The Smallest Man

by Frances Quinn

  The man looked down at me.

  ‘He yours?’ he asked the dairymaid.

  ‘No, his brother asked us to bring him in. Said he was two.’

  The man’s knees creaked as he stooped. His bumpy nose was patterned with little red streaks and his hot breath smelt of onions. I stepped back but the boy still had hold of my arm.

  ‘Tiny for ten,’ said the boy.

  ‘And perfectly formed,’ said the man, looking me up and down.

  He turned to the dairymaids and the young man, who’d only just managed to close their astonished mouths.

  ‘Time’s up, folks. And here…’ He fished in the pouch at his waist. ‘Half your money back, since you didn’t see the whole show. Quick, or I’ll change my mind.’

  He held on to my arm as the boy showed them out, then fetched a tall stool from behind the cage and stood me on it. I wanted to jump down from it and run, but the fair boy would be faster than me. The man walked right round me, peering.

  ‘Come on, let him go,’ said the faerie. ‘He’s just a child.’

  ‘Shut up, you,’ said the fair man.

  ‘So do we just take him?’ said the boy, and my insides turned to water.

  ‘Nah, he’d be too easy to find,’ said the man. ‘We wouldn’t be able to show him anywhere from here to Oxford if we took him.’

  Show me?

  The man shrugged.

  ‘But I reckon the parents’ll give him up easy enough. He’s pretty but he can’t be much use to them, not that size. So, young man, where are your mother and father?’

  A memory came into my head then, of the day my father’s best fighting dog, Jasper, got hurt. He could still walk but he wouldn’t be able to fight again. ‘If a dog can’t earn its keep, it’s no use to me,’ my father said, and he sharpened his big knife, walked into the woods with Jasper and came back without him. The fair man was right; I wasn’t any use either. Sam had been helping in the fields since he was six. When I asked Mother why I couldn’t go, she said:

  ‘You’ll go when you grow.’

  But I hadn’t grown. And suddenly I was certain about one thing: I had to keep the fair man away from my father.

  ‘They’re at the eating tents,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you.’

  He lifted me down. As my feet touched the floor, I sank my teeth into his leathery arm.

  ‘You little sod!’

  I scrabbled at the flap at the back of the tent, my fingers too small to get a grip on the heavy canvas. Any second now, I’d feel his hand on my neck and smell his hot onion breath. But then the canvas parted and I tumbled out, almost falling on my face in the dirt. Behind me I heard the faerie cheer.

  ‘Sam,’ I shouted, ‘quick, get me away.’

  For once, he didn’t hesitate. He saw my face, scooped me up and ran, as the fair man appeared at the tent flap.

  ‘Hurry, he’s coming!’

  But the man just stood there, looking at us, then went back inside.

  * * *

  We didn’t see any more of the fair. When my mother caught up with us, she marched us straight home, leaving my father in the ale tent. She stomped ahead with Annie clutched to her shoulder, walking so crossly that Annie’s little head swayed from side to side like cow parsley blowing in the wind. Every twenty yards or so, she’d shout back at us. Did we realise how dangerous it was to wander off like that? Were we idiots, or what? Hadn’t we listened to a word she said? If we thought we were coming next time, we could think again. And now, look, we’d made our sister cry.

  It seemed to me more likely that Mother’s shouting had made Annie cry, but I judged it best to keep that thought to myself.

  * * *

  That night, I lay awake next to Sam, thinking about the woman in the cage. She wasn’t a faerie. Beside the matter of being in a cage and poked with sticks, when she danced I’d seen a big hole in the sole of her shoe; what kind of faerie didn’t know enough magic to fix that? But if she wasn’t a faerie, what was she? It was as though she was an ordinary person, but smaller. Like she hadn’t grown. Like me.

  Thirty-eight years old, the barkers had said. It had never crossed my mind that a person could get to be that old and still be as small as a child. I’d wanted to hurry things along, but it hadn’t occurred to me that my mother was wrong; I wasn’t just a late starter. I might never grow.

