The Queen’s Sorrow

And Gil. How had he felt about him? Well, he’d felt all things, over the years, and often all at once. He felt close to him, his boyhood soul mate, in their shared love for this woman with the hard-folded arms and cool eyes. He felt distant from him, too, though, as the husband of his beloved, which was who he’d become. He pitied Gil his treacherous best friend. And he resented him, of course he did. But he’d never wished him dead. No, he’d never done that.

In the early days, to keep himself going, Rafael allowed himself the luxury of imagining that he and Leonor might just once allude to their feelings for each other being deeper than they should be. For a time, he thought that’d be enough, but that was before he caught sight of her in the grove and witnessed the hunger in her kissing. From then on, for a while, nothing was enough and he stopped at nothing in his exploration of the life that they might have had together. Getting into bed, he’d find himself thinking about whom they might have entertained that evening, if they’d been married, and what they might have remarked to each other when alone again. And longing to see the look in her eyes as she reached around to unfasten her hair, last thing.

At the end of his second week, Rafael arrived home for supper one afternoon with Antonio to find the house being packed up. Just inside the main door, three men were taking down a tapestry: two of them up on ladders, the third supervising from below, and all three absorbed in a tense exchange of what sounded like suggestions and recriminations. Rafael might have assumed that the huge, heavy hanging was being removed for cleaning or repair – although no tapestry in the Kitson household looked old enough to require cleaning or repair – had he not noticed the packing cases around the hallway. Some were fastened and stacked, others still open. In one lay household plate: platters and jugs, the silverware for which England was famed. In another, cushions of a shimmering fabric. Towering over the cases, resting against the wall, was a dismantled bedframe, the posts carved with fruits and painted red, green and gold; and on the floor he spotted – just as he was about to trip over it – a rolled-up rug.

One of the men glanced down, eyes rheumy with a cold, as if wondering whether he had to pack the two Spaniards as well. At this point, the pale woman appeared, hurrying as if she’d been looking for them: a purposeful approach. ‘Mr Prado? Mr Gomez?’ Some kind of announcement was going to be made, it seemed, and, to judge from her expression, one that would give her pleasure. She spoke, indicating the boxes, then herself, a touch of her fingertips to her breastbone. Rafael missed it, and looked to Antonio for translation. Antonio looked dazed, still catching up with her. ‘She’s the house –’ He frowned, and then it came to him: ‘She’s the housekeeper?’

She was. A skeleton staff was staying behind, of which she was the backbone, the housekeeper. Later, Rafael would learn that the Kitsons lived for most of the year at their manor in the countryside and, like many of their friends, had only been at their townhouse to witness the splendour of the royal newlyweds’ entrance into London and the elaborate pageants held in the streets to celebrate it. They’d ended up having to be patient. The wedding had taken place at Winchester Cathedral just days after the prince had come ashore at Southampton, but the royal couple’s progress to London thereafter had been leisurely, taking almost a month.

Now, though, in the first week of September, festivities over, the Kitsons were heading back to their manor. In Spain, the land was for peasants: that was the unanimous view of Rafael’s fellow countrymen. Something, then, that he had in common with the English: the dislike of towns and cities, the preference for open expanse and woods.

The first evening after the Kitsons’ departure, he arrived back alone. Antonio was using the departure as an excuse for his own absence – as he saw it, he no longer needed to play the part of the guest. Not that he’d ever really done so. Rafael took it to mean the contrary, considering himself obliged to show support for the pale woman who’d been left almost alone to cater for them. He knocked on the door – wielded the leopard’s head – and was disappointed to hear that one of the dogs remained in residence. The pale woman opened the door, dodging the animal; the boy, too, was behind her. The woman wasn’t quite so pale – flushed and somehow scented – and Rafael guessed she’d been cooking. He wanted to apologise for having interrupted her, but didn’t know how. She looked behind him. ‘Mr Gomez?’

‘No.’ He didn’t know how to say more.

She shrugged, seemed happy enough to give up on him, and stepped aside to let Rafael in. He noticed the bunch of keys on her belt: all the house keys, he presumed. She said something that sounded concerned and, frowning, touched his cloak. Said it again: ‘Drenched.’ Drenched. Then something else, faster, and a mime of eating, a pointing towards the Hall.

