The Queen's Dwarf A Novel (49 page)

“He never will forsake her.” I poured the wine into flagons. We drank to the queen’s health, to the king’s love. We drank until I drifted to sleep at the table. From some misty world of half dream, I felt Will lift me, carry me, lay me upon my bed.

I woke a little as Griggory undressed me. At last, I slept.

*   *   *

I watched from a distance as she took her first steps from the confinement chamber, her arms empty of the child she had nurtured in her body, yearned for so much during her lonely, heartsick times. She was too pale, her eyes dark with grief. Even the finest delicacies the kitchens could prepare could not tempt her appetite. None of Simon’s dog tricks or Pug’s capering or the wiles of the rest of the menagerie could hold her attention.

Cocooned by my fear for her and my isolation from the everyday world of the court, I did not realize that the menagerie had gained the attention of a new and dangerous audience until the countess of Carlisle sought me out in the stables.

I had not really spoken to the countess since the day she left my life in ruins. I let my hatred of her show in my face. “Is there a piece of my correspondence to His Grace you are unable to decipher for the queen?” I asked. “Intrigue demanded that I dash those missives off in great haste.”

“I took no pleasure in giving the queen your letters. But I had to protect someone I love. With Buckingham dead, it was the only way I could maintain enough power to do so.”

“Your
power
?” I scoffed.

“Power is nothing to sneer at. What would you sacrifice right now to open your brother’s cell door? Do not tell me you wouldn’t hand the queen someone else’s letters. We both know it would be a lie.”

“Someone you loved was in danger?”

“Yes. The person I love most in the world.” A self-deprecating smirk curled her lips. “Me.”

“You?”

“I am not a great believer in the unselfish gesture. I leave that to women like the queen and Kate Villiers. I decided long ago that no one—not my father or mother, certainly not my husband or any man—would ever take care of me as well as I could. It is unwomanly, I know. But it is the truth.”

“Honesty is a refreshing change. Are you considering making it a habit?”

“Only if it serves my purpose—as this gift will.” She extended the packet. I took it, wary, and opened it.

“Dog collars?” I touched the unique pattern of metal studs I had seen my father drive through leather straps so he could identify his dogs.

“I have seen identical collars at Buckingham’s bull-baiting contests,” the countess said.

“Did you take them off of the gored dogs as souvenirs?” I asked.

“I took them off of the beasts that attacked the queen.”

“How could my father’s collars—” I stopped cold with horror.

“Do not look so ghastly. No one else saw them. No one ever will.”

“Why—why would you bring them to me?”

“Anyone who linked them to your father would believe you arranged the attack to punish the queen.”

“You do not believe it?”

“I know you would not harm her.”

“Do you know who did?”

“They took a man to prison. Some underling so bewildered by it all, it was useless to question him. I did not see him, hooded as he was. The guards said it was just as well. Dogs had torn up his face.”

“I suppose that I should thank you.”

“Buckingham would tell you not to bother. Someday I will collect payment for the service I have done you.”

I wondered just how much she thought my life was worth.

“There is one more matter I must bring to your attention,” she said.

“What is that?”

“It involves what some friends of yours are printing. I believe their shop is called something knightly, like the Saracen’s Bane.”

Wariness flooded through me as I remembered the portly printer, his thin wife and three little daughters. In my fear for Samuel, I had not stopped to wonder what their fate had been.

“Is that not the place where your brother and his Jesuit were arrested?”

“My brother had a tutor who deceived him. It is rumored the man was a Jesuit.”

“Strange that the printer was not jailed with them.”

“I am glad.”

“I would not be if I were you. Since the pursuivants’ visit, the bookseller has become fierce in condemning the queen and her Church, though the king has not yet traced these broadsheets to their source.” She indicated the crumpled wrapper in which I had found the collars.

I smoothed the broadsheet—slightly smeared ink images on paper made of the cheapest rags. I stared, horrified, at the woodcut someone had stamped upon the page: an orgy of twisted limbs and malformed bodies, leering faces, and court ladies swiving with creatures barely even human. Nuns and priests, French bishops, all fornicating merrily right under the king’s nose. I could recognize us all—the queen’s curiosities—engaging in the worst sort of vice. Most repulsive of all was the image of me in my devil-imp costume, suckling on the queen’s bared breast while pieces of the child the queen miscarried hung from meat hooks above us.

