The Queen's Dwarf A Novel (23 page)

“Robin is practicing drawing subjects while they are in motion, and the countess of Carlisle is flitting about everywhere,” Sara said, defending Robin.

“And capturing hearts wherever she goes,” Archie said. “No one in all the court has the power to charm like she does. Pity she rarely uses it on her husband anymore. I cannot think the earl of Carlisle expected such an outcome when he made his great love match.”

“Love match?” I echoed.

“She spent two years in the Tower for love of James Hay, the earl of Carlisle,” Archie said, then turned and walked away. The queen rose and shook out her skirts as the king called out, “Her Majesty is eager to feed the swans. Let us away to the pond!”

I heard Robin curse as he started to gather his scattered drawings, but Sara was already halfway through the task, her nimbleness born of practice.

I fell into step with the rest of the courtiers, questions tumbling through my mind. It was hard to imagine Lucy Hay suffering such a fate for anyone. If she
had
been imprisoned in the Tower I had to wonder—what had happened to kill the marriage she had bought at such a price?

*   *   *

I was going to visit Pug six weeks later when Robin Goodfellow overtook me, a bundle sprinkled with vermilion dust tucked under one arm. “How does it feel to bewitch the queen?” he asked.

I regarded him, wary. “I have done no such thing.”

“You’ve worked some magic on her. Her Majesty is having craftsmen deliver a gift to you.”

“Why would Her Majesty tell you?” I asked, surprised.

“She did not,” he said, then walked away.

Yet nothing prepared me for the grand unveiling on the day that the secret was revealed. I had been much occupied entertaining the queen with jokes and tricks when she secreted a note in my hand and ordered me to my room. I raced through the corridors so fast, my legs ached, not daring to open the missive where anyone else might see, dreading what the page might contain. But when I opened my chamber door, the whole menagerie, including Archie, awaited me there, mouths sticky from some honey cakes Griggory was serving. “What is this about?” I demanded as I shoved the missive in my doublet.

“Evans herded us in here by the queen’s command,” Rattlebones said. “Except for Archie. He came to the Lair on his usual mission to stir up trouble and refused to be left behind.”

“Her Majesty has sent you a gift.” Robin gestured to the table where I attended my studies.

Atop its surface something rectangular lay hidden beneath a swath of black frieze—the stuff the queen had worn on her pilgrimage.

“Hurry and uncover it, Jeffrey,” Dulcinea urged, sampling another honey cake.

“Not everyone wants to gobble pleasures up the way you do,” Sara said. “Perhaps he wants to savor the surprise.” Sara turned to me. “It was all Will could do to keep her from peeking.”

I crossed to the table, their smiling faces pinching my conscience. I took hold of the coarse cloth and pulled. The frieze slid from my fingers.

Gasps rose all around me, and for a moment I forgot to breathe. It was a writing box, far plainer than the one that had fascinated me that first day in the queen’s chamber, yet more beautiful than anything I had ever owned. A knight in armor was painted upon it, his sword frozen a heartbeat away from lopping the head off of a giant. The knight’s helmet had been cast aside, his gold-brown hair and features so like my own, it astonished me. A captive princess looked on, hands clasped in prayer, her dark eyes unmistakably the queen’s. But the giant was not Will Evans. The face half-revealed by the thrown-back visor had the look of Buckingham’s.

“It is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Will Evans said. “Isn’t that just like Her Majesty to have Goodfellow paint it for you?”

“Goodfellow?”

The artist tried to demur, but Will Evans gave a booming laugh. “I know your work, Robin. But you’ve made me look far too pretty as the Green Knight.”

“You weren’t my model, though I would have picked you had it been up to me. The queen gave specific instructions. Even the hound should remind you of someone.”

Evans and I both squinted at it. I surrendered first. “I cannot see it.”

“Good.” Goodfellow looked a trifle grim. “I’d not get the queen in more trouble if I can prevent it, though I can’t imagine why Buckingham or Bishop Laud would be hanging about the queen’s dwarf, rummaging through your things, Jeffrey. Still, no reason to poke at them and make them any angrier than that foolish trip to Tyburn did. Hope the resemblance is close enough, though, to satisfy the queen.”

