The Queen's Sorrow (25 page)

Rafael had been thinking, earlier, of the fastening on Cecily’s cloak – how, one day long before he’d ever arrived, she’d have chosen that button and braid. He’d been thinking of her pleasure when she spotted them on the market stall –
Ooh, these
– and her anticipation on bringing them home. He’d been thinking tenderly, too, of her boots: just the fact of their existence, forever hidden away and unremarked upon. The
miracle
of their existence, was what he felt although he didn’t understand why he felt that. And the little mole on her temple: she was so pale, but there was that tiny, rogue darkness, that small resistance to her pallor. The presence of the mole, the absence of eyelashes. These had been some of his peculiar preoccupations – like dreams – during that long, empty day. He’d been thinking, too, of their walk together, revisiting it: her striding ahead of him, her freedom coming not from leaving the Kitson house but from walking into the darkness. How he’d admired her for that. How he’d envied her courage.

Every day, Rafael expected news but when the royal baby was two weeks overdue, the only news was that a woman was claiming she’d been asked to give up her own newborn boy. The story was everywhere in no time. An unmarried twenty-year-old daughter of a London apothecary: she was saying that two men and a lady had come to see her. Three times, they’d come, she said. She didn’t know how or why they’d found her; they’d come from nowhere. They were kind, reassuring: the lady had said the loveliest things about the baby,
Oh, he’s as bright as a button, isn’t he! Look at that! – see how he
looks into your eyes; he’s keen to know what’s going on, isn’t he?
She spoke to the little mite himself:
You’re keen to know what’s going
on, aren’t you?

You could still nurse him, they’d told the young woman. Should still nurse him. You should definitely do that. Keep him big and strong. They’d unswaddled him:
Look at those legs!
You’re a strong ’un, aren’t you?
He’ll be well looked after, they’d told her. He’ll have a life better than you could ever imagine. A life of unimaginable splendour. You couldn’t wish for more, for him, could you? Could you really turn that down?

But she did.

She’s overwrought, was her own mother’s word on it. Overtired. Confused. It’d never happened, the mother said. No one had visited.

She was in trouble for having made the claim. She’d been taken away for questioning.

A kitchenful of Kitson staff were listening to the story for the umpteenth time. Rafael was only there because he’d reached the limit of his endurance of the chill in his room. ‘Arthur was a changeling, wasn’t he?’ Cecily piped up,
addressing him over numerous heads. For two weeks, they hadn’t exchanged more than greetings in passing. Startled, he didn’t grasp what she’d just said. ‘Your Arthur. You and Nicholas: your King Arthur.’

Still he didn’t grasp it.

‘Changeling,’ she persisted. ‘Changed. With another baby.’

‘Was he?’ Rafael managed. He had no memory of it. But there was so much to the story and he knew so little.

‘Yes. You remember – Merlin took him and hid him. Took him from the old king and put him with someone else for safety. The man he knew as his father wasn’t his father.’

He shrugged her off, but his heart was thumping him giddy and sick.

That night, he pondered again the circumstances of her widowing, something upon which he frequently dwelled. He pictured her first night alone with her fatherless child, putting him to bed and taking leave of the bedside, stepping back to be utterly alone.

He considered, too, the circumstances of her appointment to the Kitson household. Was it before or after her widowing? Did she enquire after a vacancy, or was one made for her? He recalled her change of duties when the Kitsons departed: the nonchalance with which she carried around her waist all those household keys. How she was called upon by senior staff, the varied and important duties with which she was entrusted. How she was deferred to in recognition of her capabilities. Her ease with everyone else in the house.

He wondered what she said last thing at night to her son, and with what kind of touch. A fingertip to the nose, perhaps. Or the palm of her hand over his heart.

He thought of how she pronounced ‘Rafael’. Comically inadequate. A mere sideways swipe at it. And how, in turn, humour flashed into her eyes whenever he tried to say her name, although he couldn’t for the life of him hear how he’d got it wrong.

That look of hers had often come for him as direct and secret as a dig in the ribs.

A few days later, someone came to London with a tale even less likely than that of the apothecary’s daughter. An eighteen-year-old lad claimed to be the previous king and the answer to a lot of people’s prayers. What else he’d been saying, if anything, Rafael didn’t know, like how he was accounting for his supposed earlier death. Was he mad, or being manipulated, or was this a simple prank that’d got out of hand? By the time Rafael heard of it, it was over: the lad already apprehended and punished. Whipped, and his ears cropped, and paraded around the city with a placard proclaiming his crime. Antonio laughed, ‘Well, he won’t be doing that again in a hurry, will he?’

But that depends, doesn’t it
. ‘Was he mad, or simple, or what?’ Rafael asked.

‘I don’t know, do I.’ Antonio sounded as if he resented the implication that there were distinctions to which he should have paid mind.

Rafael wondered if the queen had heard. Would she be told, or would she – in her condition – be protected? Or would she have demanded in advance, going into her
confinement, to be told everything that was happening in the outside world? He suspected that her officials misinformed her or failed to inform her at their peril.

