The Queen's Sorrow Read online

  But no: he pulled away from her a little, so she’d know he was looking at her, posing a question, You all right? It was a risk: he was giving her the detachment she’d need to turn from him and explain it away, apologise for it – Well, that was a mistake, wasn’t it? – and go. What she did, though, was sigh – a clear indication that she, too, didn’t want to face any of that – and she rubbed his back and shoulder blades to reassure him that they were in this together, that she was with him on this. That was all he’d wanted and, avoiding the wet patch, they settled down to sleep.

  But not quite. Because there was something bothering him. Did he dare ask her? ‘Cecily?’

  She tensed. She was ready for it, so he might as well ask. He said into the darkness, ‘What’s your real name?’

  She remained just as tense and didn’t answer. He regretted that he’d overstepped the mark, deeply regretted it. He’d come this far and then – just to satisfy his own curiosity – had asked too much of her. How reassuring, then, a minute later, was her touch of a fingertip to his back, and he let it soothe him. A long, sinuous stroke of her fingertip, then again – shorter, this time, more definite – and then a mere dab of it, but by then he understood: this was no reassurance, this was a message. She was writing her name.

  S-i-c-

  He lay there listening to her fingertip mute on his skin and then, when she’d finished, he said it: ‘Sicilia.’

  She left some time before dawn; he was too sleepy to manage more than the faintest acknowledgement of her going. In the morning, he woke alone but to the memory of her, the warmth and scent still there to be luxuriated in. It had happened: finally, it had happened. And she’d wrung every last pleasure from their encounter. Whatever else she might be feeling now, her enthusiasm had been unmistakable, was undeniable. How – why – before this, in his life, had he settled for so little? Had he not known there was such pleasure to be had? Not simply physical. No, he hadn’t known. Well, now he did, and he could never unknow it. He was hooked. When she’d ground herself against him, it’d seemed to him that she knew him for who he was and that until then, he himself hadn’t known. He felt he’d met his match, although he hadn’t known he’d been missing one.

  It wasn’t as if Leonor would mind, would care, if she knew. Not really. Why would she care? She’d probably be pleased. Relieved to be free of him. He was sorry he’d burdened her; it must have been hard for her, he saw now. Him and Leonor: not meant to be, however much he’d wanted it. She’d known that, but he’d refused to see it. He felt sorry, too, that she didn’t have in her life what he’d just experienced. She’d probably experienced it with Gil. As for Cecily’s husband: well, he’d given up on her, hadn’t he. Hadn’t wanted to, but, in effect, that was what he’d done.

  Rafael was at her mercy. He’d do his very best by her, but if she chose to turn away from him, he’d have to accept it. Perhaps even now, across the house, she was recoiling, blaming him for it having gone too far when he – not distressed, as she’d been – should’ve been the one to stop it. But worse, far worse than anything she could say or do to him, was the fact that, just as this had happened, he was going to have to go. Could be by the end of the week. There’d be more than a thousand miles between them. How could this be happening? It couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t happen. He had no idea – not an inkling – how he could endure it.

  But he couldn’t live here in London. He wouldn’t want to. Well, he could. People did. People survived it: married and raised children, ran their businesses. He could ask the queen for permission to stay. But he couldn’t stay, because of Francisco.

  What he wanted was to be left, somehow, to love Cecily. The two of them in a room: that’s all. Put like that, it didn’t seem much to ask.

  He was standing at his window, looking over London roofs. Down there somewhere was the man who’d been Cecily’s husband and still considered himself as such. That man knew nothing of what had happened in Rafael’s room. For him, this morning was, presumably, the same as any other, which was to say it was lonely. Perhaps he was thinking of Cecily. Of her absence. Rafael presumed to know something of what he might be thinking and feeling; but for that man, Rafael didn’t even exist. She’s gone from you: sympathetic though Rafael was, he felt the man should know. He willed the message across the rooftops to find him. She’s been gone from you for a long time. Regretful though it was, he should face it. Rafael didn’t envy him those fraught, early-hours meetings with Cecily; the thought of them made him almost grateful for how little Leonor usually said.

