Little Read online

  ALSO BY EDWARD CAREY

  Observatory Mansions

  Alva & Irva, The Twins Who Saved a City

  THE IREMONGER TRILOGY:

  Heap House

  Foulsham

  Lungdon

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Edward Carey

  Illustrations © 2018 by Edward Carey

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Carey, Edward, author.

  Title: Little : a novel / Edward Carey.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017061111| ISBN 9780525534327 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525534341 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Tussaud, Marie, 1761–1850—Fiction. | Orphans—Fiction. | Wax modellers—Fiction. | France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6053.A6813 L58 2018 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061111

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Elizabeth

  CONTENTS

  Also by Edward Carey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Extraordinary Life and Historic Adventures of a Servant Called Little

  Also

  Before | 1761–1767: A Little VillageChapter One

  Chapter Two

  Book One | 1767–1769: A One-Way StreetChapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Book Two | 1769–1771: A Dead Tailor’sChapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Book Three | 1771–1778: The Monkey HouseChapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Book Four | 1778–1789: A Cupboard in VersaillesChapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Book Five | 1789–1793: The Palace of PeopleChapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Book Six | 1793–1794: Quiet HouseChapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Book Seven | 1794–1802: The Waiting Room and the Cardboard PropertyChapter Sixty-five

  Chapter Sixty-six

  Chapter Sixty-seven

  Chapter Sixty-eight

  Chapter Sixty-nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-one

  Afterward | 1850: At HomeChapter Seventy-two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE AND HISTORIC ADVENTURES OF A SERVANT CALLED

  LITTLE,

  containing travels across three countries, lost children, lost parents, ghosts of monkeys, tailor’s dummies, wooden dolls, an artificial populace, one king, two princesses, seven doctors, the man who walked all over Paris, the man who was shop dolls, his mother a mogul, the man who collected murderers, famous philosophers, heroes and monsters, everyone of significance, several houses each bigger than the last, progress, retreat, a large family, scenes of historical import, famous people, ordinary people, love, hate, massacres of innocents, murders witnessed, bodies taken apart,

  blood on the streets, misery, prison,

  loss of everything, marriage,

  memories captured and contained,

  calamity daily exhibited,

  history owned.

  Written by

  herself.

  ALSO:

  Drawn by herself.

  In graphite, charcoal, and black chalk.

  {This being a likeness of her pencil.}

  BEFORE

  1761–1767

  A LITTLE VILLAGE

  From my birth until I am six years old.

  CHAPTER ONE

  In which I am born and in which I describe my mother and father.

  In the same year that the five-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Minuet for Harpsichord, in the precise year when the British captured Pondicherry in India from the French, in the exact year in which the melody for “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” was first published, in that very year, which is to say 1761, whilst in the city of Paris people at their salons told tales of beasts in castles and men with blue beards and beauties that would not wake and cats in boots and slippers made of glass and youngest children with tufts in their hair and daughters wrapped in donkey skin, and whilst in London people at their clubs discussed the coronation of King George III and Queen Charlotte: many miles away from all this activity, in a small village in Alsace, in the presence of a ruddy midwife, two village maids, and a terrif
ied mother, was born a certain undersized baby.

  Anne Marie Grosholtz was the name given to that hurriedly christened child, though I would be referred to simply as Marie. I was not much bigger, at first, than the size of my mother’s little hands put together, and I was not expected to live very long. And yet, after I survived my first night, I went on, despite contrary predictions, to breathe through my first week. After that my heart still kept time, without interruption, throughout my first month. Pigheaded, pocket-sized thing.

  My lonely mother was eighteen years old at my birth, a small woman, a little under five foot, marked by being the daughter of a priest. This priest, my grandfather, made a widower by smallpox, had been a very strict man, a fury in black cloth, who never let his daughter out of his sight. After he died, my mother’s life changed. Mother began to meet people, villagers who called upon her, and among them was a soldier. This soldier, a bachelor somewhat beyond the customary age, possessing a somber temperament brought on by witnessing so many appalling things and losing so many soldier friends, took a fancy to Mother; he thought they could be happy, so to speak, being sad together. Her name was Anna-Maria Waltner. His name was Joseph Georg Grosholtz. They were married. My mother and my father. Here was loving and here was joy.

  My mother had a large nose, in the Roman style. My father, I believe, had a strong chin that pointed a little upward. That chin and that nose, it seems, fitted together. After a little while, however, Father’s furlough was over, and he returned to war. Mother’s nose and Father’s chin had known each other for three weeks.

  To begin with, for always, there was love. The love my father and mother had for each other was forever present on my face. I was born with both the Waltner nose and the Grosholtz chin. Each attribute was a noteworthy thing on its own, and nicely gave character to the faces of those two families; combined, the result was a little ungainly, as if I were showing more flesh than was my personal due. Children will grow how they will. Some distinguish themselves as prodigies of hair growth, or cut teeth at a wonderfully young age; some are freckled all over; others arrive so pale that their white nakedness is a shock to all who witness it. I nosed and chinned my way into life. I was, certainly, unaware then of what extraordinary bodies I should come to know, of what vast buildings I would inhabit, of what bloody events I would find myself trapped within, and yet, it seems to me, my nose and my chin already had some inkling of it all. Nose and chin, such an armor for life. Nose and chin, such companions.

  Since girls of my stamp were not schooled, it was Mother who gave me education through God. The Bible was my primer. Elsewise, I fetched in logs, looked for kindling in the woods, washed plates and clothes, cut vegetables, fetched meat. I swept. I cleaned. I carried. I was always busy. Mother taught me industry. If my mother was busy, she was happy; it was when she stopped that uncertainty caught up with her, only to be dispelled by some new activity. She was constantly in motion, and movement suited her well.

