Chapter 4: The West Wing

I waited until Conroy's breathing went slow and heavy.

Then I slid out from under his arm, pulled on my riding dress, and left my boots in my hand.

The two guards at the door had been changed for the night.

They were not looking at the door, because they were looking at the bolt on the outside of it.

It was drawn back.

Someone had unlocked us from the other side.

I slipped past them down the stair with my heart going like a drum, and nobody called out.

At the turn of the landing, a woman in a grey apron stepped out of the dark.

She was old and bent, with hands rubbed raw by lye, and I had seen her face somewhere in my childhood.

"The linen woman," I whispered.

"Hush, Highness."

She took my sleeve and pulled me through a low door I had never noticed, behind a stack of laundry baskets.

The passage inside was narrow and smelled of lye and mice.

"Who sent you?" I said.

"Nobody sent me. Your mother brought me my first pair of boots."

That was all she said until we reached the end.

She put a key in the lock of a plain wooden door and pushed it open on candlelight.

The sealed west wing had been the Queen's favorite part of the palace when I was small.

She used to dance down its long gallery in her stockings.

Now the windows were shuttered, and the air smelled of sweet syrup and sickrooms.

My mother sat in a chair by a cold hearth with a blanket over her knees.

She was so thin that her wedding ring turned on her finger.

"Mother," I said.

"Is it you?" she said. "Or is it the medicine again?"

I crossed the room and dropped to my knees and took her hands.

They were ice cold and trembling.

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