The Smallest Man

by Frances Quinn

  I didn’t know if there was or not, but I said no, to be polite.

  Straightening up, seemingly joint by joint, he beckoned me in. ‘Come inside then, lad, or the cold will creep in with you.’

  At the far end of the room, the queen sat on a big chair, with a red canopy hung with gold tassels. It was on a platform with steps all round, and a dozen ladies were sitting around her, some sewing, one in a window seat, plucking at a lute. They all looked up as I came in and one said:

  ‘Oh, he’s so tiny! Look at his sweet little face.’

  The others were talking what I supposed must be French. I didn’t understand the words but it wasn’t hard to tell they were saying much the same thing. Sam would have laughed his head off if he’d heard them. The queen smiled and beckoned to me, and the ladies crowded around, clucking and cooing. One crouched down and stroked my hair, as if I was a cat.

  ‘What are you going to call him?’ she asked. ‘What about… Lord Minimus?’

  ‘My name’s Nat,’ I said.

  Then I thought, should I have said that? Perhaps the queen was allowed to change my name if she wanted to, like my father did when he bought a new dog. But the queen said, in her funny French accent, that I had a perfectly good name already. A movement caught my eye; there was a small black dog sitting on her lap. She lifted it up onto its back legs so it was standing like a person. It was the ugliest dog I’d ever seen; its nose was squashed flat, and its eyes bulged out from droopy folds of fur.

  ‘This is Bonbon,’ the queen said, stroking its wrinkly head. ‘Bonbon, say hello to Nathaniel.’

  The dog stared at me with a look that said life had disappointed it so far, and it wasn’t expecting my arrival to bring any improvement to the situation. And then a strange creature poked its head up behind the queen’s shoulder; about as big as a rabbit, but shaped like a person, and covered in brown fur, everywhere except its face and hands. And behind it came another one. The first one clambered down onto the arm of the chair, stood up and looked at me with shiny black eyes. Suddenly it opened its mouth and made a huffing noise at me, showing sharp yellow teeth. I jumped back, almost tumbling off the step, and the ladies laughed.

  ‘This naughty pair are Bruno and Bella,’ said the queen.

  ‘What are they?’ I asked.

  I was trying to make sense of their funny little hands and feet, which looked so much like a person’s: were they people who’d been bewitched in some way?

  ‘They’re monkeys,’ she said, which didn’t enlighten me much because I didn’t know what a monkey was. Not wanting to look foolish, I decided to ask someone later, and in the meantime keep well away from them. If they were bewitched, they’d most likely be cross about it, and I didn’t like the look of those teeth.

  ‘So,’ said the queen, counting on her fingers as though she was ticking off a list, ‘we must have a little bed made for you, and a chair, and some lovely clothes. Can you dance?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  At home there was dancing round the maypole at Whitsuntide, but my mother never let me join in, in case I got trampled on.

  ‘Monsieur Lefevre can teach you. And you must have the other lessons too. Reading and writing, and of course French.’

  I wasn’t sure about the reading and writing. Sam went to the village school for a while and came home shaking his head, saying letters and numbers made his eyes hurt. But I didn’t want to seem ungrateful and I liked the sound of the bed.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said. ‘But what am I to do here?’

  ‘You are to be my dwarf,’ she said, and that was the first time I knew that there was a name for what I was.

  * * *

  Those first weeks, I missed home so much it was like an ache in my belly. I missed my mother, and Sam and Annie, and being able to walk around Oakham and know every face. The palace was so big and full of people that when I walked its long corridors, full of strange faces peering down at me, I felt smaller than I ever had at home. Every single bit of the day was different and strange to me: when I woke in the morning I missed Sam’s warm back against mine, and when the day ended at a dinner table laden with goose and partridge and syllabub and tansies, I longed for a bowl of my mother’s stew, eaten by the fire.

  What I missed most, though, was the hope I used to have. I wished I could turn back time to the day when I still believed I was going to grow long legs and strong arms, and be able to do all the things other boys did. When I didn’t know what I was and I didn’t know my father wanted to be rid of me.