  There was a knock on his door, the door was opening and in the doorway stood Antonio. Antonio and the lip: the lip simultaneously demanding attention and demanding that he avert his gaze. The split was still open, the blood in it barely congealed, and for a single breath Rafael felt the tenderness of it as if it were his own. If it was any consolation to Antonio, he’d have seen Rafael blanch. He showed no recognition of it. ‘Listen, Rafael: there’s been a …’ – he blinked, a kind of rapid frown – ‘a battle. Outside the palace. My friend Alonso has been injured and he isn’t likely to survive.’

  Rafael floundered: battle? Someone not survive?

  ‘A messenger just came. Six dead, lots injured, it’s being kept quiet, what with …’ He didn’t bother to finish. What with everything.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rafael, at a loss for words, his blood whirling inside him. No wonder Antonio wasn’t bothered about the lip.

  ‘He’s a good friend,’ Antonio said, ‘He’s been a good, good friend to me, and I have to’ – a shrug – ‘sit with him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rafael, his pulse noisy in his head. ‘Yes, but –’ How will you get there? The streets, the river, the palace steps and passageways: all harbouring potential danger.

  ‘Well, I won’t try to come back, I don’t think.’ Just the one journey. ‘I mean, not until –’

  – until the baby is born dead or alive, until the situation is resolved one way or another and we’re released and on our way.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll just stay there.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Rafael offered, suddenly convinced of it. This called for solidarity. ‘It’ll be safer.’

  Antonio’s response was a pointed, amused look which Rafael took a moment to read: his company, recently, hadn’t exactly done Antonio any favours, had it? He cringed. ‘I’m sorry.’ He’d said it before he realised, and was glad he’d said it.

  Antonio looked as if he were going to say something but then settled for something else: ‘I’ll be fine on my own,’ he said, ‘but thank you, Rafael.’ And then he’d turned and was gone.

  Rafael hadn’t seen Cecily, that first morning, when he’d gone for the water for his wash. He’d seen her that lunchtime, though: she was smiling at him as he came into Hall, and his heart shimmered. And with that smile, it began: her coming to his room, most nights, and sometimes in the days, sometimes once but on several occasions only to say hello and start back downstairs again as soon as she’d arrived, which didn’t matter because all that mattered was that she’d come. He lived for her coming to his door, suspended himself between those knocks of hers at his door. That was what he did – all he did – now: listened for her footsteps. Oh, he sketched and designed, but then there she was and those sketches and designs were nothing, just scribbles and doodles, and all the time he’d spent alone had dissolved into nothing. And they’d be kissing before she was properly through his door and laughing at their own fervour and subterfuge, at their own sheer delight and the ridiculousness of it, two grown people.

  The nights she didn’t come, he drifted in the shallows of sleep and didn’t give up on her, not until the household’s day could be heard to be under way. He never knew, those nights, if she’d gone to the priest, her ex-husband. And later, when he could have asked, he didn’t. He tried not to even think about it. Tried to accept that she had her own reasons for staying away. She couldn’t – he knew – come every single night, leaving
Nicholas and chancing her way through the house. For her part, she never explained her absences, never even referred to them. She let it be: and so, then, did he.

  Not that they didn’t talk. For two people with so much that couldn’t be talked about, they did a lot of talking. They pondered their very different upbringings and their brief shared past.

  And when you said …

  That time you …

  And together, they made a story of it: their story, the story of them. Nothing about their predicament, though: never that. Because what new or illuminating could be said about that?

  Did others talk about them? Did people know what was going on between them? Rafael didn’t care, because what could they do about it? And even if people did know, did they care? They had a more serious preoccupation, but about which, likewise, there was nothing new to say: the queen’s predicament, the country’s predicament. There was the possibility that there’d be trouble for anyone who even mentioned it, and who needed more trouble? There was more than enough of it about already, and no one could risk it hitting home.

  The waiting for an announcement from the palace went on and on: for days after Cecily came first to his room, then a week and into a second week. It probably had no purpose, now: there was little likelihood of good news, this late on.

