First published 2017
by Black & White Publishing Ltd
29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL
www.blackandwhitepublishing.com
This electronic edition published in 2017
ISBN: 978 1 78530 118 6 in EPub format
ISBN: 978 1 78530 109 4 in hardback format
Copyright © M. G. Sinclair 2017
The right of M. G. Sinclair to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Ebook compilation by Iolaire, Newtonmore
For Shula
Contents
Title
Prologue
Escape
The King
The Cardinal
Ascent
Return to the Past
Decay
Spain
Flight
Epilogue
Author's Note
Acknowledgements
It was the Prado where he first caught my eye. I was intending to visit the famous ‘Black Room’ by Goya, the paintings which were found surrounding the artist’s body upon his death, too grotesque to be allowed beyond the confines of his studio. Unsure where to go, I made my way to the first floor. Then almost immediately I saw him. He was out of the way, positioned in the corner alongside a far more magnificent picture of Philip V.
Instantly he struck me like no person before or since. A court dwarf dressed in a red and yellow cape, painted by Velazquez in the mid-seventeenth century, his name Don Sebastian de Morra. Painfully proportioned, with stunted arms and legs, he was sat against a bare wall, crookbacked, his knuckles pressing into his thighs, his drip chin concealed behind thick beard. And yet this poor creature was fixing me with a stare of rapacious intelligence, his black eyes demanding my attention. And I realised at that moment how many great minds have been born in the wrong body at the wrong time – that for every Archimedes or Shakespeare, there have been other seeds which have had the misfortune to fall on stonier ground.
Escape
(1608 – 1632)
Sebastian Morra was born in Camoches, a village in the hinterlands of Normandy. Forty miles from Caen, it lay on an outcrop facing five thousand miles of open Atlantic, clinging to its spur like some barnacle to a whale. It was the ocean that brought the whiting, the bass, the mackerel, the bream and the crab. But it was also the ocean that brought the wind. A hard easterly that stung the eyes, that blew away the earth and left only sand and rock behind; that brought clouds and driving rain from September to June, an incessant wetness which made its way through every wall, roof and into the damp logs which sputtered in every fireplace. Dark and unrelenting months as the air tugged and squalled, wearing the people down as they protected their soil behind low walls, binding it as best they could with beans, beetroot and turnip, or else braved the water, with its currents and rip tides – moods that answered only to the earth and the sun. The only release came with summer, both a blessing and a curse, a momentary respite from the scrabble and toil, a few weeks to revel, drink and forget. But always too brief and always with the same bitter ending, when the wind returned and the sodden cycle began all over again.
The village was a quarter of a mile from the shore, a straggle of no more than sixty dwellings, all in varying states of disrepair. Sebastian’s was no exception. Like its neighbours, it was walled with mud and stone. Timber was avoided, the fishermen knowing all too well how their boats suffered in the salt and the breeze. But while rock could resist the elements, whatever the mortar, the wind would pick it out, leaving the loose stones to crumble – particularly high up, near the thatch. And no matter how much his parents tried to repair the seaward side, they could never seal all the cracks or keep out the chill which followed every setting sun.
The inside was divided into two. One room for his parents. The other, larger, was used for everything else – a place to eat as well as a bedroom for him and his brothers at night. It was dark. The only light came through the open chimney and a door on the landward side, and Sebastian was to remember it more as a burrow than a home. A life of shadow. All of them packed together like a litter of newborns. Evenings spent crouched tight round the fire, with its familial stench of smoke and sweat that made its way into their clothes, skin and nose until everything they drank or tasted was overpowered by it.
Both his mother and father shared the local physiognomy, flat faces that had been ground to the nub, though it was there the similarity ended. His father was black-eyed, sullen and lean, dressed in his dark tunic, either away at sea or staring into the fire with a drink in his hand. She was the opposite. Blue-eyed, always around and busying herself in her dress and shawl, nudging and cajoling, a whirl of good humour and chat. They squabbled incessantly but seemed to fit each other’s absences well enough. She found comfort in his silence while he found sanctuary in her warmth. And each seemed content in their role, she taking care of the children, he fetching the water and catching the fish.
Sebastian was their first child, and as such, his birth was celebrated. However, by the age of three it was obvious something was wrong. While his chest was normal enough, his back, limbs and jaw remained of infantile proportions – the skull outlandish on his tiny body. Consequently, many of his earliest memories were of distorted faces: the expressions of horrified relatives, visitors flinching as they caught his eye, the stares of unfamiliar children peering round doorways.
Revolted, his father avoided him whenever possible. Instead the boy took sanctuary in his mother’s company. Pitying him, she swaddled him close, at first within the confines of the crib, and then when, aged five, he was able to escape it, she still kept him close to her skirts – safe from his two younger brothers Charles and Audrien who rampaged through the gloom, a pair of clumsy giants oblivious to his presence. And there he remained for his earliest years, secure in his orbit. A speck in infinite space, yet safely revolving around a single star.
