The Queen's Dwarf A Novel (41 page)

“We all knew something was wrong,” I said, lying. “The rope was wobbling.”

“I see. No member of your band of freaks would play assassin, but the most powerful noble in the land would murder the queen in such a crude fashion? Buckingham could have the queen aboard a ship to France before nightfall if he wished it. You want to help the queen? Get back to your Freaks’ Lair and do what you do best. Creep about listening behind arrases and pry through people’s letters. I’ll find you when the duke has need of your services.” Ware strode from the room, sure I would obey.

I stalked out of the palace to the master of arms the queen had secured for me. I did not wait for a servant to open the door. I burst in to where he had just finished a lesson with one of the earl of Carlisle’s pages.

I saluted my master. “En garde.” The page sniggered as the master turned to fight me. I flung myself into the battle more fiercely than ever before.

No one was laughing by the time I put down my sword.

*   *   *

Exhausted, drenched in sweat, I made my way to Will’s chamber, intending to tell him my suspicions. He sat at Dulcinea’s bedside, his great paw engulfing her hand as Boku fed her sips of some foul brew.

I slipped up beside them. “How is she?” I asked.

“She will be fine in time,” Will said, his smile a broken thing. “She must rest and do as Boku tells her.”

I thought of Ware’s suspicion of Boku. “Has she seen a surgeon?”

“Butcher, more like!” Will snarled. “Poking at her until she screamed! But Boku put a stop to it. Dulcinea’s resting now. All will be well.”

“It will be, Jeffrey.” Dulcinea let her head fall back to the pillow and gave me a wan smile.

My throat felt raw. “I am sorry about the baby.”

“She is better off this way. Will promised he would see my baby girl buried in consecrated ground even if he’s damned for it.”

“Will would have made a fine father,” I said.

Her beautiful eyes drifted closed. “But I would have made an abominable mother. Maybe worse than mine was—and she was a witch indeed. That is why I am glad about what happened. The one thing the surgeon and Boku agree on is that I will never be able to have children.”

“Will won’t care about that,” I said. “He loves you.”

“I know.” Tears ran down her cheeks, dampening the pillow. “But you see he does not need to marry me now. I can stay free like the butterflies.”

I looked at Will’s face. Had he looked so stricken when I had entered?

“Is that not right, Will?” she asked.

“Yes. A butterfly should be free. But I will be here if you need someplace to land.” Will let go of her hand.

I stood there, uncertain what to do. He had burdens enough to bear without me adding my suspicions. I had no solid proof, nothing except the hard knot of instinct beneath my ribs. But he was the queen’s sergeant porter—the shield that stood between Henrietta Maria’s private quarters and the outside world, a world that had become far more dangerous.

I could keep my secret for a few days while he dealt with Dulcinea’s rejection, but if something happened to the queen, I would never forgive myself. Worse still, Will Evans would never forgive me.

I tapped him on the arm, nodded my head in the direction of the door. Will followed me into the dimly lit corridor.

I looked the passage up and down. When I was satisfied no one was listening, I drew him into a nearby alcove. A marble bench built into the wall looked out a window over the garden. I patted the seat and Will sat down. I climbed up onto the surface and stood, thinking how easily the pair of us had made adjustments to our difference in size. This would be a harder gap to bridge.

“What is it, Jeff? I need to get back to Dulcinea.”

What would be the point of reminding him Dulcinea had just jilted him? I sucked in a deep breath. “Will, I’ve been down in the hall where they’re clearing away the wreckage. The timbers splintering might not have been an accident. Master Jones and Uriel Ware are attempting to find out what happened.”

I could see Will’s temper smolder. “You think Buckingham did it to rid himself of the child?”

“Dulcinea told you Buckingham fathered the babe?”

“She did not have to after that outburst of his just before she performed. She was shaking before she even stepped onto the rope! I’ll kill him with my own hands if he hurt her.”

I imagined Buckingham’s throat crushed in Will’s grip, Will squeezing while the duke’s face turned a satisfying purple. How would His Grace like the sensation of being totally helpless in someone else’s grasp?