Having hung up his cloak, he went along to the Hall and, self-consciously, took a place at the single table alongside the others: the porter who’d let him through the gate; a man who he was fairly sure was one of the grooms; and a quite elderly man whom he’d seen around but had no idea what he did. And the dog, of course. The old man was talking to the others – dog included – and didn’t let up when the pale woman began bringing in the dishes. Rafael rose to go and help her, but she shook her head and then he saw that she had the child in tow as helper. When an array of dishes was on the table, she helped the boy on to the bench and took her place beside him. After Grace, the old man resumed his chat and the others took him up on it, although the child kept quiet. Clearly, mealtime silence was only for when the whole household was in residence. Perhaps they were catching up on a day spent mostly alone.

Eventually, Rafael felt he should say something. ‘Very good,’ he said to the woman, indicating the spread, even though it was yet more meat – poultry of various types – served as usual with the jellies which he guessed were made from berries of some kind, whatever kinds they had in England. She frowned and shook her head, and he understood her to mean it wasn’t her doing – this food had been left by the cook for them. But to this, he smiled back his own dismissal: the food was well presented and that would have been her doing; there was still plenty that she’d done. And this time, albeit with a small show of reluctance, she allowed it, bowing her head. To follow the meats, she fetched a bowl of something sweet, causing much excitement among his fellow diners. Usually there wasn’t anything sweet, just the soft, wet cheeses. This was a sweetened, fruited cream with the unmistakable, delectable flavour of strawberries.

When the table had finally been cleared, Rafael wondered what he should do. Usually, he’d go to his room and work on his design, but surely it would be rude to walk away openly from this small gathering. The woman indicated that he should join them on cushions around the fireplace – in which no fire was lit – and so he did, only to find to his embarrassment that both the porter and the groom were excusing themselves. The old man took a heap of cushions and lay back immediately for a sleep, and the dog muscled in. The woman seemed to have produced from nowhere an article of clothing to adapt or repair, and her little boy began working on another, unpicking stitches for her. Rafael felt profoundly awkward: he had nothing with him, nothing to do. Pretend to doze, perhaps; perhaps he should do that. He had a cold and was conscious, in the silence, of his snuffling. But then the woman spoke to him: ‘Spain, England,’ and she drew a horizontal line in the air with her index finger. ‘How many days?’ She laid the fabric in her lap and held up both hands to display her fingers: ‘Five, six, seven …?’

‘Five,’ he said. ‘Five days.’

She looked appreciative of the answer – that he had answered – but then didn’t seem to know what to make of it, didn’t seem to know if a five-day sea-journey was long or short, or indeed longer or shorter than she might’ve guessed. There was nothing to say.

He indicated her son: ‘Four, five years?’

‘Four.’

So, he’d been right; and of course, because Francisco was almost four. ‘Big,’ he said, careful to sound impressed.

Looking at her boy, she shrugged with her mouth as if considering. She was being modest; the boy was tall, and – Rafael saw it – she was pleased he’d noticed. Sad, too, though – Rafael saw this, too – if only for a heartbeat: a fleeting sadness, perhaps at her little boy growing older and leaving his infant years behind. ‘Nicholas,’ she said. Rafael repeated it with obvious approval. ‘My son,’ he said, making a fist over his heart. ‘Three years. Francisco.’

‘Oh!’ Her eyes lit up, and she looked as if she’d like to ask more. Instead, though, a small gesture, and unconsciously, Rafael felt, a reflection of his own: a brief, steadying touch of her own hand to her own heart. Which rather touched him.

‘Rafael,’ he said, tapping his chest.

‘Cecily,’ she reciprocated. This, he hadn’t expected, and suffered a pang of anxiety that he’d pushed her into it. ‘Madam’would’ve been fine. Again she looked expectant and he guessed that he was supposed to repeat it, to try it out, which he did and to which she looked amused although it had sounded all right to him.

After that, he’d felt relaxed enough to excuse himself and go up to his room to fetch paper and charcoal, and for the following couple of hours in Cecily’s company he sketched and half-worked on ideas.

