The Queen's Sorrow

by Suzannah Dunn

  Antonio was complaining, ‘What d’you think they do, in that month?’

  Rafael didn’t follow.

  ‘Women. In the month they’re shut away.’ He was merely registering his scepticism; he didn’t require an answer.

  They try to relax, Rafael presumed. They sew and sew and sew: make everything that should be needed, and make it beautiful. Bedcovers and pillow cases and nightdresses and cradle-canopies and swaddling. And in the particular case of the queen, he supposed, there’d be official business to be done in preparation: letters to be prepared, declarations, a blank left for prince or princess and the date. The letters’ carriers to be selected and briefed, their safe passage planned – cleared, costed – and prepared for.

  ‘Anyway,’ Antonio got up, stretched, scrunched up the paper cone, ‘this gives us a problem.’ Whatever it was, he didn’t seem bothered. ‘Lunches – no longer available to us at Whitehall.’ He said it as if quoting. He raised his eyebrows in mock triumph, because although the officials would assume this to be a problem for them, he and Rafael were already lunching at the Kitsons’. ‘Lunches available for us, of course, at Hampton Court …’ Five hours away.

  The impracticality of their going to Whitehall every day for lunch had belatedly occurred to Cecily and she’d suggested that they stay at the Kitsons’. Just slip into Hall, she’d said, it’s a full household and no one’ll notice.

  ‘So, anyway,’ Antonio continued, ‘I was told: make your own arrangements with your host household and we’ll reimburse you soon. So, of course, I said, Yeah? How soon? Next week, he said, So I said, Heard that before, and he said, No, really; and I said, I bet, and he said, Listen, the prince’s loan is through from Spain, it’s here, we’re just sorting it all out now.’ Antonio raised his eyebrows: a flourish. ‘So, we’re going to have money.’

  Rafael had so far avoided telling him about the promised payment and, now, didn’t comment, asking instead, ‘But how do we keep in touch with the Spanish office?’

  Antonio shrugged. ‘Dunno. Didn’t ask.’ Leaving the room, he added, ‘Sorry,’ his tone giving no indication that he was.

  On Easter Sunday, the Kitson household went to Mass, and because he couldn’t pretend that he was going to church at court in the company of his fellow countrymen, now miles upriver, Rafael joined them. It was something to do. It got him out of the house.

  They’d been back a matter of minutes – Rafael halfway up the main staircase – when a cry went up: ‘Mrs Tanner? Mrs Tanner!’ It was Mr Kitson’s secretary, calling with considerable urgency. Rafael came back down to see what was going on, and there was the secretary – amid milling servants – ushering in a well-dressed but bloodied man. There was blood all over his jacket. The man was wide-eyed. Cecily was there, mid-gasp, her hand at her mouth, but the secretary was quick to say something to her that had her drop the hand and hurry forward, unalarmed and practical. From the downward sweep of the secretary’s own hand in front of the man, Rafael understood that the problem was the blood on the clothes: there was no bleeding from this man; the blood had originated elsewhere.

  Cecily encouraged the man to follow her into the kitchen. She knew him by name – or, at least, someone in the household did and she’d picked it up, because she was using his name, Mister Something. Something indecipherable to Rafael. Entering the kitchen, she turned, aware that her son was following her. ‘Rafael –’ she looked across the crowd at him, and indicated Nicholas: would he take him? Rafael stepped up to do so. Cecily had already moved on, was requesting water of someone else.

  Rafael led the boy away with the gentlest of physical prompts, but suddenly he turned, ducked and ran back the way they’d come. Rafael’s pursuit was hindered by servants gathering to gawp at the unfortunate visitor. He did his best, mortified by the prospect of Cecily witnessing such ineptitude. Nicholas was already at the kitchen door, had already opened it, but, a few steps in, came to a halt. Rafael saw Cecily glance up at the two of them – Nicholas free, Rafael following – but her face registered nothing. No surprise, no disapproval. She seemed to regard it as inevitable, Nicholas’s absconding, his truculence; she was trusting to Rafael to put it right. Her priority was to wash the man’s hands. He looked incapable of doing it himself, his hands were hers for washing and she held them in a bowl and stroked blood from them into the water. Rafael heard something of what the man was saying: ‘I held his head … I held his head … on the ground, I held his head.’ Cecily murmured back to him and Rafael couldn’t catch her words but knew from her tone that she was reassuring him: Quiet, now. Let’s clean you up. Rafael stepped into the kitchen – there was someone else there, too, a man behind him, beside the door so that Cecily and the visitor weren’t left alone – and whispered to Nicholas, ‘Come on,’ adding as an inducement, ‘Let’s have an Arthur story.’ And the boy, presumably having seen all he’d needed to see, complied.

