The Smallest Man

by Frances Quinn

  Chapter Thirty

  I waited through the long hours of darkness, imagining the moment when the trap door would open above me. I remembered what Arabella had said about Major Sarenbrant shooting the steward without a thought. But they wouldn’t do that to me, not straight away. They’d want to know what I knew first, and I didn’t want to think about what they might do to make me tell them. Or what they’ll do to the people who hid you here.

  It was almost a relief when at last he rose and left the room. I listened for boots running up the stairs. They were going to get a surprise when they saw me, and I hoped that if nothing else, I’d make the major look foolish for seeking reinforcements. I was just beginning a prayer that I’d be strong enough to withstand whatever they did to me, when his voice came from below.

  ‘We’ve no time to eat now. Pack up some provisions for us to take. We leave in ten minutes.’

  * * *

  It was Arabella who worked it out.

  ‘Shh,’ she said, putting a finger to her lips as she opened the trap door. ‘The major’s gone, but there are guards downstairs.’

  In a whisper, I told her what had happened in the night.

  ‘He moved the chest?’

  ‘Yes. I heard it, scraping on the floor.’

  She glanced across at the bed, then bent down.

  ‘Like this?’ she said, struggling to pull out a drawer in the chest. It was stiff, and I recognised the noise immediately. She pointed to the bed, where a thick red rug lay pulled aside. ‘He went looking for extra covers. I should have thought, he’s always complaining of the cold. Christ’s blood, if he’d moved the chest…’

  We were both silent for a moment.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’ She beckoned me over to the window. ‘There are two guards just below. Mother’s going to ride down the drive, as though she means to leave. They’ll try to stop her, and while they’re busy with that, you can sneak out the same way we came in.’

  ‘She can’t do that. You don’t know what they might do.’

  ‘Yes we do. But we don’t have much choice, do we? If they find you here, we’re all dead anyway.’

  Lady Denham came out of the stables on a chestnut mare, looking neither right nor left as she set off at a brisk trot. It took a moment for the guards to realise what was happening, and by the time they ran after her, shouting, she was a good way ahead.

  We ran across to the stables, where an elderly donkey was hitched to a cart.

  ‘Fitch is old, but he can still go at a clip and he knows the way to the village,’ said Arabella. ‘Take the road beside the church, that’ll get you back to where they were going to set camp. You can leave the cart anywhere, but find a grassy field for Fitch – I don’t know when I’ll be able to fetch him.’

  The cart step was high off the ground; as if the potato sack hadn’t been humiliating enough, now I was going to have to get her to lift me onto the seat. But before I could ask, she went to the back of the stables and came back with a stool for me to step up on. I was about to thank her for being so thoughtful, but I stopped myself in time. Don’t be stupid: she just doesn’t want to touch you. I remembered how people in Oakham had been like that sometimes, as if they thought my misfortune might somehow rub off on them.

  Foolishly, I’d been flattered when she assumed I had some influence with the queen, pleased that she hadn’t taken one look at me and dismissed me as of no importance. But if she turned out to be just a silly, superstitious country girl after all, what was that to me? Turning my back on her, I climbed up. There was a basket on the seat.

  ‘Bread and cheese,’ she said. ‘I thought you might be hungry.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She looked at me, with her head on one side, as if she was about to say something, but she didn’t. I flicked the reins, and the donkey moved off.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  With what I’d overheard, it was easy to pinpoint where the Parliamentarians intended to attack. While the queen’s party stayed, well guarded, in camp, Lord Newcastle took a contingent of our troops to ambush theirs at the very place they’d expected to ambush us. They came back whooping and hollering in triumph: they’d caught the other side completely by surprise, thanks to the same dense woodlands Sarenbrant’s men had been planning to hide in. The soldiers Sarenbrant had expected to pick off the queen’s guards one by one had got picked off themselves, and they’d got a good proportion of the ones that came behind them too.

