The room was just ahead of them, he could tell from Mrs Dormer’s slowing pace; she was collecting herself. She stopped short, to turn to him. No smile, now. ‘She’s frightened,’ she confided. ‘But your wife was the same age when she had your son. She wants to hear about your wife. Talk to her about your wife.’ Ahead, the door was opening for them and, before he knew it, they were in the doorway, on the threshold. His first impression was of heat, and although just minutes ago he’d have been ready to give anything to feel heat like this, he recoiled: it was stifling. He didn’t look ahead into the room, didn’t dare; just followed his guide forward, his eyes on her fur-draped shoulders. She’d know what to do, for now: his tormentor and now his saviour. What she did, though, was drop away: gone behind him in a single graceful step. She was presenting him, he realised. And leaving him to it. Talk to her. He stared down at the intricately woven carpet and, on it, his pitiful, encrusted boots. His heart was punching into his throat. Dismiss me, was all he wanted to say to the queen, dismiss me from your offended presence, and in his mind he retraced his way to the office where it had all begun; and, there, he’d say, Send me home, and, furious with him, that’s exactly what they would do.
He hadn’t raised his eyes, but he’d glimpsed the centrepiece of the room, couldn’t have missed it, an immense, gold-canopied chair. A throne. Occupied: that, too, he’d glimpsed. So, he did his bowing, scruffy and flushed.
‘Mr Prado’: that deep voice.
She didn’t sound frightened. Should he look up, or not? What was the rule? He looked up, but cautiously, head still low, hedging his bets. She was tiny in the chair under the tasselled canopy, her face a scratch amid all the finery. How odd, he felt, to be sitting in your own room up on a dais. A companion occupied a floor cushion beside the dais, but the distance and difference in height didn’t suggest ease of conversation.
The queen made as if to rise, but didn’t, not quite. So, now what? Talk to her. But from here? He managed a glance up and around: horse-faced ladies in clusters on floor cushions, somehow observing him whilst avoiding looking at him. Clever, that. Years of practice, probably. Clearly he’d get no help from them. The queen solved the problem, suddenly free of the throne-chair and approaching, all gown and jewels swinging and swaying so that he marvelled at her posture. The gown was front-laced although her pregnancy – five months at most – had yet to show. How, in all that clothing, did she bear the heat? It had him by the throat. He bowed again – and there, again, the fabulous carpet and his awful boots – as she passed him with a rasping of fabrics. ‘Come.’
She’d gone to a window and was looking back expectantly, her expression incongruous in a room of guarded faces. Rafael imagined her in just such a room – perhaps this very room – during her brother’s reign, insisting bulge-eyed on the right to practise her religion; imagined, too, the looks of impatience and disgust that she would have encountered. With one strikingly bejewelled hand, she prompted him to join her. He obliged, but hung back respectfully. Talk to her about your wife. He was waiting for her to initiate the conversation, after which he’d do his very best.
‘My doctor says I have to rest, today,’ she began, matter-off-act. ‘No reading, today, for me, because of my headaches.’ Scathingly, she repeated, ‘Rest.’
All I ever do, here, he reflected, ashamed. Except that, he realised, he didn’t. He never felt rested, here in England. He did nothing, but nor did he seem to rest. As for the queen, she seemed incapable of rest. Even now, her hands clutched at each other. Scrawny hands, cruelly reddened: not the hands of a queen.
He offered condolences on her indisposition – that was how he put it – and followed with congratulations on the news of the impending royal birth. His English was inelegant, but he felt he’d managed and at least it was a start.
‘Thank you,’ she said, dutifully. She was looking out over her garden, despite there being little to see and not much light to see it by. Dusk, already. On this January day, it had hardly ever been anything but. Barely mid-afternoon, but dusk. All Rafael could see was grim yew and brittle, half-dead lavender. To his surprise, she called over her shoulder for her cloak.
