The Smallest Man

by Frances Quinn

  Every night, I would tell myself, tomorrow will be different – tomorrow I’ll be better. But every morning, I woke with the same fear cramping my belly, and when I sat in the saddle, I was as useless as the day before. I only kept getting back on because each day I did meant another day before I had to accept that I was what Crofts said I was: the queen’s little dolly, good for nothing but dancing a jig or spouting a silly rhyme. And then face his scorn.

  As Jeremiah had said, Shadow was a good steady mount, and she patiently bore my tumbles, slowing to a stop after I fell off into Jeremiah’s hands, then waiting for him to lift me back into the saddle. One day, as I stood beside her after yet another fall, she reached her head down and nuzzled mine, as if to say, come on then, get back on.

  ‘She likes you,’ said Jeremiah. ‘Horses always know a good person from a bad one.’

  We’d been about to go in but, touched by the horse’s show of affection, I decided to have one more go. Jeremiah was adjusting the saddle when a horsefly settled on Shadow’s neck. She shook her head, and it must have bitten her; she darted forward, too fast for Jeremiah to grab the rein, and took off across the grass. I didn’t have a chance to get my balance, and as she sped up, I started to slip. I tried to pull myself up, but it was too late, I was off balance, my own weight dragging me down.

  ‘Whoa,’ shouted Jeremiah, but the bite had spooked Shadow and she just kept running. In panic I grabbed at the front of the saddle, but it was no use, I was sliding off.

  You could be trampled into the ground.

  ‘Hold on!’ Jeremiah shouted.

  I tried to keep my leg anchored over the saddle, but my foot was slipping. My scrabbling to pull myself back up must have frightened Shadow and she bucked. I slid sideways off the saddle and I could see the ground coming towards me and the mud spraying up from the hooves that would kick me.

  Nothing left of you but bits of bone.

  I lost contact with the saddle and the world turned upside down. I landed on my side with a thump that knocked the air from my lungs. Pain shot through my leg and I crumpled myself into a ball, waiting for a flailing hoof to crack my skull.

  ‘Nat!’

  I peeled my hands from my eyes. Shadow was standing ten feet away, and Jeremiah was running towards me, his coat streaming out behind him and his long arms flailing like the sails of a windmill. Every bit of me hurt. He knelt beside me, his face white.

  ‘I thought you were a goner.’

  I sat up and took a breath, wincing as my ribs protested.

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘And I know what it is now. I’ve got to fall.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve got to lose my fear. I can’t do that if you catch me.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. The queen wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.’

  I looked away from his kindly smile.

  ‘I’m not doing this to ride with the queen,’ I said. ‘I lied to you. I’ve challenged Crofts to a race.’

  ‘You… well, you can just unchallenge him. Nat, you’re brave enough to do it, but brave won’t be enough. You’re too small, and that’s the truth of it.’

  ‘I thought you were my friend.’

  ‘I am, and that’s why I won’t let you kill yourself with this foolish idea.’

  ‘I’ll do it by myself then.’

  ‘No you won’t. Because I’ll be telling the lads in the stable not to let you take a horse out on your own. I’m not letting you hurt yourself, and that’s that.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Both of us sulked for a week, then Jeremiah knocked on my chamber door and asked if I wanted to have breakfast with him. He’d often forage a little feast for us from the kitchens to eat after our lessons, but we hadn’t breakfasted together since the day I fell off Shadow.

  ‘I have it on good authority there’s apple pastries just out of the oven,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I didn’t think you’d want to miss them.’

  Though we were friends again, he was adamant he wouldn’t help me race Crofts. But I was certain now that if I lost my fear, I’d improve. I’d had my dream of growing taller taken away from me; I wasn’t going to let this one go too. I waited a few days, then one morning when we were eating breakfast, I asked about his life in Kent. It was easy to get him reminiscing about how beautiful the countryside was, and he was laughing as he told me about the funny sayings they had down there. Then I said:

  ‘What was it like, when you grew so tall?’