  Rafael wondered often what had happened to Antonio’s friend. Had he rallied? Or was he buried, now, in English soil?

  He told Cecily that he loved her; he said it often.

  ‘And I love you,’ she’d reply, just as insistent, but her manner was different from his, was calm, as if she were correcting him.

  Once – genuinely puzzled – he asked her: ‘Why do you love me?’

  She had to think. ‘Because of how you look at me.’ She revised, ‘Because you look at me.’

  He was ashamed, apologetic.

  ‘No …’ she tried to explain better. ‘It’s trusting,’ she said, ‘that look of yours. You’re trusting.’

  Which was exactly how she looked at him. That very first look – first smile – on the stairs, a year ago, had been exactly that.

  And once she told him he was beautiful. She was holding his face in her cupped hands and she’d sounded grave, perhaps even puzzled. ‘I’ve never seen anyone like you.’ Dark, was what that meant. Differently shaped, possibly, too: his face was – he knew – quite unlike most English faces, which were long and flat. The faces of some Englishmen were bone-thin, the skin taut and translucent across the bridge of the nose; whereas on others, abundant flesh had the look of potted meat. Most English people were either fat or thin, but – Rafael was sure – the cause was the same: their abysmal food, which either washed through them or somehow stuck on them. No good to a body. But that was when there was food at all, and a winter of hunger was on its way.

  Rafael saw from his window that there were more people on the streets despite the downpours, despite the official cancellation of festivities for the feast days of St Peter and St James, and despite the armed guards, the liveried men of one of the dukes, who patrolled on horseback in fours and sixes. The patrols had begun after the burning of a twenty-three-year-old pregnant woman, Perotine Massey, who’d gone into labour on the pyre. Her baby had been rescued by the crowd but thrown back into the flames by the sheriff. During the night that had followed, it’d sounded to Rafael as if every church window in the city was being smashed, and he’d willed the rioters on. On and on and on, through the night. And even though he knew it was impossible, he’d willed the clamour to reach Hampton Court Palace so that the queen might have to be told what monstrous act had been done in her name. She needed to wake up to what was happening; the people of England were in desperate need of her.

  Despite the troubled atmosphere, more and more of them were coming to London. The failure of the harvest was the cause: the second year in succession, which was a year more than people could cope with. Rafael had heard talk in the household of widespread flooding in the countryside: of animals dead in the fields, and crops putrid. Many of the people walking down the lane beneath his window were, from the look of them, coming from the countryside in search of work and food. Whole families weighed down by bundles, and trailing children. They didn’t stop to shelter from the rain beneath overhanging first floors, as Londoners did; they hurried on, but not purposefully, because the same people would often pass again in an hour or two. Walking in circles. They might be exhausted, but they hurried, expectant, heads up, taking it all in. They were conspicuous and they knew it; they were self-conscious, wary, obliging, stepping out of others’ way.

  That was when they were new to the city. They ended up sheltering, Rafael saw, but not as Londoners did, with a view to moving off during a pause in the rain. They didn’t move on until they were made to, because they had nowhere else to go. They crouched: obstinate, hopeless, confounded; not knowing where to put themselves. He’d seen – although he wished he hadn’t – such people relieving themselves in the lane. They did it surreptitiously and miserably, at first; but later, carelessly. One day, he witnessed a squatting child kicked over by a furious passer-by. He heard the child’s wounded cry, his outrage, and saw the mess on his legs. He felt for the boy, but he felt at least as much for whoever was caring for him, faced with that mess and no change of clothes, no water except from the freezing conduit.

  He feared for Cecily. Food would be imported, but at a price: a price that the Kitsons would probably be able to afford but, as housekeeper, Cecily would be getting up in the small hours, into the stinging cold, and half-running for miles with her bundle of baskets to the docks, chasing rumours of shiploads. And the frantic crowds at the quays, her chances of getting through them and then, if she were successful, getting away from them with her goods and then getting home safe: he didn’t want to dwell on all that. And then, whatever she did manage to bring back: how much of it would be for herself and her son? How generous would the Kitsons be, in the face of their own children’s needs? And even if she and her boy had food, she’d be living among people who were famished: locals and friends whom she’d pass in the street, flinching from their slow, swollen eyes.

