The Queen's Dwarf A Novel by Ella March Chase Read Free Book Online Page A

those Jesuits choking down their silent screams.” Clemmy shuddered. “Guess you’ll think me weak for hating bloodletting, you being raised around your father’s trade.”
    “I didn’t like bloodletting between dogs and bulls,” I said, made smaller by his admission and my part in extracting it. “My older brother, John, never minded, but Samuel…” Clemmy’s talk of Jesuits made me think of Samuel’s medal and what the angry crowd at Tyburn might do to the boy who had sewn it there. “My brother Samuel has a tender heart,” I said, finishing my sentence.
    “Guess we think alike, Jeffrey Hudson.”
    I slipped under the covers, surprised that the bed Clemmy and I slept in no longer seemed strange. I had become accustomed to the bed and the man who shared it just in time to leave them.
    *   *   *
    Six years ago, John had boosted Samuel and me into a tree to watch the noble household of Burley-on-the-Hill stream out of the manor’s gates. Heralds and gentlemen at arms forged the way, a small army to guard the riches highwaymen would covet. Great lords rode glossy horses beneath fluttering pennons. Coaches carrying the noble ladies rumbled past, running footmen striding ahead of them. In the rear, two-wheeled carts labored beneath all the goods needed to set up household in grand estate. Servants were stuffed among the furniture in much the same way, choking on the dust raised by their betters.
    It seemed impossible that I was to be part of that procession on the pink-tinged May morning Ware hoisted me into one of the first carts. “I cannot let you go bouncing into the road to be trampled after the trouble I’ve taken to train you.” Ware almost smiled as he settled me into a nook he had formed out of trunks.
    By the time the cart jolted down the hill, I had squeezed myself in as securely as I was able. I peered over the cart’s edge, watching everything I’d known melt into the distance.
    Upon arriving at the manor, I had memorized every wonder I saw so that I could describe them to Samuel next time I saw him. But as the carts wound through the village of Stamford and onto the Great North Road, I could not imagine when I would see my brother again.
    Loneliness knotted in my belly, despite the people who filled the road as far as I could see. But by the time we crested the hill and rumbled into the village of Hampstead three days later, even loneliness for Samuel could not hobble my curiosity. A forest of windmills spun over our heads. Buildings sprawled in the distance, stitched together with a web of roads.
    More steeples than I could count pierced smoke from chimneys that honeycombed the sky. Clemmy climbed into my cart, daring his master’s anger. “That’s Westminster and the City.” He fairly quivered in his eagerness to point out the Tower of London’s stout yellow walls.
    St. Paul’s was next, floating like an ark in God’s great flood. Small houses scrabbled like drowning sinners against the cathedral’s walls.
    “Isn’t just worshipping goes on there,” Clemmy said as we wound down the hill. “Place of business, it is. Bell ringers will let you climb to the top of the steeple if you’ve got the coin. They keep pebbles up there that people can throw at folk below. See that black snake coiling through the city? That’s the Thames. Ships sail in from places where oliphants and pygmies and dragons eat folk like us as if we were mutton.”
    All too soon, the crushing traffic of the city surrounded us, its noise louder than the rattle of the duke’s carts. I could not suppress a shudder as I imagined what would happen if I tumbled into that chaos. Most of my life, I had avoided being trampled in crowds by riding on someone’s shoulders—my father’s or John’s. When I turned twelve, I devised a way to clear my own path by whittling the end of my blackthorn walking stick to a point and jabbing the ankles of anyone who traipsed too close. Samuel had laughed when children warned