The Queen's Dwarf A Novel (10 page)

When Evans finally worked Griggory’s cloak free, he tossed it onto a stool with such unintended force, the wooden legs skittered across the floor.

“Griggory would have had your costume off you a long time ago and you’d be tucked in bed, where you belong,” Evans grumbled. “Where the devil is the man?”

I wedged my fingers under the place where my breastplate was grinding its way into my flesh. Evans must have seen me wince.

“You’ll be wanting free of that armor, friend. Probably blistered or bleeding underneath it, the way it’s wrenched to one side.”

I unfastened what I could reach, while Evans set himself to defeating the buckles I could not. The long process cost several muttered oaths, but when the giant peeled the plates from my torso, I sighed in relief. Air struck me, cold on the damp shirt. Sometime during my acrobatics, the breastplate reduced the thin silk to shreds.

Evans frowned. “Can’t have you wearing soaked rags to bed.” He tossed me a length of towel. “Strip down and dry off before you catch your death.”

I curled inward, my cheeks on fire at the idea of baring my shrunken body to this behemoth of a man. But Evans had already turned away. He went to a trunk and took out a stocking and a pair of scissors. As I rubbed myself dry, he snipped holes for my head and arms.

“This will keep you warm.” He tossed the makeshift garment toward me, keeping his eyes averted. I pulled the fabric over my head, and wondered at a man who would ruin perfectly good stockings for someone he’d just met. He flung back the blankets on a bed wide as meadows. “I’ll boost you up, then under the covers with you, lad.”

He scooped me up onto a bed so high, it seemed like a cottage loft. The moment he let go, I rolled down into the giant-size hollow Will Evans had made in the feather mattress when he slept.

Evans chuckled. “I’ll throw you a rope to help you climb out later. Just sleep while you’ve the chance. Her Majesty always throws herself into playacting after she’s had a night with Buckingham. Trying to drive all his devils away.” For the first time, I saw Will Evan’s frown and understood why children feared giants in the tales their elders told. He looked in my direction.

“Forgive me, lad. I do not mean to brood over things no one can cure. You will come to grieve Her Majesty’s troubles yourself. She is such a winning little sparrow.”

He cocked his head. “How did you come to serve the queen?”

He would find out the truth soon enough. “I am a gift to Her Majesty from the duke of Buckingham.”

Warmth drained from Evans’s face. Before I could tell him the lie Buckingham had concocted to disguise my true loyalties, the door swung open and Griggory edged into the room.

“Her Majesty said I was to attend the dwarf.” Griggory made it sound as if she’d asked him to coddle a snake. Yet since I’d mentioned Buckingham’s name, even Evans regarded me as if he wanted to scrub everything I had touched.

“Griggory will set bread and cheese in your reach in case you wake before I return. I am to take you down to meet the others at dinner.” Evans straightened the badge of livery at his shoulder.

“The others,” I echoed.

“The rest of the queen’s menagerie,” Evans said. “Griggory, see if you can find him something more appropriate to wear than my sock by then.”

The giant lumbered to the door, and I saw why his gait was uneven. His legs bowed inward, his knees knocking together. There were patches stitched where holes must have rubbed in his hose.

I pulled the covers over my head, imagining Evans striding down the stairs. Would he raise the alarm among other members of the queen’s household?
Jeffrey Hudson is Buckingham’s man. Do not trust him.
Would he even put suspicion in the mind of the queen?

I intended to pick at my predicament until I could find a way to ease it. But the rich food of the banquet, the excitement of my performance, and strain of ceaseless training had taken their toll. I drifted to sleep, dreaming of glowering giants and grotesque shadows of the human curiosities serving a prisoner queen.

*   *   *

When I woke, the sun was streaming in the window and Will Evans sat brooding by the fireplace. He’d chosen the most uncomfortable seat in the room—a three-legged stool, which groaned under his weight. I wondered how long he had been waiting, his shaggy head bowed, his elbows braced on his knees. His clasped hands seemed the size of boulders. Scenes from our last encounter rekindled in my mind and I could not forget his expression when he heard I was linked to Buckingham.

