I Was the Perfect Queen, But He Forgot My Name novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Laundry Stairs

She slips out through the servants she has known for eight years, frees the Keeper with her seal, and finds a pencil line in the Book: Unwritten at Midsummer.

The physician left a brown bottle of tonic on my nightstand and told the guards to see that I took it.

I poured it into the pot of the dying fern in the window.

Then I sat on the edge of my bed and made myself think.

There were two guards in the corridor and two more under my balcony.

There was no way out through the front.

But I had lived in this palace for eight years, and a queen who fixes everything learns where everything is.

I went into my dressing room and knelt in front of the linen cupboard.

The back panel slid sideways with two fingers.

Behind it was a narrow stair the servants used to carry sheets up to the royal bedrooms.

I had found it in my first month.

I had never told anyone, because I had never needed to leave.

I took the stairs in my stocking feet with a candle stub in my fist.

Halfway down, on a landing, Catrin sat with her chin on her knees and a bundle on her lap.

"I'd have knocked," she said, "but I'm told I'm not allowed in."

She held up the bundle.

It was a grey maid's dress and a cap, and one worn pair of boots.

"You knew," I said.

"I didn't know. I hoped.

Four years ago you left the cupboard open and I saw you in it," she said, with a crooked smile.

"I never said. A queen ought to have a secret door."

I changed on the landing with her holding the candle.

The laundry was warm and wet and full of white sheets hanging from the beams.

The laundry master was folding a tablecloth at one in the morning, a huge man with no talent for conversation.

He looked at me in a maid's dress, and I looked at him.

I knew that his wife had taken ill in the autumn and that I had sent a basket of broth and a physician.

He had never been able to say my name either.

He put down the cloth, pointed at the kitchen stair and laid one finger on his lips.

"Thank you," I whispered.

He bowed his head.

The kitchen was dark except for the night bakers at their ovens.

None of them looked up.

They had fed me for eight years, and every one of them knew the sound of my step.

The guest wing was on the far side of the east court.

Two guards stood at Daveth's door with their halberds crossed.

Catrin pulled me behind a pillar.

"They'll never let you in," she breathed. "You're meant to be locked up."

"They'll let me in because I'm the Queen."

I took the heavy signet ring from the chain around my neck.

It was a plain gold seal with a crown cut into it.

It had never carried my name, only my title, and I had always hated it.

I walked out from behind the pillar in my maid's dress and held it up in the torchlight.

"By the Queen's seal," I said, "the Keeper is released into my custody."

The senior guard stared at the ring and then at my face.

"Majesty?"

"Open it."

He had been taught all his life to obey that ring.

He opened the door.

Daveth was sitting on his bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and a small leather satchel in his lap.

"You took your time," he said.

Then he looked at the maid's dress and began to laugh.

It was a low, surprised laugh, and I liked it far more than I should have at that hour.

We went out into the cold garden and crouched behind the rose hedge.

"Show me," I said. "Whatever you've got in that bag. I want all of it."

He drew out a book bound in plain grey cloth, narrow as a hymnal.

"This is the Rounds copy," he said.

"The Abbey's Book is too big to carry. This holds only the twelve queens of Caldermere."

"Twelve."

"You are the twelfth."

He turned the pages by the light of Catrin's candle.

Each queen had her own page, with a name in black ink at the top and, underneath it, years of small handwriting.

Some of the pages were crowded with notes.

Three of them had a single word written across the top in red.

Unwritten.

"What does it mean?"

"It means they fought it," Daveth said.

"They went to the Abbey and demanded their names back."

"The Abbey struck them out and shut them in the tower. No one has said their names aloud in thirty years."

I felt Catrin's hand find mine in the dark.

He turned to the last page.

My name at the top, in his careful hand.

Beneath it ran eight years of dates, each with a note in a Keeper's hand: Alive. Alive. Alive.

And along the margin, in pencil, in a hand I knew at once, was a line I had never seen.

Unwritten at Midsummer.

I read the date beside it twice.

It was the day I was crowned.

"Who wrote this?" I whispered.

"The Dowager," Daveth said quietly. "On the day of your wedding. Midsummer is twelve days away."

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