The Queen's Sorrow

by Suzannah Dunn

  He didn’t mention the encounter in his letter home. It would sound ridiculous, unbelievable, and he didn’t want those back home to doubt him, didn’t want to add to the distance between them. His letters should be like whispers in their ears. If he told them that he’d spoken with the queen, they would – as he envisioned it – take a step back in surprise and confusion.

  And so, instead, it was more of the same: the shocking weather, the unfresh food, the shops, the dogs. He’d been going to tell Francisco about there being a boy of his own age in the house, but had changed his mind. He’d been thinking of the little boy as a kind of friend, almost, for Francisco, before realising there was a risk – however ridiculous – that his own little lad would see the English child as a threat, as a potential competitor for his father’s affections.

  Rafael wasn’t expecting letters in return: six weeks was the estimated delivery time to and from Seville. He’d be home before he could get any post. He’d probably be home before they got his missives, but he wrote just in case. There could be a delay, sea-journeys being as they were. Or sea-journeys being as they were, the worst could happen, and at least then they’d have word that he’d been thinking of them during his time away. At least Francisco would have something of him.

  Francisco’s preoccupation in the months before Rafael’s departure had been death. He’d discovered it. Some of their conversations on the subject had been wonderfully weird, Francisco once excitedly considering, ‘What shall I have written on my grave, Daddy? What would you like on yours?’ Mostly, though, of course, they’d been distressing: When you die, Daddy, and Mummy dies, I’ll have no one left to love. In that instance, Rafael had tried to explain that it often wasn’t quite like that. ‘You’ll be old by then,’ he’d dared to hope, ‘and you’ll have your own wife,’ wondering with a pang if that would indeed be true, ‘and your own children.’

  Rafael’s fear was persistent: that the worst might’ve already happened to his son, but that he didn’t yet know it. A choking on a grape. The yanking over of a cauldron of boiling laundry. And Rafael not there to hold him, to try to ease his terror and his pain, not there to wash him before they wrapped him up and parcelled him away for ever. He couldn’t yet know if something had happened. For six whole weeks, he wouldn’t know. For six whole weeks he’d carry on as usual, eating and sleeping and sailing on the river, mindless, oblivious and unforgivable.

  The household staff made much of looking busy, put upon, stretched – more, Rafael guessed, than was warranted by the actual workload. Mostly men, they were, and mostly liveried, which didn’t help him learn to distinguish them from one another: grooms, watchmen, footmen and clerks. Rafael’s family was probably no smaller but served more than adequately by a handful of staff who seemed to have all the time in the world. Those first few days in London, he longed to encounter the insouciance of his mother’s maid, Maria, or the sleepiness of Vicente, the stablehand. Cook was the exception, back home, but that was just Cook: no one gave his rattiness any credence, and Rafael began to think even of him with affection.

  One of the Kitson grooms limped: that one Rafael recognised. One of Mr Kitson’s clerks was blind in one eye. One of the lads who served at dinner was a redhead. As for the Kitsons themselves, Rafael tried to get an idea of who they all were. They were easy to spot, sharing a certain foxy-faced look. The family was well endowed with girls: a pack of them, of all ages, and all, it seemed, assigned to looking after one another, so that one of them was almost always rounding on another with exaggerated patience or haughtiness. Sometimes, inevitably, their ill-fitting poise would slip. Once, he glimpsed one of the girls rushing up the central staircase, feet jabbing at the treads, her skirt held high, her scarlet-clad ankles and calves revealed. Another time, he saw from his window a Kitson girl swipe viciously at a smaller one who dodged, laughed in the face of her companion’s fury and skipped away. There were only two Kitson boys. One was nine or ten years old and walked with the aid of two sticks. The other was several years older, with a long face and big ears and a permanent stare into the middle-distance. Sometimes he’d cover those ears and shut his unfocused eyes and rock. He kept close to the lady Rafael knew to be Mrs Kitson, or to a sister who appeared to be the eldest of the pack. The girl was old enough to have dropped the airs and graces affected by her sisters and sometimes, from across the Hall, she gave Rafael a timid smile, for which he was grateful.

  He didn’t need the presence of the Kitson boys to remind him to be thankful for Francisco’s perfection. Back at home, he’d sometimes found it funny: it’d seemed too much – perhaps that was what it was – so that sometimes, seeing it, he’d feel a laugh welling up. Incredulity, he supposed it was, but it felt like a laugh. So precarious, though, it seemed now, that perfection.