  But that life was gone, and I couldn’t have it back. And so when my knees trembled at the thought of all the faces looking at me, or when I woke in the night and missed Sam’s soft snore, I would make myself think of the faerie in the cage. At home, I had been no use, and being no use had almost got me a life like hers. If I was no use at the palace either, they might send me home and, if they did, my father wouldn’t hesitate to double his money and sell me to the fair man anyway. So I made up my mind to do my best with the strange new role life had handed me.

  Several times a day, the queen and her ladies went to mass; in those hours I took my lessons. The rest of the time, they sat and gossiped, or sewed, or taught tricks to their dogs and the monkeys. And me? I became a doll for them to play with. They sewed me costumes, of satin and velvet and lace, exclaiming over how pretty I looked in them, and when the fancy took them, they picked me up and dandled me on their knees, chucking me under the chin until my cheeks burned hot. They laughed then and said how sweet it was that I was shy, and if you have ever been, or known, a ten-year-old boy, you’ll understand how little I welcomed those attentions. But I learned to watch out for the simpering expression that usually prefaced my being plucked up with no control over my destination, so I could step well back and distract them with a song. I applied myself to my dancing lessons, and performed the results to great applause, and when I wasn’t singing or dancing, I capered about with the dogs and the monkeys, and said silly things that made the queen and her ladies laugh.

  When the queen received important visitors, I would be stood on a stool to recite a poem for them, and one day, I was even lent out as a cure for indigestion. The French ambassador was troubled with a stomach ache, and during his time at the Spanish court, he’d learned that the comical sight of dwarves capering about, while a person was eating, was considered good for the digestion. At his request I was sent to his apartments, where I performed a few cartwheels and did a little jig, during which the ambassador despatched the best part of a capon, a good portion of roast beef, a partridge and an entire dish of syllabub, belching violently between mouthfuls and loosening his breeches three times, then pronounced himself cured. I was glad to be of help, and even more so when he gave me sixpence for my trouble.

  If you’d seen me there, singing and dancing, and smiling until my cheeks ached, you’d have thought I was the happiest boy in Christendom. And every morning, I told myself I was lucky. I had so nearly ended up in a cage at the fair, and now here I was, waking on linen sheets in a bed the queen had ordered to be made just for me. I had more new clothes than I could count, fresh underlinens every day, and even a servant of my own, to see to it my chamber was clean and tidy, the rushes freshly laid, and the fire already blazing when I rose in the morning. They got me through the day, those thoughts. But still, every night, as I lay down to sleep, I longed for home.

  Chapter Nine

  I must have been at the palace for a month, perhaps two, when I saw Charles Crofts for the first time. I was sitting in the window seat, wondering what Sam was doing at home and wishing I was there with him, when a shout from outside made look me down to the gardens below. Half a dozen lads of about my age were chasing around; a tall boy with curly black hair had snatched a hat off one of the others’ heads and was holding it out of his reach, laughing. I asked Marie, one of the queen’s ladies, who they were and she told me the tall boy was the son of William Crofts, the queen’s Master of Horse, and the
one who was like him but shorter and stockier was his brother, David. The others she couldn’t name, but said they were the sons of noblemen ‘sent here to learn about life, and how the world works.’ They had lessons in shooting and archery in the tilt yard, she told me, and kept a horse each in the queen’s stables.

  I watched them quite often from the window after that, and found myself looking out for them when we were out walking in the gardens or when the queen sent me on errands around the palace. Crofts would always be larking around, plucking his brother’s hat off and throwing it into a tree or kicking the fair-haired boy’s backside and dodging away so it seemed someone else had done it. He was the tallest of them all, and the leader; the others jostled each other and pretended to spar but no one did that with him, and when they rode their horses along the riverside, Crofts’ big black stallion always left the others behind. Once, I saw them climb the biggest tree in the orchard, a tall oak with hardly any low branches. I’d often thought that even Sam, who was the best tree climber in Oakham, would have had trouble with that oak, but Crofts’ strong arms pulled him up as though it was nothing at all. He was the kind of boy my father would have liked to have for a son.

