The Queen's Dwarf A Novel (35 page)

I stripped down to my shirt as Quintin helped Samuel out of the unfamiliar garb, the tutor’s hands awkward, yet careful as a mother’s.

He settled us both beneath the covers, and in the light of a flickering candle, I saw him smile.

“Tonight may our blessed Mother guard your sleep,” he said. “Our Lady had a special tenderness for lads, I think.”

It seemed so natural—Samuel’s love of Christ’s mother, the medal he had given me blending with the quiet benediction of this man. I had lived long enough in the queen’s Catholic household that I did not question devotions that harkened to the old faith.

Quintin took the candle from the room, leaving us in darkness. I could smell the familiar scent of Samuel’s hair, mingled with new smells of ink and musty books, oranges and the faint, acrid bite of gunpowder from the fireworks at the theater.

For a long moment I lay, awkward and apart from him, so tense, my body began to ache. Or was it my heart? We were beyond boyhood’s realm now. At least I was. I doubted Samuel would ever leave innocence behind. My eye stung with loss. Then moonlight struck one of my brother’s curls.

I reached out and slipped the strand between my fingers, seeking the familiar comfort as I closed my eyes. I had not quite drifted to sleep when Samuel shifted closer, his arm groping for where the bolster usually was. Instead, my brother flung his arm around me.

I had not slept so well since I had left the cottage loft in Oakham. I doubted I would ever sleep so well again.

N
INETEEN

November 1627

I had wanted the duke dead, prayed for it—a fiend’s prayer that Samuel would have been ashamed of. No concern for the duchess of Buckingham and her children or grudging sympathy for what Buckingham had suffered as a youth had been able to change the course of that prayer.

Only after I knew that the nobleman who controlled my fate also had John’s life clutched in his glory-hungry hands did I hope for the scheming duke to win the victory he craved.

Victorious armies brought more soldiers back to home shores alive.

I gleaned whatever scraps of news fell from the royal table, waiting to hear that the citadel had buckled under the pressure of Buckingham’s blockade. I pictured John keeping vigil on moonless nights. I imagined him fighting sleep as the ship rocked, the soothing lap of waves filling the monotonous hours of his watch. He would be listening for the muffled splash of oars or snap of canvas that meant a French boatman was attempting to slip past the English blockade to carry food to those starving Catholics trapped behind the fortress walls. Frenchmen were still blocking the English path to the Protestants Buckingham hoped to make our allies.

From what I’d heard, John would need food nearly as much as the French did. Neither the king’s fury nor the soldiers’ distress had moved Parliament to allot the funds needed for an invasion. The Commons and Lords had weighed their hatred of Buckingham against the need to provision simple soldiers. Thwarting Buckingham had won.

For months, the king had scraped together what funds he could and poured those resources into Buckingham’s hands. But in the end, even God stood against the duke. The Scots’ fleet Charles raised to go to the aid of the beleaguered forces sailed into a storm. Buckingham’s salvation had scattered to the winds.

Worse still was the news Will brought me one November afternoon. “Jeff, lad, a messenger just rode in from Portsmouth. The French slipped past Buckingham’s blockade. While our poor bastards starve, those French in the citadel are eating their fill.”

“It is hopeless then,” I said. “Buckingham has to abandon the campaign. John may already be sailing home.”

“I pray God it is so, but … there is one more thing you must know. Buckingham refused to admit defeat. He flung his forces against the citadel walls.”

“Even Buckingham cannot be such a fool. The citadel walls were too strong to breach when the army’s bellies and guns were full! How did he expect starving men to break them down?”

“The duke is guilty of the worst kind of arrogance. His pride—his accursed pride. He cast them all—whatever men they had left—on a suicide mission. Even those who reached the walls under that terrible cannon fire were doomed. When the lads went to scale the walls, the ladders they flung up were too short.”

I closed my eyes, picturing it—the clawing hunger in John’s belly, his arms weighed down with the ladder he prayed his weakened legs would have the strength to climb. I could smell the choking gunpowder, see the bright flare of weapons firing, and hear the screams of dying men. I could feel the rough wood of the siege ladder pushing splinters into John’s hands as he and his comrades swung the ladder up against the fortress’s rough stone. Had John climbed first? He had always insisted on shoving ahead of Samuel and me. Had the smoke been so thick he could not see far enough to realize the ladder that was supposed to get him over the wall never would? It would only strand him in a hail of musket fire, with nowhere to hide.

