The Smallest Man

by Frances Quinn

  There was a question in her voice, but I wasn’t sure what the question was.

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you when I asked,’ I said. ‘I just… I knew he liked you and I wanted to know if you felt the same.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why did you want to know?’

  Because I wanted you to marry him, because you’d never marry me, and that was the only way to keep a little bit of you, I wanted to say.

  ‘Henry’s my friend,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want him to get his hopes up if there was no chance.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Are you going to marry him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve asked him to give me a few days to decide.’

  I hadn’t expected that. She smiled a thin little smile.

  ‘Of course, he thinks I’m just exercising my womanly wiles. Keeping him guessing.’

  I smiled too, as though that was ridiculous, when it was exactly what I’d have told Henry if he’d asked me.

  ‘Right,’ she said. She took a deep breath and held it for a second, with her lips pressed together. ‘I’m just going to ask what I came to ask. Do you… that is… is there any reason why I shouldn’t marry Henry?’

  What did she mean, any reason?

  ‘Why are you asking me that?’ I said.

  She looked at me, her head on one side.

  ‘You don’t know why I’m asking?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You really don’t?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  Then a thought struck me.

  ‘Do you mean… I know Henry has a reputation, I know he’s been a ladies’ man. But he’ll be a good husband, I’m sure of that.’

  She looked down at her hands, and pulled on her gloves again.

  ‘Right,’ she said, standing up. ‘Well, you’ve answered my question, Nat. Thank you.’

  She walked to the door, and left.

  * * *

  She didn’t wait the few days she’d asked for. The next morning, she accepted Henry’s proposal. I’d steeled myself to look happy for them when word got round and everyone began congratulating them, but as it turned out their news was overshadowed by bigger events. That same morning, word came that Parliamentarian troops planned to march on Oxford within days. It was time to go.

  I made a quick visit to Sam’s barracks to say goodbye, only to find him setting off on his way to me.

  ‘I had a letter,’ he said. ‘From Annie. Father’s dead.’

  It wasn’t a shock; my father was a good age by then, and I knew from Sam he’d had trouble with his chest in recent years. I couldn’t find it in myself to be sad either, not for a man who’d cared less for me than he did for his dogs, and he hadn’t cared that much for them. And yet as I stood there, what I thought was that, no matter what I did, I could never make him proud of me now.

  * * *

  When we left the next day, the queen’s party was almost the same one that had landed at Bridlington so many eventful months before: Henry, me, Susan and Elizabeth, Father Philip, a few servants, and now Arabella too. The queen had been so happy to be on home ground again that day, standing there on the snowy harbour, joking with the fishermen and their families. The woman who sat opposite me in the coach now looked like a different person. The parting with the king and her children had been tearful and her eyes were still red. In pain from her rheumatism and exhausted by her pregnancy, she was hunched over like a woman twice her age, and as the coach rumbled along she winced at every bump and rut.

  Our destination, Exeter, was still held by our side. Safe in the home of a family who supported the king, the queen took to her bed, attended by Susan, Elizabeth and Arabella, so Henry and I were left to our own devices. He’d been unusually subdued since we left Oxford, and one morning, when we were out for a walk, he turned to me and said:

  ‘Does Arabella seem happy to you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s just – well, shouldn’t a girl be a bit more cheerful about getting engaged?’

  I’d seen it too. She’d been quiet throughout the journey and there were dark shadows under her eyes, as though she wasn’t sleeping well. But I’d put that down to her being worried for the queen, as we all were, and to the anxiety of being on the road again after feeling safe in Oxford.

  ‘I don’t think anyone’s feeling very cheerful at the moment,’ I said.

  ‘No, I suppose not. And perhaps she’s upset we can’t get married sooner – this isn’t the time for a wedding, that’s for certain.’

  I didn’t ask when he thought the time would be right. Seeing Arabella walk out of a church as Henry’s wife was what I had to do to keep her in my life, but that didn’t mean I was looking forward to it. As far as I was concerned, they could wait for ever.

  * * *

  We stayed in Exeter for three months, and in June, the queen gave birth to a baby girl. It was a difficult labour and we were all afraid neither she nor the baby would survive. But though the child was small and sickly and the queen was in more pain than ever, they lived. For a brief couple of days, it seemed a hopeful sign – and then came the news that Parliamentary forces were heading for Exeter. The queen wrote personally to Cromwell, asking for safe passage to Bath, where she could take the waters and recover her health. I was with her when his reply arrived, refusing her request, and suggesting she’d get more benefit from the air in London.

  ‘For as long as they allowed me to breathe it,’ she said, throwing the message into the fire. ‘And God knows, that would not be long.’ She stared into the flames for a moment, then turned to me. ‘Fetch the cipher. I need to write to the king.’

  She dictated the letter, and I set it into code. She wouldn’t take the chance of being captured, she said, knowing his love for her would make him do anything his opponents asked. So we were fleeing to France.

  If I’d known what would happen there, I’d have stayed and taken my chances in Exeter, but I didn’t, and so began a chapter of my life that I remember with no happiness at all.