  “Discover,” she would say, “what you can do. You’ll always find something. One day your father will return, and he’ll see what a good and useful child you are.”

  “Thank you, Mother. I shall be most useful, I do wish it.”

  “What a creature you are!”

  “Am I? A creature?”

  “Yes, my own little creature.”

  Mother brushed my hair with extraordinary vigor. Sometimes she touched my cheek or patted my bonnet. She was probably not very beautiful, but I thought her so. She had a small mole just beneath one of her eyelids. I wish I could remember her smile. I do know she had one.

  By the age of five I had grown to the height of the old dog in the house next to ours. Later I would be the height of doorknobs, which I liked to rub. Later still, and here I would stop, I would be the height of many people’s hearts. Women observing me in the village were sometimes heard to mutter, as they kissed me, “Finding a husband will not be easy.”

  On my fifth birthday, my dear mother gave me a doll. This was Marta. I named her myself. I knew her little body, about a sixth the size of my own; I learned it entirely as I moved it about, sometimes roughly, sometimes with great tenderness. She came to me naked and without a face. She was a collection of seven wooden pegs, which could be assembled in a certain order to roughly resemble the human figure. Marta, save my mother, was my first intimate connection with the world; I was never without her. We were happy together: Mother, Marta, and me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Family Grosholtz.

  Father was absent during those beginning years, his army finding ever more excuses to postpone his next furlough. And what could he do about it? The poor dandelion seed must go wherever they blew him. To us, he was absent but not forgotten. Sometimes Mother would sit me on the joint stool by the fire and instruct me about Father. I took much enjoyment in saying that word, Father. Sometimes, when Mother was not about, I would address the stove in my private way as Father, or a chair or chest, or various trees, and bow to them or hug them, in rehearsal for my father’s return. Father was everywhere about the village; Father was in the church; he was by the cowsheds. Father was an upright man, said Mother. And he would surely have remained so in our minds had he never come home.

  But then, one day, he did. Actual Father had been forced into retirement—not by a battle, since there were no battles in Europe that year, but as a result of a malfunctioning cannon during a parade. The cannon had been damaged at the Battle of Freiberg in 1762 and its repairs must have been very shoddy, for a single appearance of that faulty instrument caused irrevocable change in my life. One Sunday parade, the cannon’s last, it was lit as a salute, but it was somehow tremendously blocked, and it sprayed, backward, sulfur, charcoal, saltpeter, and scorching metal in a wide arc. Father was within that wide arc, and because of that he was finally allowed home.

  Mother was beside herself in worry and in joy. “Your father is coming home to us! And very soon he will be quite recovered. I feel certain of it. Your father, Marie!”

  The man who returned to our house, however, was pushed. The father who arrived was a father in a wheel chair. Father’s yellow eyes were moist; they seemed to recognize nothing in the wife who stood before him; nor even did they show any change when the wife began to tremble and moan. There was no hair on top of Father; that erupting cannon had scalped him. Most of all, though, what was lacking about this poor bundle contained in its wheel chair was the inferior maxillary bone, the largest bone in the human face, commonly called the lower jaw.

  Here and now I must make a confession: It was I who had credited my chin to Father. Otherwise, why else would I have such a proud, rude thing about me? I had never seen Father, but not seeing him I desired to have his mark upon my person, so that it was daily certain that I was his and he was mine. I cannot now say for certain—those early years being so far away and the other actors in them being no longer upon the stage—whether I declared my chin to be his only after his return, in some fit of longing, or whether I had always believed it. But its absence was the thing, and I longed to understand and to make a fuller picture of the man who was my father in distress. I wished to see him complete and fancied my face could complete the portrait, as the portrait before me was such an unhappy, ruined one.

  With my father’s arrival, a hint of my future had appeared to me. A small window opened up and called.

  The man in the wheel chair may have been lacking his lower jaw, but in its place had been fitted a silver plate. This silver plate was molded into the shape of the lowermost portion of a very average human face. This silver plate was taken from a mold, and so it would be fair to conclude that several tens of unfortunate people had exactly this same silver chin that Father had now. The silver plate could be detached. Father came in two pieces, which could be fitted together with a little pain.

  Poor Father had no idea where he was. He was incapable of recognizing his wife, nor could he tell that the little girl
silently watching him was his own daughter.

  For assistance my mother rehired her midwife, a fond, breathless lady with thick arms who adapted herself to any paying occasion, and she called often upon the doctor from the nearby village, Doctor Sander. Together they made up the little room beside the kitchen for Father, and once he was in he never left. He just lay there all day, sometimes looking out of the window, sometimes at the ceiling, but never, I think, exactly focusing on anything. I sat with Father very long hours, and when he did not talk to me I gave him some words, and imagined all the things he would want to tell me.

  After Father’s arrival, Mother climbed the stairs to her bedroom and closed the door. As days went on, she spent more and more time in bed. She stopped moving, and that was never good for her. Doctor Sander said that my mother was in a state of pronounced shock and must be slowly encouraged back to herself. Her whole body changed after Father’s arrival; her skin grew shiny and yellow, like that of an onion. She gave off new smells. One morning I found her outside, barely clothed, lying on the ground, in winter, crying. I helped her back to bed.

  I went from one parent to the other, from Mother upstairs to Father downstairs, and read to them both from the Bible. I used the little joint stool, my extension, to position myself at various stations around the perimeter of Father’s bed, depending on his needs. I was present when Father was cleaned and washed. The midwife was very affectionate to me, she sometimes held me fast to her, and in those moments I was surprised at how very big bodies could be and held her in return with all possible force. We ate many meals together; I think she must have given me some of her food. When she spoke to me of my father she frowned in concern; when she spoke of my mother she shook her head.