Shaking off any attendants, she led him through a door and down a stone staircase into an open porch. And there they stood, looking over the gardens just as they had from the window. ‘I needed some air,’ she said. The air in the porch was ragged in gusts, and so cold that the taste was metallic. He was about to make himself speak up, but she was ahead of him, asking, ‘How’s Francisco?’
She’d remembered his name: Rafael was stunned. Very well, he told her, despite not actually having a clue, and thanked her profusely for asking. He’d have liked to have repaid her interest with some news, but he had none, the fact of which – coming afresh – giddied him.
Francisco had once asked him, with genuine interest, ‘How will I die, d’you think, Daddy?’ adding, ‘I think I’ll fall under the wheels of a cart,’ and when Rafael had said he’d ensure it didn’t happen, Francisco’s response was, ‘You won’t be there.’
The queen’s bulbous little eyes were turned to him and he became aware that he was biting his lip, hard, as if to hold on to something. Self-conscious, he released it.
She asked, ‘Why are you still in England?’
He didn’t really know and, even if he did, he probably couldn’t have told her, because there was a lump in his throat. He was supposed to be reassuring her, he reminded himself, not unburdening his own fears. But she’d asked. He took his chances with an expansive shrug. Was it permissible to shrug at a queen? Well, he did, at this one. She didn’t flinch. ‘He should’ve sent you home.’ Her irritation was audible. She was voicing disappointment in her husband more than she was sympathising with Rafael, but it was better than nothing. ‘Yes,’ Rafael said, and, again, ‘Yes,’ in the hope that she would not let it drop. His wild hope was that she’d say, I’ll tell him to send you home.
She turned back to the desolate vista. ‘He wants to go.’ A gust slammed into the garden; branches flailed. ‘Not to Spain but to France. To war.’ She sighed hugely. ‘There’s no need for war with France. There really is no need. Talk is what’s needed. Not war.’ She said again, ‘He wants to go,’ then let it drop with a weary, ‘but you know all that.’
Rafael cringed because he did know, he couldn’t help but know. Everyone knew, and she knew they knew. He pitied her the lack of a private life. It was bad enough even for him, in the small household of his own family. Here, though, he had nothing but a private life. Here in England, no one knew or cared anything about him, and he didn’t like that any better.
Then she broached it: ‘Was your wife well, during her pregnancy?’ She peered at him: keen for the truth, he felt, rather than empty reassurances. The truth was, he didn’t really know. As far as he’d been aware, she’d sometimes felt well and sometimes hadn’t. On the whole, though, he supposed, she’d kept well. Yes, he told the queen. She’d made complaints – aches and pains, plenty of them – but there’d been nothing drastically wrong, he tried to explain, or nothing of which he’d been told and nothing which had had any consequence. He didn’t say that she’d kept herself to herself during her pregnancy and he’d assumed that was how it was with women. He’d never known what she was thinking and there’d been times when he’d been grateful for that.
The queen said, ‘I’m finding it very hard.’
Mrs Dormer was wrong: this wasn’t for him to hear. This was for women to hear, those women up there in her room. He said he was sorry to hear it.
‘The tiredness.’ She was aghast. ‘I am so tired. More tired than I’ve ever been, and I can’t do anything, I can’t think, but there’s so much to do, so much to have to think about.’
He said, truthfully, ‘My wife was very tired.’
She sighed. ‘The winter doesn’t help.’
Well, no. They stood looking at the dead garden with dismay. In that, united.
Then she looked around at him. ‘I’m happy,
’ she insisted, staring at him as if to stare him down; ‘I am happy,’ her words so at odds with her expression that, despite everything, he could have laughed. ‘I’m scared, though. And I shouldn’t be. I should have faith in God.’ She corrected herself: ‘I do, but’ – incredulous – ‘I’m still scared.’
Nodding, he shuffled; his feet were freezing. He didn’t find it extraordinary in the least that she or anyone should have faith in God but still be scared. Leonor had never voiced her fears to him, but he was quite sure she’d have had them. He certainly had, on her behalf, and he was about to say something of this to the queen but she hadn’t let up.