  That morning, I’d woken up smiling, so sure that soon I’d be like all the other boys. In my mind, I’d tried on their long legs and strong, wiry arms, and pictured myself doing the things they did, and seeing my father look at me proudly, like he used to do. I wanted it so badly, and I was so close to having it. Could it really be true that it wasn’t going to happen? Not tomorrow, not ever?

  It couldn’t be true. I wouldn’t believe it. But as I lay there in the dark, listening to my father’s rasping snores and Annie snuffling like a piglet, I kept remembering the way the little woman looked at me. She’d seen that I was like her. The boy and the man had seen it too. That was why the man wanted me. To put me in a cage, and make people pay to see me, because I was something strange.

  Chapter Two

  Our house was different when my father was in it. It was only one room, with a table and two chairs, and our pallets stacked in the corner, yet during the day I hardly noticed how small it was. But when he walked through the door carrying his apron, all bloody from a day spent cutting up meat, the house shrank. He was a big man, but it wasn’t just his body that took up a lot of room, it was his whole self.

  The day after the fair he came home earlier than usual. Sam had gone for milk from the dairy and Mother was sewing, telling me a story about when she was a girl. I’d been lost in my thoughts all day; she kept asking what was the matter, but I said there was nothing. I didn’t want to tell her and see in her face that she’d known all along what I was. But of course she had. That was why she didn’t want me to speak to anyone at the fair.

  She got up to start making dinner.

  ‘Wait a bit,’ he said, pulling a coin from the pouch at his waist. ‘Here, Nat, go to the baker’s and get four seed cakes. Don’t let them give you stale ones.’

  Mother turned and looked at him.

  ‘I’ve some good news,’ he said.

  I didn’t ask what the news was. It would only be about the dogs: someone had agreed to sell him a good fighter, or someone else’s best fighter had been killed.

  The bakery wasn’t busy, but the baker was deep in conversation with the blacksmith’s wife, so I waited my turn. The blacksmith’s wife had her youngest child with her; she was about Annie’s age and, like my sister, just getting used to her legs. Seeing a possible playmate, she fixed me with a determined expression and stomped unsteadily towards me, but at the last, she wobbled. I stepped forward to stop her falling, but at that moment, her mother turned and, seeing me, snatched her away. I wasn’t surprised; people often seemed afraid of me touching them. But I wondered, that day, did they all know what my mother knew? That I wasn’t a late starter at all, but someone like the faerie, who would never, ever grow?

  As I left the bakery, Jack Edgecombe was lurking at the end of the street with two other boys. If he had an audience, he never missed a chance to repeat his stupid story about me riding Ma Tyrell’s dog, or pretend I was so small he couldn’t see me. Usually I answered him back – he wasn’t what you’d call quick-witted, Jack, so most times I’d leave him floundering for an answer and make his friends smirk at him instead of me. But that day I took the long way home.

  I went to push open our front door, then stopped; inside, my mother was shouting at my father.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ she said. ‘I won’t let you.’

  She never argued with him. Never. There was no point; once he’d made up his mind he never gave in. But she was cleverer than he was. When she wanted to change his mind about something, she had a way of seeming to agree with him but then mentioning the thing again later, in a way that made it sound like what she wanted was his idea and he�
�d been clever for suggesting it. Sometimes she had to have a few goes, but she’d usually get her way and he’d end up pleased with himself. ‘You catch more flies with honey than vinegar,’ I heard her say once to a neighbour who was having trouble with her own husband, ‘and you don’t have to wear the ribbon to be the winner.’ It made me feel safe, knowing she was really in charge, not him.

  But now she was arguing with him. A little cold worm of fear squirmed in my stomach, because that meant whatever was happening was something she didn’t know how to talk him out of. I pushed the door a little and put my ear against the opening.

  ‘I’ve decided,’ he said, slamming his hand on the table. ‘And that’s that.’

  ‘You can’t do this, John. You can’t.’