For a brief time before that revelation, I had felt as if this big man and I might have become friends. But I would need to find a way to keep my distance, no matter how much I craved a kindred soul.

“Sergeant Evans?” I said.

“So you are awake. The menagerie will be glad. They’re all lathered up with curiosity.”

The prospect of facing another battery of suspicious stares was daunting. A lump of misery formed in my middle. “No doubt they’ll want to see what Buckingham’s coin has purchased.”

Evans raised his head, his unkempt hair falling away from his features. Somehow, the daylight softened their ugliness. “Jeffrey, I’ve been sitting here the past two hours. It gave me time to think.”

“Think what?” Whether to drown me like a kitten if the queen could not be convinced to let me go?

Evans fastened his sober gaze upon me. “How did you come to be Buckingham’s man?”

I should have feared Evans had uncovered my purpose here and would hobble me before I had even begun. But something in his words set my chest burning.

“I am no man at all to Buckingham. I am a thing with no will of my own. My father sold me to the duke. The duke gave me to the queen. When the queen tires of me, she will dispose of me where she will, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.” Did my voice sound as hollow as I felt?

Evans stood. “Most of us in the menagerie came here at someone else’s pleasure. But we are not as helpless in our fate as it first appears. A man cannot help the place he comes from, only how he chooses to walk once the path becomes his own.”

I thought of how much better Samuel’s life would be if I did as Buckingham wished. “Denmark House is a long way from Oakham.”

“True. But this can be your home.” Evans gathered a soft bundle from the table. “No sign of your trunks yet, so I borrowed some clothes from Archie Armstrong, King Charles’s fool. With some tinkering, we can make them work, and at least you’ll not have to go to dinner in a sock.”

“Is Archie a dwarf?”

“No. He won the clothes in a game of cards from Robin Goodfellow, the queen’s other dwarf. Archie makes it a point to fleece someone in the menagerie’s lodgings when he comes to visit a cousin who works in the queen’s wardrobe. Hamish is as honest as Archie is sly. Archie won his position at court by stealing a sheep right under King James’s nose and could never break the habit.”

“Shouldn’t a thief be branded or hanged?”

“Any other man would have been. King James and his men gave chase, thought they’d trapped the thief in a cottage. But when they went inside, Archie was not to be found. Just an ugly old woman hovering over a babe swaddled up in a cradle. The crone told the king’s men she’d not seen the thief they sought. They left the cottage, save one man, who went and looked at the babe. It was the stolen lamb wrapped up in a shawl, and Archie the thief in a petticoat he’d found. Made the king laugh so hard, he took Archie on as his fool.”

“I will have to thank Archie for loaning me the clothes.”

“Don’t,” Evans said. “I had to force his hand. There is no reason for you to be trapped in this room while Archie hoards clothes he cannot even wear. He already has twenty years’ worth of the finest garments the royal treasury can buy after playing court fool to this king and the last. Not that he appreciates either one of his masters. Tells anyone who will listen that England would be better off if the king’s brother had lived to inherit and Charles had died.”

“The king allows such talk?” I asked in surprise.

“A court fool is the one person who gets away with saying almost anything to the royal he serves. But in this case…” Evans sobered. “I suspect His Majesty agrees with Archie. King James most certainly did.”

I could imagine what my father’s reaction would be if John died. Father would wish it was anyone but John in that grave.

“Prince Henry
was
as noble a prince as ever dwelt on this island,” Evans said. “A true Arthur reborn.”

“Who was Arthur, another brother?”

Evans’s jaw dropped. “I did not think there was an English lad alive who had not heard tales of the greatest king who ever ruled. There are a hundred legends of the Round Table and the knights who gathered about it.”

“Legends?” I took the clothes around the corner of the bed to obscure Evans’s view while I changed. “My father says people use such stories to dupe fools into charging into the path of blazing muskets. He told tales of fairy realms to charm coins out of the crowds that watched me dance at market fairs. They could not afford to waste those coppers. Should have bought a meat pie or boots from the secondhand clothing man.”

I peered around the bed. Pity crowded into Evans’s deep-set eyes.

