Chapter Twenty
As we walked to the stables, I kept thinking about what she’d said after the race, that anyone who let me take a horse would be dismissed. Was she going to ask who’d let me take Shadow out before, so she could get rid of them? It wasn’t like her to be vindictive, but she’d been so angry, perhaps she would. And it would be all my fault.
She was standing there with Crofts’ father, her Master of Horse. Surely she wasn’t going to dismiss him too? For all I hated Crofts, I didn’t want that. At least I could tell her his father hadn’t known anything.
‘Your majesty, I need to explain—’
‘You explained yesterday.’
‘But it wasn’t—’
‘You explained yesterday, but I was too angry to listen. You gave me a terrible fright, you know.’
‘I know, I’m sorry, but—’
‘But I’ve thought about what you said. I know how it is to be treated like a child when you are no longer one.’
I stared up at her.
‘So,’ she said, gesturing towards the stables. ‘Choose. Which one would you like?’
‘Your majesty?’
‘Choose a horse. One of your own, to ride when you like.’
I walked across to the stable block, where Shadow was standing with her head out of the door, as though she’d listened to every word. I held up my hand and she stretched down to nuzzle it.
‘I’ll take this one,’ I said.
I can’t say that after that day no one ever treated me like a doll again. People still plucked me up off the ground without warning, and the queen never lost her delight in ordering me new costumes, and seeing me dress up in them. But my life did change. As well as giving me Shadow to ride, the queen arranged for me to take lessons in archery and shooting with Will, Matthew and the other boys, and even though they were ahead of me when I started, I practised and practised at both until I was as good as they were.
The Crofts brothers left court a few months after the race – I heard their father sent them to live with an uncle in Northumberland, to learn about managing an estate. Crofts’ friends were different, once Crofts was gone, and we never spoke of how they’d treated me before. I didn’t know then that he would come back into my life one day, and I was very much the happier for that.
The other thing that happened was I became quite famous. Hundreds of people had seen me in the race and because, even for a dwarf, I was so small, they were curious.
‘Look at this,’ said Jeremiah one morning, waving a news pamphlet at me. ‘It’s about you!’
My eyes widened as I read it:
THE SMALLEST MAN IN ENGLAND!
Spectators in Hyde Park last week were agape to see a dwarf of minuscule proportions take part in the races, and win. The tiny fellow goes by the name of Nathaniel Davy, and resides at the queen’s court. Said to be twelve years old, he stands no taller than an infant – a veritable Miracle of Nature!
Shortly afterwards, one of the court poets wrote a long poem about me, and though it was really just a pile of nonsense, when it was printed, people flocked to buy it. And when we walked in the park, people nudged each other, saying, ‘That’s the queen’s dwarf – the smallest man in England.’ When I heard them, my stomach no longer churned with shame; I felt special, even proud. Sometimes I’d walk a little apart from the others, to make sure I’d be seen, exhibiting something of a swagger when people were watching.
I still missed my mother and Sam, but as time went by, I found myself thinking about Oakham less and less, and one day, as the towers and turrets of Whitehall came into sight after a long trip down the river to Hampton Court, I realised the palace had come to mean home to me now. I had left my old life behind, and it began to seem a distant memory.
My only wish was to see the queen happy too. During the months that the duke was away on the expedition to La Rochelle, she and the king had had some time to get to know each other, unhindered by his poisonous interventions, and it looked as though my mother’s advice was paying off. By the time the fleet limped home, chased off by the French with thousands of men lost, the two of them weren’t exactly lovebirds, but they could stay in each other’s company for an evening without war breaking out, and there was even a rumour the queen was expecting a child. It turned out not to be true, but we all saw – not to be too indelicate about it – that the necessary was taking place.
But once the duke got home, he slipped straight back into place like a greased eel. At the slightest sign the king might listen to her instead of him, he’d find a way to come between them, and the king always took his side. At heart, I think he was still the unloved son who’d been so pathetically grateful for the duke’s approval, and he couldn’t contemplate losing it, even for a moment. Even when London bubbled with rumours that the duke was plotting to take over the country and kick out the king, even when Parliament came right out and said he was the cause of all England’s problems, the king’s devotion to him didn’t waver.
Despite the disastrous end to the campaign in La Rochelle, the following year the king agreed to a second attempt, certain that the duke would return victorious and be proclaimed as a hero. We journeyed down to Portsmouth for the king to inspect the fleet, and Buckingham walked us round the harbour, where lines of ships were swarming with men getting them ready to sail, and a crowd had gathered to watch. Wearing his smuggest smile, he pointed out the guns on one, and the gigantic sails on another, and the king nodded appreciatively, for all the world as though the two of them had years of sea battles under their belts.
