The Queen’s Sorrow

Rafael had no doubt that the problem in his particular case would be resolved in his favour. In the meantime, it cost him nothing to continue with his work, so he wandered in the direction of the queen’s garden. It was a raw morning, and he’d assumed no one would be there but, opening the door in the wall, he saw he was mistaken: she was there, the queen, at the fountain, accompanied by the mischievous-looking Mrs Dormer. His heart clenched, squeezing the breath from him, and he backtracked immediately. He’d claim, if questioned later, that he’d taken a wrong turning. To his dismay, though, she’d seen him, or – short-sighted – she’d seen someone, and was beckoning. A whole-arm beckoning, it was: enthusiastic, unequivocal. Yes, she was mistaking him for someone else. Wouldn’t her smirking companion put her right? He didn’t know what to do. There was no choice, though. He couldn’t disobey. He’d have to accept that he’d got himself into this – How? it was not like him to be incautious – and he’d have to see it through.

How, though, to approach her? He couldn’t just stride over there. How else, though, would he get to her? And where – while he was walking – should he look? Surely he shouldn’t stare into her face; but wouldn’t it be disrespectful to fail to meet her gaze? And crucially: when, exactly, where, should he bow? Now, in the doorway? Or when he was closer? Or both? And how much closer? And how many bows?

But there she was, gesturing with cheerful impatience. So, in the end, he just did it, putting his trust in her accepting him as a bumptious Spanish peasant, and walking over to join her. He stopped at what he hoped was a respectful distance and bowed deeply, but she was already speaking to him in English: ‘No sun, Mr Prado.’ She said it anxiously, with only the briefest, most reluctant of skyward glances. Hard to imagine what kind of harvest could come from a summer such as this. He wondered again: how did the people here survive? They’d be going hungry, next year, and they didn’t look in great shape – to say the least – even now.

Nor did she. Her small, watery eyes were pink-rimmed. It was said that she worked very hard. Rafael recalled hearing that she’d appointed a huge council of men – any English nobleman who had any claim, regardless of religious persuasion – and insisted on listening to each and every one of them, more than thirty, on each and every issue. If her extraordinary openness to him was anything to go by, he could believe it.

She said, ‘My husband is a good man.’ Good to have arranged the gift of the sundial, he took her to mean. She glanced at Mrs Dormer with something nearing a smile – a softening, a shyness – to which the lady responded with her own dazzler. Bashfully dipping her gaze, the queen repeated, ‘My husband,’ as if to listen to it, to hear it. To relish it. Rafael was surprised by such girlishness in a woman who’d been unmarried for almost forty years. He’d been assuming that this marriage of convenience was a personal inconvenience for her, just as it was for the prince. Word was that, when she’d come to the throne, she’d resisted her council’s suggestion that she should marry. Hardly surprising, given the fate of her unfortunate mother. Everyone in Spain knew that the prince had had to leave behind a mistress, his wife in all but name. Did the queen know? The prince’s job, now, was to be attentive to his new wife, and he’d be taking it seriously. Rafael didn’t envy him his duty. For all the queen’s openness, there was something off-putting about her. Not her looks, despite what everyone said; nothing so simple. It was perhaps her openness itself, he felt. An over-eagerness.

He wondered how – as heir to the throne – she’d got to such an age and not already been married. The prince was an old hand, he’d been married and widowed. Eleven years her junior, but already second time around for him. Then Rafael remembered that she hadn’t been heir: she’d been a disinherited heir, which was worse than no heir at all. A liability. Who’d have wanted her? How everything had changed for her in just one year. So much change so late in life. This once-sidelined spinster was now wife of the man who would one day be the most powerful in the world.

She was peering at him. ‘Do you have a wife, Mr Prado?’

Yes, he was glad to tell her. ‘Leonor.’ Her name came to him like a cry, which he forced down to be a lump in his throat. What would Leonor make of this? Being discussed by the queen of England. That’d be some gift to take back with him: The queen asked about you.

‘Children?’

‘One, Your Grace: a son, Francisco.’ If Francisco were present in person, he’d be frustrating his father’s efforts, clinging to his legs, refusing to look up.

‘Francisco,’ she echoed, appreciative. ‘And how old is he?’

Three, he told her.

