Dad Hears My Thoughts novel · Chapter 27 of 32

Chapter 27: Pillow

Nobody moved to help her.

That was the first thing I noticed. A whole court, and nobody bent.

"Physician!" Honoria cried. "Where is my physician?"

He came through the masks with his spectacles fogged and his bag in his hand.

Honoria grabbed his sleeve and pulled him down beside her.

"Tell them," she hissed. "Tell them what you're paid to tell them."

He knelt. He set his bag on the floor.

Then he took a fat purse out of his coat and set it on the boards beside her, among Ralph's scattered crowns.

"Two hundred, my lady," he said, loud enough for the back of the gallery. "You'll want it back."

Honoria let go of his sleeve.

"Majesty," the physician said. "With your leave, I'll examine her here. Where everyone can see."

"No," Honoria said.

"You did ask for me, my lady."

He laid one hand flat on the round gold silk of her belly and pressed.

It gave.

He took a small knife out of his bag, the kind for lancing, and slit three stitches at her waist.

A cushion slid out from under her gown and flopped onto the coins.

The seam split.

Feathers went up into the candlelight, white and gray, and came drifting down over Honoria's piled hair.

In the Duke's arms, Tuppence shrieked with joy and clapped.

Pillow! she told us. Pillow, pillow! Told you!

Somebody near the front laughed out loud.

A lady in a peacock mask. Then a man behind her. Then a dozen of them.

Honoria knelt in her own feathers, clutching at them.

"Ralph made me," she said. "Majesty, it was his idea, all of it, he said the old man would die before..."

"Be quiet," Ralph said.

It was the only time I ever heard him sound afraid.

The Duke's men came through the court carrying the little iron box between them.

The old man set Tuppence in my arms and opened the hasp himself.

He took out the matron's black ledger and gave it, not to the King, but to the Queen.

I reached over and turned the pages for her to the one I'd shut my finger on in the snow.

The Queen read two letters aloud and stopped.

"H.D."

Every head in the gallery turned to the woman sitting in the feathers.

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