Chapter 8: What Cecily Carried

The great wagons began rolling out of Whitehall on a Tuesday in June, packed high with hangings and plate and the accumulated necessities of a royal household. Margot watched from her chamber window as the first team of oxen strained against their harnesses, the drivers cracking their whips with the confidence of men who had made this journey before. Hampton Court lay twenty miles west, and the queen would not arrive until the following week, but the advance preparations required the movement of what felt like half of London's material wealth.

"Your trunk is ready," Cecily said from the doorway. She was dressed for traveling in dull green wool, practical and unmarked, which seemed to Margot like a waste—Cecily had a gift for making plain fabrics speak. But they all traveled plainly. The road was dust and uncertainty, and showing wealth on the Great Way was an invitation to misfortune.

Margot turned from the window. "Mine too. Did they assign you a place in the first wagon or the second?"

"Second. Apparently, there is a hierarchy of ladies' trunks." Cecily made a face. "Mine is to travel with the bedding. Yours?"

"The third wagon. With the wardrobe for the privy chamber." Margot had learned not to complain about these assignments. They were made by stewards who dealt in logistics, not personal convenience, and there was no use pressing against them. Besides, the third wagon meant she would arrive well rested, which seemed preferable to arriving first with dust in her teeth.

The move happened over four days, and by the time Margot stepped out of her carriage into the graveled forecourt of Hampton Court's Base Court, she was reminded that the palace itself was not merely a different place, but a different kind of place. Whitehall was a city palace, layered and corridored, a maze where one could walk for twenty minutes from the privy chamber to the gallery without ever seeing the sky. Hampton Court was cardinal directions and open ground.

The Base Court opened to the sky. The Clock Court beyond it was massive and exposed. And beyond that, toward the river, was space.

That first week, Margot spent her mornings relearning the palace's bones. She had been to Hampton Court twice before, years ago, but never with the sharp need to know every passage and doorway that her current life required. She walked the galleries, noting which led where. She observed the servants' corridors—narrower, less finished, more useful to her purposes. The water gate watch changed at intervals she timed. She learned that the privy garden, though walled, could be accessed from two different passages depending on which entrance you preferred. Knowledge was armor, and Margot had learned to gather it like other women gathered jewels.

"You're thinking very hard about everything," Cecily observed on Thursday, when they had walked the length of the river walk and back. The Thames moved past them with a kind of green-silver indifference, and the air smelled of water and stone and the peculiar greenness of summer. "Your face gets a particular look. Like you're solving a puzzle no one else has been asked to solve."

Margot had learned to answer these things with partial truth. "I like to know a place. How it works. How to move through it efficiently."

"That's very sensible," Cecily said, and there was no irony in her voice, only genuine approval. Cecily thought sensibility was something to be cultivated, like a flower garden. She did not seem to suspect that Margot's sensibility and her actual purposes were not always the same thing. "I just wander until I'm lost, and then I ask someone where I am. It's less efficient, but it's far more interesting. You meet people that way."

They turned back toward the palace. The lower garden lay quiet in the afternoon heat, and Margot was already thinking of the evening's tasks—there were letters to write, supplies to check, and a report due to Master Wren by sunset. She had nothing to report yet. The week had been unremarkable: no suspicious visitors, no unusual correspondence, no one acting in any manner that suggested divided loyalties. Cecily had spent her days as Cecily always did, warm and present and interested in matters of fashion and gossip and who was likely to marry whom.

It was, in fact, precisely this thought—that Cecily was so thoroughly herself that there was no room for artifice—that made what Margot saw three hours later so difficult to interpret.