‘He’s little.’ She sounded surprised, and asked, bluntly, ‘How old is your wife?’

Taken aback, the English word eluded him; he found himself raising his hands and doing four flashes of all his fingers.

‘Forty?’ She turned, chatting animatedly, to her companion. He felt he knew why his answer pleased her: Leonor had had her first baby in her late thirties, the queen’s own age. The queen, though, looked so much older; she could easily be ten years older than Leonor. She turned back to him, held him in that pale stare of hers. ‘I’m thirty-eight,’ she said. She placed her hands squarely on her belly and said, matter-of-fact, ‘Pray for me, Mr Prado.’ As queen, she could expect an entire population to be praying for her, but he understood that she was truly asking it of him and he was honoured. Then she and her companion were going before he realised, and he had to do his bowing in her wake.

Again, Rafael refrained from making mention of the queen in his letter home. He’d tell Leonor when he saw her. We spoke about you. He could see, in his mind’s eye, her habitual expression of humourful disdain, the scepticism with which she always faced him. He’d insist, No, really, and watch her making up her mind whether to believe him. That watchfulness of hers: that cautious, clever look. The tilt to her chin, and the hard little mouth with its crookedness so that it slipped whenever she spoke and more so when she smiled. Which made her smile seem partial, reflective, wry. She almost always looked amused, but Rafael couldn’t remember ever having heard her laugh aloud. When he’d first ever seen her, she’d been standing with her arms folded, and that’s how she almost always stood, how she seemed to be most comfortable although it didn’t look comfortable to Rafael. She held herself separately, seemed to be appraising – a look to which he hadn’t warmed, at first – but he’d learned in time that this wasn’t so. On the contrary: more than anyone else he knew, she suspended judgement.

She’d arrived in Rafael’s life as the bride of his boyhood best friend. Gil, a doctor’s son and a doctor himself, now, had gone away to study and returned home with a bride. So far, so predictable. But with her tightly folded arms and half-smile, she wasn’t the kind of woman Rafael had expected Gil to bring home; Gil, who asked little of life except that he be in the thick of it, offering a helping hand. Rafael didn’t know what to make of her. The women in his family simultaneously indulged him and brushed him off, as they did with all men. Leonor, though, took the trouble to talk with him. Well, sometimes. Her talk was of nothing much, for much of the time, but that was what made it special. The women in his family talked to him to organise him, cajole him, or set him right: they had aims in their dealings with him. Leonor meandered, passing the time of day, her gaze idling on his, her slate-hued irises sometimes blue, sometimes green, grey, even almost amber. Occasionally, she’d speak more seriously – religion, politics – and say things that, in Rafael’s experience, most people didn’t dare say, but never provocatively, never carelessly. Always properly cautious, she was. But then she’d seem to be gone from him for perhaps as long as several weeks at a stretch, even though in fact she was there, around, arms folded and gaze unflinching.

If she didn’t suit Gil, Rafael often wondered who’d suit her: who would he have imagined her with, if he hadn’t known she was married to Gil? Someone older, he felt, someone reserved. He wondered what she and Gil saw in each other. Something, though, that was for certain, because once, years into their marriage, he spotted them kissing in the grove behind their house. Slipping away unseen, he nursed his shock, because it wasn’t what he’d have expected of them.

He’d fallen in love with Leonor. When? For a while, the question preoccupied him, he felt he owed it to his helpless, hopeless loving to be able to account for it. And then he accepted that he’d been searching for an excuse: she’d always been her, he’d always been him, and thus he’d always loved her, even when he hadn’t quite liked her, even when he hadn’t been quite sure of her.

How did he live those years of unspoken love for his best friend’s wife? There was no art to it. He worked hard and was away a lot, eventually, with his work. He lived from breath to breath, and hard at his heels were the doubts, the fears: what did she feel for him, and what did she know – or suspect – of what he felt for her? In one breath, he’d dread that his longing was an open wound; but in the next, he’d be congratulating himself on his subterfuge. Each and every heartbeat trapped him between a craving to see her and a desperation to avoid her. He loathed himself – of course he did – but sometimes there was also something like pride, because sometimes the secret that he carried inside himself as a stone was, instead, a gem.

