The Smallest Man

by Frances Quinn

  ‘Worked with horses all my life. Then the old king bought a mare off the master of the house, and I delivered her. Skittish little thing, but if I say it myself, I have a way with horses. They saw that in the stables here and offered me a place. Back home, things had got a bit… well, what with one thing and another, I’d been thinking about a change, and so I took it.’

  ‘But you don’t do that now?’

  ‘No, the queen picked me out after I brought her horse up for her one morning. Said I was a wonder of nature and she wanted her visitors to see me.’

  ‘Didn’t you mind?’

  ‘I did, yes. I loved working with the horses, still go down to the stables to see them when I can. But I’d learned by then, when you look like this’ – he gestured at his long, spindly legs – ‘you’re more precarious than other people, and you’re best to take your chances as they come.’ He reached for a pie, and ate it in four bites, licking gravy from his fingers. ‘But I daresay you’ve discovered that for yourself.’

  I found myself telling him about how my father had wanted to get rid of me because I was no use, and about trying to show I could be useful after all.

  ‘But it didn’t work,’ I said. ‘And then he got a better offer from the duke and that’s how I ended up here.’

  ‘And you wish things had been different.’

  ‘I just want to be like other boys.’

  ‘Well, lad, you’ve had a lesson in life today, I’m afraid. See, you and me, we know that in our hearts and our heads we’re just like everyone else. But most people can’t see further than the outside, and sometimes it makes them nasty. There isn’t much we can do about it, except stay away from the nasty ones. That’s my advice to you, and I hope you’ll take it.’

  Chapter Ten

  I was happy to take Jeremiah’s advice; I wanted nothing more to do with Crofts and his friends. But it was impossible to avoid them completely. If I was with the queen and her ladies, they limited themselves to sniggering at me, but if I was alone Crofts would call out ‘Here comes the freak!’ or ‘Look, it’s the queen’s little dolly.’ Then he’d plant himself in front of me and block my way when I tried to go round him, so all I could do was look at my feet and wait until he walked off, laughing with the others. He never touched me; he knew he didn’t have to. When he stood there, looking down at me and smiling at my helplessness, I felt like an insect he could squash with one foot. And I wished, more than anything, that I could just go home and forget I’d ever seen Crofts and his friends. Sometimes, at night, I would look out of my chamber window at the moon, and think of my mother’s words. You’re small on the outside. But inside you’re as big as everyone else. You show people that and you won’t go far wrong in life. But how could I show people that, when they looked at me and saw the queen’s little doll-boy?

  It was at about that time that I began to realise there was someone else at court who was as lonely and homesick as me. Queen Henrietta Maria was still only a girl, barely five years older than I was. The youngest daughter of the King of France, she’d been sent away from her home and family to marry a man she’d never met, who didn’t like her much, and she had the Duke of Buckingham stirring the pot to make sure it stayed that way.

  Two or three times a week, they dined together in the Great Hall – it was a kind of spectacle that anyone who wanted to came to watch. I saw how she dreaded those dinners; she’d hardly say a word in the hours before them, and when the time came to leave her quarters, she stiffened her neck and held her chin up, as if she was making herself ready to face an enemy. Sometimes the entire meal passed without her and the king exchanging a glance, let alone a word. More often, he’d speak but only to criticise. ‘It has come to my notice,’ he would say, or ‘I am given to understand that…’, and she’d roll her eyes and say ‘From who, I wonder?’ He complained that her dress was too plain and, on another occasion, not plain enough; that her English was still poor; that she was too friendly with her maids and ought to keep a proper distance, like his mother. He had a way of looking down his long nose at her, as though she was a particularly stupid child he was reprimanding, and then the duke, sitting beside him, would chime in with a remark of his own, always loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  She’d always answer back – the time he said she should be more like his mother, she told him his mother was only a Danish princess, and didn’t compare to one from France. But when she was upset her English tended to desert her, and that made the king crosser, even though he understood French perfectly well. The evenings invariably ended with him red-faced and stuttering over his words, and the queen flinging back a tirade in her own language, while the duke looked on, like a cat who’d just been presented with a large bowl of cream and had no doubt there was more where that came from.

  At the beginning, I thought she at least had a home on our side of the palace, where she was surrounded by the people she’d brought with her from France. But as my daily lessons progressed and I came to understand their language better, I realised there was precious little comfort there either. All they talked about was how the king hadn’t kept promises that they claimed were part of the marriage negotiations – things like lifting the laws against Catholics, and building chapels in all the palaces, open to any Catholics who wanted to come. Even I, young as I was, knew that couldn’t happen; no one liked the idea of a Catholic queen anyway, and any sniff of her turning the king that way would have people thinking he was going to take us back to the days of Bloody Mary, with heretics being hunted out and burned. But her priests and advisors kept on and on at her, telling her she had to make the king do it, that the pope himself had trusted her and her alone with the job of saving the English Catholics. To her face, they blamed the king and duke, but when she wasn’t there, they complained about her, and just like at home, no one noticed I was listening. She wasn’t doing enough, they said. She was letting him get away with it, and letting down her country and her faith.