  Chapter Forty-three

  I expected to be away a few months, until the king’s forces rallied and it was safe to come home again. But as the news from across the sea became more and more bleak, it was clear we’d be living in exile for much longer. Not long after we arrived, I had a letter from Jeremiah – he’d never been much for correspondence, but I didn’t want to lose touch, so I’d written to let him know where we were. Kent, he wrote, was under Parliamentary control, and his master’s estate had been sequestered – seized because he was a Royalist, and sold to someone else, to bring in money for the Parliamentarian army.

  ‘The new master’s a merchant, down from London,’ Jeremiah wrote. ‘Doesn’t understand country ways, but he’s very well in with the county committee, and they’re the ones running things now. I tell you, Nat, we’re living in a nest of snakes. You’ve only to let a wrong word slip, and your own neighbours will turn you in, the better to show they’re on the right side. Luckily my Sukie saw the way the wind was blowing – right back when we moved here, she said to me, we shouldn’t say too much about where we’ve come from, and we didn’t. We keep our heads down, and pray for better times, but I’m very much afraid I don’t see them coming.’

  * * *

  The queen’s family made her welcome, giving us apartments in a palace beside the river in Paris, where the tall windows let sunlight flood in onto the rich tapestries and paintings that lined the walls. The beds were hung with silk and velvet and she had a household of servants waiting on her once again. But she scarcely noticed any of it. Still plagued with pain night and day, she spent all her time writing to anyone who might supply money or troops, and I was kept busy putting her daily letters to the king into code. I didn’t mind; it distracted me from thinking about Arabella and Henry. Though – to my relief – the two of them weren’t exactly turtle doves, and no date had been set for the wedding, seeing his hand touching
her shoulder or resting for a second on her waist was torture to me.

  So, when old faces from the Whitehall days began appearing in Paris, at first I was pleased. Over the next eighteen months, as the Parliamentarians captured swathes of Royalist territory, more and more of those who’d allied themselves with the king found England an uncomfortable place to be and headed for France. A bigger group meant I was thrown together less with Henry and Arabella, which could only be a good thing, I thought. Until someone arrived who I’d sincerely hoped never to see again.

  * * *

  There were four of them, in thick cloaks and riding boots; the tallest walked in front and the others fell into step behind. People turned to look as their heels clicked across the floor. Henry was standing talking to the queen, so he saw their faces. Long ago, after one too many glasses of claret, he’d prised out of me the reason why I came to race Charles Crofts, and when he realised who the taller man was, he looked round for me. But I already knew. I’d have recognised that strutting walk anywhere.

  It must have been fifteen years since I last set eyes on Crofts. After he left Whitehall, he’d been back a few times to visit his father, but since neither of us was eager for the other’s company, we managed never to cross paths. Now here he was, a grown man. He’d been tall for his age back then, and now he stood a clear couple of inches over most of the men in the room. He bowed deeply to the queen and announced himself to be at her service, as did his companions, cousins of his from Northumberland.

  I listened as he gave the latest news from England. The north was entirely in Parliamentarian hands now; his uncle’s family had been forced to leave their estate. Letters were coming very erratically at that time and the queen hadn’t had a message from the king in weeks, so she was eager to hear everything he had to tell. They talked for some time before she dismissed him, thanking him for the news and telling him he was very welcome at the palace.

  At the door, I stepped forward and put out my hand. We were men now; Crofts was probably nothing like the boy who’d taunted me all those years ago.

  ‘Remember me?’ I said.

  He looked down, and smirked.

  ‘Pie boy,’ he said. ‘Still hanging around then. And still a little runt.’

  Chapter Forty-four

  I told myself it didn’t matter. Things were different now. I wasn’t the little boy who’d capered about in costumes. I was the one who’d saved the queen from the kidnap plot. I’d been beside her when we came under attack in Bridlington and she trusted me, and only me, to code her letters to the king. What was Crofts? A cocky young blade who’d ridden in the odd skirmish, then made his exit when things got a bit too dangerous. And now he was just a hanger-on, here because he had nowhere else to go. I wouldn’t be seeking out his company, but I was determined not to change my habits to avoid him either.

  For a while it worked. The queen was having problems with her eyes by then, and asked me to draft her letters as well as putting them into code. The war at home was going badly, and with very little territory left to defend, the king was trying to be clever. By then, his opponents had split into factions – Cromwell and the army wanted things to go one way, and the Members of Parliament another, and on top of that there were the Scots, dangling the idea that they might help him out if he saw fit to come over to their way in the matter of religion, and get rid of bishops. So he’d started negotiating with all three, boasting in his letters to the queen that he could play one against the other to get what he wanted. Well, as I’ve mentioned before, the king’s high opinion of his own negotiating skills was not shared by me, and by then, it wasn’t shared by her either. She was sure he’d end up giving way to one or other of them, and sent increasingly furious messages telling him to stand firm. So between them, their letters kept me busy and that meant I rarely saw anything of Crofts. If our paths did happen to cross, he invariably made some comment about pies – there’d never been much variety to his wit – but I shrugged that off well enough.

