The Queen's Dwarf A Novel (2 page)

I pulled away from the comfort his hand had offered, wishing I could rid myself of my sins as easily. “It would only make matters worse if I were to tell you what angered her. But Will, if you knew what I did … Queen Elizabeth would have locked me in the Tower. King Henry would have demanded that my head roll. If you had seen Queen Henrietta Maria’s horror, even you would not torment me by holding out hope.”

“Whatever happened, you are her most loyal defender. I would stake my soul on it.”

I knew he was hoping for me to confide in him and shift the secret burden I carried onto his willing shoulders.

“By God, Jeffrey,” Will insisted, “if the queen knew what you risked for her…”

I chuckled without mirth. “Don’t speak of it. I will not be made ridiculous, Will,” I said, my voice cracking. “Not in front of
her.
” Kind Will. He did not remark that it was my profession to play the fool in Her Majesty’s presence. I had made myself the butt of jests from the moment I sprang into her presence garbed in a miniature suit of armor and waving a blue-and-gold pennon above my head. That moment was locked in my memory—her sorrowful dark eyes growing wide, light dancing beneath thick fans of lashes. The way she clapped her hands and laughed—a surprised, throaty sound.

“You could win an honored position in any one of a hundred noble households,” Will prodded. “If you believe the queen will never summon you again, why not ask Her Majesty to release you so you can find another situation?”

“Because the queen is surrounded by people who will destroy her if they can. Even now I fear someone is plotting to kill her. What happened with the dogs at Hampton Court—” I stopped, swore. “I know what you are thinking. Dogs attack every day with no grander reason than stealing a scrap of meat.” I could see by the flush across his cheekbones that I had guessed correctly. “People behave as if I have conjured up the danger as a ploy to regain the queen’s favor. Even you doubt me, Will.”

“I do not doubt you believe the threat is real. You spend so much time alone, it is no wonder your imagination spins danger into every shadow. But the queen is guarded by the strongest men the king can command, men stout enough to protect her.” Will lowered his gaze to spare my pride, not needing to tell me that I was in no position to help the queen, even if she let me.

“I must go before Robin tries to fasten up Dulcinea’s dancing rope,” he said. Robin Goodfellow’s thick fingers painted scenery so real, I had once witnessed a child weep when she could not take a bite of a canvas pomegranate. But he could never get the knots tight enough, and Will did not like to wound the man’s pride by retying them in front of the other performers.

Will paused at the door. “I will do what I can to plead your case to the queen.” His face, with its craggy brow and off-kilter chin, grew unbearable in its tenderness. “Jeffrey, Her Majesty is lucky to have the devotion of a subject like you.”

I listened to the thump of his boots on the marble floor, the sound growing fainter until it disappeared. Silence lowered iron bars around me. It had become my constant companion these past weary months, but it felt more ominous this time. Will had unwittingly loosed other memories. What would Will say if he knew that the queen’s enemies had used me to inflame the threat looming over her? I had urged her onto the path of defiance that led so many of her subjects to hate her.

I was no better than the trained monkey, Pug. I was a pet forever poised on the razor’s edge between gaining a sweetmeat or the blow of a master’s fist. I had learned that terrible trapped feeling three and a half years before, when I first met the man who would be my patron. Before life at court taught me that words could wound deep as any sword and even a man small as I was could bring about the downfall of the mighty. Before I sensed the stealthy tread of a murderer in the corridors behind me and knew that if I failed to expose the assasin who stalked my queen, Henrietta Maria would die.

O
NE

April 1626
Three Years Earlier
Fourteen Years Old
Oakham, Rutland

I was sure I would not sleep my last night in the shambles. I had lived my whole life amid the butchers’ shops that lined the narrow street. The strangely human screams that rippled through the animals when their fellows’ throats were slashed became my lullaby. But the eerie silence that fell when the men put down their knives seemed filled with frightening possibilities. Never more so than tonight, when I had no more knowledge of my fate than the beasts barred in the holding pens.