  The day I really understood how things were for her was a few months after I’d arrived. The evening before had ended with another falling out and when a message came that morning, I happened to glance across as she opened it. She flinched at the words, and as she folded the paper her hands trembled. For the rest of the morning she was quiet, and when Bonbon jumped up and started chewing the lace on her dress, soaking it with drool, she didn’t even notice.

  That afternoon, we went to walk in the gardens. As usual the ladies were chattering like demented sparrows, and there’s only so much talk about the relative merits of satin and taffeta a boy can stand, so I walked down to one of the landing stages and sat there to watch the boats, and daydream that I was back in Oakham. It was a Wednesday, I remember, because I was thinking that my mother would be walking back from market. She often used to buy an apple for us to share on the way back, a bite for me, a bite for her, and I wondered if she might be eating an apple and thinking of me as she walked home that day.

  A few minutes later, the queen came and sat on a bench just along the bank. She gazed out over the water, but she wasn’t seeing the wherries and barges; her thoughts were somewhere else. I sat there, half hidden by the steps, as she unfolded the message from that morning and read it, then reached down and pulled Bonbon onto her lap.

  ‘See what he calls me?’ she said quietly. ‘A silly little girl.’ She buried her face in Bonbon’s fur for a moment, then lifted her head and looked down at her with a sad little smile. ‘What would they think at home if they saw me now, Bonbon? The Queen of England, telling her troubles to a dog.’

  She didn’t look like the Queen of England though, sitting there alone, her face as pale as a winter sky. She looked like the young girl she was, lonely and far from home.

  ‘There you are.’

  The queen jumped and wiped her eyes as Madame St George, who was in charge of all the ladies, bustled up and caught sight of the paper.

  ‘What does he say? Why has it taken so long?’

  ‘It isn’t
about the chapel,’ said the queen. ‘He gave me his answer on that last night.’ She imitated the pompous tone the king often used to her, her mouth pinched as though she’d sucked a lemon: ‘It will be built when it’s built, and in the meantime, if the rooms here are not big enough, we are at liberty to worship in the garden.’

  ‘Unbelievable!’ Madame St George threw her bony arms wide. ‘This is an insult to your faith, and we cannot stand for it. Perhaps you didn’t make it plain enough – you must insist.’

  ‘Mamie, I have tried. But how can I persuade him when he can hardly bear to be in the same room with me?’

  She read from the letter. She wasn’t mimicking him now, her voice was small and flat:

  ‘I wish you to know that from now on, when I lie with you, it is for the sake of my duty to the country, and not from any affection or desire for you.’

  ‘Affection and desire?’ said Madame St George. ‘What does this have to do with affection and desire? Princesses of the blood do not marry for love, you know that.’

  ‘But don’t you remember the letters he sent? He was so impatient for me to arrive – he said he was longing to begin our life together. I didn’t seek to marry for love but I thought I had found it all the same. Now he doesn’t even like me.’

  She must feel like I did, on the day of the Oakham Fair, when I thought I was going to get the thing I most wanted, and instead everything turned bad.

  Madame St George bent down in front of the queen, and took her hands.

  ‘Listen to me. You must forget this nonsense of liking and not liking, and accept the responsibility God has given you. The Catholics of England are depending on you. Will you see them continue to be persecuted, forced to deny their faith?’

  ‘No, but I—’

  ‘Then you must make him see. He promised to change the laws, but after all this time, we see no change at all. He promised you chapels – where are they? He does not even pay your people as the settlement requires.’

  She pursed her lips and smoothed a wrinkle in her skirt.

  ‘You know I think nothing of money, but it is an affront to you that we are not paid and your court is not maintained in the correct style.’

  ‘I know. You’re right.’

  Madame St George stood up, and the queen did the same.

  ‘Forgive me, I was being silly,’ she said. ‘I won’t let everyone down, I promise.’

  She had no one, really, other than that ugly little dog and the monkeys. If I missed my family and my old life, how much lonelier was it for her, even further from home, with the king and the duke finding fault with her on one side and her own people on the other? So after that, I made it my business to notice when she was quieter than usual, when she’d stare out of the window as though she was seeing somewhere else. Then I’d perch on the steps of her chair and do my best to cheer her up. She liked to hear stories about life in Oakham, like the night a rat dropped out of the roof onto my father’s face, and he jumped up and got his foot jammed in the pisspot (I didn’t say pisspot, I knew better by then). And one day I picked up a bit of her sewing, draped it round my shoulders like a cloak, and swished it about, standing with my hand on my hip and one foot forward, toes pointed as if to show off a finely turned calf, smirking a little half-smile. She looked at me quizzically at first, then burst into laughter:

  ‘The duke in miniature!’ She wagged a finger at me – ‘Nathaniel, that is wicked!’ – but she was still laughing, and from then on, when she was quiet and sad, I’d impersonate the duke, and make him say the silliest things I could think of. It wasn’t much, but I just wanted her to know there was someone on her side.