  He looked away.

  ‘It’s a long time ago. I don’t remember it very well.’

  ‘You told me once you were six foot tall when you were twelve.’

  ‘That’s about right.’

  ‘Well, did people stare at you?’

  ‘Not people that knew me, but if I went off the estate they did. I was a bit hard to miss.’

  ‘Didn’t you mind?’

  ‘Like I said, it was a long time ago…’ He sighed. ‘All right. Since you ask. They threw stones at me, the local lads. Called me a monster.’ He sat back and stared up at the ceiling. ‘And then a girl was attacked one night, and the village blamed me. She didn’t say it was me, she didn’t even say the man was tall. But I was the odd one, and that was good enough for them.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Luckily for me, there’d been a big hunt that day, so we were still settling the horses well after dark, and there were six good people who could swear I was in the stables when it happened. Otherwise I don’t know how it might have gone. And you know what, Nat?’

  He looked at me; were there tears glistening in his eyes?

  ‘After that the village women crossed the road if they saw me coming. Or they’d huddle together, as though I might take it into my head to grab them, right there in the middle of the street.’

  ‘But they knew it wasn’t you.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘It didn’t matter. They’d decided I was a monster and that was that. Anyway.’ He rubbed an enormous hand across his eyes. ‘It’s a long time ago.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  He smiled.

  ‘No, lad, you weren’t to know. But you’re a crafty one, Nat – you meant to make me think, and you have. I understand it now: you want to show them you’re not what they think you are. And the truth of it is, that’s what I should have done, instead of just keeping my head down, and letting people believe what they wanted to.’ He stood and brushed the crumbs of breakfast off his breeches, then looked at me for a long moment. ‘All right. We’ll give it a try. But if you die, and the queen puts me in the Tower, you’d better haunt the place and get me out.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Every few weeks, I’d stand beside the queen, as Mr Van Dyck painted and muttered. She talked more and more about her family, and life in France, and after a time she began to ask me about English customs and sayings that she didn’t understand.

  ‘I will never master this language,’ she said after I’d explained one day that raining cats and dogs just meant raining hard. ‘But at least you don’t laugh at me when I ask, like everyone else does.’

  Most of all, she talked about Gaston, the brother she missed as much as I did Sam.

  ‘Was he sad that you left?’ I asked one afternoon, remembering Sam standing outside our house and waving until we couldn’t see each other anymore.

  ‘Yes, he was. He came all the way to the ship and we cried when we parted. But we always knew I would have to go away when I married, just like my sisters. They’re braver than me though, and they seem to be happy. I thought it would be the same for me, but it isn’t.’

  She sounded so sad that I didn’t think before I spoke.

  ‘But that’s not your fault,’ I burst out. ‘That’s the duke’s fault, and the king’s for listening to him.’

  I looked up: had I gone too far? When we talked about home, and our families, it was easy to forget she was the Queen of England, but she was, and he was the king, and I wasn’t sur
e if it was all right to say what I’d said. Mr Van Dyck snapped his fingers.

  ‘Please! Face the front.’

  I held my breath, but she wasn’t angry.

  ‘I know you don’t like the duke any more than I do,’ she said. ‘But what can I do, when the king likes him so well, and me so little?’

  I didn’t know how to answer that. I admired the way she held her own against the king and the duke, always fighting back when they criticised her, but it wasn’t getting her anywhere. I’d noticed how the king would glance across to the duke when they argued, and get an encouraging nod. It wasn’t hard to imagine the conversations that nod represented; the duke telling the king that he wouldn’t take that kind of thing from any wife of his, and the king ought to keep his uppity little queen in line. So every time she fought back, she was playing into his hands. But there was another way – the one I’d seen work so many times on my father.

  ‘I think you should do what the duke does,’ I said. ‘With the king, I mean.’

  ‘What Buckingham does?’

