The Queen's Dwarf A Novel (53 page)

“That Will was upstaging me in the masque. Can’t bear when someone else gets more attention than I do.”

“I know that is not true. Well, perhaps a little bit. You paid in blood for being center stage this time. Your shoulder popped out of place and two of your ribs were broken from the leap you took from the mast, or from Ware’s pummeling—we don’t know which. Boku bound the injured parts to hold them still, give them a chance to heal. He’s been putting something made with moldy bread on your stab wound. It has not festered.”

“Boku should have made up his mind whether he was harming me or helping me. My last memory is of him stabbing me in the chest.”

“He said it was a trick he learned when he was traveling among the Moors. He’s traveled all over, Jeffrey, learned so many things. When he blew into the hollow reed, you started to breathe more easily. You were lucky, Jeffrey. Very lucky.”

“Not if … if Ware…” I faltered, more terrified than I had ever been in my life. Samuel loved his saintly Father Quintin so much. How could I bear for my brother to despise me? “God, Samuel, what did he say?”

“He told me everything. Taunted me, told me how you were going to hell for what you had done for me.”

I closed my eyes, wishing to Heaven Boku had just let me die. “Samuel, don’t hate me.”

“For saving me from a life in the shambles? For getting me an education and placing me in the care of the finest man I’ve ever known? How can you think I would hate you?” Samuel’s voice quavered. With what? Love for Father Quintin or sorrow that I was destined for hell?

“I did not know Quintin was a priest. I never would have put you … in harm’s way on purpose.”

“I know that, Jeffrey. When I think of you—spying for Buckingham, trapped here by men like Ware … I know how much it cost you, inside. Yet you never ceased trying to make certain I was safe. You sacrificed so much. You shouldn’t have done it. If I’d known, I never would have let you,” he said fiercely.

“Even you could not have stopped me, brother,” I said. “You were … the only person who … loved me. Until I joined the menagerie.”

“I am so glad you found them. I knew something was amiss when several of the guards started taunting me worse than usual. Sharpening their knives and tweaking me about my throat, saying I had best hope they not get some signal. When Havlock explained someone in the menagerie had asked him to stand guard over Master Quintin and me, I guessed you were fighting some battle to keep us safe—Father and Mother, the queen, and me. Even Will Evans. You’ve spent your whole life smaller than everyone else. Yet, somehow, you are always trying to protect us.”

“Must look absurd—a man my size playing hero. Ridiculous, aren’t I?”

“No. Brave. Like no one else in the world. Not because of your body, but because your spirit is larger than anyone I’ve ever met. John always thought so, too.”

“I miss him,” I said, my chest so full that it ached.

Samuel clasped my hand. “I miss him also. But not as much as I am going to miss you.”

A frisson of alarm jolted through me. “You’ll not be able to be rid of me from now on.”

Samuel picked at my coverlet, his curls catching the light. He hesitated a moment before he spoke. The pause filled me with sinking dread.

“Jeff, the queen has arranged to slip Father Quintin out of the country on a merchant ship. He’s going to the Jesuit school in France. I’m going with him.”

I started to protest, but I knew it was futile. Samuel would not feel right about leaving this wise man who needed him. “I suppose there is no dissuading you. You might as well help him until he can rejoin the other Jesuits in his order, but as soon as you turn Father Quintin over to them, you can hurry back here. I’m certain the queen will help me find you another tutor.”

“Father Quintin can school me best in the ways that I need.” Samuel drew a deep breath. “I’ve decided to take holy orders.”

I choked, fought to remember how to breathe, this blow more crushing than any Ware had dealt me. It wasn’t my ribs breaking this time, but my heart.

“Holy orders … become a priest?” Panic battered dark wings inside me. “Samuel, no. I won’t let you do it! Have you seen what happened to your Father Quintin? He can barely walk because he spent two weeks in a priest hole! The courts sent him to Barbados, to the cane fields, as punishment. The courts could execute him because he returned to England.”

“If I know Father Quintin, he will come back to England again.” Samuel set his jaw, stubborn with a resolve that shook me to my core. “Father Quintin told me about the dangers in becoming a priest. I’m willing to face them. I hope I can show his courage.”