  Chapter Eleven

  My efforts to cheer up the queen were heartfelt, but they weren’t much against the nastiness she got from the king and the duke, and the constant nagging from her side that she ought to be persuading the king to do more for the Catholics. I watched her become more and more unhappy, but I didn’t expect what happened that autumn.

  It was a trip to the gallows at Tyburn that brought matters to a head. I’d been there a couple of times with Jeremiah, who very much enjoyed a hanging, and had an uncanny knack of predicting, even before the ropes were round their necks, which were ‘snappers’, whose necks would break and grant them a quick death, and which were ‘dancers’, who’d dangle, jerking in agony for half an hour or more. Like most boys of my age, I was entertained by any gruesome spectacle, so I was pleased when, on the first sunny morning after a week of rain, Madame St George suggested a walk to Tyburn. That morning, I’d had an encounter with Charles Crofts, in which he’d said my mother must have been a witch to give birth to a freak like me. So when they discussed the excursion, I was too busy imagining how it would feel to be big enough to punch him on the nose to take much notice. It didn’t occur to me that there might be any other reason for the jaunt than a hanging, even though I’d never known the queen to attend one before.

  It was a mile or so through the parkland, a long walk for legs as short as mine, but Jeremiah kindly kept me company at the rear of the party. As we approached the gallows I was disappointed to see no crowds; had someone mistaken the date? But up ahead of us, the queen and her ladies walked on, right up to the spot, then knelt and began to say prayers. Seeing my puzzlement, Jeremiah whispered that they were praying for the souls of Catholic martyrs who’d been hung there.

  ‘It’s not my place to say so,’ he said, looking at the passers-by casting curious glances, ‘but I think there’ll be trouble over this. If the king hears of it, I don’t like to imagine what’ll happen.’

  * * *

  Of course he heard of it; the duke had ears everywhere. That evening, the king marched into the chamber, his face red and his beard quivering.

  ‘N-now you have gone too far!’ he said. ‘Kneeling at T-T-Tyburn! What were you thinking of?’

  Her little chin went up and she stood and faced him.

  ‘How and where I pray is my own concern. Or have your promises about my faith been cast to the wind now, like all the others in the marriage settlement?’

  ‘My concern is what you prayed for.’

  ‘Since you ask, we prayed for the souls of our Catholic martyrs.’

  ‘You prayed for the men who plotted to blow up Parliament, and kill my father.’

  She rolled her eyes.

  ‘I can assure you we did not. Your informant has—’

  ‘And to walk there barefoot like penitents? Did you not see what trouble that would cause? The people already suspect you, must you make them hate you too?’

  They hadn’t prayed for the men behind the Gunpowder Plot, nor walked there barefoot. But if the duke said they did, the king would believe it. She appealed to her ladies to confirm the truth, but he shook his head.

  ‘Do not compound your difficulties by lying. I have it on good authority you did.’

  ‘Your good authority has misinformed you—’

  ‘Enough,’ he said, his hands clenched into fists by his sides. He turned to us.

  ‘Leave. All of you.’

  We looked at each other, unsure what to do.

  ‘N-n-now. Or I will s-s-summon guards to remove you.’

  * * *

  The news rippled through the court in minutes: the queen’s people were being sent home. All of them, from Madame St George, the priests and the advisors, to the lowliest serving maid, had to go. The king had decided – with a little help from the duke, naturally – that it was their influence that was making difficulties between him and her.

  Outside, one of the king’s secretaries confirmed it was true. His voice was drowned by shouts of protest but then a piteous cry from the window above pierced the clamour. We all looked up. The queen would have been furious when he said what he was going to do, and tried to argue him out of it, but clearly he’d stood firm. That cry – that must have been the moment she realised he was serious. Then came the most terrible sobbing, as she begged him not to do it. We didn’t hear his reply, but I
could picture him, standing there with his arms folded and his mouth all tight like a cat’s backside. She appeared at the window; he slammed it shut. She banged on the glass so hard it shattered. People gasped, and she started to shout to us but the king caught hold of her, pulling her away. She clutched the window frame and then looked down, wide-eyed, as her hand turned red with blood. He dragged her away and she disappeared out of sight. We stood there, staring up at the window, but she didn’t appear again.

  That night she took to her bed, crying and refusing to eat or see anyone. Eventually, the king agreed she could keep two priests, her dresser, a cook, a baker and her dressmaker, but the rest were to go. Their complaints about wages owed were ignored, so her so-called friends helped themselves to her wardrobe instead. I don’t know if it was true – so many rumours flew about over those few days – but people said she was left with a single dress by the time they’d finished.

  * * *

  The day she returned to the chamber, with her poor hand bandaged, it was a different place, and she was different too. Her French ladies in waiting were replaced by English ones, and among them were the duke’s mother, his wife, his sister and his niece, so she was surrounded by his spies. Sitting up on her canopied chair, she looked smaller somehow, and though she answered politely when they addressed her, she barely spoke of her own accord. I did my best to make her laugh with a story about my father’s dogs, and she smiled now and then, but it was at parts of the story that weren’t funny, so I knew she wasn’t really listening.