  There were three other young men in the household who were clearly well-to-do, not staff, but didn’t share the Kitson resemblance and, anyway, were too keen, too polite and too watchful of themselves to be members of the immediate family. At dinner, they served the high table. Rafael couldn’t fathom who they were or what the arrangement with the Kitsons might be.

  At the palace, a Spanish lad had got himself into trouble and had had his earlobe bitten off in a fight with an Englishman, according to Antonio. ‘Clean off,’ were Antonio’s words.

  Rafael doubted that there’d been much cleanliness about it. ‘A fight?’

  Antonio looked expressionlessly at him. ‘There are a lot of fights,’ he said.

  But that was at the palace, where Spanish and English were shut in side by side. In the city, Rafael was beginning to feel more confident, braving some local exploration. To and from the river, he began to deviate just a little from his route: down Lombard Street and then Abchurch Lane, perhaps, or St Nicholas Lane, instead of St Swithins Lane. Or down Walbrooke into Dowgate. Up St Laurence Pountney Hill. The English might not like foreigners but there were foreigners here nevertheless, running their businesses. Word had spread among Rafael’s fellow countrymen of French button makers, Dutch shoemakers, an Italian hatmaker, a Genovese glove-perfumer. These people were managing to live their lives here unmolested. Still, Rafael walked fast with his head down, his hat low over his face, avoiding streets from which tavern noise came, turning from streets in which he’d have to balance on planks. These precautions afforded him a limited view of London, of course. He saw few sundials – hardly surprising, given the climate – and none was innovative: nothing more unusual than a decliner. He noticed the forlorn remains of shrines: stripped empty, often stuffed with rubbish. Something else that struck him – head down, listening more than he dared look around – was how much the English talked: they never seemed to stop; they even talked to the dogs they took around on leashes, even to cats on top of walls. For all this talk, there was never any flow to it that he could hear; hard and sharp, the words sounded to him.

  The river was an easier place for Rafael to be – not only on it, but also on the quayside. There, he could stop and stand, facing south, soaking up whatever sunlight there was, and take his time to look. Breathing space. Once, he watched the dazzling royal barge being towed downstream. On that occasion, he could enjoy the luxury of being just one of the crowd.

  If he wasn’t at or en route to and from the palace, nor in the Kitsons’ Hall for dinner, then he was up in his gloomy little north-east-facing room. That was where he spent the evenings. Downstairs, the Kitsons entertained themselves and their guests as the trestle tables were cleared and stacked away, music played and dancing attempted. Staff finished their various duties and then retreated to the kitchen, Rafael presumed, to gossip and play cards. Up in his room, having written home – a little, each evening, towards a weekly letter – Rafael would work on calculations, work on his design. He also spent a lot of time gazing from the window: hours, he spent, doing that. St Bartholomew’s Lane was below with nothing much to it, just houses, but linking Threadneedle Street and Throgmorton Street, so there was always someone passing through. Sometime
s more than someone: gangs, probably apprentices on the loose, and, to judge from the whoops and kicking of a ball, good-natured enough, but he was very glad not to be down there. Later on, he’d see the Kitsons’ guests leaving, as comfortable defying curfew as anyone in any other city he’d ever visited, their way lit for them by torch-bearing boys.

  His little window was glassed and had a curtain, for which he was grateful. No shutters, though, and he missed them – the window looked odd, to him, without them. Exposed. And in general, around the Kitson house and on the houses along his routes, he missed their sounds: the clunks and gratings as a household stirred at the start of a day and then as it settled down at the end. When he’d had enough of staring into the dusk, there was the mere rasp of curtain rings along a pole. Dusk, in England, took for ever. Worth watching, it would’ve been, if there’d been a sky to see, if there’d been light enough to cast shadows. But as it was, it just hung around outside, damp, like something mislaid.

  From time to time in any evening, though, came something that made it sparkle: the booming of church bells. Sometimes his floor would shake with it, and he’d get down there to feel it. There were three churches just beyond the end of St Bartholomew’s Lane. A hundred in the square mile of London, he’d been told. For a Godless country, that was a lot of churches.

  If Antonio wasn’t back by the nine o’clock curfew, he wouldn’t be coming back and Rafael would doze in the near-dark before waking to darkness and lighting a candle by which he’d get ready for bed.

