The Queen's Sorrow Read online

  I’ll remember this.

  Here and there amid a mess of blue-black, gilt-edged cloud were patches of turquoise sky.

  This is what I’ll take with me.

  A long, cold dusk wild with bells. The mustiness of beer and the spiciness of woodsmoke.

  Firewood had been carried into the lane from the bigger houses and Rafael and Antonio headed for the bonfire with none of the reticence that’d been necessary for the food. Rafael was chilled to the bone and longed to be standing too close to the fire, barely enduring the heat. When they reached the newly lit pile, flames were already tearing into the wood, unleashed on it and racing to make nothing of it. Instantly, the spectacle – its grandeur – had him stupefied. The insubstantiality of fire, but its unsurpassed savagery: he stared into the flames to try to make sense of them, to track their wild work, but there was no sense to be made, the fire was hauling in the very air itself and turning it instantly into nothing. And they put people in that.

  Later, back in his room, he wondered again where Cecily had been, all evening. His preoccupation the last few hours had been with memories, but now the future turned around and stared him down. Cecily would grow old here and he’d never see it. And surely he should be glad of that, but glad was the absolute opposite of how he felt. And even though he didn’t understand it, he let himself feel that sadness and his utter desolation to be leaving her. He didn’t understand it: he loved Leonor, didn’t he? Yes, he did. He really did, often somehow in spite of himself. So, what was this, then? Well, it didn’t matter what it was – he was going home, so it didn’t matter how he felt. Already it belonged to the past. This happened to me: he nestled it away beneath his breastbone, this sadness of his, to take back with him to Spain. It was of no consequence. It would just have to be lived with.

  That night, lying awake, he tried to remember if he’d been surprised when, after they’d married, Leonor hadn’t got pregnant. Or had he expected nothing? Oddly, he really couldn’t remember. He hadn’t felt that much about it, he suspected. So be it. And perhaps, in a way, it’d been a relief. He hadn’t been able to imagine being a father – that, he did remember. He’d paid lip service to the idea – It’d be lovely if we were blessed – but the truth was that life was good or certainly good enough. Better than he’d ever imagined it could be. No, that wasn’t true – he had imagined it that good, of course he had. He just hadn’t ever thought it’d happen. But it had. He’d got what he’d wanted: he’d married Leonor.

  Except that he hadn’t got what he’d wanted, had he. He’d wanted Leonor to be in love with him, and that hadn’t happened. He knew it.

  And sex: they did have sex, but not often, then even less often, then rarely. There’d been no problems in the early years of their marriage, no shyness from her, and she took pleasure in the act, liked to be on top. No, it wasn’t her pleasure that was at issue, but his. There was nothing amiss physically, but he could never quite shake off the suspicion that his presence – the presence of him in particular, in person – was of no consequence to her. He felt he might’ve just as easily not been there: not him. He could have been any man. Certainly he never felt made love to, and that was what he wanted from her. She reached her climax with a muted sound, as if she’d been caught out and had to give in. It had the tenor of resentment, that small sound of hers, even though the climax was something she’d been striving for.

  And then, one morning three years into their marriage, standing looking from their bedroom window, arms folded, she said, ‘I’m going to have a baby.’ Said levelly, businesslike, as if saying she were off to the shops.

  ‘Baby?’

  She didn’t react; he’d got it right.

  But she didn’t have babies: that was a fact about her. Two husbands, twelve years of marriage and now thirty-six years old. And as yet, no babies.

  She looked at him as he floundered – that faintly critical look of hers that she always had for him. In this, too, he was failing: she had big news for him and he couldn’t take it in. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, pathetically.

  ‘Sure as I can be.’

  They stared at each other.

  ‘When?’

  ‘October?’ She shrugged: hard to know.

  He said, ‘Congratulations,’ because wasn’t that what was said, in these circumstances? He had a faint tingling in his stomach: everything was going to change and he didn’t have the faintest clue how.