  When Cecily came to collect her son, she said to Rafael, ‘Later,’ meaning that when they were away from listening little ears, she’d tell him what had happened. And that evening, in a corner of the kitchen, she did. ‘A priest was shot,’ she whispered. ‘Dead – I mean, shot dead – during Mass today.’

  Rafael didn’t understand. During Mass? Shot? Who would do such a thing? For a moment he was baffled enough to think she meant that the priest had been married and the Church had had him shot for it.

  ‘Some man,’ she said, ‘a man, just – some man.’

  A man who didn’t like Catholics. The gravity of it hit Rafael. If a man could walk into a church and fire at an officiating priest, there was no sanctuary and no one could be considered above attack.

  She said, ‘The man who came here, he’s one of Mr Kitson’s colleagues, from –’ Rafael missed it; somewhere other than London. ‘He’s in the city for a week to work. He’d gone to Mass …’ She shrugged: You know the rest. He’d been a bystander.

  I held his head.

  ‘Stay in the house, Rafael,’ she said, ‘from now on. Until that baby’s born. Until you go home. Stay in the house.’

  And he did. For two and a half long weeks. Two and a half weeks of giving up on pressing the Spanish office for news or money, and waiting instead for a summons that didn’t come. Two and a half weeks of sending no letters home nor being able to check for any that might have arrived. Two and a half weeks without a shave. Antonio was still taking his chances, being immeasurably better than Rafael at passing for an Englishman, and he could get away with it as long as he kept his mouth shut – which, somehow, he was managing, because he came and went unscathed. Where he went, Rafael didn’t know, but seeing as he’d go for several days at a time, it was most likely to Hampton Court, where he was probably sleeping on someone’s floor. Or in her bed.

  Once, a couple of years back, Rafael had gone to find Antonio during the afternoon because his mare was foaling and in trouble, and when there’d been no answer to his knocking on the main door, nor to his calling, he’d gone inside to wake him. The bedroom door had been ajar, and before he’d realised that he’d looked, he’d glimpsed Antonio naked on the bed, face down, and, beneath him, also face down, a woman: a woman’s bare legs alongside Antonio’s. The two figures were so still and quiet that Rafael might’ve thought them to be sleeping – albeit in an odd position – if not for the rhythmic flexing of Antonio’s buttocks. Rafael had drawn back, mortified, paralysed, unable to believe he’d been so stupid as to come unannounced into the house and to the bedroom door, and unable to believe that Antonio hadn’t heard him. No change, though, in the quality of the silence; no one shifting inside that room to check around or reach for a bedcover. Rafael contemplated owning up – coughing – but already the instant of having seen them was receding and, with it, the opportunity to confess his presence. He’d backed to the main door, very careful to make no sound. Outside, he tried to compose himself. He hated having seen Antonio’s nakedness. Couldn’t bear to think of Antonio as even having the capacity to be naked. Couldn’t bear
for nakedness even to exist where Antonio was concerned. Let alone the rest, the actual activity, which he now tried to persuade himself was not what he’d seen. He’d headed for the stables, shaking, to deal with the mare himself as best he could. Passing his house, he’d glimpsed Leonor in the courtyard with Francisco and was overcome with relief that it hadn’t been her in Antonio’s room.

  For two and a half long, Kitson-bound weeks, the only fresh air Rafael had was in the various little courtyards – where there was plenty of it, gusting and buffeting against the walls, as trapped as he was. He wandered around the stables, exchanging rueful smiles with the more approachable of the grooms. Talked to Flynn and the friendlier of the other dogs. Sometimes he was so tired of the courtyards that he’d stand just outside the gate – only just outside, and only in the early morning or dusk when he could be fairly sure of no one else being around. The weather was nothing much of anything, but always unpleasant. No breath of spring. Always wet, even if it wasn’t actually raining. Steady seepage from the sky. And cold. Sometimes there was something that was almost snow and he learned a new word from Cecily: flurry.