  ‘He never argues with him. He flatters him and tells him what he wants to hear.’

  ‘So you think it’s my fault then, that I should have been more pleasant to him?’

  I risked Mr Van Dyck’s clicking finger and turned round. I must have looked worried; she shook her head.

  ‘No, I’m not angry. Nathaniel, no one speaks the truth to me. The duke and the king say I shouldn’t keep causing trouble. My courtiers told me I should fight them harder. And look where listening to that has brought me. So tell me what you think.’

  And so I found myself telling the Queen of England about my mother’s belief that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and you don’t have to wear the ribbon to be the winner.

  ‘Your mother sounds a very wise woman,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, she is. She’s much wiser than my father, because he always thought he’d won, even when he hadn’t.’

  I smiled to myself, thinking of what my mother would say if she knew I was passing on her advice to the Queen of England.

  ‘And you really think I can also do this?’ said the queen. ‘When the king doesn’t even like me?’

  ‘I don’t know, your majesty. But I think if you don’t try, well then…’ I hesitated, but she nodded for me to go on. ‘If you don’t try, you’ve let the duke win. And he shouldn’t win.’

  She thought for a moment.

  ‘You’re right. What you suggest, I think it will be hard. But to let him win – perhaps that would be harder.’ Mr Van Dyck gave an irritated sigh as she turned and looked down at me. ‘I came here to be queen, and if I have to use honey, that’s what I will do.’

  * * *

  Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that. My mother had had years of doling out honey instead of vinegar, and even she couldn’t always make it work. And she didn’t have someone as clever as the duke trying to turn my father against her. With his help, the king and queen continued to fall out regularly, and the entire court knew they rarely spent the night together. But one evening, at one of the public dinners she used to hate so much, she said something to the king and, after a moment’s hesitation, he laughed. He didn’t laugh very often – never with her – and when the duke saw it, he looked like a man who’d lost a shilling and found a thimble. When she saw I’d noticed, she made a little sign with her finger, like a bee flying through the air.

  Not long after that, she had her first triumph over the duke. By then, everyone in England knew he was all but running the country, and people didn’t like it: there was a rhyme that went around, saying the king ruled the kingdom, but the duke ruled the king and the devil ruled the duke. Relations with the French had got worse, because – of course – the laws against Catholics hadn’t been abolished, and when the King of France started persecuting French Protestants, the duke saw a way to make himself more popular. Some Protestants were under siege in the port of La Rochelle, and he persuaded the king that if they sent the navy to rescue them, the country would be grateful to their victorious monarch and his favourite advisor. The duke even decided to command the fleet himself, though to the best of my knowledge, the most commanding he’d ever done was to his tailor, about the placement of beads on his doublets.

  At his farewell banquet, he couldn’t resist trying to provoke the queen. He gave a speech about how they were going to sail to victory, and at the end, he turned to her and said:

  ‘It is regrettable we must take this action against the family of our queen, but the French have shown we cannot trust their promises.’

  The entire room held its breath; everyone was expecting her to give him an earful about how the French weren’t the only ones who hadn’t kept their promises. But she looked up at him, her face a picture of innocence, and said:

  ‘I also regret the need for this fight. But I am Queen of England, and so of course I hope England will be victorious.’

  He flinched as though she’d poked him in the eye with her spoon, but recovered quickly and bowed. The king patted her hand and said how wise she was becoming, and the duke had no choice but to smile one of his oily smiles and agree. When she glanced over at me a few minutes later, I lifted my finger and made the sign of a bee flying.

  Chapter Seventeen

  With the duke away, the queen took the chance to spend more time with the king, and that meant I could snatch some extra riding practice with Jeremiah during the day, walking Shadow further into the parkland around the palace to make sure no one saw us. And I turned out to be right; surviving that first fall chased away the crippling fear that made me sit so stiffly in the saddle. I still fell; bits of me were black and blue and some mornings my muscles ached so badly I could barely stand. But I’d learned to tumble away from Shadow’s hooves and, week by week, the falls became less frequent. Because I was so small and light, Jeremiah had to come up with different ways to do things, and we had to try lots of tricks that didn’t work before we found the ones that did. But when, one morning, I finally got Shadow to move off, walk and stop, all by myself, I almost burst with pride. I wished, that day, that my mother could have seen me.