  Arriving downstairs for breakfast, Rafael walked into an atmosphere that wasn’t quite what he’d expected for a morning following celebrations. There was a blankness to people’s faces and a carelessness in their demeanour – platters and cups slammed down and dragged across tables. He might’ve put the blankness down to hangovers if it hadn’t been for that noisiness.

  Antonio said, ‘You heard?’ and suddenly Rafael realised he was the only person who hadn’t heard. Antonio enlightened him: ‘No prince.’

  Rafael’s heart clenched before Antonio elaborated, ‘No, I mean, there never was. Not yet. False alarm. Not born yet.’

  But that was ridiculous. How could that have happened?

  ‘Palace never confirmed.’

  So, a rumour had gathered momentum as it rolled through London, and galloped away.

  Antonio smirked, ‘They’ll have to do it all again.’ But Rafael knew that’d be impossible. The innocence would be gone, the enthusiasm wouldn’t be garnered.

  After breakfast, he retreated to his room, not even having looked around for Cecily. He’d resolved that he was going to avoid her – he was going to have to avoid her – as best he could until he left.

  For the next two days he was successful in avoiding her altogether, but she had a hand in his dreams. The first night, he dreamt they were at the market and she was with Nicholas at a stall, conducting her business, the very picture of competence, while he stood with one of the household dogs on a leash. The dog’s neck was all muscle and he was rearing on his hind legs, desperate to be off. Rafael pleaded with the dog, appealing to him to behave, while passers-by gave him derisive looks because this was no place to bring a dog. And then the dog was loose, gone, the leash bouncing behind him. Barging through the crowd with spectacular disregard for obstacles. Boxes crashed to the cobbles and oranges rolled gaudily in the mud. Rafael was frantic; not for the dog – he’d be back – but as to how he could apologise enough to Cecily for shaming her. He woke and lay stunned, uneasy.

  The second dream – what he remembered of it – was that he was travelling somewhere to see her. Hang on for me, I’ll get to you, I’ll get there, but the distance was daunting and time was folding down hard on him. He was on horseback but the terrain was sand and eventually he had to dismount and lead the horse. Each step – for both of them – was protracted. Then suddenly the terrain was rocky, every step jolting his spine up into the back of his head, and some of the rocks crumbled or rolled away underfoot, snatching his footing or that of the horse. His back was slick with sweat and he was shaking all over. Then came rain, drowning rain. The air itself was water and still they plodded on, Rafael and his horse, even though he felt as far away as he’d ever been and – worse – he couldn’t go back because to turn around now would be as hopeless as pushing onwards. And then he woke, baffled and wretched.

  How had this happened? He hadn’t felt like this for years and he’d assumed he never would again. And to feel it for a colourless, frank-faced, almost eerily composed Englishwoman, of whom he knew next to nothing. Love was done with: that was how he’d felt, before Cecily. It had been a journey – the journey of his young life, long and exhausting – which had reached its destination in Leonor. What was happening made no sense. He loved Leonor. Didn’t he? He’d just about always loved her; he’d spent his adult life yearning for her. He cringed to think how she’d look at him if she knew what he’d brought on himself with Cecily: amused, a little scornful, sceptical. Which was just how she always looked at him. He yearned for her, but she was forever retreating. There was no
home for his heart in Leonor. He’d married her and had been stupid enough to think that was the end of it. In their married life, he was like a dog turning and turning, ready to make his bed, ever hopeful and trusting, but kept there turning, turning, turning.

  It happened again, four days later. The news – if that was what it was – came shouted down the lane and Rafael, up in his room, heard it: ‘A prince!’ The proclamation delivered in a laughing yell, the clear implication of which was, Really, truly, this time. The first time in four days that Rafael had heard any reference from anyone to the previous mistake.

  People were in doorways and on thresholds in a flash, but self-conscious, peering up and down the lane. Rafael hurried downstairs. The steward was already at the door and literally in an awkward position, his back to the open doorway as he tried to humour the restless Kitson crowd. Apologetic, he’d raised a hand, a palm, to hold them back. ‘This evening, yes? This evening.’ Asking them to bide their time, this time. If warranted, he implied, there’d be celebrations in the evening. By which time, presumably, there’d be confirmation or otherwise.

