The Fallen Queen. Emily Purdy

Shall I go to court to serve the Queen when Cousin Edward marries? Will he buy me jewels and gowns and puppies and kittens and pet monkeys and songbirds in gilded cages? Oh, Father, I do so long to have a pair of monkeys! I shall dress them in little suits and gowns just like babies! And parrots, talking parrots—I can teach them new words and feed them berries from my hand! And will my husband and I have lots of babies? I want a nursery full of babies! I want to be a little woman round and stout as a barrel with a baby always in my arms, filling out my belly, and a bunch of them tugging at my skirts calling me ‘mother’! I want our home to be filled with joy and laughter!”

      Father laughed heartily. “So many questions! You’re curious as a cat, my Kate! Stop a moment and still your eager tongue, my lovely love, and let me answer! No, you’ve never met him. His name is Henry, Lord Herbert, he is the Earl of Pembroke’s son, and a handsome, fair-haired youth not quite two years older than yourself, and I believe his eyes are blue. You’ll like him. I’m as sure of it as I am that this marzipan is delicious!” He waved a hand at the nigh empty box on his desk. “As for the rest, all in good time, my pretty Kate, all in good time! Stop chomping at the bit, raring to be off, my fine filly; slow down and enjoy your life, without racing through it at breakneck speed. If you go too fast, it will all pass by you in a blur and you’ll miss it all.”

      Nervously, I tugged at Father’s sleeve to get his attention. “Me too?” I asked timidly. “I am to be married? Someone wants to marry me?”

      “Aye, my little love.” Father swooped me up to sit upon his lap. “Though being as you are only eight, you shall have to bide at home and content yourself with being betrothed a while, but, aye, my little Mary, you are to be a bride just like your sisters! And Time has a sneaky habit of flying by, and all too soon the dressmakers will be marching up the stairs to unfurl their banners of silk before you and make you a fine wedding gown of any cut and colour you choose!”

      “Who?” I asked in a dazed and breathless whisper. The man I was to marry was of far greater importance to me than any new gown, though honesty compels me to admit that a rich deep plum velvet and silver-flowered lavender damask trimmed with silver fox fur billowed briefly through my mind, and my inner eye caught a teasing, tantalizing glimpse of the fine wine sparkle of garnets and deep purple amethysts set in silver. “Who would want to marry me?”

      “I’ve chosen someone very special for you, my little love.” Father chucked my chin and kissed the tip of my nose. “Now he is a wee bit older than you are, five-and-forty, and a kinsman of mine. Mayhap you’ve heard tell of him, for he’s a war hero, one of our greatest—my cousin William Grey, Lord Wilton.”

      Kate gave such a frightful shriek that I nearly toppled off Father’s lap, and Jane momentarily forgot her own staggering surprise as horror, then pity, filled her eyes as she stared at me. Then both my sisters were there, crying and clinging tight to me, as though they could not bear to let me go. But all I could do was nod, my disappointment and hurt went too deep for tears, and there are times in a dwarf’s tormented life when one feels all cried dry of tears.

      The whole of England knew the story of Lord Wilton, and little boys fought to play him in their war games, their vying for this prized part often leaving them with bloodied lips and blackened eyes. He had been hideously wounded, his face grotesquely mutilated at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh. A Scottish pike had smashed through the front of his helm, shattering several teeth as it stove in his mouth, and pierced through his tongue, knocking out even more teeth in its violent progress, and penetrated the roof of his mouth. At some point, his nose had also been broken and smashed in in a grotesque and bloody parody of one of those darling little dogs with the pushed-in noses that Kate adored so. To make matters worse, his helm had been quite destroyed by enemy blows, and the metal intended to protect his face had instead turned against him, biting deep, like jagged steel teeth, lacerating his flesh, and leaving behind ugly, jagged scars zigzagging like a violent lightning storm all over his face. The enemy pike had also cost him an eye. Some said he was merely blinded and wore a black leather patch to cover the hideous grey-clouded eyeball, though others claimed the eye was white and sightless as an egg, while others said that it concealed an empty hollow, that the Scottish warrior who took it had boasted he had plucked it out of its socket like an olive, though some rather ghoulishly insisted that he popped it in his mouth and swallowed it whole, and yet others insisted he had chewed it with great vigour and glee.

      Regardless of which of these tales was the true one, Lord Wilton left the battlefield that day with a face that frightened children and now went about veiled like a lady in public lest his ears be assaulted by cries of “Dear God, what is that hideous thing?” and “Monster!” and the terrified wails of children, the screams of women, and the thud of their bodies falling down in a faint. I felt sorry for him; I, “Crouchback Mary,” the “little gargoyle,” the “goblin child,” and “mashed-up little toad,” could well understand his pain and torment. It must have been especially hard for him since he had once been accounted amongst the handsomest of men, whilst I had been born ugly and misshapen and had known no other form or face.

      But empathy was not enough to make me want to marry him. Oh what a pair we would make! I could picture myself leading my half-blind and veiled husband around by the hand, my crooked spine straining and aching at the awful effort. People would think we were a couple of freaks loose from the fair or some nobleman’s collection of Mother Nature’s mistakes. Those who enjoyed such spectacles might even come up to us and offer us pennies to peer beneath my husband’s veil or toss down their coins and cry, “Dance, dwarf, dance!”

      “Nay, pet, look not so downhearted! You’re frowning as if the world were about to end without you ever having tasted of all its pleasures! Smile!” Father cried, setting me down and with the tips of his fingers pushing the corners of my mouth up to form a smile that instantly disappeared the moment he removed them. “Lord Wilton is a wonderful man and a great hero! A husband you can be proud of! I myself have told him all about you, and he cannot wait to make you his bride. How impatient he is for his little Mary to grow up! He wants to be informed the moment you shed your first woman’s blood! He longs for an understanding and intelligent young wife, a quiet, sensible girl whose head and heart will not be turned by a handsome face, one who is content to bide at home and sit by the fire and read to and converse with him, someone he can tell his stories to and relive his former glories with, someone like you, my little love, not some flighty little minx he is likely to find one day rolling in the straw with the stable boy between her knees! And, mind you, just because his face is ruined, doesn’t mean that William is lacking in amorous skill, quite the contrary, but that is not a subject fit for your tender years. Suffice it to say that upon your wedding night you shall experience a heavenly rapture, and not of the spiritual kind, but a warm, quivering, panting, pulsing, throbbing ecstasy of the flesh! William has the tongue and fingers to rival the greatest musician in England; he plays a woman’s body like an instrument! But forget I said that until you are old enough to remember! It’s not a fit subject for a little maid like you to contemplate.”

      “But, Father!” Kate wailed. “He is so ugly! And old! I have seen him riding through London in his litter, his face covered by a thick veil, with a shawl about his shoulders, just like a hunched and shrivelled-up old woman calling out to his bearers in a whining voice that they are going too fast, or too slow, or to watch out for that pig or that little girl or not to step in the street muck, and to turn here and turn there as though he laid the streets of London himself and knows them better than any!”

      “Katherine!” Father barked sharply. “I am appalled and ashamed of you! Don’t you realize, girl, that you are talking about a great war hero? The man who led the first charge against the enemy at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, mind you! I’ll thank you to show some respect for your future brother-in-law! Everyone with a drop of English blood in them should go down on their knees and thank William Grey for sacrificing his looks, and his vanity, for their sake. And before he was injured, he had much to be vain of. He was as bold and brazen as a strutting cockerel! If you girls were boys, the stories I could tell you,” he added with a wink. Then, hurtling over the obstacles that stood in the way of a good story,