Subsequent evenings, this became the routine, sometimes with him working at the table, sometimes on a letter home. The old man, Richard – and dog, Flynn – would sleep; and Cecily would continue her work on a gown. Fine wool, it usually was: definitely not her own. ‘Frizado,’ she said, once, holding it up for him to see and relishing the texture between her fingertips. Another time, ‘Mockado,’ and another, ‘Grogram.’ Later, every evening, though, she’d put her work aside and then, standing up, standing tall to stretch, she’d reach to the small of her back to release her apron’s bow with a tug. As it dropped away, she’d swoop it up, giving it a shake to release any creases and looping it into a couple of easy, loose folds. Then she’d reach into the linen basket for the little unassuming roll of undyed linen in which were pinned and pocketed her own special needles and threads.

The first time, she’d held up a needle, presented it to him although it was so fine that it vanished in the air between them, and said, ‘From Spain.’ She said it with a depreciating little laugh: there wasn’t a lot they could talk about and this was the best she could do. For his part, he’d tried to look interested. What did interest him was that she’d made the effort to find something they had in common. That was what mattered; not the actual, invisible, though no doubt very good needle. She turned it in the air: ‘Very, very good,’ she assured him, eyebrows raised and head tilted in a parody of earnestness which he then mirrored so that she smiled.

Also in that linen pouch were floss silks of various colours. Her method was to lay them on the dark glossy tabletop to make her selection. The skeins were greens and blues, reds and yellows: the greens from fresh and bud-like to velvety firblues; the blues from palest lunar glow to deepest ultramarine; the reds from cat’s tongue rosiness to alizarin; the yellows from the creaminess of blossom to the confidence of lemons and the darker, greeny-gold of pears. The best needles might well come from Spain, but everyone knew the best embroidery came from England.

Rafael would watch Cecily choosing her colours. She’d feel her way along the range, not touching: fingers walking above the row, rising and falling as if idling on the keys of a virginal. Then – yes – she’d pick one up, pleased to have made the decision but perhaps also a little regretful, Rafael detected, to have committed herself. The selection would be hung over her finger, unregarded, while she made the next few choices, then she’d drape them all in the fold between thumb and forefinger to trail across her palm. That little handful she’d lift into the light, whatever remained of it, sometimes even leaving the room, presumably in search of what was left of it. The scrutiny involved a slow turning of her hand one way and the other, then a flip so that the skeins could dangle free and light run the length of them. The final test was a single strand concentrated in a tiny loop, like an insect’s wing, which she’d press to the embroidery for consideration against what was already there. From what he could glimpse, her design was of some kind of beast – stylised – prancing or pawing inside a geometric border. Her brilliant colours were so unlike those in which his designs were realised by Antonio. His and Antonio’s colours were incidental: ochre tints in marble and patinas on bronze. And her materials, lax in her lap, were so pliable in comparison to theirs, which needed tackling.

Whenever he was too tired to think, he sketched what he saw in the room: the immense fireplace and, in detail, the Tudor roses carved into it; an expanse of wall-panelling and its delicately carved frames; sections of the decorative plasterwork on the ceiling; several floor tiles of differing heraldic designs; and the table clock from all angles. One evening, he began sketching Nicholas: unapproachable Nicholas. And perhaps that was why, the dare of it. Nicholas: approachable only like this, in surreptitious glances from across the room. And, anyway, Rafael found himself thinking, he stares at me, from that first evening, from the doorway, and ever since. Nicholas had never yet spoken in Rafael’s presence, nor smiled. What he did – all he did – was stare. There was no blankness to that stare, it was full of intent: Leave me alone. Whenever their paths crossed, Nicholas stared Rafael down; stared until Rafael – smile abandoned – looked away.

Not now, though, for once. Not when the boy was relatively off-guard, weary at the end of the day and wedged under the wing of his mother. He was kneeling beside her, playing with a tin of buttons. Well, not playing. Play must have been his mother’s intention – ‘Here, look!’ – and he was obliging her to the extent that he was doing something with the buttons, but all he was doing was gazing at them as he dabbled his fingertips in the tin. Rafael had considered him an unnaturally still child – never running around, always clinging to Cecily – but now he noticed how much the apparently motionless Nicholas was in fact moving: chewing his lip, and shifting his shoulders – one, two, one, two – in a strange, rigid wiggle. The poor boy was so taken over by this restlessness that there was nothing of him left for button-playing.