  ‘To our secret weapon,’ said Lord Newcastle, the old hypocrite, as he raised his tankard to me that night. As always, the queen insisted we eat outside, sitting round a fire just as the soldiers did. Extra rations of ale had been given out to celebrate the victory, and through the haze of woodsmoke came periodic cheers, as the circles of men round their fires recounted the events of the day.

  ‘They must be cursing now, trying to work out how we knew,’ said Henry. ‘Here’s to Nat Davy, the queen’s spy.’

  When dinner was over, the queen said she had an an-nouncement to make. Henry nudged me: ‘Wait till you hear this.’

  Thanks to me, she said, we’d been able not just to foil the kidnap plot, but do some real damage to the other side.

  ‘You showed true courage, Nathaniel, and it deserves to be recognised.’

  Lord Newcastle nodded.

  ‘Very well deserved,’ he said.

  My heart thumped. They’d realised I could be useful. I didn’t dare hope I’d be assigned to a troop, but even if they let me ride along on a skirmish, that would…

  ‘I am appointing you Honorary Captain of Horse,’ she said. ‘With my thanks.’

  It took me a moment to recognise the words. Honorary Captain of Horse. The same title the king had given their eldest son, nine-year-old Prince Charles, when the war began. I thanked her, of course, but as I looked around at the real soldiers who’d fought that day, I couldn’t feel proud of a made-up honour fit only for a child who would never see the field of battle. Other men proved themselves with strength and skill, but the only talent I’d shown was being small enough to fit into a potato sack. The soldiers cheered, but they weren’t cheering me as one of their own.

  As we sat on into the night, celebrating the victory, I drank my share of the ale and sang my share of the songs, so the queen wouldn’t think I was ungrateful. But disappointment sat in my guts like a stone. And I kept thinking about the girl, Arabella. If anyone had shown courage it was her, and her mother: they’d seen what Major Sarenbrant was willing to do to anyone who so much as argued with him, yet they’d taken the risk, to save the queen. And we’d left them to it. Ever since I’d driven away from the house in the cart, I’d been telling myself they’d be fine, no one had seen me there, there was nothing they could be blamed for. But all the same, I wished I knew for sure. She might be just a silly, superstitious country girl who thought she could catch bad luck from touching me, but I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her.

  * * *

  Next morning, we were stamping out the last of the fires when she arrived, riding the same white horse. This time the red hair didn’t tumble loose from her hood; it had been cut in ragged tufts to just below her ears, and a bruise marked her cheek, staining the pale skin violet and blue. My stomach turned over: what had we done?

  ‘They made my mother tell them,’ she said. ‘And then they killed her.’

  As Susan dabbed witch hazel on the bruise, Arabella explained that her mother had managed to talk her way out of trouble with the guards, pretending she hadn’t realised she wasn’t even allowed to go into the village. But Major Sarenbrant was already suspicious about our ambush, and when one of the guards mentioned the commotion with Lady Denham, he realised something had been going on at the house. He lined the whole household up and threatened to kill Arabella unless someone told him what had happened.

  ‘He held a knife against my throat. I told her not to tell. I said they were going to kill us anyway, so why help them?�
�� She put a hand up to her ragged hair. ‘That’s when he did this. With the knife. He said if she didn’t say, he’d do the same to my neck, and he couldn’t promise that would be a clean cut either.’

  ‘Jesu,’ said the queen. ‘You poor child.’

  ‘So she told them. Except she didn’t say it was me that sneaked Nat in, she said it was her. But they didn’t believe her.’ She looked down for a moment and took a deep breath. ‘He told two of the soldiers to take her outside and shoot her. I tried to stop them but he had hold of me. I bit him though.’ She pointed to the bruise. ‘That’s what got me this. But it was worth it. I bit his finger to the bone and I didn’t let go till he hit me. He screamed like the pig he is.’

  She stared out through the door of the tent, as though she was seeing it all again in her head.

  ‘She didn’t struggle or anything,’ she said. ‘She was so dignified.’