  Before long, all I thought about was what it would be like to be one of them. To be with boys my own age, fighting and running and larking about. And to learn to ride and shoot, instead of sitting in the chamber all day with women and monkeys and dogs, being dressed up and petted and told I was sweet. I told myself again and again that I was lucky to have the life I’d been given, when things might have gone so differently. But still I kept thinking, what a life theirs must be.

  I couldn’t have it, I knew that. But I was so lonely that I started to wonder, could I at least be friends with them? We were the same age, after all, and sometimes the boys in Oakham had let me join in a game of catch-as-catch-can or fox’s footsteps, as long as the numbers were uneven so neither team got stuck with me instead of someone good. And I knew by then that I could make people laugh, with the way I told a story, or mimicked someone’s way of talking. Maybe that would be enough to make them like me.

  On the afternoon of the queen’s birthday, when she was away getting ready for the evening’s festivities, I took my chance and slipped down to the gardens. The Crofts brothers weren’t there but the others were squatting on one of the gravel paths, playing knucklebones. The fair-haired boy looked up, and I pointed to the stones.

  ‘Can I play?’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Do you even know how to do it?’ said one.

  ‘Of course.’

  I was good at Knucklebones; it was one of the few games the boys in Oakham played that didn’t require strength or speed, and I’d practised and practised flipping the stones up and catching them. By the time the Crofts brothers came striding down the path a bit later, I’d won three games.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Crofts, nodding at me.

  ‘Nat. He’s the one that was in the pie,’ said Matthew, the fair-haired boy.

  ‘I know that. What’s he doing here?’

  Matthew looked uncertainly at me and the others glanced at each other. I nodded to the window above.

  ‘I saw you from the chamber,’ I said. ‘It gets boring up there.’

  ‘Don’t you get fed sweetmeats all day long, like the monkeys?’ said Crofts. ‘That can’t be too bad.’

  ‘I could bring some down,’ I said. ‘There’s always loads, they wouldn’t even notice.’

  ‘And what happens if we’re playing a game and you fall over and hurt yourself? You’d go running off to the queen, and we’d get the blame.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Of course you would.’

  ‘I wouldn’t. I’m not a telltale.’

  ‘You swear?’

  ‘I swear.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘What are you then?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They say you’re ten.’

  ‘I’m nearly eleven.’

  ‘Then why do you look like that?’

  Heat rose in my face.

  ‘I’m… just small. I’m a dwarf.’

  It was the first time I ever said that word out loud and it was like a stone in my mouth.

  ‘You look like a baby.’ He glanced round at the others and smirked. ‘Bet you still wear a tailclout.’

  Before I could answer, he snatched me up and tipped me upside down. I hung, helpless, by my ankles as he poked at my backside, then shook his head.

  ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Got to be fair, no tailclout there.’ His voice bubbled with laughter as he put me down. ‘I’m surprised they let you use the pisspot though – could be dangerous for you.’ He mimed someone toppling into a pot, and sang out, ‘Help, I’m drowning in piss,’ in a squeaky voice, waving his arms.

  The other boys were laughing now. And I stood there with a stupid smile on my face. Pretending I thought it was funny too, as my cheeks burned with humiliation. Still hoping they’d let me be their friend.

  ‘Right,’ said Crofts. ‘You have to pass a test.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What?’

  He thought for a moment, narrowing his eyes. Then he looked towards the orchard, and smiled to himself.

  ‘Let’s see if you can climb a tree. Come on.’

  They ran off and I followed, like a pathetic little puppy. I knew, even before I caught them up, where I’d find them. By the time I got there, they were all sitting in the big oak tree, the one even Sam would have struggled to climb. Above its broad, straight trunk, the first branches were well out of my reach. Crofts smirked down at me.

  ‘Come on then, pie boy. What are you waiting for?’

