The Queen's Dwarf A Novel (17 page)

She drew my hands away from my face and kissed my cheek. “Do not vex yourself over what you cannot change, Jeffrey. If your body was not so small and I had not been forced to come to England, our paths would never have crossed. That would have been very sad indeed.”

A lump formed in my throat, due to all the things I wish I could have said. Not to the queen, but, rather, to the lost girl who so often broke Will Evans’s heart.

Mitte, the queen’s favorite spaniel, whined and scratched at her skirts, wanting to comfort her as much as I did. She scooped up the wriggling bundle of fur and buried her face in its neck.

I angled my body away to blot out the sight. God help me, I had to act on Buckingham’s orders now or I never would. Only the thought of Samuel gave me strength enough to reach into the pouch Inigo Jones had designed in my costume.

I pinched the token from Tyburn between my fingers, dragged it out. I bowed my head over it and mumbled a prayer, hoping curiosity would be stirred. To betray with a prayer was perhaps an even greater wickedness than Judas Iscariot’s kiss.

“What have you got in your hand?” the queen asked as soon as I murmured “Amen.”

I pretended to muster my courage and extended my cupped hand. The medal winked, an evil eye against my skin. “A beggar slipped this to me on my way to chapel last Sunday. He said, ‘Give this to the queen. Tell Her Majesty that God’s faithful beyond the palace walls pin all our hopes on her.’”

“Yet you kept it for yourself, you little thief!” Madame Saint-Georges complained.

“I only wanted to make certain it was not poisoned before I let Her Majesty touch it.” I turned to the queen. “I figured if I carried it on my person, any poison would do its vile work on me. Perhaps I was foolish, but you seemed so happy for once. I did not want to trouble you. Was I wrong to do as I did?”

The queen picked up the coin, her fingertips brushing my palm. I had never felt any so soft. The warmth of her melted into my skin. I closed my hand tight on shards of guilt.

“This is not a coin,” she mused. “A holy medal, perhaps?” She held it up to the candle. Red glow spilled across the disk and bled between her fingers. I knew she could read the crude letters that had been struck into the medal’s surface.

“Tyburn,” she whispered.

“Tyburn?” One of her maids of honor turned to question Madame Saint-Georges. At thirteen, what could a protected little French girl know of such a place?

“It is the scaffold where criminals are executed,” Saint-Georges explained.

“Not just criminals,” I interjected. “Catholics, as well.” I had heard of a time when Bloody Mary had burned those of the reformed faith, but I did not mention that fact. “Jesuits and priests also die at Tyburn, suffering a traitor’s death.”

The maid of honor crossed herself. “God rest their blessed souls.”

The clock on the wall ticked so loudly, it hurt my ears. The queen pressed the hand clutching Buckingham’s medal against her breast. Amid the gauze of her costume I saw part of a rose she had torn from her hair. The petal stained the fabric, red as blood.

“Buckingham was present at the meeting where King James agreed my marriage would usher in a new age of tolerance. I swear the only reason Buckingham continues to push for the persecution of Catholics is to show his power over me.”

“A queen has more important matters to concern herself with than gutter folk,” Madame Saint-Georges scoffed, leveling me with a glare. “What do they expect her to do?”

“I do not know what they expect. I think, rather, they hope.” I pictured Samuel’s fervent joy those rare times we could find a priest. “I know someone who has never gone to Mass in a true chapel or church. His sins weigh on his conscience for months, sometimes even a year, before he can unburden himself to a Catholic confessor brave enough to absolve him. This lad lives in terror that he will die without Extreme Unction and be sent to hell. When a neighbor’s babe was not baptized, this lad wept for weeks, thinking of the tiny life walled out of Heaven.”

The queen pressed her hands on her own empty womb.

“Jeffrey! Shame on you for troubling Her Majesty with such tales,” Madame said. “Can you not see they distress her?”

“I am sorry. But it is hard to be poor. Not even to have hope of Heaven…” I looked into the bleak reality of my own future. “Your Majesty, if I were truly brave, I would say what is in my heart. But I do not have the courage of the lad I spoke of.”

The queen tipped her head to one side. Dark curls tumbled back, exposing her throat. “What does your heart tell you, Jeffrey? Your heart is big as any man’s.”

