The Queen's Sorrow (26 page)

Had he ever loved Leonor like this? No, but it would have been impossible to love Leonor like this. She wasn’t open to it, she wouldn’t have welcomed it. She would have considered it an intrusion. Somehow she always managed to make him feel he was fawning over her. For his part, he had never felt loved by her. With Leonor, he’d had to love from a distance.

A week later, the queen had contractions. Another whole week had passed by, but now, at last,
contractions
: the word was everywhere and even if Rafael hadn’t understood it, he’d have guessed from the sound, the hardness in the middle of it. There seemed to be no enthusiasm, but nor was there scepticism, because surely the time had come. This had to be it. If not today, then tomorrow. Certainly by the end of the week. There was a quickening of pace in the household, a gathering of wits, a meeting of cooks. The minimum was done in the kitchen to ensure that – be it in a day’s time or three or five – they’d be ready. But then there was nothing: no more news, for five, six, seven days. Nothing.

Rafael kept to his room, waiting for word that he was to go. Whenever he saw Cecily, he did no more than greet her, despite, every time, deeply regretting the distance between them. But it had to be done. He’d retreat to his room, stung. He kept his door closed, not even answering Nicholas’s knocks if he could get away with it. They’d reached Guinevere and Lancelot’s bewitchment and he’d seen from Nicholas’s frown that he hadn’t been able to explain their falling in love nor why it was a betrayal of Arthur.
They wanted to be together, just the two
of them
, he’d tried,
and poor Arthur felt very, very left out
.

The weather worsened. The sky was nothing but slabs of near-black cloud-cover sliding along in succession, no chinks of blue. Mostly, it rained hard all day. Sometimes there’d be an afternoon of no rain, but then the air was like wet cloth. A whole week of it, two weeks, now almost three. Surface water no longer drained away, there was nowhere left for it to go. The lane was under a couple of inches of floodwater. Inside, everything smelled damp: stone, wood, fabrics.

Antonio had told Rafael that an ambassador had arrived from Poland with congratulations because, it seemed, the first rumour had rolled as far as Poland but the retraction behind it had got lost along the way. He’d had to be received, of course. He’d been travelling for weeks in anticipation of a jubilant London. It was said that the prince and his men even laughed, if hopelessly, desperately:
I mean, you’ve got to laugh
… He had to stay, that ambassador. So he, too, now, was waiting.

Rafael was spending these last, desperate days trying not to think of Cecily. He’d have loved to switch one of her earlobes back and forth across his lips. And then he’d have lain his lips behind that lovely ear and stroked them along the channel beneath her jaw, down the flank of her throat into the dip at the base that deepened with each inward breath. He couldn’t help but think of how poised she was and how, he felt, he might undo all that poise with a lick.

Antonio came to his door again, opening it uninvited and asking, ‘D’you think the queen is pregnant?’

Rafael sighed. How could she not be? – this far down the line, this late into a pregnancy. He could understand there having been a mistake early on, but not now, and not with so many doctors and midwives involved.

He remembered when Leonor’s pregnancy had continued into November. She was huge; he couldn’t believe she’d grow bigger, but she’d said, ‘The doctor says it’ll be a while yet.’ He must’ve looked impatient or irritated or something, because she warned, ‘He’s just taking his time, Rafael,’ and that was him told.

‘Is he all right, though? Is he moving?’

‘Yes.’ She sounded exasperated.

‘Well, how much longer, does the doctor think?’

She’d shrugged. ‘Weeks?’ Then, ‘It doesn’t matter, as long as he’s safe.’ And duly, once again, Rafael was put in his place.
Of
course, of course
, he rushed to agree.

His mother was unbothered: ‘She’s got her dates wrong, is all.’

Yes, that was all. And that’d be why she was so snappy with him, with his questions: she’d never want to have to admit to having made a mistake.

A new due date was issued: the fourth or fifth of June, which would be a full moon. But the fourth and fifth passed and nothing happened. Nor was there any change in the weather. The cloud-stuffed sky was featureless; obscenely so, it seemed to Rafael. An affront to anyone glancing skywards. No change in the weather and none in policy. Eight burnings, in the first two weeks of June, despite riots, one of which had London Bridge closed for a whole day.

Into the chilly air came the smoke from burning bodies, and it didn’t blow away but was trapped under the lid of cloud. Rafael kept his window closed; he hated that he might be smelling it, breathing it, tasting it. Not only priests or bishops, now – but one day, two women who’d ‘said things’. That was what Antonio had told him: ‘They said things.’ But to whom? Because someone must have turned them in.

One of the women had said that Jesus wasn’t in the sacrament.
Is he here or is he not?
That was what she’d been asked at her trial.
It’s a simple question
. She knew full well it was a simple
question, one to which she had a simple answer: ‘He isn’t,’ she’d said, with a half-laugh of disbelief, dismay. Clear enough, wasn’t it? What was wrong with everybody? ‘He’s not there, is he,’ and she shrugged an appeal to everyone in the room.