And Gil. How had he felt about him? Well, he’d felt all things, over the years, and often all at once. He felt close to him, his boyhood soul mate, in their shared love for this woman with the hard-folded arms and cool eyes. He felt distant from him, too, though, as the husband of his beloved, which was who he’d become. He pitied Gil his treacherous best friend. And he resented him, of course he did. But he’d never wished him dead. No, he’d never done that.

In the early days, to keep himself going, Rafael allowed himself the luxury of imagining that he and Leonor might just once allude to their feelings for each other being deeper than they should be. For a time, he thought that’d be enough, but that was before he caught sight of her in the grove and witnessed the hunger in her kissing. From then on, for a while, nothing was enough and he stopped at nothing in his exploration of the life that they might have had together. Getting into bed, he’d find himself thinking about whom they might have entertained that evening, if they’d been married, and what they might have remarked to each other when alone again. And longing to see the look in her eyes as she reached around to unfasten her hair, last thing.

At the end of his second week, Rafael arrived home for supper one afternoon with Antonio to find the house being packed up. Just inside the main door, three men were taking down a tapestry: two of them up on ladders, the third supervising from below, and all three absorbed in a tense exchange of what sounded like suggestions and recriminations. Rafael might have assumed that the huge, heavy hanging was being removed for cleaning or repair – although no tapestry in the Kitson household looked old enough to require cleaning or repair – had he not noticed the packing cases around the hallway. Some were fastened and stacked, others still open. In one lay household plate: platters and jugs, the silverware for which England was famed. In another, cushions of a shimmering fabric. Towering over the cases, resting against the wall, was a dismantled bedframe, the posts carved with fruits and painted red, green and gold; and on the floor he spotted – just as he was about to trip over it – a rolled-up rug.

One of the men glanced down, eyes rheumy with a cold, as if wondering whether he had to pack the two Spaniards as well. At this point, the pale woman appeared, hurrying as if she’d been looking for them: a purposeful approach. ‘Mr Prado? Mr Gomez?’ Some kind of announcement was going to be made, it seemed, and, to judge from her expression, one that would give her pleasure. She spoke, indicating the boxes, then herself, a touch of her fingertips to her breastbone. Rafael missed it, and looked to Antonio for translation. Antonio looked dazed, still catching up with her. ‘She’s the house –’ He frowned, and then it came to him: ‘She’s the housekeeper?’

She was. A skeleton staff was staying behind, of which she was the backbone, the housekeeper. Later, Rafael would learn that the Kitsons lived for most of the year at their manor in the countryside and, like many of their friends, had only been at their townhouse to witness the splendour of the royal newlyweds’ entrance into London and the elaborate pageants held in the streets to celebrate it. They’d ended up having to be patient. The wedding had taken place at Winchester Cathedral just days after the prince had come ashore at Southampton, but the royal couple’s progress to London thereafter had been leisurely, taking almost a month.

Now, though, in the first week of September, festivities over, the Kitsons were heading back to their manor. In Spain, the land was for peasants: that was the unanimous view of Rafael’s fellow countrymen. Something, then, that he had in common with the English: the dislike of towns and cities, the preference for open expanse and woods.

The first evening after the Kitsons’ departure, he arrived back alone. Antonio was using the departure as an excuse for his own absence – as he saw it, he no longer needed to play the part of the guest. Not that he’d ever really done so. Rafael took it to mean the contrary, considering himself obliged to show support for the pale woman who’d been left almost alone to cater for them. He knocked on the door – wielded the leopard’s head – and was disappointed to hear that one of the dogs remained in residence. The pale woman opened the door, dodging the animal; the boy, too, was behind her. The woman wasn’t quite so pale – flushed and somehow scented – and Rafael guessed she’d been cooking. He wanted to apologise for having interrupted her, but didn’t know how. She looked behind him. ‘Mr Gomez?’

‘No.’ He didn’t know how to say more.

She shrugged, seemed happy enough to give up on him, and stepped aside to let Rafael in. He noticed the bunch of keys on her belt: all the house keys, he presumed. She said something that sounded concerned and, frowning, touched his cloak. Said it again: ‘Drenched.’ Drenched. Then something else, faster, and a mime of eating, a pointing towards the Hall.