  Over the following months though, more exiles arrived, mostly of the same stamp: young men who’d treated the war as a game, and then made themselves scarce when they realised it wasn’t. At home, the king’s influence had imposed a certain seriousness on court life. But in France, with the queen distracted by her efforts to secure support for the war and stop the king doing anything stupid, her new court became a place where too many people had nothing better to do than drink, play cards, set each other dares and make sport of those who weren’t in their company. The queen’s priest, Father Philip, was mimicked for his stooped posture and the tremor that had come with age; Lord Drage, who’d been injured in battle, was the subject of a crude little poem comparing him to a donkey with three legs. And of course, I didn’t escape.

  They took care never to do it in front of the queen, and at first they left me alone when I was with Henry and Arabella too. I didn’t mention it to her or to them. Not just because I didn’t want anyone else to fight my battles for me, though I didn’t. It was more that I didn’t want them to see me through Crofts’ eyes, even for a second. But keeping it a secret made me feel so alone, the way only people who are different feel alone. There’s an invisible wall between us and the rest of the world, which even the people who love us are on the other side of. Sometimes, you can forget it’s there, but every time I saw Crofts’ mocking face, it reminded me what people – even people who were my friends – must see when they looked at me.

  I hoped in time they’d get bored, but of course they didn’t; there was so little else to do. They invented a game where they’d take turns to suggest how a wife might be found for me: recruiting a magician to bring a doll to life, carving a face onto a turnip, dressing Susan’s poodle up as a woman. It caused so much hilarity that before long they were playing it at the dinner table every evening. I could tell just by the smirks directed at me but, because they usually sat some distance away, it was a while before Henry happened to overhear. His face darkened and he turned towards Crofts.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘He’s just an idiot. It doesn’t bother me.’

  ‘Well, it bothers me and—’

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Arabella, who’d been talking to someone else. She hadn’t heard what Crofts said, and I didn’t want her to.

  ‘Nothing. Henry was just saying he thought the meat was tough tonight.’

  When she’d gone to bed, I asked Henry not to tell her what we’d been talking about.

  ‘I don’t want a big fuss made about it. It’s better to ignore him.’

  ‘I’d happily thump him for you, but I know you don’t want that,’ he said. ‘But I don’t understand why you’re letting him get away with it. You’re never short of a smart remark, you could show him up for the clod he is with half a dozen words. Get people laughing at him and he’ll soon leave you alone.’

  How could I explain to Henry – tall, strong, normal Henry – it wasn’t as easy as that? It was true, I could have made Crofts look stupid with a few words – but he’d only have to mention ‘Mrs Turnipina Davy’, or whistle over the damned poodle and ask if it would have me as its wedded husband, and the company would dissolve into laughter. And when that happens, when they’re all looking down at you, picturing you marrying a turnip on a stick and laughing till their sides ache, you can make all the smart remarks you like, but you’re just pissing in the wind.

  * * *

  Would things have been different if Crofts hadn’t seen me at the window that day? I don’t know. But that was when it all changed. The window was at the turn of a staircase and as I glanced out, Arabella was walking Bonbon in the garden. The dog was in her last months then and very smelly, with rheumy eyes and patchy fur. She could barely shuffle along on her bandy little legs, but she still liked to take a turn round the garden, nosing at bushes and lifting her face to smell the air.

  I leaned against the window. Arabella – who normally walked as though there wasn’t a second to be lost – matched the dog’s painfully slow pac
e, looking down and speaking encouragingly to her. Now and then she’d stop to let Bonbon sniff something interesting, then lean down to give her a little pat before they moved on.

  I didn’t hear him come up the stairs behind me. Normally, Crofts’ confident steps were hard to miss, but I suspect he’d seen me and crept up to find out what I was looking at.

  ‘So that’s how it is, pie boy,’ he said. ‘Well, well.’

  I turned, startled. He grinned and wagged a finger at me.

  ‘All our efforts to find you a wife, and you had one in mind already. She’s a bit tall for you though. Oh, and promised to someone else.’

  There was no point in denying it; anything I said would only give him more sport. My face burned and, not wanting him to see, I turned to walk on up the stairs.

  ‘I wonder if she knows?’ he called after me. ‘Or have I found out your little secret?’

  * * *

  I pictured him walking up to Arabella at the dinner table and telling her, in front of everyone. How they’d all laugh: there I was, the court freak, thinking to throw my heart at the most beautiful girl in the place. It was as comical as anything they’d have seen at the theatre, back in the Whitehall days. He wouldn’t even care that Henry was sitting there. If I’d been an ordinary man, it would have been something to whisper in corners. Did she love me back, people would ask; was Henry being cuckolded even before he was married? With me, it was a safe joke; Henry could laugh along with everyone else, though I knew he wouldn’t.

  But the worst was that Arabella would know. Once, I’d worried that if she realised I loved her, she’d laugh at me. But I knew her better now. She wouldn’t laugh; she’d look at me with pity in her eyes, and that I could not bear.

  That evening I sat, as usual, with Henry and Arabella. Crofts and his friends were sniggering, now and then looking over at us. The room was full. Were there more faces round the table than usual, or had I just not noticed before how big the company had grown? I listened to Arabella and Henry talk without hearing a word they said, swallowed food I didn’t taste, and waited.