  Nights, he missed Leonor. Waking, he’d remember how, on his last morning, Francisco had climbed into bed and laid down beside him, thrown his rag-rabbit into the air, caught it, turned over and gone back to sleep.

  In his second week, he got a bad cold. The surprise was that it’d taken that long, as all the Spaniards he came across had already been laid low. Especially Antonio, who had lolled around for days on end, hugging himself and barely raising his eyes, refusing to do the river-journey back to the Kitsons, imposing instead on friends at the palace. Well, now Rafael understood. For two days, he stayed at the Kitsons’, stayed in his room except at suppertime. Then the worst of the cold shifted, but only down to his throat where it stuck, itching, causing a cough which inflamed it further, particularly at night. After several days and nights of this, he was taking his place for supper when a cup was placed in front of him on the table. He swivelled to see the pale woman: a flash of a smile from her, her fingertips to her throat and a forced cough, It’s for your cough. And then she was gone – stepping back and away across the room – before he’d begun to thank her. He was touched, but mortified that his cough had been so noticeable. Under the faintly contemptuous glances of his neighbours, he raised the cup to his nose but was too blocked still to be able to smell it. He took a sip: honey, he detected, and something sharper. Two more sips and complete relief: something he’d stopped believing was possible. Enough remained in the cup for him to take it to his room and he got his first good night’s sleep for almost a week.

  The following evening, the woman did the same and this time he was ready to thank her. The evening after that, too, and the one after that. But the next one, he thanked her as usual and said, ‘It’s good, now,’ and, smiling, raised his hand – Enough, thank you – which she must have understood because that was the last of it.

  He still felt rotten for much of the time, because of indigestion. There was so much meat in England and so little else. Meat, even on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and even in the court of this Catholic queen. Clearly she was bringing back only some of the Catholic ways. The Kitson family went to Mass, but everybody did now that the queen required it. There was no other evidence of their Catholicism. Rafael didn’t know if he knew much about Protestantism. He knew that a Protestant priest would speak in English, not Latin, which he found hard to imagine: it didn’t seem, to him, to be a language for wonders. And Protestants believed they could talk to God, he knew: offer up their every hope and grievance and He’d hear them, He’d listen to them. They debated the contents of the Bible, too, as if it were up for debate and by anyone.

  Rafael had been going with the Kitson household to Mass at St Bartholomew’s on the corner, but he missed a few days when he had his cold and, afterwards, didn’t resume. He realised that if anyone marked his absence, they’d assume he was attending Spanish Masses at the palace. Likewise, his fellow countrymen, if they considered it at all, would assume that he was going to Mass with the Kitsons. At home, for years, his attendance at church had been the bare minimum. Church distracted him from God – that was how he felt – and perhaps this was because of the gloom of the buildings when – he was sure of it – God was in light. He didn’t know how his brothers could bear it, that gloom, the two brothers of his who were priests. He’d feel God’s presence sometimes when he was riding, or in the garden, or making calculations, and often when he glanced at his son. The feeling was always both awesome and intimate. It was a feeling he hadn’t yet had in England.

  When he was young, he’d talked about that feeling with his friends and many of them had felt the same. The Spanish Church, though, would judge it heretical; so now, older and, he hoped, wiser, he was careful to keep it to himself. He, whose family, Jewish-looking, Jewish-named, had no room for error.

  During one of his visits to the Kitsons’ local church, he’d glimpsed the pale woman. She’d had her eyes closed, as did many people – but they were dozing, he was sure, and she was biting her lip. He saw there was a vigilance about her.

  Towards the end of the second week, Rafael was advised by an official in the Spanish office to abandon his project. The strain on the prince’s budget – two households to support, the one he’d brought with him and the one his bride had assembled for him – meant that there was no guarantee that Rafael would be paid, nor even that he’d be reimbursed for what he planned to spend soon on materials. ‘But you must’ve known,’ Rafael objected. The prince had been in England for a month. ‘You could’ve stopped me coming.’

  ‘Not me,’ the official replied with a shrug, ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’

  Rafael had known that very few of his fellow countrymen were working. Duplication of any Englishman’s duties was to be avoided. In deciding this, Spanish officials had been trying to keep the peace. Sit tight, everyone had been told, and passage home will soon be arranged.

  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.