His words drove through me, more piercing than the wound Boku had dealt me the day Uriel Ware had died. “If you become a Jesuit, I’ll never see you again, Samuel,” I whispered. “You’ll never be able to come home.” My eyes burned and my hands shook, my future stretching out before me without Samuel.

“Of course I will come home. The moment I am ordained.”

“Oh, Samuel.” There was no point in arguing. I could see it in his eyes. I thought of Tyburn, the scaffold where Catholic martyrs had died among thieves and murderers. I remembered the dried blood Henrietta Maria had kissed. Would Samuel’s stain the same hellish spot? It seemed a fitting punishment for what I had done—manipulating the queen into losing the love of her subjects on the road to Tyburn Tree. But Samuel was innocent. Would he pay the price because of what I had done?

Samuel touched my good arm, his face so solemn, it felt as if he were already an ocean away from me. “Thank you for not trying to dissuade me.”

I struggled to find a jest, a fool to the end. “When you thought you had the right of something, no power on earth could change your mind. I won’t even bother wrestling the power of Heaven. Everyone thought you were the sweet one at the Hudson fireside. You were the most stubborn.”

“Jeffrey, speaking of that fireside: Promise me you will go home sometimes to visit Mother and Ann. Father, too. With John gone, and now me, they will need you.”

“I am the last son our parents would see if they had the choice.”

Samuel winced, didn’t even bother denying it was true. “That does not mean they will not be glad to see you.”

“Fine. I will visit Oakham whenever the queen’s household is within reach of it. I can’t have you skipping off to devote your life to God with a guilty conscience.”

I saw my brother’s eyes grow bright with tears. He was the only lad I knew who had never attempted to hide them. “I will miss you, Jeffrey.”

“You’ll have plenty of company: saints, martyrs, priests. Why, God alone is three in one. You will be downright thronged with company.” Did my bitterness seep through? No. Only my grief.

“Do not jest about God.”

Humor drained out of me. “God can forgive me this one small trespass. I am giving Him my most precious possession.”

Samuel’s face turned pink with both pleasure and embarrassment. “Father Quintin knows ways to pass letters between us when I can send them. I will be very busy. They say the Jesuit regimen is strict.”

“They had to make it so, or everyone would be running away from a perfectly lovely future their brothers arranged for them and choosing to become a Jesuit instead.”

Samuel smiled. “I am so glad you awakened before I had to leave. I was afraid if you did not, I wouldn’t have a chance to tell you good-bye. You see, the packet sails in the morning. Father Quintin and I must be on it.”

I felt as if the floor were falling out from under me. But the parting had been inevitable. I should have known Samuel would have been chafing to get at his studies. Besides, the sooner Quintin was on a ship, the less chance he’d be thrown back in prison. I was certain most of the king’s advisers would wish the Jesuit behind bars. Many of the people beyond the palace walls would want him dead. I would have liked the priest myself, if it weren’t for the fact that his influence might get Samuel killed.

“So this is good-bye.” I could not fathom more pain than I felt at that moment.

“It is good-bye for now.”

“Wait.” I struggled up. “Have Will take you up to my room. In my trunk, my Fairy King costume is there. Bring it to me.”

Samuel flushed. “I put it under your pillow for protection. Will is off questioning everyone at the Saracen’s Bane, trying to track down any of Ware’s fellow conspirators. No telling how long it might take or if he will be able to find them all. Will wanted to put you here in his room until you grew stronger. He worried that one of Ware’s men might decide to come after the man who saved the queen. He thought you’d be safer here while he was away. Master Quintin thinks anyone working with Ware would have scattered to the far corners of the kingdom by now. But Will didn’t want to take any chances after what happened to Dulcinea.”

I wondered if Will would be so determined to guard me if he knew I had been in Buckingham’s employ. Guilt dragged at me as I groped under my pillow with my good arm until I found the coarse cloth of my tunic, the lump where Samuel had sewn the holy medal the night before I left for Burley-on-the-Hill.

“Give me your penknife,” I said as I drew the garment out. Samuel did as I asked.

With some difficulty, I sliced the lump of cloth free from the rest of the garment. I could feel the hard disk of the medal still concealed. Despite the covering, I could picture the face of Samuel’s beloved Holy Mother.