  Someone had been sent to get confirmation, which did end up taking all day. Rafael kept himself to himself in his room until shortly before supper when he detected the return of the messenger. Downstairs in the kitchen, household servants had gathered by the door, obviously still curious but also clearly having lost heart during the day-long wait. Cecily was there ahead of Rafael and didn’t see him. The bearer of the news was soaked, scarcely recognisable as one of Mr Kitson’s secretary’s assistants. Self-important but exhausted, he slung them the news – ‘No’ – as he pushed through on his way to whomever he was required to report to. Everyone dispersed without a word.

  On his way back upstairs, Rafael reasoned that this was still before the due date, and first babies tend to be late, and it’s easy, anyway, to get dates wrong. Impossible to get them right. And, anyway, the longer a baby stays inside, the better. The bigger, the stronger. Stay safe. Rest up. The queen would keep stitching. All those ladies around her, stitching, pacing themselves through the days, taking the tiniest steps – miles of them – around expanses of linen.

  Rafael had been thinking, earlier, of the fastening on Cecily’s cloak – how, one day long before he’d ever arrived, she’d have chosen that button and braid. He’d been thinking of her pleasure when she spotted them on the market stall – Ooh, these – and her anticipation on bringing them home. He’d been thinking tenderly, too, of her boots: just the fact of their existence, forever hidden away and unremarked upon. The miracle of their existence, was what he felt although he didn’t understand why he felt that. And the little mole on her temple: she was so pale, but there was that tiny, rogue darkness, that small resistance to her pallor. The presence of the mole, the absence of eyelashes. These had been some of his peculiar preoccupations – like dreams – during that long, empty day. He’d been thinking, too, of their walk together, revisiting it: her striding ahead of him, her freedom coming not from leaving the Kitson house but from walking into the darkness. How he’d admired her for that. How he’d envied her courage.

  Every day, Rafael expected news but when the royal baby was two weeks overdue, the only news was that a woman was claiming she’d been asked to give up her own newborn boy. The story was everywhere in no time. An unmarried twenty-year-old daughter of a London apothecary: she was saying that two men and a lady had come to see her. Three times, they’d come, she said. She didn’t know how or why they’d found her; they’d come from nowhere. They were kind, reassuring: the lady had said the loveliest things about the baby, Oh, he’s as bright as a button, isn’t he! Look at that! – see how he looks into your eyes; he’s keen to know what’s going on, isn’t he? She spoke to the little mite himself: You’re keen to know what’s going on, aren’t you?

  You could still nurse him, they’d told the young woman. Should still nurse him. You should definitely do that. Keep him big and strong. They’d unswaddled him: Look at those legs! You’re a strong ’un, aren’t you? He’ll be well looked after, they’d told her. He’ll have a life better than you could ever imagine. A life of unimaginable splendour. You couldn’t wish for more, for him, could you? Could you really turn that down?

  But she did.

  She’s overwrought, was her own mother’s word on it. Overtired. Confused. It’d never happened, the mother said. No one had visited.

  She was in trouble for having made the claim. She’d been taken away for questioning.

  A kitchenful of Kitson staff were listening to the story for the umpteenth time. Rafael was only there because he’d reached the limit of his endurance of the chill in his room. ‘Arthur was a changeling, wasn’t he?’ Cecily piped up, addressing him over numerous heads. For two weeks, they hadn’t exchanged more than greetings in passing. Startled, he didn’t grasp what she’d just said. ‘Your Arthur. You and Nicholas: your King Arthur.’

  Still he didn’t grasp it.

  ‘Changeling,’ she persisted. ‘Changed. With another baby.’

  ‘Was he?’ Rafael managed. He had no memory of it. But there was so much to the story and he knew so little.

  ‘Yes. You remember – Merlin took him and hid him. Took him from the old king and put him with someone else for safety. The man he knew as his father wasn’t his father.’

  He shrugged her off, but his heart was thumping him giddy and sick.

