The Queen's Dwarf A Novel by Ella March Chase

have to thank Archie for loaning me the clothes.”
    “Don’t,” Evans said. “I had to force his hand. There is no reason for you to be trapped in this room while Archie hoards clothes he cannot even wear. He already has twenty years’ worth of the finest garments the royal treasury can buy after playing court fool to this king and the last. Not that he appreciates either one of his masters. Tells anyone who will listen that England would be better off if the king’s brother had lived to inherit and Charles had died.”
    “The king allows such talk?” I asked in surprise.
    “A court fool is the one person who gets away with saying almost anything to the royal he serves. But in this case…” Evans sobered. “I suspect His Majesty agrees with Archie. King James most certainly did.”
    I could imagine what my father’s reaction would be if John died. Father would wish it was anyone but John in that grave.
    “Prince Henry was as noble a prince as ever dwelt on this island,” Evans said. “A true Arthur reborn.”
    “Who was Arthur, another brother?”
    Evans’s jaw dropped. “I did not think there was an English lad alive who had not heard tales of the greatest king who ever ruled. There are a hundred legends of the Round Table and the knights who gathered about it.”
    “Legends?” I took the clothes around the corner of the bed to obscure Evans’s view while I changed. “My father says people use such stories to dupe fools into charging into the path of blazing muskets. He told tales of fairy realms to charm coins out of the crowds that watched me dance at market fairs. They could not afford to waste those coppers. Should have bought a meat pie or boots from the secondhand clothing man.”
    I peered around the bed. Pity crowded into Evans’s deep-set eyes.
    “That is the saddest thing I have heard,” Evans said. “A lad growing up without tales of valor to brighten his life. Those tales were like food for me when I was growing up in Wales. My mother claimed I gobbled legends down like my brothers gobbled oat cakes. That is what made me grow so tall—to give such stories room to stretch their wonders.”
    Evans’s tales tempted me, but anything he might share about the king could prove useful. I began to put on my borrowed stocking. “I would rather hear about King Charles’s brother.”
    “From the moment Henry Stuart was born, he seemed forged of brighter mettle than other men. No one could best him with a sword or on horseback, and no matter how fierce his father and the royal council pressed Henry, he would not wed a Catholic. Not for a hundred alliances would two religions sleep in his bed, he said.”
    “Considering the discord religion fired between the king and queen last night, perhaps Prince Henry was wise.”
    “I am not an educated man,” Evans said. “But I know that Catholics and Protestants are knit into England as tightly as the threads in that stocking you are donning. Could you pull out one strand or the other without unraveling the whole garment?”
    He did not seem to want an answer. I wondered whose God Will Evans bent his patched knee to.
    “Prince Henry was only a lad when he set off to visit the most famous traitor imprisoned in the Tower of London. Spent hours with Sir Walter Raleigh to learn science and hear tales of Virginia and other uncharted territories. Even realms of alchemy, all the secrets of the brotherhood called the School of Night.”
    “The School of Night?” I echoed.
    “A wizard’s school made up of atheists. Men like Raleigh and the earl of Northumberland, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, and Dr. John Dee.”
    The idea of a wizard’s school sent a delicious shiver down my spine as I pulled the borrowed shirt over my head and did up the laces.
    “Of course, wizardry is a crime. King James himself wrote a book about how to root out witches.” Evans adjusted the queen’s badge on his livery as I stepped into Archie’s breeches. “The prince