I burrowed under the frayed blanket my younger brother, Samuel, and I had shared since we could climb the ladder to the cottage loft. I wondered why his conversations with God always took longer when I needed to talk to Samuel myself. The rest of us Hudsons dealt with prayers the way we scrubbed our faces in winter, rushing through the ordeal as quickly as possible, jumbling forbidden Catholic Latin with lawful Anglican English, and not overly fastidious about either. Grumbling loudly enough for my kneeling brother to hear, I punched a lump of straw in Samuel’s side of the pallet to smooth it in case he ever decided to come to bed. Not that I expected my show of irritation to do any good. It never had before.

But tonight should be different, I thought. Once we climbed out from under this blanket in the morning, everything would change. Next time I returned to the cottage, I would be a visitor. I wouldn’t know all the little happenings of Samuel’s day. He would know nothing of mine.

My stomach lurched and I wondered if my older brother, John, had felt this sick dread when he had left home to become an apprentice three years ago. It seemed strange to think of him as a grown man, wielding a butcher’s knife for the master he served five shops away. I remembered Mother weeping as she stitched him a shirt out of her wedding petticoat, and Father’s wide grin when he returned from the secondhand clothing man with a pair of boots. John had drawn them on and paced the cottage floor, every sinew in his lanky frame determined to show he was officially a man.

Our sister, Ann, had tied up John’s bundle—two pairs of stockings she had darned, a leather apron, and three scorched ginger nuts Samuel had earned by sweeping out the baker’s oven. The preparations for my leave-taking would not be so elaborate.

“I convinced His Grace to take Jeff with nothing but the clothes on his back,” Father had said, congratulating himself, the night he announced I was to be handed over to the duke. “Made His Grace wary that some sickness from the shambles might travel to his mansion on the hill.”

I had been tempted to remind Father that
he
traveled from the shambles to the duke’s holdings all the time in his position as trainer of the nobleman’s bull-baiting dogs. But why bother? Even if the duke had permitted me to bring a whole wagonload of goods to my new life, my take-leave would have been nothing like John’s. Of all my family, only Samuel would mourn my leaving.

I closed my eyes for just a moment—not because they were suddenly burning, but to rest them until Samuel’s prayers were finished. I must have dozed, for I started awake, panicked at the absence of Samuel’s warmth on the pallet beside me.

Moonlight trickled in through the hole in the roof that Father had not gotten around to mending. A white-robed ghost seemed to take shape in the silvery glow: Samuel, sitting cross-legged in the moonlight, my mother’s sewing basket at his side.

“What are you doing over there?” I asked.

“Thinking,” Samuel said. “When John left home, it was a comfort to picture the place he’d sleep near the master butcher’s hearth. But no matter how I try, I cannot imagine what life will be like for you once you leave Oakham behind.”

“I’ll still be staring at people’s knees, but the stockings will have fewer holes in them.”

Samuel did not even try to smile. I climbed out of bed and crossed to where my mother had laid my costume the night before. But the garb that turned me into a Fairy King was not where I remembered it, one side of the green cloth more crumpled than I recalled.

I had worn it scores of times dancing for pennies at the market fair. Is that how the great ones heard of me? I wondered as I smoothed out a wrinkle.

“Do not pretend to jest, Jeffrey. Not tonight.” Samuel’s face clouded. I could not bear it if he cried.

“I’ll not jest if you promise not to get melancholy. After all, there is a chance that I might be stealing your blanket again by nightfall. The duke might take one look at me and decide I am not worthy of his attention.” I meant to soothe Samuel. Instead, he grew alarmed.

“Never say that!”

“So you are eager to get rid of me after all?”

“You know I am not. But Father has already been bragging at the pub, and I fear his temper. I fear the duke even more. People say such horrible things about how wicked he is. Are you afraid?”

There was no use lying to Samuel. He’d always been able to see right through to the truth in me. “A little.”

“So am I. That is why I had to protect you.”

I looked at my slight, fair brother with his tousled golden ringlets and eyes far too gentle for the shambles and I thought how John would have laughed at Samuel’s claim.

“Protect me?” I echoed. “How?”

“I sewed Our Lady in the seam of your tunic while everyone was sleeping.”