  ‘You must see it makes sense. He can’t earn his keep here, you know that.’

  They were talking about me. She said something about how I hardly cost anything to keep, but I only half heard. In my mind I saw my father walking into the forest with Jasper and coming back without him, and I understood. The fair man had found me. I never discovered how, but it can’t have been hard. Everyone in Oakham knew whose child I was.

  ‘I won’t let him be put on show like a freak,’ said my mother, and now there was a horrible pleading sound in her voice.

  ‘Lucy, he is a bloody freak.’

  My hand dropped from the door.

  ‘Think about Sam and Annie,’ he said. ‘When they want to marry. Who’ll have them if people think they could have a child like Nat? Whatever cursed him, they’ll think it cursed the whole family.’

  I’d heard people say we were cursed before – once Jack Edgecombe even said a witch had stolen my mother’s real baby and left me in its place – but my mother always told me they were talking nonsense. I waited for her to say it then, but she didn’t.

  ‘It’s for the best,’ he said. ‘And Swires’ ten shillings will pay our rent for the year.’

  ‘The rent wouldn’t be a worry if you didn’t owe so much at the Red Lion.’

  Swires must be the fair man, but why would he pay our rent? Then she said it. Quite quietly, but I heard every word.

  ‘How can you think of selling him? He’s your son.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘Not that again. I’ve told you over and over—’

  ‘That’s enough.’ He slammed his hand on the table again. ‘I won’t hear a word more. He’ll go with Swires.’

  She wouldn’t let him do that. Not send me away, to be in a cage.

  Tell him. Tell him he can’t do that.

  After perhaps a minute, she spoke.

  ‘All right. But not now. When the fair comes again in September. Give me a chance to prepare him.’

  My father sighed heavily.

  ‘I daresay Swires’ll wait. He seems keen enough to have him. But don’t think you can change my mind. In September, he goes.’

  Chapter Three

  In the weeks that followed, neither my father nor my mother told me what had been decided. I told myself I’d heard wrong. I told myself I’d dreamed it all. But I knew I hadn’t, because sometimes, I’d look up and catch her brushing away tears. And he, when he looked at me at all, couldn’t meet my eye.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the faerie, all alone in her cage. Had her father sent her to the fair too? Had she been there since she was a girl? Surely my mother wouldn’t let that happen to me. But perhaps the faerie had thought that too, and now there she was, and that was her life.

  No. That couldn’t be right. My mother would not do that. That day, when I’d waited for her to say he couldn’t send me away, and she hadn’t, that was just because she knew if she argued, he’d dig his heels in. Now she’d be thinking up a way to change his mind, without him even noticing she’d done it. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

  But I kept remembering how he sounded when he said I was a freak. He wanted to be rid of me; what if there was nothing she could say to change that? What if the only way to change that was to grow?

  * * *

  ‘Are you sure this is going to work?’

  Sam looked from me to the tree where he was looping a rope around two low branches.

  ‘Yes. Come on, lift me up.’

  He sighed.

  ‘Don’t blame me if you end up all long and thin like a worm.’

  He hooked the rope under my arms, taking my weight in his. As he eased his hands away, I dropped, gasping as the ropes pulled tight around my chest and under my arms; it was hard to breathe.

  ‘Are you sure—’

  ‘I’m all right. Tie the rocks on.’

  We’d collected them the day before: six heavy ones. Sam attached one sack to my ankle. As he let go of it, pain jolted through my leg and into my back. He winced as he let go of the second sack and I cried out. The weight pulled the rope even tighter, biting into my skin.

  ‘I’ll get you down—’

  ‘No, I’m all right. Talk to me, so I don’t think about it.’

  ‘What shall I say?’

  ‘I don’t know… tell me a story. A silly one – that one about the pigs, that Mother used to tell us.’

  Sam was hopeless with stories. He could never remember what order things happened in, so he had to keep going back and saying, ‘No, wait a minute, the second house was made of wood… or was it straw?’