‘I’ve been frightened before, Mr Prado – I’ve lived much of my life afraid – but I’ve had faith in God and’– anguished, she unclasped her hands, splayed them, re-clasped them – ‘it’s been enough. But now …’ She shivered, shuddered. ‘You know, Mr Prado,’ her gaze scouring his, ‘I’d worried that I’d lose God a little if I loved a man. I’d have less love to give Him, I’d be distracted. But it’s not so, is it? It’s the opposite. I have more love for God.’ She relinquished him, looked away. ‘I don’t know that I did love God, before. Not love. Worship, yes, of course. But love? Well, now I do, and so now, for the first time, I’m terrified of losing him.’
He felt for her. It was all he could do, standing there.
She said, ‘I’m finding it hard to be a wife as well as a queen.’
He didn’t doubt it.
‘He wants me to make him king.’
Him: the prince. Rafael knew, of course. Everyone knew. A perfectly reasonable expectation, was the Spanish view.
‘But I can’t do it.’ She glanced at him. ‘I mean, I really can’t. Council –’ She flapped a hand, perhaps to demonstrate Council’s dismissive attitude, perhaps to convey her despair. ‘And the English people …’ She shrugged, accepting, resigned: ‘And they’re my people; I serve them. But my husband doesn’t understand, and he refuses to listen to me,’ she said, plaintively. ‘For so long I wanted to be queen, to be able to step up and do the job, but now sometimes I’d just like to be a wife.’ She turned to him with the softening that was, for her, close to a smile. ‘Having a baby is a lot to do, isn’t it, Mr Prado.’ She laid both hands on her stomach. ‘Keeping the two of us alive, getting him grown, getting him born. A lot for me to do at thirty-eight, when I’ve never been strong. But he trusts me absolutely, doesn’t he?’ Gravely, she added, ‘This is the only time I’ll have him all to myself. He doesn’t know how important he is, dozing in here. Important to everyone else, I mean. Of course he’s important to me – he knows that. But to everyone else: little prince.’ She took a breath, decisively. ‘You’re very good to me, Mr Prado.’ And turned to the stairs, talking over her shoulder: ‘I have confessors, and ladies, officials, doctors,’ and reminded herself, ‘I have a husband.’ At that – at having to remind herself – she almost smiled. ‘And of course I have him –’ a hand again to her stomach. ‘But …’ She didn’t finish; just stepped ahead of him, leading him up the steps.
He wondered what it was that she felt he’d done for her. He’d done nothing. He was supposed to have reassured her, but he’d failed.
At the door, she paused and turned to him. ‘You know, Mr Prado,’ she said, fixing him with her watery stare, ‘if there’s ever anything I can do for you in return, you must come to me. Promise me you’ll come to me.’
She’d arranged for him to be given refreshments before his journey back into the city. As he was escorted from the room, and then from the guarded hallway, he’d intended to say that he’d prefer to be going. He was desperate to get away with what he recalled of his time with the queen, hold it intact and cherish it. Hanging around at the palace would be to risk it settling, sinking and draining from him. But somehow it hadn’t happened, this polite refusal, and then there he was, sitting at the end of a long table at the back of the Hall. A platter of thinly sliced meats came, served with a spoonful of a jelly made from some hedgerow fruit, and linen-wrapped bread – white bread – and even a glass of sack, Spanish sack. He had to remind himself to savour it, though, thinking instead of the queen, of her standing there beside him, small but steadfast in that freezing cave of a porch. Beleaguered by frailties, fears, and enemies. He wished he could have done more for her than just listen. He finished what he’d been given and took the platter, linen and glass to the buttery hatch.
Making his way back to the riverside steps, he tried to see himself through the eyes of the various Englishmen who glanced at him. They didn’t know where he’d been, and they’d never be able to guess. He, himself, even, didn’t quite believe it. Had he really stood there, a man from Spain – from a converso family, at that – with the queen of England, with her confiding in him? He loved her for it – for having taken him there to her side, and for having been so open with him. She’d shown him, when he’d ceased to believe it, that anything was possible.