The English spoke their minds, that’s how it seemed to Rafael. Not that the woman had been saying very much, really. Certainly, she hadn’t considered herself to be saying very much – that had been clear from the shrug. The English were a practical people, with no love of magic and mystery. Their one legend was of a good king who did good deeds: just a boy, just a man from a homely background with the barest help from a magician at the beginning of his story and the very end. A magic sword: a piece of hardware, its handing over at the beginning and handing back at the end being magical, but in between it was just a sword. No wide-open spaces, in England, no far-off gazes, no dreaminess. Instead, an eye for detail – their gardens, their gold-and silverwork, their embroidery. No big ideas, no great statements. And there was no Jesus that the woman could see inside that sacrament, and she’d felt it needed saying.

But she was sentenced to burn for saying so, this twenty-seven-year-old mother of three. The date was discussed and fixed. Guards were requisitioned, a decision having been made as to the appropriate number. Men were appointed and funded to buy the wood and build the pyre. A stake had been found and fixed, a stool made, bindings bought and gunpowder funnelled into a little bag to tie around her waist in the hope of hastening an end to her suffering if the flames dwindled.

Mid-afternoon on the tenth of June, a messenger arrived at the Kitsons’ to take Rafael back with him to the palace at Hampton Court. Rafael was having his afternoon sleep when a Kitson servant-lad knocked on his door to relay the message, and he woke in a panic. Surely this was his call home. All this time, almost a year, but now that the moment had come, he didn’t feel in the least ready for it. He clattered downstairs only to discover the messenger relaxing over a substantial snack. Not yet having endured the river-journey between the city and the palace, Rafael didn’t realise until later how welcome and how necessary that break would have been. Resenting the messenger’s meandering chit-chat with the steward, he interrupted to ask if arrangements had been made, or needed to be made, for the transportation of his trunk. The messenger claimed to know nothing of any trunk, but advised Rafael to bring whatever he needed for an overnight stay because he wouldn’t be able to make it back before nightfall. Rafael checked: nothing had been said about his trunk?

‘No trunk. Just you.’

The journey took more than four hours. At least the craft had a canopy to protect Rafael and the messenger from the showers and the breeze which rattled and rustled it. No such provision for their four rowers, whose only respite consisted of frequent breaks to gnaw on hunks of bread and drain ale from flasks. Rafael had come unprepared, but the messenger was kind enough to offer a share of his own supplies, and sometimes Rafael took him up on it, feeling sheepish at his earlier impatience. The atmosphere between them was congenial but they rarely spoke, staring instead through the
canopy’s opening – politely avoiding the rowers’ straining faces – as if there were something of more interest than mere, endless river life. Rafael looked at trees and the mess of clouds that was the sky. Birds. And the palace: he watched for the palace even when, he knew, they were miles away. From time to time, he closed his eyes and just listened to the oar strokes. What he didn’t do was think. Just felt himself to be suspended there on the river between London and the palace. And that was something, at least, that did feel good: to be so far from London.

Eventually, they were travelling alongside high walls, which they did for a long time – the river arcing around the palace site – before arriving at the riverside gatehouse which was, itself, a little palace, pink-bricked and turreted, jade-windowed in the river-lit dusk. Their walk through yew-hedged, extravagantly shadowed grounds was welcome, despite his impatience, as a long-overdue stretch for his legs. He was taken with what he could see of the palace: so smart as to seem somehow stitched from brick.

They entered through a substantial double door, which was guarded, and on to a staircase which led up to a richly furnished gallery from where they were admitted, under the scrutiny of half a dozen more guards, into a room. An anteroom with two doors, the one through which they’d come and a second one. Someone high-ranking, then, he’d be seeing. It was a candlelit jewellery box of a room with no window or fireplace, nothing but floor-to-ceiling panelling, intricate and gilded. And a bench – similarly ornate – which the messenger helpfully indicated. Having just sat for almost four hours in a small boat, Rafael declined, ostentatiously
pacing and rising on his toes to stretch his calf muscles. He gestured,
You?
The messenger smiled knowingly: he couldn’t sit if Rafael didn’t. Rafael’s sitting down wouldn’t solve the problem, because the bench was too small for both of them. So they stood, looking at the glorious panelling. Rafael turned to the wall and ran a fingertip around a tiny Tudor rose.

The mystery door opened, sending Rafael’s heart into his throat, and a lady requested his presence. He’d been anticipating a man, a Spanish man, but here was an English lady. The messenger nodded cheerfully at him and was off, job done. Rafael followed the lady back into the room from whence she’d come.

It was dimly lit, in there – the window-hangings prematurely drawn – and the heat was an entity in itself. His skin swelled instantly, sticking to his shirt. Clusters of lighted wicks seemed not only illuminating but interrogative; he was dazzled. The room was scented, too, with the floral distillations worn by ladies. There they were, those ladies: there in the shadows, winks of jewels on headdresses as they turned to him. A year in London had made him wary of shadows, and even here he was prey to that unease. Even in a roomful of seated ladies. Perhaps because they were seated: their shapes collapsed, not quite discernible.