“Laud and Buckingham!” Will exclaimed. “Bless me if it isn’t so! I’ve seen just that expression on Laud’s face when he’s lecturing Her Majesty on the evils of the Catholic Church.”

He smoothed one Goliath-size hand over the perfectly fitted drawers. “What do you think is inside this, Jeffrey?”

I pulled open one drawer, then the next, finding them filled with things like powders for ink, sand in a shaker to dash across a wet page to keep it from smudging, a pearl-handled penknife, and wax with a dipper to melt it in.

“You’ve even got your own seal,” Evans said, eager. “Press it in the wax to see what it is.”

I took the dipper and bits of wax, melted this over the candle, poured it onto a sheet of paper. Then I took up the heavy weight of the seal and pressed it deep into the pool of red.

I pulled it away, saw the embossed design the seal’s ridges and curves had left behind.

“I cannot make out what it is,” Will said with a frown. “A sea horse, perhaps?”

Robin Goodfellow broke in. “It is Latin. The lads who craft my brushes and such fitted out your box. They told me that the motto is to be your own now, Hudson.”

“What does it say?” I regarded it with nervous fascination. Words had such power that to read them was magic. But these words—cast in brass, running backward—seemed even more potent.

“
Molto en Parvo,
” Goodfellow said. The phrase engraved itself in my mind.

“I wonder what it means,” I said.

“‘Much in little.’”

“It suits you,” Will said.

“We had best brace ourselves, friends,” Rattlebones teased. “Jeffrey is becoming quite a gentleman of the queen’s household instead of one of our menagerie. Before long, our Jeffrey will be far too important to socialize with people like us.”

“Do not be ridiculous,” I said, yet some of what Simon said was true. The queen clung to me now in a way she did not cling to the others: The way she had once clung to Madame Saint-Georges—her closest confidante, her most trusted friend. Had madame carried tales back to the French court when the king’s men had packed them all back to their homeland?

I was grateful when the rest of the menagerie filed out. Will Evans lingered.

“Jeffrey,” Will said softly. “I am glad the queen depends on you so. She needs a friend.”

“She does.”

“Might I share a secret?”

I felt a jab of alarm. What if Will confided something I must carry to Buckingham? I was still shaken by what had happened because I carried tales about the queen. Somehow, endangering Will Evans seemed even worse than those consequences. “Flocks of people greet you everywhere you go,” I said. “You must have friends you would be better off confiding in than me.”

“You are so clever. Cleverer than most of the courtiers are. I love to see you deal them a riposte with one of your jests. They dare not strike back at you because the queen loves you so much.”

“I get so angry at the way they treat the rest of you, I wish I could challenge them to a duel. The queen has promised me lessons in weaponry.”

Will frowned. “She would not allow you to touch a blade if she thought you might put it to such use.”

“A pistol is the weapon for me. It does not matter how tall you are or how strong. It fires a bullet the same for me as for any other man.”

“I suppose. But my secret…”

I smiled. “You might as well get the telling over with so I can get some peace.”

Will chuckled, then looked away. A flush crept across his cheekbones. “I could tell you a hundred legends of Arthur and his knights from memory, but I cannot write my own name.”

“There is no shame in that. Plenty of other folk cannot.”

“But they are not giants,” Will said. “Small men love to say I am as stupid as I am large.”

A pistol ball, a sword thrust—I would have been happy to puncture those who tormented Will with either weapon. “Who cares what they say?”

“I do.”

“Then why tell me such a thing?”

Will lifted his gaze to mine. I could see how much courage it took for him to answer. “I was hoping you might teach me.”

F
IFTEEN

It is not easy to snap a queen’s spirit, I discovered to my joy. As winter’s snow cast a coverlet over London’s harsh edges, time similarly blunted the queen’s heartache. Court ushered in 1627 and the New Year promised to be far different from the one we had left behind. I measured the months of spring by lessons learned.

I had hoped it would grow easier to pass my letters to Buckingham. But, though my hands grew deft at sliding missives into my saddle, it grew harder to write secrets down: tidbits I gleaned from half-finished letters begging for news from France, the queen’s relief when the king permitted Father Philip to return and be her confessor, her feelings that her family had cast her aside. The silence in the months following the banishment of her household was more painful than that outrage had been.