Francisco would be lost to those buttons, he’d love them. He’d line them up on the floor, transforming them in his imagination into something else, creating a drama for them and probably talking them through it. He was always occupied. What he was actually doing might well not be clear to an observer. He’d be sitting straight-backed with that downward incline of his head, his attention on his hands, and his hands busy.

Cecily shifted on her cushion and her son’s gaze snapped up to her. However unwelcoming those eyes were to anyone but his mother, there was no denying that they were extraordinary: huge, almond-shaped, and a proper blue, not what passed for blue in most eyes here in England but was really an absence of colour, a mere shallow pooling of what passed for light.

Francisco’s smile was famous, lightning-quick and lightning-bright, all eyes and teeth, almost absurd in its intensity. People would laugh aloud when first faced with it, and turn to Rafael, incredulous and celebratory: What a beautiful smile! Truly it was a gift: such a smile could never be learned. Rafael recalled it from Francisco’s earliest days: Leonor turning around to walk away, and there over her shoulder was the baby and in a flash that cheeky, laughable smile. Nothing withheld, nothing watchful or measured in it. Such a smile anticipated no knock-backs, no caution on behalf of the beholder, nothing but the absolute best in response. It was wonderful to witness and Rafael understood the seriousness of being the guardian of it.

Naïvely, he’d not intended Cecily to see his sketch of her son. But on one of her trips from the room with her silks, she glanced over and exclaimed. Instantly, though, came a hesitancy, as if it might have been presumptuous of her even to have recognised the subject. Rafael sat there with it in his lap, helpless, exposed. Was it a gift? Just because that hadn’t been his intention … It was a gift, wasn’t it, this sketch of her boy. Had to be.

‘Nicholas,’ she said, sounding amazed. ‘Look.’ And then that hesitancy again: to Rafael, ‘May I?’

He handed it to her, and she knelt beside her boy to show him. ‘It’s you.’

He stared at it, no less wary than when confronting Rafael himself, studying it, intent and grave, as if looking for something, before surrendering it back to his mother. She received it with a slight reluctance. In turn she went to hand it to Rafael, but he declined with a smile and a raising of his hands. He hoped to strike the right note – a glad giving up of it, but not too dismissive of it, either – but didn’t know that he’d been all that successful. She withdrew gingerly, looked for somewhere to place it and laid it face-up on the table, where it seemed, to Rafael, vulnerable.

The following evening, he sketched Cecily’s hand; not the one busy with the needle but the other, the steadying one, her left. The one on which she wore a wedding band. And he wondered: was she a widow? He’d been presuming so, but maybe there was a husband working away somewhere – perhaps for Mr Kitson, abroad, or at the country house. Rafael hadn’t a clue as to the ways people lived and worked here in England. Perhaps it was normal for spouses to live – to work – apart. If she was a widow, how long had she been bereaved? The child was only four. Clearly she’d had him late in life, and Rafael wondered if there were others, elsewhere, grown up. Rafael imagined opening the conversation: You know, my wife and I, we only ever had the one, and late. They had so nearly not had him; he had so nearly never happened.

There would become a graininess to the dusk and soon they’d see that it’d already happened: the lovely, velvety mix of light and dark would finally have lost balance in favour of darkness. However hard Rafael tried to see the moment happen, he never succeeded. It was, he knew, in the nature of it: it had to happen unseen or it couldn’t happen at all. This evening, as on all others, they’d been sinking into the shadows, letting themselves and the room be taken. But soon Cecily would get up and begin lighting candles, and the candlelight would gently scoop them up, set them apart and make them observers of those shadows.

He could see how unscarred her hands were: unburned, uncalloused; no signs of hardship. Certainly she endured none in this house. She was a seamstress who didn’t do the laundry; she shopped for food rather than pulling it from the soil or kneading or cooking it. But she’d have come from somewhere. She’d have survived things; there would have been things to survive, there were always things to have to survive. Had she always lived and worked in houses like this? There was no trace of her personal history on her hands, except for the marriage. It shone, the evidence of that. How long had she been here, gliding through this household, fabric over her arm, and ready when required to claim the favoured position of housekeeper? For ever, said her demeanour, but – Rafael felt – a little too deliberately. The child gave her away. That child wasn’t at home, here.