If it had been his own brother – someone claiming to be his own dead brother – how would he feel? It was different, of course – incomparable, in that nothing was at stake, let alone the ruling of a country – but still he dwelt on it. His brother would be thirty-seven. Even if – thirty-five years ago – the accident hadn’t happened, he might never have reached thirty-seven. Something could have happened at any time. Any calamity.

Four years old at the time, Rafael had no memories of his little brother, but his absence had been alongside him for almost all his life. How would he feel if a man attempted to stride into that absence?

He imagined various scenarios: a man coming to town and telling tall stories; his brothers debating what to do and going to investigate. But it couldn’t ever happen, because so many members of his family had been there, had seen Mateo die, had seen him dead. It could happen to a family of someone who’d gone missing or had been said to have died far away, but not to the Prado family, not in Mateo’s case.

Rafael had had to be told that Mateo had died. He’d been outside, exploring, and when he came back inside, he’d had to be told. He had a clear memory of being told: standing there in the hall with his aunty bending down to him and speaking kindly, her eyes red. He was mortified that she was crying. He’d never seen an adult cry. He probably hadn’t even known that adults could cry. He didn’t remember if he’d listened to what she was saying.
Something has happened to Mateo
.

What it was that had happened, he didn’t know. Whether he hadn’t been told –
Something has happened to Mateo and he’s
gone to be with Jesus
– or hadn’t listened, he didn’t know. And he wouldn’t have asked. In the face of his aunty’s crying, he wouldn’t have been ready with questions. Only later did it occur to him: What happened? How?

His mother was lying on cushions in the main room and looked to be staying there. At his own bedtime, he bedded down beside her, with no word from her nor any recognition from her of what he was doing. It was nothing so sophisticated as a decision. He just did it, probably because he didn’t know what else to do. Someone put a blanket over him and there he slept. And there he slept, alongside her, every night for years. He only re-occupied his own room when he became sick, once, with a fever, and was moved.

All he’d ever heard his mother say of Mateo’s death was,
It
was God’s will
, and,
He’s with God now
. Rafael sensed she didn’t believe it, that she said it because it was what she was supposed to say. What did she believe? That Mateo was somehow lost, was Rafael’s guess, back when he was little. She stayed vigilant in the middle of the house in case he returned. And there she was, even now. She’d never gone back to her bedroom.

As for Rafael, how does one ask such a question?
How did
my brother die?
So blunt a question itself was cruel. And to ask it would’ve revealed that he hadn’t asked earlier. He had tried, when he was nine or ten. He’d chosen to ask his aunt, seeing as she was the only person who’d ever spoken to him about it. ‘My little brother,’ he asked her, ‘did he suffer when he died?’ But it didn’t work: ‘No, darling,’ she said, smiling
her appreciation that he should be mindful of his brother’s pain. ‘Thanks be to God, it was instant.’

In the end, he did it when he was nineteen, the day after his father died. He remarked to Pedro, ‘You know, no one ever told me how Mateo died.’ Pedro looked surprised, ‘Didn’t they? He was kicked by a horse. Kicked in the head. One kick.’

And Rafael nodded a kind of thanks.

A split-second, then. Only the tiniest adjustment to time would have been needed to stop it happening. He really did feel that. He really did feel that it ought to be possible.

For Francisco’s life, he would bargain anything. The problem was, there was no bargaining to be had. If it was going to happen, it would happen. And then how would he continue to live his life? That was his terror:
How would I live
with what might be asked of me?

Antonio had come to Rafael’s room. Not to say much. He’d complained about the rain and told of a minor accident that had happened in the kitchen. Then, ‘Why hasn’t the queen had her baby, yet?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Rafael. Could the baby be dead, inside her? The doctors and midwives would know, wouldn’t they? Francisco had kicked long and strong in his final weeks in the womb: he’d been alive for anyone to feel. Well, anyone whom Leonor invited to feel. Rafael had felt him and flinched, alarmed.

He had a headache. When would Antonio leave him alone? Before Antonio had invited himself in, Rafael had
been pondering Cecily as a girl. Gawky, he imagined she’d been, and quick to learn, keen to please. He’d been wondering what hopes and expectations she’d had. Did she remember them now? He’d wondered what slights and injustices she might’ve endured in her girlhood. If he could have somehow got there first, before her, he’d have picked up her future and billowed it in the air to lose its creases: that’s how he imagined it; that was what he would’ve liked to have been able to do for her.

He wondered if her husband had been her first lover. What man had first held her hand – did she remember?

He’d been recalling the way she once reached down absently for a passing cat and the cat’s back had arched to meet her hand and prolong the touch.

He’d been thinking of how she was when she moved around the city, the few times he’d been lucky enough to be able to watch her in the streets. Her casual confidence. She wasn’t a native Londoner; she’d had to learn that confidence. Her little braveries were lost to her, now, but he wanted to retrieve them and honour them. They mattered to him.