  In a few months’ time, some of those people would be selling their boots and blankets for food. Wrapping rags around their feet to walk in mud and snow. And even then, some of them would have to tell their children, at the end of the day, that – again – there was nothing to eat. Absolutely nothing. How would Francisco take that? He’d rage, at first, Rafael imagined. For some time, he’d rage, desperate, and refuse to accept it, chucking blame at his father.

  Why isn’t there any? I want some! Why can’t you get some?

  And then? Weariness would take over and he’d suck his thumb. And then, later, to try to fill the hole, he’d angle his hand and suck the fleshier base of his thumb, wedging it in his mouth. What happens if a child keeps on doing that? – the skin gets raised, raw, and thinner. Where is God? That was what Rafael would think, to see those people down below in the lane. Was it really God’s will that people should starve? Children, babies? Mysterious ways, sins of the fathers: he knew all that. He just didn’t seem able to believe it, and if that was a failing of his then so be it.

  The Kitsons’ front courtyard was flooded, ankle-deep. At Hampton Court, he’d heard, courtiers were having to troop around daily in procession, whatever the weather, in a courtyard under the queen’s rooms, and she’d appear in a window to wave. The courtiers’ display was supposed to be wishing her luck, cheering her up, but her arriving at the window to wave back at them was giving her the opportunity to prove she was still alive. Which it didn’t, to most people, from what Rafael heard around the household, because they were saying the waving figure was an effigy or someone in disguise. Mrs Dormer, the smiling companion of the queen, Rafael wondered: would she do that? But he did believe it was the queen at the window; he didn’t believe she was dead. There’d looked to be nothing seriously wrong when he’d seen her. As to whether she’d ever been pregnant: well, who knew? H
e found it hard to believe that she was perpetrating a conscious act of deception; he suspected she simply didn’t know how or when to stop. If you were waiting for something – someone – how did you know when to give up?

  Around the house, he’d often see someone at a window or door staring confounded into the sun-deserted sky. No one remarked on the sun having given up and gone: it was so horribly obvious that it didn’t need saying. At most there’d be a raising of an eyebrow, a silence that was telling. When Cecily was with him in his room, he quite liked the rain restive on the roof. They could be adrift on a sea. Inside his bed-hangings, he strove to do his utter best by her, to magic up pleasure for her and lay it on deep. Sometimes, though, he could do nothing but to drive into her and have her unyielding against him, just as hard, and marvel and marvel again at how strong she was, how definite.

  One evening, when everyone was in place for supper, the steward stood up on the dais to make an announcement: the queen had come out of her confinement and would be going away with her husband for the weekend before resuming her duties. From that, he went straight into leading Grace, and then dining commenced in customary silence. On every face that Rafael could see – he couldn’t see Cecily – was a contrived lack of expression, and eating was brisk: people were bursting to get out of Hall to discuss what they’d just been told.

  If the announcement was true, the queen was alive and well enough to travel. And the marriage had survived – at least for now, at least as far as a public view of it. She still had a husband: she’d gone to him and he was taking her away for the weekend. He was supportive, he was publicly at her side. The glaring omission, of course, was any mention of a baby, as if there’d never even been a prospect of one.

  To give up, childless, on that absurdly long confinement and offer no word of explanation: there was dignity in it, or at least an attempt to be dignified in the face of a humiliation that Rafael couldn’t come close to being able to imagine. To have made such a mistake, such a fundamental miscalculation, not just under the gaze of your husband but everyone in the whole world, from monarchs to peasants who hadn’t even known where England was. To know you’d be the subject of children’s songs and games for years to come: the queen who dreamt up a baby, who pushed out her belly and walked around wincing and rubbing the small of her back. The ageing queen who’d deluded herself that she was young enough to be blessed with a baby. And even worse: to know there were so many people who considered that you deserved what had happened. The Kitson houseful did, Rafael knew. He could see it. Not a smidgeon of pity in any of those faces, just a desperation to get out of the room and gossip about it.