Afterwards, when we were about to leave, I was standing near the duke, who was talking to a couple of navy officers. Just as the conversation came to an end, a thin man wearing a shabby brown coat darted out of the crowd.
‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I must speak with you.’
The duke went to walk on, but the man caught his arm.
‘You won’t remember me, but I served you in the first expedition to La Rochelle. John Felton’s my name.’ He lifted his left arm; the sleeve hung empty from the elbow. ‘That’s where I got this. I haven’t been able to find work since, sir, but I’m a good sailor, and if you’ll take me with you I’ll serve you well.’
The duke smiled. I’d seen that smile before, but the man hadn’t. His shoulders relaxed; he thought the duke was going to help him. The duke glanced round at the two navy officers, then turned back to the man.
‘We’re going to fight the French,’ he said. ‘Not wave at them.’
The officers smirked and the poor man looked at the duke as though he was trying to make sense of his words. The duke leaned forward, and spoke very slowly, as if to an idiot.
‘I’ve no use for you. If you wanted to fight, you should have taken better care to stay attached to your limbs.’
‘But my lord… I’ve no way to live.’
‘In that case,’ said the duke, ‘you will have to go hang.’
He strode off towards his carriage. The man stood there, watching it drive off. He didn’t look angry, just puzzled, as though he’d expected things to go one way but they’d somehow gone another, and he wasn’t quite sure how that had happened. Still staring at the coach, he repeated, ‘But I’ve no way to live’.
I fished some money out of my purse, and went up to him.
‘Here. It’s not much, but it’ll tide you over for a little while.’
He looked down at me, and the gold coins in my palm.
‘You were with them,’ he said. ‘You could speak to him for me.’
‘He wouldn’t listen to me,’ I said.
‘But I have to go to sea. I’ve no way to live.’
I held out the money again.
‘Please, take it. I wish I could help, but the duke’s no more a friend of mine than he is of yours.’
He took the money then, and walked away.
The king went back to London, but the queen decided to spend some time in Wellingborough, to take the waters, which were said to help ladies wanting to become pregnant. She confided to me that she also wanted to get away from the king, whose endless praise of the duke’s preparations for the campaign was trying her temper:
‘All I hear is how wonderful his dear Buckingham has been, and all I see is how that man will ruin this country with his stupid games. But if I say a word, I play into his hands. So it’s better to be somewhere else for a while.’
We were all sitting in the gardens when a letter came for the queen. She read the beginning, and gasped. She looked at me; by then we’d come to know each other so well I could usually read her thoughts in a glance, but that day, I couldn’t. She was shocked, but there was something else in her eyes that I couldn’t interpret.
We all watched as she read to the end of the letter, then read it again before she looked up.
‘It’s Buckingham,’ she said. ‘He’s been killed.’
I understood then what I’d seen in her eyes. I felt the same; shocked but not sorry.
‘I must go to him,’ she said, and at first, confused, I thought she meant the duke, but then she caught my eye and wiggled her finger like a little bee flying, just a tiny bit that only I would notice. She’d seen her chance. The king would be distraught; if ever she was to make him depend on her as he’d done on the duke, now was the time. My mother would have been proud of her.
We didn’t hear the full story until later. As the duke left his lodgings in the morning, a man had rushed forward and stabbed him. That one blow being all it took, he gave himself up and told his story. He’d been staying at an inn for the past few nights, he said, and there he’d drunk and eaten his fill. He mentioned a particularly good steak pie that had formed his dinner on the last night. That morning, he paid his bill, walked to an ironmonger’s and spent his last ten pennies on a knife. His name was John Felton.
The death of the duke changed everything for the queen. By hurrying to the king’s side when he needed comfort, then gradually taking the place of the duke as his friend, advisor and constant support, she made him love her. The change was astonishing to watch: he gazed at her like a spaniel at a lamb cutlet, constantly touching her arm or her cheek, as if reassuring himself she was real. Before long he was consulting her on every decision; impossible to imagine in the days when he treated her as a silly girl. But the change in him was nothing compared to the change in her. I thought at first she was playing at it, that now the duke was no longer there to be defeated, she was gaining the king’s confidence as a way to make him help the English Catholics. But to my surprise – perhaps even to hers – over the months she grew to love him back. I didn’t understand much about love in those days, but in later years I came to realise what changed was that he needed her, and she found she liked being needed.
By December that year, she was expecting their first child. By then the king consulted her on everything, and she was helping him negotiate peace with her homeland. And though she still hadn’t been able to improve matters much for the Catholics, he’d had a beautiful chapel built for her, and she’d taken that as a sign there was hope for change. At the New Year feast, she shone with happiness. I sat back in my chair, tired from a morning ride on my very own horse, my belly full of goose and syllabub, and watched the king laugh as she whispered in his ear. It felt like a golden time for all of us. And for a while, it was.
We didn’t know, of course, what was waiting.