The Queen's Dwarf A Novel (33 page)

I swallowed hard, remembering. It had never mattered how often our mother had combed it to make it stick down straight. Before half an hour had passed, it would spring back, wild as it had been before she started.

He did not even look up, so engrossed was he in whatever task was at hand. His brow rumpled in concentration as he copied something in what looked to be Latin. I tried not to feel hurt that Master Quintin had to speak three times to get my brother’s attention.

“Samuel, did I not tell you to rest so you might enjoy your brother’s visit?”

“Jeffrey will not be here for hours yet. I just hope I have time to finish this before—”

“Your brother is here now.”

I sensed that Master Quintin interrupted to spare my feelings. Samuel dropped his pen, his head snapping around to see me. I expected him to rush over and embrace me, horrified at his blunder. He did not even seem to realize his words might have wounded me.
Had
wounded me.

“Jeff!” he cried, but it was as if someone had stitched his breeches to the seat as a jest. He shifted, as if wanting to answer the call of brotherly affection, yet could not pull free of his task. “I am so glad to see you! Don’t think that I’m not! It is just that I am not quite finished—”

“Yes, you are,” the tutor said, limping over to take the pen from Samuel’s hand. Quintin clamped the quill in the vee between his thumb and first knuckle, and I noticed his fingers were as rigid as the hooks in the butcher shop’s ceiling.

Samuel cast me an apologetic glance as he braced one hand on the table to push himself to his feet. The entire surface wriggled, slopping ink over the edge of the pot. He groped for a cloth to wipe the spilled ink from his hands. “I am so sorry I was not ready to welcome you. Now, here I am, so clumsy, and you, dressed so fine. I don’t dare greet you properly or I will ruin your clothes.”

I wanted to close the space between us and tell him I had a chestful of clothes. I had only one Samuel. But something seemed askew with my brother, and his tutor was looking on. Some affection was too precious to expose to a stranger.

“Your brother is the most diligent student I have ever come across,” Master Quintin said. “It is my dearest wish that you take this lad out into the sunshine and convince him to enjoy himself, Master Hudson. The one lesson I cannot squeeze into that busy mind of his is that a scholar must stretch his body as he does his wit. Cramp either of them overlong and it will atrophy from disuse.” He dropped the quill some distance from my brother.

Samuel grinned at him—the wide grin that had once been saved just for me. “I never imagined there was so much to learn, Jeff! Master Quintin is the wisest man I’ve ever known.”

The tutor’s brow arched. “That is not so great a tribute as it seems, since you never set foot outside your country village until we came to London. Your brother, however, has moved in the court’s highest circles.” Had the tutor known what I was thinking? If so, his words translated it as deftly as Tobie Mathews translated for the queen that first night at York House. “I am certain Master Hudson will tell you of truly remarkable men.”

Was the tutor jesting about the menagerie when he used the word
remarkable
? It was hard to tell. There was something guarded about the man, yet he had humor in him, as well. His next words seemed utterly serious, almost wistful. “I have heard the king is as fine a collector of art as any man in the world.”

“That is why I wished Samuel to lodge with me at the palace. So he could see it with his own eyes.” Samuel dropped the ink-splotched rag on the cluttered table as Quintin leveled him with a puzzled stare. “You did not tell me that you had been invited to the palace.”

Samuel fished the quill out of the muddle of writing tools. He flattened the feathers as if to smooth ruffled feelings. Mine? Or Quintin’s? I could not guess. “Plans were already set to stay here. I did not want to upset them. Much as I love my brother, Master, I don’t belong in such a grand place. Not when I can be of use to you.”

I tensed. Was I being overly sensitive? Why did it seem as though we had been apart for more than a year?

“The chance to see the royal collection is a rare privilege. Not one any student should miss.” Quintin said it tenderly, without real reproach. No wonder Samuel seemed to be blossoming under his care. “I have heard that the queen has built a most amazing chapel designed by Inigo Jones, the finest architect in all England. He has carried countless ideas from Italy, the classic designs of Palladio. I would give much to see Jones’s work myself.”

“Then come with us!” Samuel urged. “Jeffrey would not mind, would you, Jeff?” My brother turned to me, so eager and sure of my approval. Perhaps it was no wonder John got the urge to punch him sometimes. Could Samuel not tell how much I had counted on seeing him alone?

