The Queen's Sorrow (17 page)

Cecily didn’t have to shop for provisions when the whole household was in residence. Some food had come with the Kitsons from the country house and anything else was being fetched by the kitchen boys. He heard someone, sometimes, leaving the house before dawn and returning an hour or so later, still before sunrise. Cecily’s household duties had changed back to those she’d had when Rafael had first arrived. They’d reduced in scope but not in volume, to judge from the fabrics with which she was swamped whenever he saw her. That was when he saw her at all. In the full household she was less conspicuous, and he missed her.

In the second week of January, a servant came to the kitchen to tell Rafael that a man from the palace was asking for him at the main door. Rafael translated this into just one word:
home
. Was this it – his call home? The Spanish office must have heard back from his original contact and either he’d been absolved of his duty to make the sundial, or he was required to build it after all, but either way he was going home, be it now or, at the most, in a month or so. He began to shake
more than he’d have believed physically possible, every breath shattered.
Home
. Then, though: could this be bad news from home? He’d still heard nothing from Leonor, and wasn’t this what they’d do – call him in to have the bad news broken to him? The fluttering inside turned upside down and hammered at him.

He hurried to the door and demanded of the liveried lad: What did it concern, this summons? No response, save a shrug. Who, then, was asking for him? Shrug. Rafael gave up, didn’t have time for this; just, ‘Now?’

‘Now.’

One minute, Rafael told him, and dashed upstairs for his cloak; but when he came back down, the lad was gone.

Rafael didn’t know if the Thames was frozen. Two days ago, the boatmen had been smashing ice around the quays and breaking paths in it to a central, free-moving channel. How else would he get to the palace? He ran down to the river, puddles crunching underfoot and the wind scouring his face, his way lit by little icicles on protruding first storeys. Boats were moving, he saw as he got to the quayside: fewer of them, and with scant custom, but there was traffic.

Initially, he felt nothing on the wherry but the cold; he knew nothing else, and the shock of it was renewed with every pulse. As time passed, he came up with other possible reasons for his summons. Perhaps Antonio had caused some trouble. Perhaps someone had another job for them to do. He tried to empty himself of his fears – staring on to the dark, blank water – and keep himself open to these various explanations, but thrumming inside him like blood was
My son, my
wife, my mother? A fall, a fever, a fire?

Arriving at Whitehall, scrambling from the little boat, he slipped on the icy steps, scuffing his knees and one of his gloves. Picking himself up, he dashed to the Spanish office. There, though, the official looked baffled – and uninterested – before going off, leisurely, to consult elsewhere. Rafael stood recklessly close to the fire and failed to hear the door opening behind him. But when he turned around, there she was: the queen’s lady, Mrs Dormer, the one from the garden, the one with the smile. She’d had good reason to smile when he’d failed to recognise he was in the presence of the queen. ‘Come on,’ she said. So, she’d happened upon him here and was thinking she’d have some more fun. ‘No …’ his English deserted him and it was all he could do to indicate the desk, the official’s vacated desk. He wouldn’t have believed it possible for that smile of hers to widen, but it did. ‘No,
me
,’ she said. ‘It was me: I sent for you. The queen wants to see you.’

His insides lurched, stopped dead, but resumed and he breathed a laugh of relief:
very funny
. Mrs Dormer’s smile, though, faltered; she seemed to be serious. But no one had told him he’d be going to the queen, and he was a complete and utter mess. As she could well see. He’d come as he was, hadn’t even had a shave and was mud-caked from his run to the quayside, scuffed from his fall. She could see that. Yet here she was, holding open the door for him. ‘No, no, no –’ he swept a hand down in front of him, showing her, making it clear: an utter mess. But she sighed as if this were a quibble and an endearing one, at that. ‘You look lovely, Mr Prado,’ she said, in her breezy way. ‘Now, come on.’

He hurried behind her to continue his objections, trailing in the wake of her swishing, black wool cloak, his own foot
falls on the flagstones mere echoes of those made by her thick, new soles. She was fur-coddled and kid-gloved, and she’d have washed, this morning, and properly, too, the water warmed for her. ‘Please,’ he called to her; insisted. ‘
Please
.’

‘Mr
Prado
.’ She stopped, turned, and he saw how she was enjoying objecting to his objections. ‘You
look lovely
.’ Again, that laugh, quick and low, and, ‘You look
Spanish
.’

The first time, he bet, that had ever been offered in England as a compliment. And if only she knew: he didn’t, not to true-blood Spaniards, he didn’t. He tried anew, countering as best he could in his panicked English: ‘But it’s the queen.’ Her response this time was no response at all, just a mock-glare, and he saw in those widened, resolutely staring eyes that he was losing. He was on his way to the queen of England, unwashed and in damp, mud-strafed clothes. At least could he be told why he was being summoned? That would be the very least she could do. ‘Madam – please – why does the queen ask for me?’

For once, she seemed to give serious consideration to what he’d said, stopping and turning to him. ‘Sometimes –’ she specified. ‘Today, the queen is unwell.’

Which brought him up sharp. ‘She’s ill?’

‘Not ill. Just’ – touching her forehead – ‘headaches.’ She’d pitched it high as if it were first on a list, but added no more. Her hand came down to touch her heart, though. Malaise, then. ‘Tired. She works very hard, too hard, much too hard,’ and a puff of despair as if to say,
I’ve told her, I’ve tried to tell her
, confiding not the fact of the queen’s hard work but her own impatience with it. ‘And today her head is bad. She needs cheering up.’

He was to be a diversion? No wonder she didn’t care what he looked like: she must have tried everyone else and now she was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Because Rafael was no conversationalist – not even in his own language, let alone in English. He knew nothing. A sundial maker stuck on a cloud-clogged island: that was all he was. No good, here, to anyone. Oh, why couldn’t he
go home
? Why wouldn’t they
let him be?
The queen could do with some true-blood, church-going Spaniard to converse with – that’s what she needed – and he failed spectacularly on both counts.

It was ridiculous. He’d refuse. Because what would Mrs Dormer do? Manhandle him into the room? Well, that would certainly be a diversion. He’d say he was ill. At the very worst, he could bargain: beg for more time, time to go back to the Kitsons’ and tidy himself up. Two hours. Surely he’d be just as good a diversion, if not better, in two hours’ time. Better prepared. But he was still following her and they seemed to be nearing their destination, turning into a guard-lined gallery. He could try making a run for it, but he was seriously outnumbered. How he must look to these men: a laughing stock, at best; a disgrace, more like.
This is not me
; he wished they knew: not Rafael de Prado, sundial maker to the king of Spain. This, instead, was the bedraggled, despondent man he’d become during four long months in England.

But who were they to judge? A couple of years ago these men would have had her die, the woman who was now their queen. Back then, in the reign of her little brother, she’d been a traitor for her beliefs. Here they were, now, though, lined up to defend her. They’d defended her a year ago when thousands of rebels arrived on the opposite bank, led by a
charismatic commoner, and the new reign had looked already to be over. They would have been standing here while, behind the far door, the queen’s ladies cowered and the queen paced at the windows: the ladies crying – this was what Rafael had heard – but the queen at the window, wishing aloud that she could go down there and join her men. Something else he was told was that she’d ordered no one risk endangering innocent people by firing across the river. Instead, she would wait for the rebels to come across to her. Her guards wouldn’t have known that the rebellion would soon come to nothing, doors shut against it when it arrived in London’s streets. Up here, they’d have heard everywhere around and below them barricades being shoved at the doors. The clattering of makeshift weapons as grooms and gardeners and laundresses gathered up broom-handles and rakes and paddles.

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?’