“The day after the banquet at York House, when I first came to this chamber, you said something that has haunted me ever since. You said that you had passed Tyburn in your coach. There, you saw an old lady making a pilgrimage, kneeling where the Catholic martyrs died. You said you wished God would tell you what to do to ease the plight of your English subjects.”

“I remember.”

My stomach lurched. I dipped my toes into hell. “I believe God stamped his wish on this medal.”

“You cannot be serious—” one of the other ladies gasped. Whispers buzzed around me and I could feel everyone in the chamber leaning forward, holding their breath. “It is too dangerous.”

I met Her Majesty’s dark French eyes. “You told me that a queen must never be afraid. If she is doing God’s will, is that not truer than ever?”

Henrietta Maria took a deep breath. Her eyes sparkled—not with wholesome fear, but with a kind of zeal I had seen in my own brother’s face. Something full of power and light I could not understand.

“Your simple folk will have their sign, Jeffrey.” The queen turned to her ladies. “To honor the Jubilee this summer, we shall garb ourselves in black and make that pilgrimage I spoke of. Walk barefoot from St. James’s Palace, through Hyde Park, to where the scaffold waits.”

“Majesty,” one of her timid ladies said, “will the English not try to stop you?”

“They must not find out until it is done. I will have the oath of everyone in this room that they will tell no one what we have spoken of here today.”

“Not even Father Philip?” the little maid of honor asked.

“Father has been urging me to take a stand. I shall ask him to lead us.”

“What of the king?” Madame Saint-Georges asked.

The queen twisted her wedding ring around her finger. “I am a daughter of France,” she said. “If it is God’s will that I make a pilgrimage to Tyburn, how can I refuse?”

It is not God’s will, I thought. It is the duke of Buckingham’s. Now, God forgive me, I have made it my own.

*   *   *

I had spent my whole life crowded by the sounds of fellow creatures, even in the deepest reaches of night. Not only the noise of my family but also the screams of pigs being slaughtered, the whimpers of dogs Father had brought home to nurse after they survived being in the ring with Buckingham’s bulls.

There had been so many times I would have given my allotment of bread for time alone with my own thoughts. But when the queen and her ladies of the bedchamber retired, a weary Little Sara trailing behind them, I could not bear the idea of returning to my own room.

To walk into the chamber was to face reminders of the kindnesses Her Majesty had shown: my small chair, the stairs leading up to the high platform of my bed, the writing table delivered the day after I had expressed my hunger for learning, the wooden surface piled with books for the lessons she had secured for me.

I wandered through the corridors, paused near the entry to the banqueting hall, which the queen had left in such distress. Sounds of music and laughter troubled me as I peeked into the room. The garlands of flowers bedecking the dais where the royals had sat were wilting, the scenery from the ill-fated masque abandoned, a fairyland whose magic had flown. Buckingham and Bishop Laud would be celebrating their triumph over the queen, though neither would admit their delight. They would show the king faces filled with outrage on his behalf or censure toward the queen—those grim, grieved expressions I had seen them adopt other times while they mined the king’s good opinion from beneath Henrietta Maria’s feet. I could only imagine how thrilled Buckingham would be if I were to seek him out and tell of Her Majesty’s plans.

I’d come up with a masterful falsehood to dupe her, one Buckingham would have been proud of. I soothed my guilt by reminding myself that the queen lied every time she dressed up Sara or displayed Robin Goodfellow’s paintings or marveled over Dulcinea’s uncanny balance. The queen gathered us in as if she were our mother, lavishing caresses on us, spoiling us with trinkets. But in the end, we were playthings to be hoarded and put on display, dressed up and moved about however she chose. As Archie said, we were no more important to her than the trained monkey.

What loyalty did I owe to a woman who regarded me that way? To brand that ugly truth in my mind, I headed away from the festivities and made my way to the Freaks’ Lair. It was empty, the menagerie still employed in the hall or off to bed after the excitement of the performance. Only Pug, the monkey, remained, fixed to a gold chain. I crossed to the nest of old costumes where Pug curled up, asleep, one hairy wrist twined in his chain. “Ho there, Pug,” I whispered so as not to startle him. He cracked his eyelids open, recognizing my voice. He held up his captive hand with a trust I did not deserve. I untangled him, then grabbed a few dates someone had left in a bowl on the table. I put one piece of dried fruit in my hand and held it out to the monkey. Pug snatched it and took a bite. I expected him to gobble it down, greedy. But he hesitated, looking from his treasure back to me.