Cocooned from the outside world, Sebastian remembered those years as a dream. His mother was omnipresent, always watching over him. There was no one else, nothing to separate one day from another – no school or playmates, barely a glimpse of his brothers or father. It was as if he had never left the womb – until two months after his ninth birthday, when his life took a more unwelcome course.
* * *
Sebastian was first aware something important had happened when, during the usual breakfast of beans and crab, his mother began crying for no apparent reason. She had been unusually silent that morning, though he hadn’t noticed anything unusual beyond the absence of his father (a habitually late riser as a result of the drink). When he asked what was wrong, she first looked bewildered, then sat him on her lap and explained that his father was sick. He hugged her but it didn’t stop the tears. Later, unfamiliar relatives arrived at the house and whispered together, glancing across with peculiar expressions which made no sense to him. And when he tried to go to his parents’ room, he was instead turned away or given his wooden blocks to play with.
As the weeks passed, he became convinced that something of great significance lurked inside and he would obsessively watch the curtain and those who emerged from behind it, barely able to hold their features in place. They seemed horrified by what they had seen and he came to dread the day when he would be called on to take his turn. Naturally, when he and his two brothers were finally lined
up to pay their respects, he took one look at the murky entranceway then scurried for freedom, only to trip over almost immediately – the first of many occasions his legs were to disappoint him over the years. And it was only after being helped up and shushed by his mother that he finally ventured inside.
Sebastian had happy memories of his parents’ room, of wriggling beneath the bed sheets and warming himself beside his mother when it was pitch black and cold outside. But now, looking in, he saw nothing comforting whatsoever. It was dark, the only light pricking in through a strip of hessian hung over the doorway. Indeterminate forms lined the walls, lumpen shadows from sacks of animal feed being stored for winter. Otherwise, apart from an outline of the bed and a rude-cut chair beside it, the room appeared to be empty. Peering through the gloom, he was unsure what to look for. Then he heard a rasp ahead of him. Mistaking it for an animal, he retreated to the doorway, yanking the curtain aside to reveal a gaunt head upon the pillow, withered by disease. Two yellow and bloodshot eyeballs immediately swivelled to look at him. Reluctantly he inched towards the bed, trying to hold the creature’s stare, before slowly reaching towards it. As he did so, a claw emerged from the blanket and clutched at his wrist. Its grasp was surprisingly strong. He could feel the throb of agony and the urge to live. Sebastian waited for the creature to speak, but there was only silence as it stared back at him. He wanted to say something, to offer a word of comfort or a recollection of something shared. But he knew nothing about his father. There were no memories to reminisce over. Instead he sat, waiting for the grip to slacken and the moment when he could finally leave. For the remainder of that day and all the next, he often found himself absent-mindedly rubbing his wrist, trying to remove the prickle of death on his skin.
* * *
Sebastian didn’t miss his father. The man had never been much more to him than a distant, pacing figure with angry eyes and a permanent scowl. Even so, he felt sorry for his mother Julienne. For the first few days after the funeral, she was a muddle of gulps and tears. He tried to console her, and while she would pull her face into a smile and thank him, it never seemed to last.
In desperate need of coin, Julienne took on work picking shellfish and gutting, which left her with no choice but to send him and his brothers to their aunt Collette’s. There he was abandoned to her five offspring, aged between seven and fourteen, who, after a lifetime of scuffling and shouting, were little more than indistinguishable boulders of ruffled hair and bruised skin. The moment he saw them, he sensed danger and ran for the safety of his aunt’s leg. However, Collette would have none of it and brushed him away, too busy to spend time with her own children, let alone her sister’s. With nowhere else to go, Sebastian gazed at the rabble in front of him and ventured a weak smile.
One of the larger boys – a stringy, blue-eyed youth – returned a grin. ‘We’re going outside. Come.’ He motioned Sebastian to follow.
I am not moving one inch, mon ami. He hid the reply behind a fixed smile. ‘I think I’ll stay here for the time being, if you don’t mind.’
‘What? Don’t you like us?’
‘Of course I like you. I’m just cold, that’s all. It’s warmer here, by the fire.’
‘Oh, we can help with that.’ The boy turned to Collette, hands clasped, his mother’s little cherub. ‘Maman, poor Sebastian has a chill. Shall we put him in the bed next door?’
Naturellement – and suddenly they were all around him, jostling him out of the room. He tried falling to the floor, but it was no use. They simply carried him around the corner, and there introduced him to reality, first verbally and then with their fists. He screamed, cried, begged – anything to make them stop. Charles and Audrien were too young to protect him and when he called for help, they looked on dumbly, powerless against the pack. Indeed, there was fascination in their eyes, satisfaction even, the pleasure of seeing him discover how it felt to be cast out of the light.
And so Sebastian’s education began. He pleaded with his mother not to send him back again – but it was no use. All she could do was sob apologies while looking at him with a mixture of horror and shame, overwhelmed not so much by what was taking place as her inability to end it.