For once, and despite the sleet, he didn’t cower resentfully on the wherry but was keen to take it all in: London, crowding down to the river as if to get in on something it might otherwise miss. The red, regular brickwork and the unflinching gaze of so many big, unshuttered windows. And over the jostling rooftops, an endless exhalation of spires: London throwing its head back, devil-may-care. How strange to think of that anxious, humourless, dowdy woman trying to rule this brash, cynical city. For the first time, he saw what there was to admire about London. Gliding through snowflakes, he found himself listening as hard as he was looking. He was opening himself absolutely to the city, trying to love it, to be moved by it – but he knew it would never quite happen. This was a city that kept him at arm’s length.
Going back into the house, lit up by the chill and rattling from the crowds, he almost bumped into Cecily. Drowsy with household warmth, she was wrapped in her cloak with her basket on one arm and, at her side, the child. There they stood, one coming in and the other going out: at sixes and sevens. He took two steps back, involuntarily. He hadn’t been expecting to come across her, not so soon, although he’d only just been thinking of her. And now here she was, facing him with that big-eyed, enquiring look. She wanted to know where he’d been; she was expecting to be told, and he wanted to tell her, but how could he? Where would he start? He would tell her, but such a tale wasn’t for a mere threshold exchange. He’d been standing in a dripping porch, listening to the genuine fears of the troubled queen of England and there wasn’t any way that he could tell it that would make it believable. She’d think him a liar, a fantasist, or she’d think he was making fun of her.
‘Going out?’ he asked her, which was stupid of him because it was so clearly the case.
‘Buttons,’ she said in explanation, with a quick, flat smile: no real smile at all. ‘You were called to the palace?’
‘Yes.’ He busied himself removing his cloak. ‘Nothing. Just work.’
‘Work?’ Polite, but nonetheless making him uneasy.
He turned the attention back to her: ‘Urgent, these buttons?’
She shrugged it off.
‘Because it’s snowing.’
‘So I see.’ She indicated the dusting on his cloak.
He asked her, ‘Can I …’ … go for you? Seeing as he was wet already.
‘Buttons?’ she laughed, derisively: what would he know about buttons?
Helpless, he tried again, ‘But it’s snowing.’
‘I know it’s snowing, Rafael.’ Impatience, now. ‘I’ve been snowed on before.’ Then she asked, ‘Are you going home?’ and his heart contracted. She – like him, earlier – had assumed the summons was something to do with his going home. But it was how she’d asked that got hold of his heart: the appeal in it.
‘No,’ he told her. Just like that, nothing more. She’d asked and he’d told her – that was all that had happened – but somehow in that one brief exchange they’d become coconspirators. He’d known it was what she’d wanted to hear, and that he’d wanted to tell her what she’
d wanted to hear. He was desperate to go home – but he’d also liked telling her that he was staying.
She couldn’t say ‘Good’ but he saw her thinking it and hating herself for thinking it. She turned to her son – ‘Come on’ – and, to Rafael’s relief and his despair, the door closed behind her.
Although in need of a fireside and a warm drink, he went to his room. Standing at the window, he gazed at the obliterating snow. His hands were shaking; he held them to stop it. What had happened down there in the hallway? Nothing: a silliness, a madness. A madness that comes from being cooped up, far from home, for too long. He’d just imagined it. They were close, he and Cecily: that was all. They’d miss each other when he was gone, and there was no harm in that.
That evening, lining up to go into Hall for supper, Antonio confided that some people were claiming the queen wasn’t pregnant.
Rafael regarded him uncomprehendingly.
‘Not really pregnant.’
‘She is,’ Rafael refuted.
Antonio looked amused. ‘How would you know?’
And Rafael half-laughed because, yes, how ridiculous he must have sounded. ‘In my opinion, she is.’
Understandably, Antonio looked unimpressed. ‘There are people who are saying she isn’t.’
‘Well, they don’t know, do they? Why would she be saying she is, if she isn’t? It’s not something she can get away with, in the end, is it?’
The Queen's Sorrow Page 13