No, even the pleasure of seeing my nemesis thus would not be worth the price of involving Will. Retribution would be terrible if a commoner—one of Her Majesty’s freaks—murdered a peer of the realm. What payment would the king demand in forfeit for his favorite’s life? Just imagining the repercussions made me cringe. No wonder the most hated man in England was still alive.

“I know you would do whatever it might take to punish a coward who endangered Dulcinea, Will. But Buckingham? Why should the duke want to kill her?”

“To get rid of the child.”

“There are easier ways. Every cunning woman has a potion hidden away for just that purpose.”

“Who else would want to harm a rope dancer?”

“If this wasn’t an accident, whoever is guilty of this thing did not care whether Dulcinea lived or died. Her weight on the rope was just the trigger that set their trap in motion. The target the villain meant to kill was the queen.”

*   *   *

The fire on the hearth drew orange fingers into a pile of embers and sighed its dying breath as I crept into the menagerie’s deserted lodgings. The room was cluttered with the reminders of the performance that had gone so wrong: snippets of ribbon Sara had woven around the handle of Dulcinea’s basket, peacock feathers Boku had refused to wear in his headdress. Rattlebones had thrust the plumes into the ear of a cyclops mask left from some other masque, making Will laugh. I wondered when my friend would laugh again.

The glow from my lone candle snagged on the blue-green of a discarded butterfly. The beautiful creature Robin had painted lay crumpled on the floor, its wing wrenched off by Pug in the hours before the performance—before the disaster that had likely been designed to kill the queen. Was it possible that the plot had originated here, as Uriel Ware feared? Had Boku shared wine and warmth and companionship with Will and Dulcinea all this time, then sent her up onto that rope to fall?

I had been placed in the menagerie to cause trouble for the king and queen. How much more trouble could an illusionist like Boku stir up if some shadowy master or mistress commanded him to? What secrets might be hidden—not only beneath the velvet gauntlets but in the strange patched-together cupboard he had brought with him from the Carlisles’?

I made my way to the corner Boku had made his own. Shelves and cases for the accoutrements of his illusions ranged up the wall. Some of the small doors in the structure were locked. But among the skills I had practiced with Ware was the ability to pick locks. I drew what looked like a bent toothpick from a tiny sheath inside my boot and began the tedious process of tripping the lock’s tumblers.

My upper lip grew moist before I heard the click of the mechanism opening. I grasped the knob that opened the door, pulled. A book copied by hand was in the first cupboard, a swooping heathen script written on pages made of some sort of animal hide. Five pointed stars and beasts were drawn in the sky. A crude rattle of some kind was painted with a man-bird with gold-rimmed feathers, wings spread like those on the king’s gyrfalcon. A small alabaster urn was capped with the face of a dog. Small bones were laid out as if to form a living creature, and for an instant I wondered if Boku were attempting to bring back the dead.

As I moved to search the next cupboard, a voice behind me nearly made me piss myself.

“You must search more carefully than that if you hope to find what you seek.”

I wheeled around, to find Boku just behind me. My throat went dry and I wondered if he had been hidden in the shadows the whole time. Still, I tried to lie. “It was open when I came in and I could not quell my curiosity. Perhaps Pug is cleverer than we knew. He must know where you hide the key.”

“There is no key. The locks are there so I will know if someone has been prying in my things. The bird engraved on the bottom of the lock reverses itself if anyone tampers with my case. There are many such precautions built into the chest. It is based on a puzzle box stolen from an ancient grave. The thief died three days later, a tiny insect bite turning putrid. They claim the box was cursed.”

“You’re not dead.”

“I spoke to the spirit who cursed it, promised that if it gave up its secrets to me, I would return the box to its rightful place. Perhaps the old one understood that sometimes we are forced to desecrate things we do not wish to. Or perhaps there was no curse at all.” Boku reached over my head and plucked up a chain hidden between the book’s cover. He tugged, and a flat disk set with crystals thinner than glass slid free, swaying gently as I watched it drink in my candle’s light. “I shall tell you an illusionist’s greatest secret: People see what they are told to see. Instead of a grief-mad old woman muttering to her long-dead child, they see a hag coupling with your Christian devil. Instead of a gyrfalcon trained to seek a morsel doused in an elixir that strips it of its will, they see a gyrfalcon tamed to a stranger’s hand. And you—a court fool so tiny, he is thought to be no more powerful than Pug upon a chain.”

