The one good thing I could find in the whole story was that at least he’d gone to his death knowing she was safe. But for that there’d been a price: all those years spent apart. She told me once that when she was away from him, it was like having less air to breathe. And now they would never see each other again.
What was it all for?
All that blood spilt, all those lives lost. I didn’t believe the king’s cause to be right in every degree, but it was far from clear to me that the people who’d put themselves in his place would make the country better, or happier, or help us rub along more easily when we differed. And whether they were right or wrong that it was his fault so many lives were lost, taking his wasn’t going to bring any of those men back. They’d turned the world upside down, that day, and it was hard to see how they could set it to rights again.
When you’ve seen something like that, stood there and watched it happen in front of you, it can’t help but make you think. And what I thought of was another death, on a misty morning in the woods outside Paris. I would never lose my guilt about killing Crofts, and I didn’t seek to. But I couldn’t bring him back either. And if that day had taught me anything, it was that life is precious and none of us should waste a second of it.
Before my eyes closed and the flagon slipped to the floor, I had decided; the very next day, I’d travel north. God had given me one life, and I wasn’t going to waste whatever might be left of it. She might not want me. There was every chance she wouldn’t. But I had to try.
Chapter Sixty-two
The coach north took three days, and by the end of the third one, I was more nervous than I’d been since the day I was put in that pie. I arrived around the middle of the day and found a room at the village inn, telling myself I wanted to smarten myself up. What I really wanted was to put off the moment. And when the coachman shouted ‘Ready to leave’, it was all I could do not to rush outside and climb back in.
It wasn’t hard to find her; everyone had known the Denhams when they had the big house. The woman I asked gave me a strange look: what, it said, what does the likes of you want with her? But she told me to look out for a green gate and a big apple tree in the garden, so I spotted the cottage easily.
There she is.
She was hanging out some washing, with her back to me, and singing quietly to herself. I stood still for a moment, just looking at her, and then took a deep breath. My hand was on the gate when I realised she wasn’t singing, she was talking. To a little girl, playing on the ground beside her. She bent down to the child, tickling her so she wriggled and squirmed.
I stepped back, out of sight. How could I have been so stupid? She hadn’t married Henry, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t married someone else. It had been over two years since she’d come to Oakham. And in that time, someone else had found her.
I was too late after all. Sick at heart, I trudged back to the inn. I had to get away. The village was small; if I stayed overnight, she was sure to discover I was there. One day, perhaps, I might be able to sit in the same room as her husband and child, but not today. The church bells struck two; the last coach out would be going soon. I broke into a run, but as I reached the inn, it was disappearing down the road.
The best I could do then was order food in my room and stay there until the first coach left in the morning. I didn’t care where it was going; I’d take it and make my way back to Oakham by whatever route I could find.
* * *
Next morning, I was stuffing the last of my things into my bag when there was a knock on the door of my room. The innkeeper, curiosity seeping from every pore, informed me that I had a visitor. Of course. Someone was bound to tell her.
‘Waiting outside the door when we opened, she was.’
‘Is anyone with her?’ I asked, eyeing the window and wondering if I could I climb out of it. But when he said she was alone, I told him I’d come down. In truth, now she was there I couldn’t resist the chance to see her face again.
Chapter Sixty-three
As I came down the stairs she turned and smiled, and my heart flipped over.
‘So it is you,’ she said. ‘I thought it must be, but… Where have you been? The queen tried to find you—’
I told her a shortened version of my story.
‘We had no idea,’ she said. ‘All that time…’
‘What about you?’ I said. ‘I heard about your father, and your brother. I’m sorry.’
‘Poor Ed, he’d only married a month before. That stupid war – in the end, I don’t think any of them knew what they were fighting for.’ She shook her head. ‘But let’s not talk about that now. It’s good to see you. You’ll stay a while, won’t you? The cottage isn’t very big, but we can make room.’
‘No, I have to get back to Oakham.’
‘But you’ve only just got here. You can stay the night, surely?’
‘No, I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’d like to meet your husband but—’
‘What husband?’
‘Your husband.’
‘I haven’t got a husband.’
‘But yesterday I saw you. In the garden with your child.’
She frowned, and then laughed.
‘That wasn’t my child, you idiot! That’s my niece, Alice. Ed’s daughter. Ed’s wife and Alice live with Father and me.’
I think I must have stared at her like a fool as the thoughts tumbled round in my head.
She’s not married. She’s still free.
But that didn’t mean she could love me, did it? She was pleased to see me, that much was obvious, but we’d been friends; she might have been just as pleased to see Susan or Elizabeth. Or Bonbon.
I couldn’t say it, not now, not just like that. Maybe if I stayed a while, I could see how things went? And then I remembered the king, and all the time he and the queen had lost.
‘Could you… could you come here?’ I said, beckoning her down towards me. I reached out and took her hand.
‘What are you—’
‘That’s good news,’ I said. ‘About you not being married. Because the thing is, I love you.’
‘You… What did you say?’
I took a deep breath.