  I jumped up and spread my arms across the trunk, digging my fingers into the rough bark, the way I’d seen boys at home do when there were no low branches to reach for. Bracing my legs against the tree, I clung on for a couple of seconds and tried to push myself up, but my arms wouldn’t reach and I fell, skinning my palms on the bark.

  ‘That the best you can do?’ said Crofts.

  I threw myself at the tree again and held on. But as soon as I tried to edge upwards I lost my grip and slid to the ground.

  ‘Our little sister could do better than that,’ said Crofts’ brother. ‘Maybe you should try something smaller. Like a rose bush.’

  I should have walked away then, but I wanted to be friends with them so badly. Time and again I tried, while they whooped with laughter. Eventually I spotted a hole to tuck my foot into. By the time I hauled myself up to the lowest branch, my palms were bleeding and my legs shook from the effort. I looked down; the ground was very far away.

  Crofts swung down and dropped lightly onto the grass.

  ‘Right,’ he said, looking up at me. ‘Now jump down.’

  He knew I couldn’t.

  ‘It’s too high,’ I said.

  ‘It’s too high,’ he whined in a baby’s voice. ‘Well, isn’t that a shame?’

  I started to climb down, but as I stretched to reach the nearest branch, he pulled himself up into the tree again.

  ‘If that’s too high, try this,’ he said, lifting me easily and perching me even higher up. I could see, without even testing, that the nearest branches were too far for my arms to reach; I was stuck.

  They stood underneath the tree and looked up, laughing. Crofts mimed falling into the pot again and I was treated to another chorus of ‘I’m drowning in piss’. Stupidly, for a second I let myself think of how I’d longed to be their friend, and to my horror, tears pricked my eyes. Do not cry. I dug my nails into my palms. Do not cry.

  Matthew said, ‘I think we should get him down now. What if he tells the queen?’

  Crofts looked up at me.

  ‘Not a telltale, are you, pie boy? You said you weren’t.’

  You planned it like this. From the start.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t.’

  ‘So you’ll say you climbed up there yo
urself, won’t you?’

  I nodded, and they walked away, laughing. Crofts turned round.

  ‘Just so you know,’ he said, ‘you’re a freak. And we don’t keep company with freaks.’

  I sat there, stupid and sick at heart, my face burning at the memory of Crofts poking at my backside, and their laughter at my pathetic attempts to climb the tree. A freak. Well, I’d heard that before. Why did I think they’d accept me, when my own father couldn’t? And how ashamed of me would he be now, if he’d seen it all?

  * * *

  It was Jeremiah, the doorkeeper who I’d thought was a giant, who rescued me. With the queen away from the chamber everyone was about their own business that afternoon, but he noticed I wasn’t there when dinner started and came to look for me. I was shivering by then, my feet and hands numb with cold. Before I’d say what happened I made him promise not to tell the queen. I wasn’t going to let Crofts say I’d told tales. And even then, I didn’t tell him everything; I was too ashamed.

  ‘He’s a bad lot, that Crofts boy,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen how he is with horses, and that tells you a lot about a person.’ He peered down at me. ‘I should think you’re hungry?’

  I nodded.

  ‘We’ve missed our dinner, but I think I can scrape something together.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Got a friend in the kitchens.’

  With long, loping strides I had to trot to keep up with, he led the way to a little store room, lined on three sides with shelves stacked high with stone jars.

  ‘Nice and cosy in here. Gets the warmth from the ovens. Sit yourself down on the floor and I’ll be back directly. It might be thin pickings tonight but I’ll see what I can find.’

  The thin pickings turned out to be two meat pies, half a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese as big as a man’s hand, five thick slices of cold roast beef and the same of ham, a lump of butter and two mugs of small beer. To avoid any questions about that afternoon, I asked Jeremiah how he came to be at the palace. As he chewed his way steadily through the beef, then the ham and finally the cheese, accompanied by hunks of bread torn from the loaf and thickly buttered, he explained he’d been a groom in a big house in Kent.