Samuel was the Hudson who had always prayed. John had never bothered much about religion, trusting God did not need a lad from Oakham telling Him His business. I prayed enough to keep Samuel from fretting, but I couldn’t imagine God would heed someone He’d fashioned from birth to make others think of demons and devils and witches and such.

But as I looked into Will’s worried face, I said, “God help John. God help them all.”

“They say what’s left of them are straggling into Portsmouth.”

I gripped the table, to steady myself. “How many?”

Will hunkered down, curving his hand over my arm. “The messenger thinks two thousand.”

“Two thousand died? Out of a force of seven thousand?”

“Two thousand are left.”

I tried to take in the scope of this disaster. “John survived,” I said, more to myself than to Will. “You do not know how strong he is. I’ve seen him fight three lads at a time and win.” I did not say he had been defending me.

“There will be no way to tell for some time. I think half the families in England will be waiting for news.”

“I know that John survived.”

“Buckingham cannot. Even the king will see him for the villain he is now. The duke is to wait upon the king at Whitehall. Buckingham will get what he deserves at last.”

It was true. Fierce joy warred with my fear for John and my sick horror at the thought of those skeletal corpses littering French ground.

Buckingham would fall. As the days slid by, all of England cried for his blood. What would happen to me when the duke faced justice? Would he expose me as his spy to spite the queen? Make certain Her Majesty would send me away? That would be the best I could hope for. An image of the old bloodstains on the scaffold at Tyburn flashed in my memory. No, I dared not think about suffering that fate.

Instead, I imagined my life beyond the palace gates. It would not be easy to go back to cottage living—scarce food, winter’s cold numbing fingers and toes. But it was another kind of hunger that would be most painful to endure. I would not have books or tutors, beautiful art to fill my hours. Nevertheless, I could surrender all with scarcely a pang if it meant Buckingham’s downfall. It was the thought of losing the people inside these walls that made my heart ache: Henrietta Maria, with her quick delight and fierce temper. Will Evans, the bedrock so many depended upon. I would miss Robin’s paint-speckled scowls and the way Sara hummed while she combed out Scrap’s ears. I’d miss seeing young pages grow wide-eyed as Simon told them the story of how he’d grown so thin—claiming he’d swallowed a minnow whole as a boy and it was still swimming around in his stomach, gobbling everything he swallowed before it could stick to his rattly bones. I wouldn’t be there if Boku ever told us where he had come from, where he had been. I would miss watching Dulcinea float above the crowd like a bright-plumed bird.

But I would not be able to harm them anymore. I would never have to betray the queen again or see disillusionment fill Will’s eyes. Most important of all, Samuel would be safe.

I had seen Quintin’s love for my brother, knew the tutor meant it when he said he would care for Samuel no matter what. Even if I could not pay for Samuel’s lessons, Quintin would keep him to assist as a scribe. Once Buckingham was in disgrace and I was exiled from court, Samuel would cease being a pawn in the duke’s hand. My brother could sink into obscurity and so would I. It would be worth the cost, and yet, as court and king waited for Buckingham to ride from Plymouth, I tried to imprint in my memory the sound of the queen’s laugh when she danced with the king or played with her puppies in the garden, the feel of her hand those rare times she touched me. I studied the great furrows concentration carved into Will’s brow when he practiced his writing and the wistful way he smiled when he watched Dulcinea dance upon the rope he’d secured himself.

As I committed my friends to memory, I caught Boku watching me with his own kind of intensity. I would never get to know the man concealed beneath those inscrutable eyes. Why did I sense he knew me? The ugliness, the betrayal, the lies? Perhaps this dark man had some secret beneath the velvet gauntlets he wore, secrets dark as those I kept myself.

Late November 1627

It was no small feat to sneak past the guards and hide in the chamber at Whitehall on the day the duke of Buckingham came to face the king. His Majesty had required all the most powerful men in London to attend, leaving no room for insignificant playthings like me. Yet I would have risked more than the guards’ anger to see my enemy’s downfall.