I hesitated just long enough that his tutor understood without words. “I fear I have only gotten permission for you to visit the queen’s side of the palace.”

The tutor shuffled the papers together on Samuel’s desktop. I could tell my brother wanted to grab them back. “Samuel, I have managed to get along without you somehow these forty years.” Quintin smiled. “Granted, I do not know how, but it is not good to grow too dependent on you.”

Quintin sniffed the air, his eyes drifting shut. “I vow, I might be in Valencia again, the scent of oranges is so strong. Your Samuel delights in oranges.”

I had not known he had ever tasted them, let alone developed a fondness for them. I would not get to see him take that first sweet-sour taste of them after all. Disappointed, I untied the bag I had brought with me, my offering seeming inadequate. “They were crushed on the way here.”

Quintin sighed. “It is a hazardous path between our station and the palace. There are countless pitfalls on the way.”

Pitfalls indeed. What had Quintin called him? “Your Samuel”? He did not feel like my Samuel anymore. He’d sprouted so, he’d soon be taller than John. A satisfying prospect if it meant Samuel would be harder to bully, but with Samuel’s nature, the best I could hope for was that people who did not know him would be more likely to leave him alone. His face was fuller in the cheeks. His cowlick even obeyed him now. But there was still a hungry expression about him, something in his face that seemed to yearn outward. It startled me to realize I did not know toward what.

“Go on, lads. Off with you. When you return, Master Hudson, there is someone anxious to see you: a friend of yours.”

“I cannot imagine who.” I did not have any friends save Samuel and those in the menagerie.

Samuel seemed to sense his tutor’s resolve. He grabbed the sack of oranges and thrust them into his teacher’s hands. “I wish you would eat these while I am gone,” Samuel said.

“They are for you,” I wanted to protest, stung, but Quintin was quicker to reply.

“Your brother intends them for you. But if you decide to share them with our guest when you return, that would show Master Hudson the good manners I am intent on teaching you.”

I heard the thud of footsteps on the stairs. A portly man appeared so intent on wiping ink-blackened hands on his apron, he didn’t see me. Tufts of white hair thrust out above each ear, the top of his head bald and gleaming. “Has Samuel’s brother arrived? Never heard such a clamor from the street vendors down below.”

Master Quintin chuckled. “They are hoping to flush out a customer with ties to the palace. This is Samuel’s brother, Jeffrey Hudson. Master Hudson, this is my boyhood friend, Bartholomew Rowland.”

Rowland looked down at me. He tried not to gape. “W—welcome to the Saracen’s Bane. My girls are anxious to meet you.” Rowland shouted down the stairs. “Maggie! Gwendolyn! Alice!”

What sounded like a trio of bullocks thundered up the stairs. I was stunned when three delicate girls between the ages of five and ten peeked out from behind their father.

“Girls, say good morrow to Samuel’s brother,” Rowland bade them.

The middle child buried her face against her big sister’s shoulder, while the younger one looked as if she thought I might eat her. She obviously thought her thumb was the tastiest morsel, for she popped it in her mouth. The eldest girl tried to curtsy, no easy task, since her sisters were both clinging to her. “Good morrow, sir,” she said.

A door at the back of the chamber opened and a thin woman bustled out. The two younger girls bolted over to her, the thumb-sucker scaling the woman like Pug climbed Inigo Jones’s scaffolds.

“Forgive them their breech of manners, Master Hudson,” the woman said, cuddling her daughters close. “The girls have grown quite shy of visitors.”

“My wife, Margery,” Rowland said, introducing the woman with a wave. “No woman in London is finer at stitching together a book’s pages or etching copper plates for illustrations. She learned at her father’s knee.”

“I am honored to meet you, Master Hudson,” she said. “The girls and I are off to my aunt’s for the night. I regret we will not be here when you return.”

“I plan to retire early as well,” the printer said in obvious discomfort.

I could only be grateful. That would be one less batch of intruders when it came to time with my brother. Yet what was driving Rowland from his own hearth?

The monkey child piped up from her mother’s arms, “I’m going to be taller than Gwenny someday, so mama says she’d best not pull my hair. Are you going to be taller than Samuel?”

