The Queen's Sorrow (22 page)

‘Do you play an instrument?’ he asked her.

She shot him that mischievous look. ‘Not yet,’ she said.

Then, ‘Some people say the king’s still alive.’ She’d spoken emptily, carefully noncommittal, staring again into the hearth. He sensed she was testing him.

But he was confused: ‘King?’ Still alive? Did she mean the Spanish prince? But he
was
alive, wasn’t he? Or had something happened? Something he’d missed?

‘The boy,’ she said, seeing his confusion. ‘The queen’s brother.’

Oh, the dead king. He understood. But, ‘Still alive?’ How could that possibly be? He’d been dead for over a year. Why would he have disappeared?

She shrugged. ‘It’s what some people are saying.’
That’s all
I’m saying
. ‘That he’s going to come back.’

Wishful thinking, he realised: that was what it was. There were people who wanted the dead king back instead of their queen, and wanted him so badly that they’d believe any old nonsense. That was how bad these times were, in some people’s eyes.

He checked: ‘You …?’
You don’t think so, do you?

She gave him a long, flat look.
He’s dead
, it said. Rafael saw that she’d resigned herself to it.

So, she too hankered for the old days, the days before the reign of the queen. The days before people were burned. And
perhaps, even, if she was like other people, the days before England was linked with Spain. It was understandable, but he wanted to say,
You have a good queen; she’s a good woman and a
good queen; she thinks only of what’s best for England; she’s hardworking
and mindful of others, appointing that huge Council and
listening to each and every man, and she’s merciful
. The English forgot how merciful she’d been. She hadn’t even executed the girl who had been pretender to her throne, not until the second attempted coup, after which, of course she’d had no other option. He wanted to say,
She has great dignity – which has
survived intact despite years of assaults on it – but no airs and graces
,
none
. And for England’s sake, she’d weathered great changes in her life in a mere year, changing herself from spinster noblewoman living a life devoted to God, to monarch, wife and expectant mother.
She will see you through
: he was certain of that. She’d need to stop the burnings, though, yes. The burnings were a mistake, of course. And she would stop them, he was sure.

Or so he’d assumed. Later that week, coming into the kitchen, he was aware of a commotion in the back yard and ventured to the threshold. A lad whom Rafael didn’t recognise as from the household – backed by a further dozen or so strangers – was proclaiming something. Gathered around was an agitated crowd of household staff. Rafael spotted a window open, above: the Kitson boy who walked with the sticks was watching, listening. The proclaiming lad ushered someone forward – a woman – and she threw her hand into the air. There was something in it, something small.

Cecily came to Rafael’s side. ‘Cecily?’ he asked. ‘What is this?’

At that moment, the steward came barging into the yard, forcing Rafael and Cecily to step aside, to opposite sides of the doorway. He began clearing everyone from the courtyard: for the strangers, an emphatic sweep of an arm towards the gate; for his own staff, a clap-clapping,
Back to work!
Cecily obeyed immediately; she’d have gone if Rafael hadn’t stopped her. ‘What was that?’

‘Oh –’ She looked worried, shook her head,
It doesn’t matter,
don’t ask
.

But he was insistent. ‘Cecily?’

She reconsidered and said that five people had been burned in Essex the day before, but had managed to make speeches and their words – their resistance – had been written down and had come to London. To be readily received, judging from what he’d just seen.

‘But what was in the woman’s hand?’ he asked her.

She looked flat into his eyes and gave it to him: ‘Bone.’

‘Bone?’
Bone
. Fragment, relic. From the ashes. The ashes had been combed, and those five people had been made martyrs.

Francisco had once asked him, ‘Daddy, what’s inside people?’

‘Bones,’ Rafael said.

Francisco had reeled in horror: ‘But dogs eat bones!’

‘Not
your
bones,’ Rafael had laughed, ‘not people’s bones. Animals’ bones – dead animals’ bones. Your bones, Poppet, are safe.’

That evening, Antonio appeared in the queue for supper and, having expressed his voluble dismay at the English failure to observe Lent, said, ‘Guess what?’

Rafael couldn’t even feign interest.

‘The new Pope has decided he loathes the English queen. Loathes us, of course – war mongers that we Spaniards are – but loathes her, too, now, because of the marriage. Going to excommunicate us all, did you know that? England and Spain. Poor cow, she can’t do right, can she. She hauls England kicking and screaming back to Rome, and Rome shuts the door in her face. She can burn as many people as she likes, but it’ll make no difference.’

‘She doesn’t “like”,’ Rafael objected. ‘She isn’t burning anyone.’

