The Lady Who Waited at Lochleven

"They tell it as though it was only the boy and the queen," Jeannie said, years later, to a granddaughter who'd asked about the famous escape from Lochleven for a school lesson. "The boy who stole the keys, the queen who found the courage to use them. That's the whole story, as far as anyone bothers to write it down."

"Wasn't that most of what happened?"

"It was the last night of what happened. It was not most of what happened." Jeannie settled into her chair properly, the way she always did when a story required the full telling rather than the short version. "I was there for months before that night, and I can tell you plainly: a queen who has spent months in real despair does not find the composure for a daring escape on a single evening's notice. Someone has to keep the despair from winning, every single day, long before there's any key to steal at all."

"What did you actually do?"

"Nothing anyone writes ballads about." Jeannie almost smiled at that. "I managed what small comforts our circumstances allowed her. I carried correspondence when carrying it meant real risk, under watch that made even an ordinary letter a matter requiring true care. Mostly, I simply sat with her, month after month, so the loneliness of that captivity didn't finish the work despair was already trying to do on its own."

"Did you ever resent the boy getting all the credit?"

"Not the boy. He earned every bit of what he's remembered for — a boy risking real danger to steal those keys deserves exactly the credit history gave him." Jeannie shook her head slowly. "What I've minded, all these years, is simpler than resenting any one person. It's that the histories only ever remember the single dramatic night, and never the many ordinary months that made a queen capable of surviving that night at all."

"Do you think she knew? The queen, I mean. Did she understand what you were doing for her, all those months?"

"I believe she did, in her own way. She never made a ballad of it either, mind you — queens rarely trouble themselves to credit the women who kept them standing. But she was kind to me, in the small private ways that told me she knew exactly what those months had cost me to manage." Jeannie reached for her granddaughter's hand. "Write your lesson about the boy and the keys if that's what's asked of you. But when you're older, remember there was a great deal more holding that escape together than a single stolen ring of keys and one queen's justly celebrated courage. There were women like me too, whose names never made it into anyone's lesson at all."