‘I love you. I think I’ve probably loved you since the day I met you.’
‘You… well, that just about takes the biscuit.’ She snatched her hand away, stood and looked down at me, her hands on her hips, her face reddening. ‘Of all the… You come here now, and tell me you love me?’
I looked down at my feet.
You fool.
I was right all along. She thought the idea was ridiculous, of course she did.
‘Why didn’t you say so before?’ she said.
I looked up.
‘You idiot,’ she said. ‘All that time… I nearly married Henry because of you! You bloody well broke my heart, Nat Davy.’
‘But you loved Henry. I saw the way you used to look at him.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘Still this? You numbskull, I wasn’t looking at Henry. Who was usually standing beside him?’
She was looking at me? That day, when we left for Oakham, that look was for me?
‘You loved me since the day you met me?’ she went on. ‘Then why didn’t you ever do anything about it? Oh yes, you said, Henry will make you a very good husband. Why would you say that if you loved me?’
‘But why did you say yes to him if you loved me?’
‘Because I thought… this is so embarrassing… I thought it would make you jealous. And then you might—’
The door opened and the innkeeper came in, casually drying a tankard and trying to look as though he hadn’t been listening outside.
‘Coach is here,’ he said. ‘Will you be wanting—’
‘What we want is a bit of privacy,’ she snapped, and he backed out, carefully leaving the door ajar.
‘Let me see if I understand this,’ I said. ‘Are you saying you loved me too?’
‘But you know that! I
told you everything in my letter. When you didn’t reply, I thought—’
‘I didn’t read it,’ I said. ‘I thought you were just saying goodbye, and I couldn’t bring myself to hear it.’
‘It took me hours to write that letter! I said I thought you should know I loved you, and if you thought you might love me, you only had to write and tell me where you were, and I’d come to you. I said I’d live in a cave, if it meant we could be together. And I’ve spent nearly three years, up to and including the last ten minutes, thinking I’d embarrassed myself and that wherever you were, you were laughing at me for being such a fool.’
‘You’d live with me in a cave?’
‘Obviously I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.’
‘So when you say you loved me back then…’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you by any chance think you might still love me?’
‘As it happens, I do.’
From outside the door came the clang of a pewter tankard hitting the floor.
She folded her arms and frowned at me.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘Are you going to give this village something to gossip about, and ask me to marry you, or not?’
‘Isn’t it usual for the lady to be a bit less forward?’
‘I think we’ve established that if I wait for you to take the initiative, I’ll be ninety before I get a ring on my finger.’
She crouched down again, and looked into my eyes.
‘I love you, Nat Davy,’ she said. ‘Even if you are the biggest idiot in England.’
Epilogue
London, 1663
For years and years I haven’t thought about those long ago days at the palace. And then Sam wrote, and said I had to come to London, there was something I should see.
Tradescant’s cabinet of curiosities, they call the place – all manner of strange and wonderful items, collected from across the world, just for people to come and gaze at them. Sam and Sarah having already made a visit, and Sarah none too keen to pay twice, my niece Lucy came with me that morning. A grown woman now, she looks more like my mother than ever, and she has my brother’s sweet nature.
‘Shall I take you to it?’ she asked. ‘Or do you want to find it for yourself?’
‘Will I know it when I see it?’
She laughed.
‘Yes, there’s no mistaking it.’
So I looked around at the wonders on display. In the first room alone, I saw a piece of the true cross, a mermaid’s hand and a scene from Hamlet carved on a cherrystone, but they couldn’t be what Sam meant. Along one wall was a bank of cabinets full of little drawers, and a couple of elderly ladies were poking about in one and exclaiming over the contents, so I went to have a look. But inside the drawers was just a collection of gemstones carved into animals.
‘I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it,’ Sam had said in his letter. ‘If you won’t come to London just to see us, you’ve got to come and see this.’
She wrote it of course, Sarah. Sam never did get to grips with the alphabet. But she’s a clever one, I’ll give her that. It was her idea to come to London, and it’ll be her pushing that got Sam a good job at the fish market – though by the way she wrinkles her nose at the smell of his clothes, I’d bet she’s got plans to move him on soon. And now she wants Lucy to get a place at the palace, which I’ve no doubt is the real reason she welcomed me so warmly to their home for the visit. But I don’t mind. Lucy’s a lovely girl, and if I can help her by a word to the queen, I will. My own two boys are country lads, they’d no sooner live in the city than on the moon, and though she loves the queen as dearly as I do, Arabella would go mad with boredom if she had to live at court. She’s as happy as a dog with a bone running the estate for her father, and if the new house is smaller than the old one, well, she doesn’t mind and nor do I.
Lucy smiled at my puzzled expression, and nodded at the next room. I walked through, and there it was. In a corner, in a glass case: the suit I wore when we were painted by Mr Van Dyck. Even after all these years, the red velvet glowed at me across the room; the queen always did insist on the best. When I got closer, it was threadbare in places, but the lace around the neck was still white, and the gold buttons down the front were all there. And beside it, my boots, all scuffed round the toes from the gravel in the palace gardens.