“You need protection more than I do now,” I said, pressing it into my brother’s hand. “You might ask your Lady for one thing, though, in return for giving her back to you.”

“What is that?” Samuel asked.

“I know a woman and her husband who long for a babe more than kingdoms or crowns. Perhaps your Queen of Heaven might arrange for a prince on earth?”

“I’ll pray to her. Jeff, I hate to leave you this way.”

I tightened my hands on the coverlet, clutched tight so I would not try to catch hold of Samuel, never let him go. “Better not keep God or the tides waiting,” I said gruffly.

Samuel embraced me, and I did not mind the pain. I could feel his tears hot on my cheek. They mingled with my own. “Jeff, I could not have asked for a better brother.”

“Might have asked for a taller one,” I grumbled.

“Just measure the part you take up in my heart.”

With that, Samuel turned, hastened away. I knew I would never see my Samuel again.

If he ever returned, he would be changed. A priest. A Jesuit. If he came to England, he would be a hunted man.

I closed my eyes and prayed his Lord and Lady would take better care of him than I had.

*   *   *

If anyone had told me the queen of England would visit me while I was still abed, I would have scoffed at the notion. I had dreamed of Henrietta Maria often enough, her ivory skin bare, her dark hair threaded through with my fingers, her lips ripe from kisses she returned as eagerly as I bestowed them. In my dreams, she had not been wed to Charles. In my dreams, when I rolled her beneath me, I was tall as Buckingham and as beautiful to look at. She returned my kisses with the same passion I felt for her.

I had done my best to put her out of my mind since I had regained consciousness. She was alive. She was safe. But nothing could ever be the same. We could never go back to the way our relationship had been before the countess of Carlisle showed her Buckingham’s letters. Not after my confession at little Moll’s pageant.

Even if the queen would forgive me for my betrayal enough to summon me into her service again, I could not bear the humiliation in seeing Henrietta Maria every day, knowing that she knew of my passion for her now.

I love you as a man loves a woman.
Time and again, those words ran through my mind. I saw her shock, her empathy. Was she also disgusted? Had her imagination painted a far different picture from mine? A shrunken dwarf of a man—a freak—trying to pleasure her?

I felt sick at the thought that my lady might be repulsed by me, even in her imagination.

So when I heard tramping feet outside Will’s chamber door, heard cries of “Make way for the queen” from her guards, I had to fight not to bury my head under the coverlets.

The bedchamber door opened, and there she stood, the dowager duchess of Buckingham, with Lady Carlisle behind her. Those familiar ringlets pressed against the queen’s brow, a soft pink gown making her look like spring’s first primrose. A blue sash cinched the dainty waist she longed to have blossom with a child.

She looked at me through her lashes, this daughter of a king seeming almost as shy as I felt.

I attempted to struggle out of bed, intending to kneel at her feet, but she closed the space between us, gently pressing me back down onto the pillows. The scent of her drifted over me.

“Do not tire yourself observing formalities on my account, Jeffrey,” she said. “I wanted to speak to you in private, explain why no one must ever know of your courage save those who witnessed it. His Majesty has forbidden anyone present at the pageant to mention what happened there. He fears such talk might give other malcontents ideas, hopes of furthering this mad cause. To seize England for true Englishmen is what they claim.”

“I am glad Uriel Ware will not become a martyr. He will slip into obscurity and no one will remember him.”

“I pray you are not in too much pain.”

“I am better every day, Majesty. Are you well? You did not suffer any injuries from Ware’s attack?”

“A lump on the back of my head from when you knocked me out of the path of Ware’s knife.” She smiled.

“I am sorry to have hurt you.”

“Do not be. There was a scratch upon the breastplate Sergeant Evans got me to wear. He said the armor was your idea. If I had not been wearing it, if you had not risked so much to come to my aid, I would have died as my father died.” She shuddered, and I could see childhood nightmares in her eyes. “While you were unconscious, Sergeant Evans told the king and me everything. How you came to know of the plot against me. It is hard to think the rope dancer was enmeshed in this treachery, even harder to imagine that she is dead. Dulcinea was so young and beautiful. No wonder both you and Sergeant Evans loved her.”