“What are you?”

“One who travels paths my masters set my feet upon. As you do.”

“Why did the countess of Carlisle place you in the royal household? To harm the queen?”

“What do you believe?”

“No.” The herb scent grew stronger, and I wondered if Boku was drugging me as he had the falcon.

“The countess is, perhaps, the greatest illusion I have ever encountered.” He reached over my head and pressed something I could not see. A drawer slid out and he plucked up a blown-glass vial with letters painted upon it. I recognized that they were Hebrew, like the page Samuel had shown me in his lesson books at the Saracen’s Bane. “Now, I have retrieved what I came for, I must return to Dulcinea and use it to ease her pain. We will not speak of this again.” He gently shut the cupboard door. It was not until he was gone that I realized I had never heard the magician speak so much. Yet he had never asked what I had been looking for.

*   *   *

I tilted with phantoms long into the night, trying to unearth motives and strip away disguises that might conceal whoever had meant to harm the queen. Did Henrietta Maria realize that the nightmare that had terrified her since childhood had come true? A shadowy assassin stalking her, rigging the scaffolding to crash down upon her?

I could not shake the image from my mind—some faceless predator milling around during our rehearsals, listening as we pieced together our dances and acrobatics, timing them to the music. Had the villain talked to Rattlebones about the spaniels or examined one of Goodfellow’s painted butterflies? Or had the malignant force stood beneath Dulcinea’s dancing rope to help Sara retrieve the butterflies as Dulcinea scattered them time and again in an effort to perfect the effect Jones had designed.

It chilled me to imagine calculating eyes attempting to gauge where best to weaken either the wood or the performers. I wondered if the queen’s attacker knew that in some ways a botched assassination attempt would be a more effective torture for the queen than its success. A swift, crushing death would put an end to this horrendous speculation, be in many ways more merciful than the terror of looking into every face that came your way, wondering if it was possible that the next person you saw was plotting your murder.

How do you protect a queen from an assassin? I wondered, feeling helpless. I could not even decide what reaction I
hoped
to see in her or what I could do to make her safe. On one hand, I wanted her walled inside a tower, where no malevolent force could reach her. I wanted her fearful enough to put an end to her secret trips to the chapel while the rest of the palace slept. Even with stalwart Will guarding her, it was not safe. An enemy who got wind of her ritual need only hide behind an arras or statue, then cause some sort of commotion Will would have to investigate. When his back was turned, it would be easy enough to strike.

I wanted Henrietta Maria to regard every member of her household as if that person might be a spy. Trusting no one would be wisest. After all, she could not trust me—a man who would gladly die to save her, if Samuel’s future had not hung in the balance.

Yet to see that relentless dread in Henrietta Maria’s eyes—to have her grow suspicious of those who loved her most … it would be like denying her sun and air. She had been luminous from the first moment I saw her. To extinguish that light was more than I could bear.

It was not as if Henrietta Maria was new to the dangers of court intrigue. She’d cut her milk teeth upon it. The struggle for power between her brother the king, before he was of age, and her mother, whose regency was struck down—that battle had marked her childhood. She’d witnessed Richelieu’s Machiavellian plotting, the de Guise family grasping whatever power they could steal. She was far more learned in the ways of this deadly political game than I could ever be. As I entered her chamber, it was obvious she refused to allow the accident to shake her courage.

The queen had dressed in a gown of defiant crimson. She was determinedly going about the business of her day, yet there were dark circles beneath her eyes and a tiny cut on her brow.

I pulled my gaze away from it and made my formal bow. “Majesty, forgive me for my tardiness. Are you well?” I asked. “Does your wound hurt?”

She touched her fingertips to the scab. Her wedding ring glinted. “I did not even realize I had been cut until dear Lucy dabbed her handkerchief upon it and I saw blood. I was too horrified at what befell the rest of you. I have never seen such a thing happen before—scenery crashing down! If I had been in my seat at the time—” Her voice hitched in unease. “His Majesty said I might have been killed!”