How old was I then? Twelve, perhaps? And the queen, standing beside me, was still only seventeen. What would we have thought, back then, if anyone had told us what would happen to us? And yet we’ve come through it all, both of us. When she came home from France to join her son, the new king, people cheered in the streets. And me? I’ve got everything I ever wanted, and more.
Then I saw there was a label, saying who I was – as if you could get a life like the one I’ve had into five words. That’s when it came to me that I should write this all down and tell my story properly. Show people that, on the inside, I’m as big as anyone else. Just like my mother said, all those years ago.
Lucy stooped to read what the label said.
‘Costume worn by Nathaniel Davy, the Smallest Man in England.’
She turned and looked at me.
‘Is that what they used to call you, Uncle Nat?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s what they used to call me.’
Author’s Note
When I read a historical novel that features real events, the question in my mind is always ‘How much of this is true?’ Nat Davy is a figment of my imagination, but his story was inspired by that of Jeffrey Hudson, court dwarf to Queen Henrietta Maria, who became what these days we’d call a celebrity, thanks to his tiny size, doll-like looks and ready wit.
Like so many figures who lived on the edge of great historical events, Jeffrey’s life is documented only in snatches, but thanks to Nick Page’s excellent biography, Lord Minimus, we know that he was presented to the queen in a pie, and that he accompanied her to Holland to buy arms for the Civil War, putting him by her side during the attack on Bridlington – and yes, she really did go back for the dog (which fans of the period may know was actually called Mitte – my excuse for the change is that people kept asking me why a French queen had a dog with a German-sounding name). Jeffrey was with her on the journey down to Oxford, when a kidnap plot was rumoured; we don’t know how far the plot went, so the details of the one described here come from my imagination, as do Arabella and the Dunham family. He then accompanied the queen to France and there killed a man in a duel; it’s not known why.
This is a novel though, not a fictionalised biography or a history textbook, so not everything that happens to Nat happened to Jeffrey Hudson and, here and there, I’ve changed the order of events, or their locations.
After being banished from France, Jeffrey was kidnapped en route to England by the infamous Barbary pirates, who roamed the seas around Europe capturing ships and their passengers; the wealthy were ransomed, the rest sold into slavery in North Africa, which is what seems to have happened to Jeffrey. Nothing is known of his life there, but it’s thought he may have been held for as long as twenty-five years, and eventually freed, with hundreds of others, as a result of a scheme to use a percentage of customs takings to pay for the release of Barbary captives.
Unlike Nat, as far as we know, Jeffrey didn’t get a happy ending – his biographer found no record of him marrying, and believes he died, alone and poor, back home in Oakham. As there’s no record of that either, I like to think there’s at least the possibility that Jeffrey found his own Arabella – but we’ll never know.
Acknowledgements
There should really be a five-author credit for this book, because it wouldn’t have got finished without my amazing writing buddies, Kate Clarke, Lucy Smallwood Barker, Amy Hoskin and Clêr Lewis, who read endless drafts, brainstormed ideas and got me out of some very deep plot holes. You four are just the best – thank you doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Thanks to Jan Bhend, Sarah Giles, Ian Kirkpatrick and Julie Ball, who read e
arly and frankly terrible drafts and gave me useful feedback; to Ollie Rice, my mentor and cheerleader for longer than either of us care to remember; to Sheila Saner from Riding for the Disabled, and Jo White, who helped me figure out how Nat might learn to ride; and to Dave Harris of Kent Fire and Rescue, for answering my hopelessly vague questions about how quickly a fire in a seventeenth-century house that he’d never seen might spread, and in which direction. And thanks to my friend John Garvie for the picture of Jeffrey Hudson that sat on my desk as inspiration while I wrote the book.
Thank you too to the people who made my story into this book: my super-smart editor Clare Hey, possibly the only person in the world who I could still like after they’d asked me to throw away 30,000 words and write new ones to replace them (she was right); my sharp-eyed and wise copy-editor Susan Opie; cover designer Emma Ewbank; proof reader Seán Costello; and all the team at Simon & Schuster, especially Marketing Director Hayley McMullan and Publicity Managers Jamie Criswell and Jess Barratt, who pushed Nat out in the world. And huge thanks to my fantastic agent, Alice Lutyens, for spot-on advice, irrepressible enthusiasm and especially for taking a punt on Nat, and me, before his story was even finished.
At the risk of this turning into an Oscar speech, thank you to my mum and dad, for giving me the love of reading that made me want to write, and to my teachers at St Angela’s Ursuline Convent School for Girls in Forest Gate, East London, especially Mrs Atherfold, Miss Turvey and Dr Betts, for showing me that being able to string a sentence together gives you more options in life than I’d ever imagined.
Last but definitely not least, thanks to my long-suffering husband, Mike Jeffree, for everything else.
Q & A with Frances Quinn, author of The Smallest Man
How did you come across the true story that inspired the novel?
The Smallest Man Page 28