Having hung up his cloak, he went along to the Hall and, self-consciously, took a place at the single table alongside the others: the porter who’d let him through the gate; a man who he was fairly sure was one of the grooms; and a quite elderly man whom he’d seen around but had no idea what he did. And the dog, of course. The old man was talking to the others – dog included – and didn’t let up when the pale woman began bringing in the dishes. Rafael rose to go and help her, but she shook her head and then he saw that she had the child in tow as helper. When an array of dishes was on the table, she helped the boy on to the bench and took her place beside him. After Grace, the old man resumed his chat and the others took him up on it, although the child kept quiet. Clearly, mealtime silence was only for when the whole household was in residence. Perhaps they were catching up on a day spent mostly alone.

Eventually, Rafael felt he should say something. ‘Very good,’ he said to the woman, indicating the spread, even though it was yet more meat – poultry of various types – served as usual with the jellies which he guessed were made from berries of some kind, whatever kinds they had in England. She frowned and shook her head, and he understood her to mean it wasn’t her doing – this food had been left by the cook for them. But to this, he smiled back his own dismissal: the food was well presented and that would have been her doing; there was still plenty that she’d done. And this time, albeit with a small show of reluctance, she allowed it, bowing her head. To follow the meats, she fetched a bowl of something sweet, causing much excitement among his fellow diners. Usually there wasn’t anything sweet, just the soft, wet cheeses. This was a sweetened, fruited cream with the unmistakable, delectable flavour of strawberries.

When the table had finally been cleared, Rafael wondered what he should do. Usually, he’d go to his room and work on his design, but surely it would be rude to walk away openly from this small gathering. The woman indicated that he should join them on cushions around the fireplace – in which no fire was lit – and so he did, only to find to his embarrassment that both the porter and the groom were excusing themselves. The old man took a heap of cushions and lay back immediately for a sleep, and the dog muscled in. The woman seemed to have produced from nowhere an article of clothing to adapt or repair, and her little boy began working on another, unpicking stitches for her. Rafael felt profoundly awkward: he had nothing with him, nothing to do. Pretend to doze, perhaps; perhaps he should do that. He had a cold and was conscious, in the silence, of his snuffling. But then the woman spoke to him: ‘Spain, England,’ and she drew a horizontal line in the air with her index finger. ‘How many days?’ She laid the fabric in her lap and held up both hands to display her fingers: ‘Five, six, seven …?’

‘Five,’ he said. ‘Five days.’

She looked appreciative of the answer – that he had answered – but then didn’t seem to know what to make of it, didn’t seem to know if a five-day sea-journey was long or short, or indeed longer or shorter than she might’ve guessed. There was nothing to say.

He indicated her son: ‘Four, five years?’

‘Four.’

So, he’d been right; and of course, because Francisco was almost four. ‘Big,’ he said, careful to sound impressed.

Looking at her boy, she shrugged with her mouth as if considering. She was being modest; the boy was tall, and – Rafael saw it – she was pleased he’d noticed. Sad, too, though – Rafael saw this, too – if only for a heartbeat: a fleeting sadness, perhaps at her little boy growing older and leaving his infant years behind. ‘Nicholas,’ she said. Rafael repeated it with obvious approval. ‘My son,’ he said, making a fist over his heart. ‘Three years. Francisco.’

‘Oh!’ Her eyes lit up, and she looked as if she’d like to ask more. Instead, though, a small gesture, and unconsciously, Rafael felt, a reflection of his own: a brief, steadying touch of her own hand to her own heart. Which rather touched him.

‘Rafael,’ he said, tapping his chest.

‘Cecily,’ she reciprocated. This, he hadn’t expected, and suffered a pang of anxiety that he’d pushed her into it. ‘Madam’would’ve been fine. Again she looked expectant and he guessed that he was supposed to repeat it, to try it out, which he did and to which she looked amused although it had sounded all right to him.

After that, he’d felt relaxed enough to excuse himself and go up to his room to fetch paper and charcoal, and for the following couple of hours in Cecily’s company he sketched and half-worked on ideas.