“I will never be taller than Samuel.” I had known that truth for a very long time, but saying it to this small girl made the truth ache.

Quintin cleared his throat. “Master Hudson, you really should hurry. It’s unkind to get the peddlers’ hopes so high when you have no intention of buying anything.”

He wished to help me escape the discomfort. I could tell in the tone of his voice. I seized the chance and made my way down to the coach with Samuel.

A footman waited to open the door. Samuel’s eyes widened at the liveried servant. My brother hesitated a moment before he climbed into the equipage. He ran his fingertips across the velvet seat, never able to resist feeling something soft.

For as long as I could remember, Samuel had comforted himself by twirling his silky curls. John had often grabbed the curl out of Samuel’s grasp, giving it a stiff yank. I often thought John would have to shave Samuel bald if he wanted to put an end to the hair twirling. What no one but Samuel knew was that I was the one who’d started the habit. At night when I’d been anxious or scared, I would run one of my brother’s curls between my fingers so I could sleep. I had almost asked him to snip one off so I could take it with me to Buckingham’s.

The thick silence in the coach’s interior left too much space for painful imagining. I filled it with mindless chatter as best I could.

“You are so tall, I almost would not have recognized you. I hoped you would get more to eat without me around.”

“I did. For a while. Until…” Samuel reached for a strand of his hair and wound it around one ink-stained finger. “I don’t blame them. You would have been as mad as Father and Mother and John if you’d caught me.”

“Doing what?”

“Everything would have been fine if that meddling baker’s wife hadn’t praised mother for her ‘Christian charity’ in feeding the widow.”

“Oh, Samuel. Doesn’t the widow have her own son to do that?”

“He turned lunatic from his time at sea. When she got sick with the pox, he took all the food that was to last the whole winter, took the widow’s coins and even the Virgin statue from under the floorboards, then ran away. ‘Saved the widow’s life, you Hudsons have,’ Mrs. Baker told Mother. ‘So careful of the widow’s pride, as well, sending food all secret with your lad.’”

“I meant Buckingham’s coin to make things better for you!”

“I couldn’t break the habit of sneaking food away from the table, and it would have been a sin to waste it once I’d already taken it.”

“That argument lacks a certain logic.”

“It is up to Master Quintin to help me sort it out. You have only yourself to worry about now.” Samuel looked me up and down. “You’ve grown as well in the time you’ve been gone.”

Was it possible? A child’s excitement surged through me, the hope I’d felt after one of John’s attempts to stretch my inadequate body. But that child had watched his brothers and sister grow—seen hems let down and breeches grow so short that they had to be passed down to the next child in line. My shirtsleeves reached my wrists, hose plenty long enough to tie to my breeches. Irritation at my gullibility pricked at me. I hadn’t expected such tricks from Samuel. “I have not grown at all.”

“Not in size, Jeffrey. But there are other ways to grow. I do not know how to explain it except that since you left Oakham, you’ve grown large in …
knowing.
”

I lowered my eyelids for dread Samuel would see the ugliness I had learned of. How strange, to protect a lad who had grown up in the shambles from the luxury-filled life where I now belonged.

“May I tell you something? I half-dreaded your coming to see me. I was afraid you would be ashamed of me,” Samuel confessed in that shy way of his.

I started to protest, but Master Quintin’s lessons had infused some new confidence in my brother. “I knew you would not want to feel embarrassed by me and you would try not to show it. But Father told us you turned him away when he first came to the palace.”

I remembered the sense of violation I had felt when Father had touched things in my room. How mercenary Father had been, wanting to sell the writing box the queen had given me. Did my abhorrence of the man who had sired me make me as ungrateful as the king had claimed? Samuel, of all people, should understand my wanting to keep Father out of my new life. But Samuel couldn’t. He was fool enough to go chasing into the cottage of a lunatic and a widow with pox. He would never bar the door to his own parent. There was no way to make Samuel understand, but I did the best I could.

“You are not Father,” I said.

“I know that. But it is not so hard to imagine I could shame you. You were always so much cleverer than I was. I could never think what to say. But now—everything is changed!” His eyes sparkled. “Jeffrey, I cannot believe my good fortune.”