  He told Arthur stories to Nicholas. Morgana’s wickedness was uncovered – Gawain was no fool – and she fled, realising that Arthur had the protection of Merlin’s magic, cursing, If I can’t hurt you, I’ll hurt the ones you love.

  ‘I’ll hurt the ones you love,’ Nicholas repeated, whispering, wondering, his eyes huge.

  Then, in the early afternoon of the last day of April, dozing in his room, he heard a commotion below. Something being shifted, hefted, by the sound of it. Glad of any excuse for something to do, he slunk downstairs for a look. Two men were hauling a tabletop from the Hall towards the main door. That was all, then. Just as he was about to retreat, the men paused to re-align the tabletop and one of them glanced up at him there on the staircase, smiled and told him, ‘A prince!’

  Rarely was Rafael addressed by any man in the household, let alone with a smile, so he didn’t immediately register the actual word or even its tone. Only as he was rustling up a smile in response did he realise: prince, and the relief with which it’d been said, the surprise, the delight.

  ‘Now?’ he managed. Already? More than a week before the due date? And, suddenly fearful, ‘The queen?’ The man had said nothing of the queen.

  But he made the same gesture – eyebrows, shoulders – and said, ‘Fine.’

  Really? Could it really, in the end, have been so easy? Incredulous, they laughed together, Rafael and that man. And then he was gone, swept up in the passage of the tabletop through the doorway.

  Celebrations, Rafael realised, watching the men go with the table: there would be food in the street. Somewhere upriver, far from all this kerfuffle, with her newborn son, was the queen. That small, tense, downcast lady. See? he said to her under his breath, willing it across the miles to her. See? You did it. You did it fine. It was over and done with, and early, too, but only by a week. Not too early. Perfect timing.

  He wondered how Cecily was taking the news. She’d favoured the old days, as had most English people, but wasn’t it different, now? Because there was a future, now, and even if it wasn’t the one for which you’d wished, it was here and to be lived. No more waiting and wondering and worrying. Here was this future, against all the odds, and wasn’t that – in a sense – to be respected? Rafael craned to watch the men with the tabletop: eager and intent, they were, getting on with it. They probably hadn’t been in favour of the idea of a half-Spanish heir, but now the birth was to them a kind of miracle. And Cecily was a woman to get on with things. As long as the prince survived, the queen’s reign would be secure, and a secure reign can relax. And a woman with a baby isn’t going to burn people.

  There was a future too, suddenly, for Rafael. The prince would be leaving, now, with all but the diplomatic staff. Even in the unlikely event that the sundial did still have to be built, Rafael was sooner or later – and not very much later – on his way home.

  The Kitson kitchen rose to the challenge of getting food on to the tables at no notice at all; relished, even, this chance to show what they could do. Fleet-footed came the serving lads to replenish supplies, and their invisibility was itself a kind of display, accentuated rather than diminished by the occasional lapse, a momentary lark-about, a feigned lob of a bread roll. Out came platters of meat and trays of pies, and cheeses, some so fresh that they were still slick and milk-pale and had to be chopped into cubes rather than sliced. Family and servants from the Kitsons’ and nearby houses stood reverently at the tables to make their selections, and their catching of crumbs in cupped hands looked like acts of tenderness. The Kitsons had dressed up for the occasion and looked self-conscious, the girls uncharacteristically demure in their finery. The Kitson boy with the unfocused gaze was unsettled and retreated almost immediately to the house with his elder sister.

  Rafael and Antonio held back from the food, keen to partake but wary of being seen to muscle in. Rafael eavesdropped on speculation as to forthcoming festivities: pageants, processions, and wine to flow from the conduits. He spotted the two grooms he’d once overheard speaking so viciously of the queen – bitch, witch – and found it hard to believe, now. There they were, restrained and appreciative in helping themselves to the food, their faces benign, even comical: the long, red-tipped nose of one of them like a child’s drawing.