From my place behind an arras, I could see the dais where the throne sat beneath its cloth of estate. By the time the king mounted it, the chamber was thronged with lords, the nobles slavering like Father’s dogs, hot with the scent of blood.

It was a miracle Buckingham had reached Whitehall alive, some claimed. Most of England wanted him dead, and assassins were said to lurk around every corner. I wished them luck—but only after this day I had waited for so long.

I stood on tiptoe, trying to see, as a booming voice from the back of the chamber announced, “George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham.”

Snarls of outrage raced through the crowd as a figure strode toward the throne. I could see the sheen of Buckingham’s hair—he stood taller than most in the room. His head high, shoulders flung back, he seemed more conquering hero than the man who had decimated the fleet and lost five thousand men. His sapphire velvet doublet gleamed with silver braid. A chain of rubies encircled his neck just beneath his collarbone. Had he worn the stones as a kind of defiance. Mocking the blood the headsman’s ax had drawn from the neck of Edward Strafford, last of the ancient line of Buckingham dukes King Henry the Eighth had executed a century before?

If Buckingham mounted the scaffold, would I go to witness the execution? The question popped into my head unbidden. I had never developed a taste for blood sport, but before I had my first pair of breeches, I had learned the danger of turning my back on a wounded bull. Better to see his throat slit than be gored in the back by a creature who had managed to live.

I held my breath, trying not to think of the duchess of Buckingham, the one person in the kingdom I cared for who must be glad of his return. Buckingham reached the foot of the throne and knelt. “Your Majesty,” the duke said, his voice filling the chamber. “I have come to beg forgiveness for the loss of so many brave men. My officers were the finest any commander could ask for. My soldiers fought with such courage as to break a commander’s heart. I alone am responsible for the defeat they suffered at the hands of the Catholics guarding the port to La Rochelle. It is my fault that we did not get past the island to free the Protestant stronghold beyond.”

I looked to the king, hungry as the rest of the crowd to see the duke savaged by royal wrath.

Charles Stuart rose and closed the space between them. The king’s unlovely face looked all the worse beside Buckingham’s beauty. “It is I who should beg you for forgiveness,” the king said. “I have failed you and your brave officers. Your king and these lords who would judge you have slept safe in soft beds while you suffered hunger and danger. No man—not in the House of Lords or the Commons—shall ever question your bravery in my hearing. This defeat is the fault of those who clutched at their purse strings while your army shed blood for king and country.”

The king’s voice cut through the murmur of the crowd’s disbelief. “Your Grace, I command you to rise.” I could see the gleam of tears in the king’s eyes as he drew Buckingham to his feet. “You are and will always be my most beloved, valiant friend. We will gather another fleet for you to command. You will sail to the aid of La Rochelle on a brighter day and I dare any man to tell you nay.”

Bile rose in my throat as the king embraced my nemesis. I sagged against the wall. My legs gave way and I slid down to the floor, but I did not need to fear anyone would see me. The lords were beyond caring about one stowaway eavesdropping behind an arras. They knew now, as I did, that nothing on God’s earth could break Buckingham’s hold on the king but the duke’s death.

I could not forget a tale my tutor once told me: how blind King John of Bohemia had been so eager to fight in a battle that he tied a guide rope between his horse and six of his knights, then rode into the fray swinging his sword. When the fight was over, people found the lot of them all slain—six knights and their king still tied together—tangled, with no way to cut free of one another.

Would King Charles end the same way? So bound to Buckingham that His Majesty would be destroyed in the chaos of Buckingham’s downfall? If one as powerful as the king might vanish beneath fate’s trampling hooves, what chance did Samuel and I have?

T
WENTY

The court still reeled at the news of Buckingham’s pardon as the queen’s household moved once again to St. James’s Palace. As the weeks after Buckingham’s return passed, descriptions of the king’s welcome of England’s most hated villain flew through the streets of London, then onward along every road to the far reaches of the kingdom. Hatred of the duke grew—a force so dangerous, a proclamation went out forbidding any man to speak of the duke of Buckingham, for fear it would incite an uprising.