Violet swallowed.Think of a basic lie. “The laundress sent me.”
“The laundress?” the guard repeated.
Violet faltered. Did the castle not have one?
“What is the name?” the guard asked, his voice rising with each word.
Violet shifted the bundle higher against her chest. “Hers or mine?”
His face hardened. The answer had been too quick. Too bold. Foolish, perhaps, but panic made her tongue sharp.
“Yers,” he grunted.
“Maisie.” Violet offered the first name that came to her. “And if ye have a quarrel with the linens, ye may take it up with the woman who gave them to me.”
The guard looked over her plain cap, her borrowed apron, the bundle in her arms. His gaze lingered on her face long enough to tell her that he was trying to place her and failing.
“I’ve nae seen ye before.”
“I’ve nae seen ye either,” she shot back. “Yet here we both are.”
His mouth tightened. “Ye’re a quick one, are ye nae?”
“I must really take the linens back,” she responded, turning around.
“Stop!” the guard called.
Before she could respond, a maid rounded the corner, balancing a tray of cups and oatcakes. Violet let one cloth slide from the top of her bundle and drop at her feet.
“Blast it,” she muttered, bending quickly. The maid shifted to avoid her.
For one blessed second, the tray, the maid, and the fallen cloth blocked the guard’s path.
“I saidstop!” the guard barked.
The baby cried again somewhere above, the sound thin and angry.
Violet snatched up the cloth. “If I stop any longer, the woman waiting for these will skin me.”
“Oy!”
“Forgive me.”
She turned down the nearest stairs before he could reach her.
The stairs climbed more steeply than she had expected. Her breath shortened, but she did not slow down. At the landing, she turned left, then halted when the baby’s cry came from behind her right shoulder.
Wrong way.
She spun back, nearly colliding with a little boy carrying a coal scuttle.
“Watch it,” he complained.
“Mind yer feet,” she snapped, then hurried past before he could remember her face.
The cry came again, clearer now.
She followed it into an upper passage where the stone was warmer and the walls a bit cleaner. The servants around this part of the castle moved with more purpose. That meant the nursery was near.