Rafael concentrated again on his sketch. There was plenty for him to do, from the fan of bones across the back of the hand to the indentations on the knuckles. His own wife’s hands, by comparison, were small and featureless. Not that he’d ever actually sketched them, but, then, he didn’t have to, he knew them. Dainty, was how he’d thought of Leonor’s hands, if he’d thought anything of them at all, although the realisation surprised him because he’d never thought of her as dainty. She was small, yes, but strong.

Prettily bejewelled, was what he remembered now of Leonor’s hands. Cecily’s wedding ring, her only ring, was loose. It moved as she moved her hand, dropping back towards the knuckle and revealing a stripe of pallor. She was fussing Nicholas’s hair now and Rafael could almost feel the reassuring clunk of that ring – its solidity and smoothness – as if on his own head. The slight resistance of it, its switching back and forth. He wondered if her feet were like her hands, long and distinctly boned. And then he wondered what he was doing, wondering about her feet. The dusk must be addling him. He wasn’t thinking of her feet, of course: what he was thinking of was proportion and line. Because that was what he did, in life. In his work. Angles. She had begun to walk around the room now with her taper, bestowing glowing pools, and he let himself think of the strong arches beneath those soft-sounding feet of hers.

Then she took him utterly by surprise in coming up and looking over his shoulder. No escape.

The surprise, now, was hers. ‘My hands?’

He cringed. ‘Yes.’

She looked down for a while longer at the drawing, then began to look at her own, real hands – raising and slowly rotating them – as if for comparison. As if seeing them when before, perhaps, they’d gone unremarked. But also as if they weren’t hers. He said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh! – no.’ The briefest, faintest of smiles to reassure him. Then, tentatively, the tip of her index finger down on to the paper, on to a stroke of charcoal, where it paused as if resisting following the line. Then back, locked away into a demure clasp of her hands. She gave him another brief smile, this time as if in formal thanks. This sketch, he didn’t offer her. It was just a study, after all. A technical exercise. That’s all it was.

Thereafter, chastened, he made a show of sketching the far end of the Hall, rigorous in his shading, frowning at his efforts. Cecily had returned to her embroidery, her son was drowsily stroking the dog, and the old man rattled with snores. When Rafael judged an acceptable interval had elapsed, he made his excuses. Cecily’s upwards glance was dazed from the close work she’d been doing and – reminded, herself, of time having passed – she switched that glance from Rafael to Nicholas, to check on him. And there he was, fallen asleep. Rafael hadn’t noticed, either. He wasn’t surprised, though: the child had quite a nasty cold. Cecily huffed, exasperated: he’d have to be woken to go to bed.

Rafael slammed down the impulse to offer to lift him. It would be too familiar of him. But it must have occurred to Cecily, too, because now she was looking at him as if she didn’t quite dare ask. He’d have to do it, then; but here came a flush of pleasure that he could do something, could offer her something. Still mindful, though, of overstepping the mark, he gestured: Shall I …?

Her response was a hopeful wince: Could you? Would you mind?

He set down his sketches and charcoal, convinced that he was going to do it wrong, do it awkwardly and wake the boy, who’d be alarmed to find himself being pawed by the Spanish stranger. Approaching him, Rafael sized him up, deliberated how to ensure least disturbance and greatest lifting power. Cecily fluttered around him as if offering assistance, but in fact doing nothing of the kind – although there was nothing much she could do except wipe her son’s nose. Rafael crouched, slotted his hands under Nicholas’s arms and drew him to his chest. ‘Come on, little man,’ he found himself soothing, just as he would with Francisco. The boy offered no resistance and Rafael nearly overbalanced. Righting himself, he strained for the lift, bore the weight then settled him, marvelling how the little body could feel both so unlike Francisco’s and, somehow, at the same time, identical. His heart protested at the confusion. Breathing in the muskiness of the boy’s hair, he nodded to Cecily to lead the way.

She led him from the Hall to a staircase and up the narrow stone steps to a first-floor door, opened the door, ushered him inside, and drew a truckle bed from beneath the main bed. He made sure not to look around – that would be improper – as he lowered Nicholas on to the mattress. Nicholas frowned, turned on to his side and drew up his knees; Cecily bent over him, wiping his nose again and then busy with blankets. Rafael retreated, risking a glance back from the doorway and getting a preoccupied smile in thanks. She’d be staying in the room. He made his way to his own.