“They might as well have cast me into the sea to drown,” Henrietta Maria told me one night. “It is as if they have forgotten me.”

Far more enjoyable were the lessons I taught Will about how to wield a pen. He spent hours in my chamber, grappling with the delicate process of forming his letters while I sat cross-legged on the table. Secretly, I was glad he continued strewing the pages with ink blots so I could badger him into returning to lessons so frustrating that most men would have quit. I had my own reputation to think about, I warned him. I would not be responsible for sending him out into the world with such clumsy penmanship. I pretended he did not know the motive behind my complaints: That I eagerly anticipated Evans’s heavy tread outside my door. I enjoyed his rumbling Welsh voice. Most of all, I craved the stories I wrung out of him when I complained how tedious it was to sit like a stump and make certain he did not spill the ink horn.

The queen tiptoed further beyond her bleak humors, as well. The king devised entertainments, disappointing the court by treating the queen with earnest tenderness, seeking to please her. Her new ladies added their own efforts, vying for the prime place in her affections. She would have to choose one of them. They were the only friends at hand and she was far too social a creature to remain isolated for long.

The first times the king availed himself of the marriage bed following her court’s departure, the queen was hostile. The divide between Catholic French princess and Protestant king was still wide. But Charles’s outburst comparing the Gunpowder Plot to the assassination of Henrietta Maria’s father had penetrated the queen’s outrage and eventually worked its way into her heart.

When she confided she had nightmares about devil-faced assassins murdering her father, I urged her to share those dreams with the king instead. During one twilight while they walked in the garden, I overheard them speaking in low voices not only of the assassins who haunted her dreams but of those who had stalked the king’s childhood, as well. The Gunpowder Plot had plunged frail, shy four-year-old Charles into the horrific truth his father had experienced from the cradle. Traitors and assassins could wait around any corner. Survival depended upon the wheel of fortune, and it was forever turning.

I tried to control fortune’s spin, contriving ways to smooth the damage my meddling had caused without betraying the divided allegiance that could be my downfall. I collected weapons I could use in the court’s arena, discovering vulnerable spots in even the most invincible courtiers. I tweaked the countess of Carlisle, contrasting her worldly ways with the queen’s youth and openness.

I reveled in the flickers of frustration in Lucy Hay’s face when her wiles did not distract His Majesty’s attentions from his wife. The king approached the queen’s bedchamber with growing confidence, and the queen no longer seemed to dread his visits.

His attentions seemed to foster harmony between the queen and her new ladies, as well, and I began to relax a little more, able to let my mind wander, rather than being on constant alert.

One morning, a soft rain was falling, canceling the ride the queen had planned. The duchess of Buckingham was already in bed with a cold, and no one was willing to risk the queen getting damp.

To while away the time, the other ladies had gathered around the gaming tables, as they so often did. I sat upon a cushioned stool at the queen’s side, all but forgotten as the queen gambled with the duke’s mother and sister and the lively Lady Carlisle. For hours, they had played thus, the dice box rattling in rhythmic counterpoint to the women’s voices. I let my mind wander, wondering what Samuel was doing, if he had visited the widow lately and taken the Virgin beneath the floor flowers, as he was wont to do.

Yet something in the queen’s voice penetrated my musings. I discerned sadness, though I had not been listening to her words. The countess of Carlisle’s reply I heard clearly.

“Majesty, I know you imagine what it would have been like if your father had lived. Maybe things would have been as idyllic as you dream. But there are daughters who might consider themselves better off if their fathers were plucked out of their lives. My father kept me in the Tower of London for two years.”

“You cannot mean that.”

“It was my mother’s fault my sister and I turned out to be so headstrong, he insisted. We were raised by women, with no man about to guide us. He claimed it made us disobedient and full of strange ideas about our place in the world. I was only six and Dorothy seven when King James’s court condemned Father for treason. It was Tom Percy’s doing, but since that cousin visited my father just before the plot was to commence, the king believed my father was involved. So off to the Tower my father went for sixteen years. The only time we saw him was when our mother took us to visit him there.”