  I thought of the night before, when the camp had caroused into the early hours, celebrating our victory, and I’d been awarded my pretend honour. We’d won this round, but Arabella and her family had paid the price, just like the man with the shell box.

  The queen took her hands.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Arabella. But we’ll get revenge for this.’ She turned to me. ‘Fetch Lord Newcastle. We’ll attack today, this very morning.’

  ‘No,’ said Arabella. ‘They’re gone. They smashed up the house, destroyed everything they couldn’t steal, and then they went.’

  ‘How did you escape?’ asked Henry.

  ‘I didn’t, the pig let me go.’ She looked at me. ‘He told me to ride here and give you a message from him. He said he knew who you were, and to tell you you’re a traitor to the county of Rutland, and to England. And if you ever cross his sight, you’ll die a traitor’s death.’

  Chapter Thirty-two

  With her home destroyed and no family nearby, Arabella was alone. The queen wanted to send her, with a guard of soldiers, back to the Ingrams in York.

  ‘They’re good people,’ she said. ‘They’ll take care of you until your father and brothers come home – which, God willing, will be soon.’

  ‘No,’ said Arabella. ‘I’m coming with you. I want to see you beat the people who killed my mother, and I think I’ve earned the right to.’

  The queen did her best to dissuade her, but even by then I’d realised that once Arabella decided to do something, God himself would have a difficult time talking her out of it. A mere queen didn’t stand a chance. So when we set off again, she came with us.

  From the first morning, she rode with Henry and me, a little behind the queen and Lord Newcastle. And I wasn’t pleased. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her, not at all. But Henry and me, we’d got used to each other: we could ride for miles in a companionable silence, or just as easily pass the time making childish jokes, becoming sillier and sillier until our bellies ached from laughing. But if a woman was around, he couldn’t stop himself from flirting – even an old crone we passed on the road would get a twinkle and a tip of his hat, and more often than not, he’d receive a gummy smile in return. And since Arabella had attached herself to us, I concluded she’d fallen for him just like all the others, and I didn’t fancy spending my days as a gooseberry while they made cow eyes at each other.

  So I got into the habit of dropping back and staying out of their conversation, or riding ahead with the queen and Lord Newcastle, even though his endless stream of stories beginning ‘Speaking from my extensive experience…’ made me want to slice my own ears off. That made the miles very long, and it also threw me into a melancholy cast of mind. Ever since my father’s visit, my thoughts had often turned to Sam and his wife and daughter. I was happy for him, but it brought back our childhood days, when I watched him grow and become able to do things I couldn’t do. Now he had something I’d never have. Jeremiah did too, and then the two lovebirds riding along in front of me became another reminder of what I lacked. I thought I’d become resigned to it, but a part of me couldn’t quite accept the truth; can anybody ever accept that they’re impossible to love? So no matter how much I told myself to forget about what I couldn’t have and be glad for the life I’d got, I still dreamed of a wife to love, who would love me back.

  One afternoon on the road, I’d been deep in such thoughts, and by the time we stopped to make camp I was feeling thoroughly sorry for myself. Wrapped up in my brooding, I wasn’t concentrating and, instead of sliding down from Shadow’s back, holding on to the strap as I usually did, I got my foot caught in the stirrup. Arabella saw my plight.

  ‘Wait,’ she said, as I wriggled my foot, cursing. ‘Let me help.’

  ‘There’s no need, I’m fine.’

  I didn’t want to see the disgust on her face if she had to touch me.

  ‘You’re obviously not,’ she said, her hands on her hips. ‘But if you’d rather struggle, and make a show of yourself, go ahead.’

  ‘I can do it. You don’t need to stay.’

  ‘You’ll be sorry you said that if I go and you fall on your head and die.’

  ‘I am not going to fall on my head and die.’

  I tugged my foot but the stirrup had twisted and I couldn’t get it free. My face flushed red under Arabella’s steady gaze; why didn’t she just go away?

  ‘This is silly,’ she said. ‘What if I just untangle your foot? That’s all, I won’t lift you down.’

