently run up half a dozen new ones that suited the queen’s changed shape, working at home with her mother, and now even the new shifts were having their carefully felled side-seams pulled.

Blanche pulled a small seam-ripper—a razor sharp knife with a rebated point, just a few inches long, and another product of Master Pye’s superb eye and hand—from her basket and began to open a side seam.

“Blanche!” called Goodwife Ross. Blanche rose to her feet, dropped her sewing into the basket beside the chair and rushed to the Laundress, whose commands were not to be ignored. She still had her little knife in her hand—it was precious, five days’ wages’ worth of steel and it would slice through her pockets in a heartbeat. She tucked it behind her ear.

“Blanche, I need you to run a message to Master Cord’s down Cheapside. And ask where our spring linen order is. I’m that vexed and I misremembered this morning.”

Indeed, the whole establishment ate fine white linen the way a newborn suckled milk, and Master Cord’s later delivery was playing merry hell with the laundry.

Blanche bobbed a curtsey.

“I’ll have Ellen finish the shifts,” Goodwife Ross said.

Blanche shook her head—one tiny sideways motion to indicate disagreement was allowed in senior staff. “I’ll take it home, if’n it please you, ma’am.”

Goodwife Ross nodded her strong approval. “Good. Ellen has her hands full. Fetch your basket and skip along.”

Blanche stepped back into the seamstress’s room and re-packed her basket.

Ellen sighed. “A nice spring day? I’d like to be sent with the errands.”

Blanche frowned. “Goodwife worries about ye, Ellen.”

“I can handle myself,” the young woman said. But where Blanche was tall and broad shouldered, Ellen was doll-like and slim as a reed. The strength of Blanche’s arms and hands was legendary among the pages and squires to whom she’d taught a few manners—even before the Galles came.

“None of us can handle the Galles,” Blanche said. “Are you careful when you walk out? Never the same route twice?”

“Yes, Mother,” Ellen said, and laughed. “May I please have another cup of milk?” Both girls laughed. “But Blanche, ain’t you a Galle?”

Blanche nodded. “My pater was, sure enough.” Blanche de Roeun, a town in Galle, once. Now she was Blanche Gold.