Sad, dark eyes peered at me from that ugly face. He held out the half-eaten fruit to share.

Suddenly, I could not bear seeing him chained and alone. I unhooked the leash from its post in the wall, and the creature leaped up onto my shoulder. I reached up to peel him away from me, but—as if he sensed my intention—Pug scrambled across the back of my neck and down into the crook of my arms, pulling his chain with him. He laid with his belly up, his legs kicking the air like an ugly baby.

“Stupid animal,” I grumbled without malice, the chain bound around me. “You’ve got us both so tangled, we’ll never get free.”

Pug looked up at me, suddenly horribly wise. He laid his hand against my cheek.

*   *   *

Next morning as I entered the queen’s chamber, I could tell something had altered. The frenetic emotion that had gripped her since I’d joined her household had transformed into an air more unsettling. Every surface seemed draped with black cloth, her ladies under the command of Madame Saint-Georges applying shears with questionable skill. The laps of her little maids of honor overflowed with piles of black frieze to be fashioned into garments as they stitched the mountains of cloth. How alien the coarse material seemed, pillowed against bright silk skirts. Even the queen’s face appeared different, no longer frantic with gaiety, nor blustery with tantrums. Henrietta Maria’s animated features were as solemn as those of the Madonna that the widow in the shambles kept hidden from everyone but Samuel and me.

Her confessor beamed from a cushion in the corner as he read aloud from a volume of the
Lives of the Saints,
while Will Evans stood guard like a contrary Joshua, determined to hold
up
the walls of Jericho instead of tearing them down.

“Jeffrey!” the queen called out when Will announced me. “We have no time for play today. We have much sewing to do if we are to garb everyone who wishes to take part in my pilgrimage to Tyburn.”

“I see, Majesty.”

“Sergeant Evans insists he will accompany me. But I would not force anyone to make such a stand unless they chose to.” Her black Valois eyes asked what she would not say aloud.

I wanted to stay as far from my handiwork as possible. I imagined the London streets, the city folk who loathed the French. Women who would soon be sending their sons and husbands and fathers to fight the queen’s brother in a war her marriage had been meant to prevent, if what the king said was true.

I glanced up at Will Evans, noted his brow furrowed deep with worry. “Your Majesty,” he said. “Forgive me for speaking out of turn, but the walk to Tyburn is no place for Master Hudson. I do not doubt Jeffrey’s courage or his devotion to you, but I will have my hands full keeping you and your ladies from harm. Master Hudson would be trampled and lost in the crowd. We might never find him.”

I felt a new depth of self-loathing as I pictured the queen’s bare feet treading the road I had set her upon and Will Evans attempting to shield her.

The queen turned to me. “What say you, Jeffrey?”

“I think I would look well in black.” I looked from Henrietta Maria to Will and back again.

It would match the hue of my heart, I thought.

E
LEVEN

June

I cannot say what it was that deepened the queen’s attachment to me during the weeks that followed. But she stitched me into the fabric of her days as intimately as she pulled the black thread through the frieze. It unnerved me to see how openhearted she was; to sense that something in me called to her, a rare communion I tried to resist.

Yet how could I? She shone at the center of every day, her eyes lighting up when I came into the room, her laugh spilling over my antics. She needed me, and I had not imagined how dangerous that sensation could be.

It felt so strange to think of my life before the queen, the journeys I had taken because of her. I had been glad to put all of the places I had lived behind. But when Griggory packed the contents of my room so we could join the rest of the queen’s household on its trek to Whitehall Palace, I felt a loss I had never experienced before.

I had heard of Whitehall’s size and splendor. When I finally beheld my new home, I was overwhelmed by the chaotic jumble of buildings. Whitehall might have been one more Gothic beast sprung from Will’s imagination. To prepare me for the move, he described the palace as so greedy for space that it devoured the houses once crowding the suburb of Westminster. Henry VIII had leveled every building in the area to form his sprawling seat of government.