Subsequent evenings, this became the routine, sometimes with him working at the table, sometimes on a letter home. The old man, Richard – and dog, Flynn – would sleep; and Cecily would continue her work on a gown. Fine wool, it usually was: definitely not her own. ‘Frizado,’ she said, once, holding it up for him to see and relishing the texture between her fingertips. Another time, ‘Mockado,’ and another, ‘Grogram.’ Later, every evening, though, she’d put her work aside and then, standing up, standing tall to stretch, she’d reach to the small of her back to release her apron’s bow with a tug. As it dropped away, she’d swoop it up, giving it a shake to release any creases and looping it into a couple of easy, loose folds. Then she’d reach into the linen basket for the little unassuming roll of undyed linen in which were pinned and pocketed her own special needles and threads.

The first time, she’d held up a needle, presented it to him although it was so fine that it vanished in the air between them, and said, ‘From Spain.’ She said it with a depreciating little laugh: there wasn’t a lot they could talk about and this was the best she could do. For his part, he’d tried to look interested. What did interest him was that she’d made the effort to find something they had in common. That was what mattered; not the actual, invisible, though no doubt very good needle. She turned it in the air: ‘Very, very good,’ she assured him, eyebrows raised and head tilted in a parody of earnestness which he then mirrored so that she smiled.

Also in that linen pouch were floss silks of various colours. Her method was to lay them on the dark glossy tabletop to make her selection. The skeins were greens and blues, reds and yellows: the greens from fresh and bud-like to velvety firblues; the blues from palest lunar glow to deepest ultramarine; the reds from cat’s tongue rosiness to alizarin; the yellows from the creaminess of blossom to the confidence of lemons and the darker, greeny-gold of pears. The best needles might well come from Spain, but everyone knew the best embroidery came from England.

Rafael would watch Cecily choosing her colours. She’d feel her way along the range, not touching: fingers walking above the row, rising and falling as if idling on the keys of a virginal. Then – yes – she’d pick one up, pleased to have made the decision but perhaps also a little regretful, Rafael detected, to have committed herself. The selection would be hung over her finger, unregarded, while she made the next few choices, then she’d drape them all in the fold between thumb and forefinger to trail across her palm. That little handful she’d lift into the light, whatever remained of it, sometimes even leaving the room, presumably in search of what was left of it. The scrutiny involved a slow turning of her hand one way and the other, then a flip so that the skeins could dangle free and light run the length of them. The final test was a single strand concentrated in a tiny loop, like an insect’s wing, which she’d press to the embroidery for consideration against what was already there. From what he could glimpse, her design was of some kind of beast – stylised – prancing or pawing inside a geometric border. Her brilliant colours were so unlike those in which his designs were realised by Antonio. His and Antonio’s colours were incidental: ochre tints in marble and patinas on bronze. And her materials, lax in her lap, were so pliable in comparison to theirs, which needed tackling.

Whenever he was too tired to think, he sketched what he saw in the room: the immense fireplace and, in detail, the Tudor roses carved into it; an expanse of wall-panelling and its delicately carved frames; sections of the decorative plasterwork on the ceiling; several floor tiles of differing heraldic designs; and the table clock from all angles. One evening, he began sketching Nicholas: unapproachable Nicholas. And perhaps that was why, the dare of it. Nicholas: approachable only like this, in surreptitious glances from across the room. And, anyway, Rafael found himself thinking, he stares at me, from that first evening, from the doorway, and ever since. Nicholas had never yet spoken in Rafael’s presence, nor smiled. What he did – all he did – was stare. There was no blankness to that stare, it was full of intent: Leave me alone. Whenever their paths crossed, Nicholas stared Rafael down; stared until Rafael – smile abandoned – looked away.

Not now, though, for once. Not when the boy was relatively off-guard, weary at the end of the day and wedged under the wing of his mother. He was kneeling beside her, playing with a tin of buttons. Well, not playing. Play must have been his mother’s intention – ‘Here, look!’ – and he was obliging her to the extent that he was doing something with the buttons, but all he was doing was gazing at them as he dabbled his fingertips in the tin. Rafael had considered him an unnaturally still child – never running around, always clinging to Cecily – but now he noticed how much the apparently motionless Nicholas was in fact moving: chewing his lip, and shifting his shoulders – one, two, one, two – in a strange, rigid wiggle. The poor boy was so taken over by this restlessness that there was nothing of him left for button-playing.