  So, it’s over, Rafael dared to think: the people’s suspicion of the queen, their loathing of her. No jubilation – nothing so extravagant – but people were conducting themselves with an absence of caution and dread where before they’d been cowed and belligerent. And what did they choose to do with their new-found freedom? Stand around chatting and sampling cheeses. Relief, Rafael realised: that was what it was, that was all it was. But it was everything. It was all they’d wanted, all they’d needed. Happiness was small and sweet, he realised, and each of them was rich today on a pocketful of it. Even he and Antonio were exchanging small talk which belied a profound gratitude. Because this was it, at last: this day of chatting and cheese-sampling was truly the beginning of their leaving England and going home.

  A viol-bearing trio who’d appeared from a neighbouring house with an air of graciously fulfilling an obligation had no sooner bestowed bows to strings than the sky was cracked open by bell-ringing, and for a while everything was sky instead of street: the life of the street rolled up into each immense swing and enacted to each tuneful bang. Rafael and Antonio were able to cease attempts at conversation and give their attention as commanded to the great growling bells and those that were higher but faster and just as insistent. They were inescapable, those bells, and wherever Cecily was, she’d be pausing alongside everyone else and glancing skywards despite there being nothing to see.

  Children, though, played regardless, tracked by dogs hopeful of dropped food. The Kitson girls and others in velvet tagged along with mere lockram-wearers, making their own alliances. Making and breaking them, as well as pacts and challenges, skirmishes and truces, all in the blink of an eye. Children busy being children. Even Nicholas.

  Nicholas?

  Yes, there he was – definitely him – across the street, with a boy of his own size, his eyes fixed on those of the boy but not with the usual challenge, Leave me alone. Quite the opposite: it was clear that he was holding the boy hard in his gaze and defying him to break away while he was talking to him. Talking to him: Nicholas, talking. Yes, definitely. Plain as day, even from where Rafael was standing. And the other boy was listening: that, too, was clear. Wide-eyed with scepticism, but listening.

  I’ll hurt the ones you love: Rafael remembered how Nicholas had repeated it, his imagination obviously captured.

  Where was Cecily? But too late: her son was circling his companion and off, with a lolloping gait to portray himself horse riding. Rafael hadn’t taken a breath, hadn’t dared, but now he willed that other boy to follow, to join in. Nothing happened. Still lolloping, Nicholas disappeared from view behind a gr
oup of people, but the other boy remained where he stood and appeared to lose interest, glancing around but nowhere near the direction in which Nicholas had gone. Lost to Nicholas and whatever game he’d proposed. But then, suddenly, it did happen: the boy was in pursuit; he, too, galloped from view.

  Francisco was always desperate for friends. From his first weeks, he’d seemed to recognise children as his own kind, craning towards them, enthralled and fascinated. The first time he’d ever laughed spontaneously was when a little girl skipped past him in the village square. He’d burst into giggles. Rafael longed to be able to give him friends, to make friendship happen for him. No one’s happiness mattered to him as much as Francisco’s, and the intensity of it was beyond anything he’d ever experienced or could imagine. Leonor’s happiness was important to him, as was his mother’s – as much as there could be happiness for his mother – but Francisco’s was imperative, perhaps because it meant so much to Francisco himself, more than anything except the love and protection of his parents. As yet, the little boy understood nothing of mitigation, compromise, deferment. He was new to happiness and thrilled with it, but there was usually very little or nothing at all that he could do to bring it about for himself.

  Once when he’d put Francisco to bed and all the good-nights had been said, Francisco added in his still-new, stilted, formal language, ‘I will miss my friend.’ Puzzled, Rafael asked, ‘Who’s your friend, darling?’ and Francisco confided shyly but with obvious pleasure and pride, ‘Daddy is my friend.’

  The bell-ringing died down after an hour or so to become more doleful than celebratory, a distant tinkling instead of overhead clamour. Rafael and Antonio had braved the tables when some food remained to be had; now, the tables were crumb-littered, forlorn. Still no sign of Cecily. Rafael assumed she was helping in the kitchen, and, anyway, why would she want to stand around in the cold breeze? He was only doing so because he’d spent so long confined to the house, and because this would be one of his last evenings in London. He stayed watching, conscious of making a memory.