Increasing numbers of peasants pressed in around the Queen until the King, or his deputies, sent a strong detachment of the Royal Guard to watch over her. The Guardsmen, however, were careful not to offend the people, and did nothing to move the crowd itself, which grew denser.

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.