‘She signs the warrants,’ Antonio countered, chattily. ‘Fifteen-year-old blind girl, yesterday.’

Rafael tried to steady his revulsion. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.’

Antonio smirked at what he clearly regarded as Rafael’s naïvety. ‘You don’t believe it? – fifteen-year-old blind girl? Which bit don’t you believe? Fifteen? Blind? Girl?’

Appalling though it was: ‘It’s Church business.’

‘She still signs.’

‘She probably doesn’t even look at what she’s signing.’ But even as he said it, he doubted that anything would get past her. In his mind’s eye, he saw her peering at the warrant and raising a query.

‘Oh, well, then,’ breezed Antonio, ‘that makes it all right, doesn’t it – don’t look, just sign.’

‘Someone probably signs for her. She’s not been well.’ Again, though, to his considerable unease, he doubted she’d ever delegate.

Antonio half-laughed, relishing the sparring. ‘And did that someone sign the letter she wrote to the sheriff – wrote at
length – to tick him off for letting a heretic down from the pyre? A heretic who’d recanted in the fire. Heretic no longer? Doesn’t matter. “Don’t do it again,” she said. “Don’t ever let anyone go, even if they repent. Burn them anyway.”’

‘All these stories’– Rafael blustered – ‘no one knows what’s what, any more.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ mused Antonio. ‘What the English are good at – the only thing they’re good at – is seeing straight to the point.’

No word back from Pedro, but the Spanish office had informed Rafael that the prince’s long-promised loan had arrived and, in a matter of days, just as soon as they could balance their books, they’d be making him a payment. As to how much, they wouldn’t say. Couldn’t say, more like, until they’d seen what they’d been granted and had sifted through the hundreds of claims on it. Nor did they say whether the payment was intended to be compensatory or towards completion of the sundial. Rafael didn’t ask. He was determined to use the money, if at all possible, to get home.

Then, though, the Spanish office moved away. On Good Friday, April the fourth, the queen and her husband and court moved upriver to Hampton Court Palace to prepare for the birth of her baby in just over a month’s time. Everyone had gone, including all the Spaniards who’d been resident at Whitehall. Antonio had seen them go, or some of them, on boats. He’d been at Whitehall, watching them embark on their five-hour river-journey, and now here he was, in
Rafael’s room, with that news and more. ‘Not Windsor,’ he announced.

‘Windsor?’

‘
Not
Windsor.’ Antonio had made himself comfortable: he was lounging on the end of the bed. Rafael had sidled away to the head. Antonio had got some comfits from somewhere: sugar-coated seeds and spices, held in a cone of paper. Neither of them had money spare for comfits, nor did anyone whom Rafael knew. Antonio had, of course, offered them; Rafael had, of course, declined. ‘Windsor’s where she
was
going.’ The crack of a seed between Antonio’s teeth. ‘But it’s too far away. Better protected if she’s closer, at Hampton Court.’

Rafael frowned his incomprehension.

‘Well’– a delving into the cone – ‘they can get troops there, quickly, can’t they. Whereas getting them to Windsor …’

‘But who’s the threat?’

Antonio paused, to make his own show of incomprehension that Rafael should have to ask. Then a shrug, a dismissal:
anyone
, the shrug said;
everyone
.

But Rafael wasn’t having it. ‘You think they’d – what?’ Attack their queen? He’d heard talk of wishing her dead, but that was just talk. Attack their own pregnant or nursing queen?

Antonio made a show of stifling a laugh: again, Rafael’s naïvety. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘they’re already on their way. There’s a lot more river-traffic than usual, all of it heading upriver.’

‘But they’ll be going there to wait for news of the birth.’

More amusement. ‘With firearms?’

‘This is London,’ Rafael said; ‘everyone has firearms.’

Another shrug:
If you say so
.

Rafael pushed it: ‘And, anyway, aren’t those firearms for us?’ Spaniards. ‘Aren’t they going there for us?’ Not to threaten her, but to threaten all the Spaniards surrounding her.

‘No difference, now. She
is
one of us, as far as they’re concerned.’

Rafael was about to take issue with that – was that really what the English believed? – but Antonio blew a sigh and said, ‘If she dies, how do we get out of here fast enough?’
If she
dies
: purely conversational. But she was nothing to Antonio. Nothing but the reason for him being stuck here. ‘They’ll forget us, probably. Leave us behind.’

Our own people
: flee, forgetting their few fellow countrymen back in the city. That hadn’t occurred to Rafael, and panic prickled in his stomach.

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.