  Shadow skittered to the side, annoyed at the feeling of me hanging so awkwardly. She’d be tired and hot from the long ride; it wasn’t fair of me to keep her from food and water.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  Ignoring my grudging tone, Arabella untwisted the strap and eased my foot out. I slid down and bent to brush off my breeches, hoping to hide my embarrassment.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, without looking at her. ‘I would have been able to get down anyway, but—’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, what is the matter with you?’ I looked up. She folded her arms, and glared down at me. ‘What have I done? Come on, tell me. What have I done?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Every time I open my mouth, you make yourself scarce. Going on ahead, or hanging back on your own. So I know there’s something.’

  ‘No, it’s not—’

  ‘I’m too blunt sometimes, I know that. But I don’t think I’ve said anything to offend you, and if I have, you ought to be a man and tell me what it is, not sulk like a silly little boy.’

  ‘I don’t sulk. I just get bored listening to you and Henry flirting with each other like two pigeons in the spring.’

  ‘Flirting?’ She made it sound like I’d accused her of walking down the street naked. ‘When have you heard me flirting with Henry? Tell me. When?’

  ‘I make it my business not to listen.’

  ‘You just said you got bored listening to us.’

  ‘Well anyway, it’s no skin off my nose if you two want to be alone together.’

  She rolled her eyes.

  ‘We don’t. You’ve got it wrong.’ A blush crept across her cheeks as she spoke. ‘Henry’s a nice man, but he’s not the kind of man I like. In that way, I mean.’

  I didn’t believe her; that blush told its own story. You hope I’ll tell Henry what you said and make him keener on you. He always liked the ones who played hard to get best.

  ‘So there’s no need for you to ride by yourself,’ she said. ‘Not on my account, anyway.’

  ‘Well, sometimes I like to, as it happens.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, throwing up her hands, and turning to stalk away. ‘Do what you like. It makes no difference to me.’

  Chapter Thirty-three

  I thought about that conversation later, and I wasn’t very proud of myself. I shouldn’t have been so rude about accepting her help and I needn’t have brushed her off when she said that about me riding with them. She’d only been trying to be friendly, and even if I didn’t believe her when she said she wasn’t sweet on Henry, what was that to me? I was tire
d of riding by myself too; it was boring and lonely and it caused me to dwell on things that made me sad. So the next morning I joined them as we set off. Arabella raised an eyebrow, but she said nothing about our encounter the day before, and nor did I.

  Wanting to atone for my churlishness, I thought I ought to make conversation with her, so I asked if she was looking forward to seeing her father and brothers again when we got to Oxford.

  ‘Well, I’m hoping to see them. If Matt and Edward haven’t shot their own heads off by then.’

  Henry laughed.

  ‘Arabella doesn’t think too highly of her brothers.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ she protested. ‘I love them. But I wouldn’t trust them to find the right end of a broom, let alone a gun.’

  ‘Tell Nat about the lessons,’ said Henry.

  ‘He doesn’t want to hear about that.’

  ‘He does, it’s funny. Go on.’

  ‘Well, they had tutors, before they went away to school, but they hate book learning and my father kept getting rid of the tutors because the boys couldn’t hold the simplest things in their heads – especially Ed, he’s hopeless. When it got to the fourth tutor in a year, Father said he’d set them a test after a month, and if they couldn’t pass, they’d get a whipping.’

  ‘Guess what she did?’ said Henry. ‘She charged her brother sixpence, put on his breeches, and pretended to be him. Every morning for a month.’

  ‘We were very alike when we were small,’ said Arabella.

  ‘And she got full marks in the test.’

  ‘Did your father ever find out?’ I asked.

  ‘He realised something was amiss as soon as he heard Ed had got such good marks. Then when the tutor said he was very attentive and keen, he worked it out – my father’s quite clever, we don’t really understand why he has such stupid sons. I had to give Ed his sixpence back; it was only fair when he got a whipping after all. But I got what I wanted.’