  Soon, we’d progressed from walking to trotting. But if I wanted to race against Crofts, I’d have to gallop, standing up in the saddle, and that last step still defeated me. Jeremiah tried every trick he could think of, but nothing worked.

  Just when I thought I’d never get it, it was Shadow who showed me what to do. Probably by accident, but I don’t know; she was a very clever horse. We set off at a trot, as usual, and as she went into a canter and I eased myself up, for some reason she kicked up her back legs. Usually when I lost my balance, I slid to one side, but the movement jolted me forward and without thinking about it I grabbed at her mane, winding my fingers into the thick, coarse hair. And I stayed on.

  ‘Nat! That’s it!’ shouted Jeremiah as he loped along behind us. ‘Just stay like that, you’re there!’

  When I pulled Shadow up beside him, he was dancing on the spot, waving his long arms in triumph. We’d circled the paddock at a gallop and though I’d wobbled once or twice, somehow, reaching forward and twining my hands into Shadow’s mane had put me in just the right position to keep my balance.

  From then on, we seized every possible moment. By the time the autumn race meeting was three weeks away, I could gallop the entire distance. Even Shadow was pleased with me, bending her head to nuzzle my shoulder when I slipped down off her back at the end of a ride. Jeremiah had attached a special strap to the saddle so now I slid down by myself, and we’d worked out what to do about getting on too. There’d be a mounting block with steps at the park, so we’d practised with the one at the stables early in the mornings, when only the grooms were around. Holding on to the strap, I could just about manage to scramble into the saddle from there. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do.

  * * *

  Up there on Shadow’s back, flying along, I felt equal to anyone, and as the races got closer, fear turned to ex
citement. My mother’s advice about not having to wear the ribbon to be the winner might be working for the queen, but Crofts was never going to leave me alone unless I humiliated him the way he humiliated me. And I began to believe that I could, once and for all.

  But the day before the races we went into the city, and as we came back on the royal barge, Crofts and the other boys were riding along the riverside. I watched as he pelted along ahead of the others, seemingly without the slightest effort, and my heart hit my boots. When I rode Shadow, we were a team, but Crofts rode as though his horse was part of him. How had I ever thought I could beat that?

  I didn’t realise he’d seen me watching but he must have guessed I was on the barge with the queen. As we walked up through the gardens, he was standing by the path, pretending to fiddle with his boot. He waited until the queen and her ladies had passed by before he stood and looked down at me.

  ‘The queen’s little dolly,’ he said. ‘Got your hobby horse ready for tomorrow?’

  I went to walk on, but as usual he stood in front of me and blocked my way.

  ‘You can’t even ride a horse, can you?’ he said.

  ‘You’ll find out tomorrow, won’t you?’

  ‘Are you serious? You really want to do this?’

  ‘I said so, didn’t I? And you accepted my challenge.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Have it your own way, pie boy.’

  As he turned to walk away, he said, ‘Should be a good crowd tomorrow, three hundred or so. And they’re all going to be laughing at you.’

  * * *

  That night I had a nightmare about the race. As I walked up to the mounting block, Shadow turned into Ma Tyrell’s dog, from Oakham. Then she was a horse again, but I got on facing the wrong way, and she started running before I could turn round. I slipped off her rump and as the ground rushed towards me, I woke up, sweating. What if I fell off as soon as Shadow moved? What if I couldn’t even manage to get on? As I lay there in the dark, I asked myself why I’d ever come up with such a stupid idea. I’d wanted to stop Crofts humiliating me, and now here I was, helping him to do it.