  The pain came in hot stabs.

  Remember the faerie. Remember the cage.

  ‘Then the pig, no, the wolf… Nat, you look funny. I think you should get down. You’ve probably grown loads already.’ He glanced at the mark we’d made on the tree, to check against afterwards, and back at me. ‘Well, a bit, anyway.’

  ‘No, carry on with the story.’

  ‘All right. Well, the third pig…’

  His voice came from far away. There was a roaring in my ears and when I looked down he was at the end of a grey tunnel and its walls were closing in.

  * * *

  ‘You shouldn’t have got me down.’

  Dust billowed up from the straw as I stamped around. Why did he have to do that? I could have held on for longer.

  ‘I thought you were dead.’

  ‘You idiot, of course I wasn’t dead.’

  ‘Well, you looked dead. Your eyes were closed and you were all white. Anyway, you probably would have been dead, if I hadn’t got you down.’

  I stood beside the mark on the tree. Sam’s face told me the result.

  ‘Not even an inch?’

  He shook his head, avoiding my eye.

  ‘Half an inch?’

  ‘I don’t know… it could be.’

  As I’ve said before, lying was not Sam’s strong point.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ he said. ‘It’s not you who’d have got the whacking if you’d died.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to die. Next time, just leave me—’

  ‘Are you joking? I’m not putting you up there again. Why can’t you just wait to grow, like Mother says?’

  I hadn’t told Sam when I worked out what I was. He was my little brother. He was the only person in the world who made me feel tall. How could I have him feeling sorry for me?

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You help me try again with the stretching, and I’ll give you my bread, every day for a week.’

  ‘No. It was horrible seeing you go all white like that. I’m not doing it again.’

  If he was prepared to turn down extra food, nothing was going to change his mind. I would have to think of something else.

  * * *

  As it turned out, my mother had an idea of her own. After dinner the next day, she waited until no one was around, then handed me a piece of bread.

  ‘Let’s see if we can feed you up a bit. Get you growing.’

  The next afternoon she sneaked me an early bowl of the broth she was cooking for dinner, and from then on she found a way to give me a bit of extra food every day. As children do, I accepted my good luck without asking where it came fr
om. It was only when I was older and looked back that I understood: all that summer she’d gone hungry, to try to make me grow so she didn’t have to let my father sell me to the fair man. But it made no difference. The summer slid towards its end, and still I got no taller.

  Chapter Four

  A lot of things can change the course of your life. For me, it was a shilling. I always imagine it to be a bright, shiny one, but I never saw it. All the same, I have that shilling to thank for everything that happened: good and bad.

  As September approached and my mother still said nothing about the fair man, I told myself she must have found a way to change my father’s mind. Then one night I woke, needing to go outside; we didn’t have a pot indoors in the summer. As I surfaced from sleep, I realised my mother was crying softly in the dark. Beside her, my father sighed.

  ‘Lucy, the boy has to go,’ he said quietly. ‘And like I said, if you don’t tell him tomorrow, I will.’

  He turned over, the straw pallet crunching beneath his weight, and began to snore. But she was still awake and every now and then she made a smothered sound, between a hiccup and a sigh, like Annie did after she’d been bawling for ages and finally stopped. As though there were a few last cries left inside that had to squeeze themselves out.

  I don’t know what frightened me more: my father’s words or those stifled sobs from my mother. I sat up and yawned so she’d think I’d just woken, and went outside. After I’d done my business behind the house, I clambered up the woodpile by the door and perched on top. My hands pleated and unpleated the linen of my nightshift as my father’s words echoed in my head.

  The boy has to go.

  He was going to sell me to the fair man; she couldn’t stop him. I felt light, and insubstantial, as though my bones had melted away and I was filled with air. It couldn’t be true, it just couldn’t be. They couldn’t send me away, all on my own, to live with strangers, and get poked with sticks, and never come home again. I didn’t want to be a baby, but my eyes filled up with tears, and I sat there as they dripped onto my shift.