“That is the saddest thing I have heard,” Evans said. “A lad growing up without tales of valor to brighten his life. Those tales were like food for me when I was growing up in Wales. My mother claimed I gobbled legends down like my brothers gobbled oat cakes. That is what made me grow so tall—to give such stories room to stretch their wonders.”

Evans’s tales tempted me, but anything he might share about the king could prove useful. I began to put on my borrowed stocking. “I would rather hear about King Charles’s brother.”

“From the moment Henry Stuart was born, he seemed forged of brighter mettle than other men. No one could best him with a sword or on horseback, and no matter how fierce his father and the royal council pressed Henry, he would not wed a Catholic. Not for a hundred alliances would two religions sleep in his bed, he said.”

“Considering the discord religion fired between the king and queen last night, perhaps Prince Henry was wise.”

“I am not an educated man,” Evans said. “But I know that Catholics and Protestants are knit into England as tightly as the threads in that stocking you are donning. Could you pull out one strand or the other without unraveling the whole garment?”

He did not seem to want an answer. I wondered whose God Will Evans bent his patched knee to.

“Prince Henry was only a lad when he set off to visit the most famous traitor imprisoned in the Tower of London. Spent hours with Sir Walter Raleigh to learn science and hear tales of Virginia and other uncharted territories. Even realms of alchemy, all the secrets of the brotherhood called the School of Night.”

“The School of Night?” I echoed.

“A wizard’s school made up of atheists. Men like Raleigh and the earl of Northumberland, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, and Dr. John Dee.”

The idea of a wizard’s school sent a delicious shiver down my spine as I pulled the borrowed shirt over my head and did up the laces.

“Of course, wizardry is a crime. King James himself wrote a book about how to root out witches.” Evans adjusted the queen’s badge on his livery as I stepped into Archie’s breeches. “The prince did not consider Raleigh’s doings wizardry. He saw science as deciphering God’s fingerprints upon the world. Prince Henry made those around him believe it was God’s intent that we explore His mysteries. Everyone in England loved him save one.”

“Who was that?” I asked, plunging my arms through the holes in the doublet.

“The duke of Buckingham. He favored Prince Charles. Tutored him in manly arts and the sports that helped him grow strong.”

I thought of the duke’s single-minded determination to keep the queen beneath him in the king’s esteem. Buckingham would have loathed rivalry with the king’s gifted son.

“How did the prince die?”

“A fever. It struck so suddenly, some people say…” Evans hesitated.

“Say what?”

“That Prince Henry was poisoned.”

I froze, the doublet half on, remembering the first time I had met the countess of Carlisle. Her pursed lips, the slyness in her voice as she addressed my master:
Very lucky for you that the Prince of Wales died
 … Was it possible Buckingham was somehow tied to the prince’s death? If he was willing to poison the king’s son, would it not be easy to use the same method to rid himself of a widely loathed French Catholic queen? When the time for the fatal draft came, who better to administer it than the fool at the queen’s side every day?

Evans bent down to help me with the last fastenings. “Ah, but what does such gossip matter?” he said. “Prince Henry is dead and Buckingham has risen so high, even the queen is in his shadow. You are dressed once I tie these laces. We’d best feed you and introduce you to the others before the rehearsals begin.”

“Rehearsals?”

“For the queen’s great passion, the masque. Playacting of sorts. She tries to shape the world into something prettier, where she can be beloved, heroic—all she dreamed of when she crossed the seas from France. Sometimes, I think she considers her masque world more real than the one she shares with the king.”

No wonder, with her life so full of snares. I wished I could escape this world, as well. “I see,” I said, doubting Evans could guess how much I meant it.

“Even after last night’s fete, grand as it was, you can only imagine.” Evans fumbled with the laces, drawing them tight as he was able. “The whole court is a world of make-believe, Jeffrey. The courtiers may seem like papier-mâché dragons. But the dragons breathe real fire, and even seas made of silk will drown you. Sometimes even the most astute man cannot tell what is real. If you have not heard of King Arthur, you cannot have heard of the Colosseum.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“The Romans had menageries like the queen’s. Tigers and lions, and gladiators, as well. Slaves who fought one another and the beasts for the amusement of their betters.”

“Like the bull-baiting ring my father has charge of.”