  That night, he pondered again the circumstances of her widowing, something upon which he frequently dwelled. He pictured her first night alone with her fatherless child, putting him to bed and taking leave of the bedside, stepping back to be utterly alone.

  He considered, too, the circumstances of her appointment to the Kitson household. Was it before or after her widowing? Did she enquire after a vacancy, or was one made for her? He recalled her change of duties when the Kitsons departed: the nonchalance with which she carried around her waist all those household keys. How she was called upon by senior staff, the varied and important duties with which she was entrusted. How she was deferred to in recognition of her capabilities. Her ease with everyone else in the house.

  He wondered what she said last thing at night to her son, and with what kind of touch. A fingertip to the nose, perhaps. Or the palm of her hand over his heart.

  He thought of how she pronounced ‘Rafael’. Comically inadequate. A mere sideways swipe at it. And how, in turn, humour flashed into her eyes whenever he tried to say her name, although he couldn’t for the life of him hear how he’d got it wrong.

  That look of hers had often come for him as direct and secret as a dig in the ribs.

  A few days later, someone came to London with a tale even less likely than that of the apothecary’s daughter. An eighteen-year-old lad claimed to be the previous king and the answer to a lot of people’s prayers. What else he’d been saying, if anything, Rafael didn’t know, like how he was accounting for his supposed earlier death. Was he mad, or being manipulated, or was this a simple prank that’d got out of hand? By the time Rafael heard of it, it was over: the lad already apprehended and punished. Whipped, and his ears cropped, and paraded around the city with a placard proclaiming his crime. Antonio laughed, ‘Well, he won’t be doing that again in a hurry, will he?’

  But that depends, doesn’t it. ‘Was he mad, or simple, or what?’ Rafael asked.

  ‘I don’t know, do I.’ Antonio sounded as if he resented the implication that there were distinctions to which he should have paid mind.

  Rafael wondered if the queen had heard. Would she be told, or would she – in her condition – be protected? Or would she have demanded in advance, going into her confinement, to be told everything that was happening in the outside world? He suspected that her officials misinformed her or failed to inform her at their peril.

  If it had been his own brother – someone claiming to be his own dead brother – how would he feel? It was different, of course – incomparable, in that nothing was at stake, let alone the ruling of
a country – but still he dwelt on it. His brother would be thirty-seven. Even if – thirty-five years ago – the accident hadn’t happened, he might never have reached thirty-seven. Something could have happened at any time. Any calamity.

  Four years old at the time, Rafael had no memories of his little brother, but his absence had been alongside him for almost all his life. How would he feel if a man attempted to stride into that absence?

  He imagined various scenarios: a man coming to town and telling tall stories; his brothers debating what to do and going to investigate. But it couldn’t ever happen, because so many members of his family had been there, had seen Mateo die, had seen him dead. It could happen to a family of someone who’d gone missing or had been said to have died far away, but not to the Prado family, not in Mateo’s case.

  Rafael had had to be told that Mateo had died. He’d been outside, exploring, and when he came back inside, he’d had to be told. He had a clear memory of being told: standing there in the hall with his aunty bending down to him and speaking kindly, her eyes red. He was mortified that she was crying. He’d never seen an adult cry. He probably hadn’t even known that adults could cry. He didn’t remember if he’d listened to what she was saying. Something has happened to Mateo.

  What it was that had happened, he didn’t know. Whether he hadn’t been told – Something has happened to Mateo and he’s gone to be with Jesus – or hadn’t listened, he didn’t know. And he wouldn’t have asked. In the face of his aunty’s crying, he wouldn’t have been ready with questions. Only later did it occur to him: What happened? How?

  His mother was lying on cushions in the main room and looked to be staying there. At his own bedtime, he bedded down beside her, with no word from her nor any recognition from her of what he was doing. It was nothing so sophisticated as a decision. He just did it, probably because he didn’t know what else to do. Someone put a blanket over him and there he slept. And there he slept, alongside her, every night for years. He only re-occupied his own room when he became sick, once, with a fever, and was moved.