The true purpose of the Royal Menagerie
 … the broadsheet proclaimed.
Blood alone can save our king.…

T
WENTY-
N
INE

Dawn was creeping across the floor three weeks later when I was awakened by an insistent rap. I sprang out of bed, panicked that childbed fever stalked the queen, the contagion that killed more mothers than any other malady.

I flung the door open, expecting to find a servant in the king’s livery. Instead, I was staring at Will’s hairy shin above boot tops with no stockings.

“What is it?” I asked, more frightened than ever. “The queen?”

“Dulcinea.” His voice broke. “Good God, Jeff. Boku claims someone poisoned her.”

“There are people at court a dose of poison might improve, but a dancing girl?” I scoffed. “Why would anyone seek to harm Dulcinea now that Buckingham is gone?”

“That is what I said! The quail she was eating must have been spoiled, or she caught some ague that is twisting her reason. I would not have left her side except that she’s thrashing about, asking for you, Jeff.”

I flung on breeches and boots, threaded my arms through a doublet. Leaving the garments open, I started after him. “She’s young and strong,” Will insisted more to himself than to me. “I know she will not die.” He paused, searching my face. “We just have to put her at ease. If she will let Boku do his work … watch. She will get well. She will get well.”

For once, he did not spare my dignity. He scooped me up and set me on his shoulder. Anguish rippled from him in waves as he loped back toward the women’s quarters in his awkward, knock-kneed gait. I grabbed handfuls of his bristly hair to keep from falling off.

“We must hurry,” Will said as we passed wide-eyed servants and gape-mouthed guards. I knew some part of Will still hoped one day Dulcinea might change her mind and love him.

My teeth were near jarred out of my head by the time we reached the chamber Dulcinea shared with Sara. I had never been inside it before. Dulcinea had obviously taken all that was prettiest, softest, and best in their small store. Her bed might have belonged in a sultan’s harem, draped with sheer loops of gauze and luxurious embroidered linens. A pewter plate scattered with tiny bones of a quail sat on the seat of a chair. A table by the window was piled with vials and small casks of creams and lotions and unguents that smelled of musk and jasmine. But not even those rich scents could disguise a creeping odor of death I knew from the shambles. Dulcinea will never dance upon her rope again, will never learn to love my friend, I thought with sick certainty.

She lay on a pile of cushions, thrusting her long legs against the mattress. My heart twisted to see that sometime in the past weeks Will had given her the wedding linens he had gathered for her so tenderly. The alabaster flesh that had won her the attentions of a duke was beginning to mottle. Slender fingers gripped handfuls of coverlet. Her gaze darted from dark corner to dancing shadow, as if seeing devils no one else could see.

“Dulcinea, love, I have brought Jeffrey,” Will said as he set me on my feet. I wobbled a little, the absence of his jouncing gate oddly more jarring than his running had been.

“Jeffrey. I need to confess before I die.”

“You are not going to die!” Will growled. But he was the only one in the chamber who believed that.

“I’m no confessor,” I said as gently as I could. “Better to summon Father Philip.”

“I do not want Father Philip! You are the one I have done a great wrong. To you. To the queen.” A haunted expression crossed Dulcinea’s face, as if she had been shaken out of her pretty dream world to find she really lived in the gutter.

“Do you believe in hell?” she asked.

“My brother is in Fleet Prison. That is close enough for me.”

Terror flickered at the backs of her eyes, and I wanted to give her ease. “How can anyone really know what Heaven or hell are?”

“I do. Wanting what you can never have. Scorning what you should be grateful for. Getting so greedy that you gorge on pleasure until your soul splits open and everything good in you seeps out. Believing someone loves you when that person tramples over you without even noticing. You know how that feels, don’t you, Jeffrey?”

Was she thinking of the falsehood I had told so the queen would cancel the wedding? “If you have been listening to the rumors regarding my feelings for you, you need to understand. I was lying in a meddling attempt to save Will from breaking his heart over you. I let the queen believe I loved you. I don’t.”