* * *
Necessity is a quick tutor and Sebastian soon acquired a feral, rat-like intelligence, grasping the best places to take cover and how best to scuttle between them. From his hiding holes, he watched the pack assiduously, learning their patterns as they moved from room to room. Above all he learned to fear their silence. Noise meant they were busy, squabbling amongst themselves. It was only when the uproar subsided and they had run out of things to do that their attention turned to him. Even then he found ways to defend himself – always keeping a handful of stones in his pocket to fling at pursuers or hiding on the roof and stamping on any hands unwise enough to follow. And when they did catch him, as they invariably did, he found there were advantages to his size. He was difficult to hit and nature seemed to have blessed him with thick ribs and bones that resisted even the worst beating – that moment when there was nothing to be done except to curl into a ball and retreat within.
They also called him names, among them ‘flea’, ‘runt’ and ‘changeling’. Most popular was ‘shrew’, a moniker that was cruelly apt. It wasn’t just his size, but his whole demeanour. The battering had left marks both without and within, burdening him with nervous habits that made themselves particularly apparent when he was in groups. Ill at ease, he would paw at his face or shuffle his feet, forever glancing round in search of escape. Even in later life, he would sometimes find himself flinching instinctively when people reached toward him, and suffering bouts of melancholia for no apparent reason beyond an innate distrust of his fellow man.
* * *
Having never seen another of his kind, Sebastian had no idea what to expect, and it wasn’t until adolescence that his condition became fully apparent. Previously, he had sustained himself with hopes that he would catch up, that some dormant part of his body would awaken and propel him to the height of his peers. But the world continued to grow around him, as he stubbornly remained the same. It was a problem that only became worse with time. His body felt like a prison cell – the bones like bars through which a larger man was trying to escape. Certain parts grew to adult size: his skull, spine, palms and teeth. Others remained childlike: the jaw, fingers, arms and legs. Every moment of the day he was reminded of his abnormality, from when he woke to find himself engulfed in a sea of blanket to his evening meal, when what seemed a simple spoon in others’ hands became a ladle in his own. Above all, he could see his deformity reflected in the eyes of others – the way they looked at him with ugly, rude expressions, midway between fascination and disgust.
His brothers, by comparison, flourished as the years went by. Despite their youth, they were far larger than him and he was only able to keep out of their constant fights through a combination of bribery and threat. It frustrated him how they advanced through life with such insufferable ease. Whenever he looked at them he could see himself but improved in every way. So tall, precisely proportioned, effortless in movement and thought. Not that it was their fault. They had no way of giving him the life they led, no way of freeing him from an existence eked out in tiny spaces, safe from the teeth of the outside world.
Desperate, he battled against his situation, trying to do what nature couldn’t. For the whole of his twelfth year he kept to a meticulous routine. Every day at five in the afternoon he would walk to the tumbledown barn that lay half a mile outside the village, all the time struggling not to trip over his own unwieldy feet. After walking inside, he began by measuring himself against the doorframe, etching his height into the wood with a sliver of flint. Then, retrieving a coil of rope from the corner, he tied up his legs, tossed the rope over a beam and hoisted himself upside down. Next he would knot the rope tight so he was hanging freely before finally grabbing a heavy bag of stones and stretching himself for as long as he could bear. After a brief rest, he would st
art again, until, an hour or so later, the pain became unendurable and he would topple home as best he could while trying to force back the agony of burning limbs.
In spite of all his efforts, nothing changed. What little growth there was only came with age. Each cut in the doorframe simply overran the last, leaving an ever-deeper scar in the wood. He persevered nonetheless, long after his situation became apparent, until the day came when he could lie to himself no longer and finally hurled both bag and rope into a nearby field. In desperation he tried a more direct approach, breaking his leg with a shovel in the hope it might somehow grow back longer. But all he ended up with was an infection, a month in bed and the remainder of the year with a hobbling gait.
Momentary release arrived with Sebastian’s thirteenth birthday, when he and his brothers were finally allowed to stay at home. It was summer and most days they would escape from the house to the fields inland, climbing trees or swimming in the local pond. Usually Sebastian observed from a distance, preferring to watch the wheat ripple in the breeze as the afternoon gave way to dusk. With no one to teach him, he named the trees and birds himself, or guessed them from the names he knew: woodcock became nightingales, rooks became blackbirds and beech trees, oaks – a private language that was his and his alone.
* * *
Despite having always wanted to support his mother and work beside her along the shore, Sebastian had to wait until he was fourteen before he was deemed large enough to try his hand with tools. There were already enough people to harvest the beach, so he and his brothers took a cart to the local farm where they were lined up in front of the owner and each presented with a spade and scythe. Then, after a few minutes’ instruction, they were shown a strip of ground to reap and till. Naturally Charles and Audrien completed the task with ease, reducing their plots to naked earth within a few minutes, the barley piled in a neat stack alongside. Sebastian, meanwhile, struggled to lift, let alone use, either tool. Nevertheless, what he lacked in ability, he made up for in effort, planting his scythe in the ground before slashing wildly and ineffectually at the crop. His limited success only spurred him on and he had to be forcibly stopped after losing his balance and nearly decapitating himself.
The Cardinal's Man Page 1