That holy medal was Samuel’s most beloved possession, a gift from the half-mad old woman who kept a statue of the Virgin Mary under her floorboards. Much as his generosity touched me, it unnerved me, as well. Holy relics had been outlawed in England, along with the Catholic faith. Five monarchs had ruled since Henry VIII had broken with Rome, and factions were still warring over England’s immortal soul—Anglicans, Puritans, Catholics, and whatever other sects sprang up in between.

John gets ginger nuts. I get a chunk of tin that could land me in Fleet Prison, I thought with wry humor, but I curbed my tongue, saying only, “Samuel, you should not have given me your medal.”

“It was the only way I could think of to remind you when I am not around,” Samuel insisted.

“Remind me of what?”

“That what people say of you is not true. You weren’t born of dark magic. You are good. A gift from Heaven.”

I shook my head and turned away. Samuel’s hand drifted down on my shoulder. “Whenever you doubt yourself, touch the medal and remember Our Lady loves you, Jeffrey, and so do I.”

My eyes burned. I nudged him with my elbow to disguise my emotions. “If you’d given me ginger nuts, I would have shared them with you.”

Samuel punched me back, and I knew he understood what I could not say. I’ve shared everything—my whole life—with you. Until now.

We climbed into bed and stared at the ceiling as the night slipped through our fingers and morning dawned in a hurly-burly of preparations. I had never been bathed and combed, trimmed and polished with more vigor, never hammered with more instructions of how I was to behave in the duke’s presence. The bathing was women’s work; Father’s work: barking out orders. But I could see Samuel outside the mad circle. He stayed close, watching me, until the only thing left to say was good-bye.

*   *   *

It seemed I had barely blinked before I was standing in my new master’s withdrawing room at the center of a world I had never known.

Sweat trickled beneath my leaf green tunic, burning skin scrubbed raw. The handwoven cloth scoured my ribs as Father hefted me onto the writing table that dominated the duke of Buckingham’s privy chamber. From here, George Villiers ruled my village and much of England besides. Not that he ruled it well, I had heard men in Oakham’s shambles grumble. Buckingham had just limped home after squandering the greatest fleet England had ever sent to sea. His intent: to reprise Drake’s famous raid upon the Spanish port of Cádiz.

The duke’s failure had not cost him any of the king’s love, from all reports. Charles Stuart had welcomed Buckingham back. The rest of England loathed Buckingham more than ever.

I stood before the most powerful nobleman in England and tried not to tread on the inked pages that littered Buckingham’s table, or smudge wax still soft on the letter stamped with his seal. The candle he’d used to melt that wax flickered so close to me, I could feel the curls my mother had pressed into my hair wilting. I remembered the blisters she had burned into her hands while holding my golden brown locks around a hot poker, and I wondered if winning this nobleman’s favor could make my mother love me.

Buckingham crossed his arms over a doublet sprinkled with jewels, and I fought the urge to rub my eyes. Every surface in the room gleamed in the late-afternoon sun, even the tapestries draping the walls threaded with gilt. I remembered the tale my father had told me as we trudged from his butcher shop to His Grace’s estate of Burley-on-the-Hill.

“Nothing but a lowly knight’s son was George Villiers, and a second son at that. His family was poor, but that lad was prettier than any ever seen. Aped the ways of his betters and used his fair face to make two kings love him. Rose to be court favorite to slobbering James. When the old king started to wither, Buckingham turned all that charm on James’s stammering runt of a son, our new king, Charles.”

It was easy to see how the royals had fallen under Buckingham’s thrall. I could not remember when I had first made a game of picturing myself in other people’s skins—striding on the legs of a running footman, or inhabiting a tall man who cut through the crowds that swallowed me up. But as I stared at the duke, my imagination failed me.

Never had I seen a man knit together with such perfect pieces. White hose clung to the finest legs I had ever seen—and God knew I had been lost in a forest of legs my whole life. Sable hair tumbled in curls to broad shoulders garbed in peacock blue cut velvet. My heart beat faster as Buckingham approached me.

“A pretty plaything you will make, Jeffrey Hudson,” he said. “I hardly believed the rumors I heard regarding your appearance. Seldom does a specimen live up to expectations.”