“Neither did Buckingham. But I loved him.”

I felt Will flinch.

“We were beautiful to look at. If you could have seen us, tangled in the duke’s fine sheets, you would have been amazed. He had mirrors hung so we could watch ourselves. We didn’t see that we were empty inside.”

“Dulcinea,” Will soothed her said soothingly, “that was in the past. Do not fret about things you cannot change. Just get well.”

“I never can, Will. Someone so pretty was born to be a whore. That is what my mother said. She handed me to one of her customers when I was barely eight. I learned to cross laundry ropes, strung between houses, to get away. Buckingham … couldn’t get away from King James. No rope in the kingdom was high enough or long enough. The king could always reach him.”

Had not Buckingham’s wife said the same thing with different words?

“Buckingham wanted to be so much more than a body people wanted to grope. So did I. We wanted to dazzle the world with such … brilliance that we’d never be forgotten. Now Buckingham will be remembered as a reckless fool. And I … I will be known as the woman in league with the man who tried to murder the queen.”

“You?” Will exclaimed. “I don’t believe it.”

“I would have done his bidding forever, stirring up trouble when he wished it, loving Buckingham when I was able. Then Buckingham died. I threatened to tell everything.”

Who would want to silence her—to protect Buckingham’s reputation? The mother who had idolized Buckingham and turned panderer to a king? Lady Carlisle, his mistress? I thought of Buckingham’s duchess—her fierceness.
Would that I could do something to shield him.

Even poison a young woman? Who else could care so much about Buckingham’s reputation?

“You threatened whom?” I asked. “The duchess? The king?”

“No. I had stolen letters. Listened at keyholes. Betrayed all of you; the queen, the menagerie. He told me it didn’t matter, that freaks do not have feelings.”

Every flaw in Will’s body and mine seemed to swell larger, twist uglier with the label she had given us. It was as if the monsters depicted in that grotesque broadsheet were trying to break free.

Will looked as if he were going to be sick. “You were spying on us?”

“He needed a way to get to the queen. What better way than through the menagerie she loved? But once I knew he was trying to kill the queen—”

“Buckingham is the one who sabotaged the scaffolding the night you lost the babe?” I asked.

Dulcinea gave a ragged laugh. “Buckingham was not clever enough to plan such a thing. The duke became as much a tool in evil hands as I was.”

“If not the duke, then who?” I prodded, knowing from the rattle in Dulcinea’s chest that the poison was doing its work. “Was the Wizard Earl’s daughter the one behind the plot?”

“Recognized who it was the day … set the dogs on the queen. Meant dogs to rip out the queen’s throat.”

“Dulcinea’s not making any sense,” Will said, but she plunged on.

“Could scarce believe my eyes. Dogs knocked mask askew. A devil’s grin carved…” She touched the hinge of her jaw, revulsion flooding her face.

Simon Rattlebones shuddered. “The dog trainer I met at the Saracen’s Bane when I took your letter to Samuel,” he said. “He had a hideous grin.”

“Phineas,” I whispered, disbelieving. “I’ve known him since I was a child. He would never use dogs to kill.”

“Stopped savage dogs before they could do the dark angel’s will. Frightened me at first, but the Gargoyle … his eyes were the kindest I’ve ever seen. He was searching for you, Jeffrey.”

“He never reached me.”

“Guards dragged him off. Poor Gargoyle kept telling them he didn’t do it. Not easy to train a pack to attack a specific person. Didn’t try to bite the queen’s other ladies. How could someone do that?”

“My father could make his dogs fight lions if he wanted them to,” I said. “Get a piece of clothing—something that smelled of the person. Savage the dog with a pike wrapped in cloth with the person’s scent on it.”

“Other ways, as well. Stitched something on queen’s petticoat. Oil made dogs go mad. When the queen was sick, I sneaked into her chamber. Found the clothes she’d been wearing when she was attacked.”

“That’s what you were doing in the queen’s chamber the day she lost her babe.”

“Waited for a chance to sneak away. Take the clothes to the … angel that Dr. Dee summoned.”

“Dr. Dee?” Rattlebones frowned. “Is she talking about the alchemist?”