The Queen's Sorrow (32 page)

Rafael wondered often what had happened to Antonio’s friend. Had he rallied? Or was he buried, now, in English soil?

He told Cecily that he loved her; he said it often.

‘And I love you,’ she’d reply, just as insistent, but her manner was different from his, was calm, as if she were correcting him.

Once – genuinely puzzled – he asked her: ‘Why do you love me?’

She had to think. ‘Because of how you look at me.’ She revised, ‘Because you look at me.’

He was ashamed, apologetic.

‘No …’ she tried to explain better. ‘It’s trusting,’ she said, ‘that look of yours. You’re trusting.’

Which was exactly how she looked at him. That very first look – first smile – on the stairs, a year ago, had been exactly that.

And once she told him he was beautiful. She was holding his face in her cupped hands and she’d sounded grave, perhaps even puzzled. ‘I’ve never seen anyone like you.’ Dark, was what that meant. Differently shaped, possibly, too: his face was – he knew – quite unlike most English faces, which were long and flat. The faces of some Englishmen were bone-thin, the skin taut and translucent across the bridge of the nose; whereas on others, abundant flesh had the look of potted meat. Most English people were either fat or thin, but – Rafael was sure – the cause was the same: their abysmal food, which either washed through them or somehow stuck on them. No good to a body. But that was when there was food at all, and a winter of hunger was on its way.

Rafael saw from his window that there were more people on the streets despite the downpours, despite the official cancellation of festivities for the feast days of St Peter and St James, and despite the armed guards, the liveried men of one
of the dukes, who patrolled on horseback in fours and sixes. The patrols had begun after the burning of a twenty-three-year-old pregnant woman, Perotine Massey, who’d gone into labour on the pyre. Her baby had been rescued by the crowd but thrown back into the flames by the sheriff. During the night that had followed, it’d sounded to Rafael as if every church window in the city was being smashed, and he’d willed the rioters on. On and on and on, through the night. And even though he knew it was impossible, he’d willed the clamour to reach Hampton Court Palace so that the queen might have to be told what monstrous act had been done in her name. She needed to wake up to what was happening; the people of England were in desperate need of her.

Despite the troubled atmosphere, more and more of them were coming to London. The failure of the harvest was the cause: the second year in succession, which was a year more than people could cope with. Rafael had heard talk in the household of widespread flooding in the countryside: of animals dead in the fields, and crops putrid. Many of the people walking down the lane beneath his window were, from the look of them, coming from the countryside in search of work and food. Whole families weighed down by bundles, and trailing children. They didn’t stop to shelter from the rain beneath overhanging first floors, as Londoners did; they hurried on, but not purposefully, because the same people would often pass again in an hour or two. Walking in circles. They might be exhausted, but they hurried, expectant, heads up, taking it all in. They were conspicuous and they knew it; they were self-conscious, wary, obliging, stepping out of others’ way.

That was when they were new to the city. They ended up sheltering, Rafael saw, but not as Londoners did, with a view to moving off during a pause in the rain. They didn’t move on until they were made to, because they had nowhere else to go. They crouched: obstinate, hopeless, confounded; not knowing where to put themselves. He’d seen – although he wished he hadn’t – such people relieving themselves in the lane. They did it surreptitiously and miserably, at first; but later, carelessly. One day, he witnessed a squatting child kicked over by a furious passer-by. He heard the child’s wounded cry, his outrage, and saw the mess on his legs. He felt for the boy, but he felt at least as much for whoever was caring for him, faced with that mess and no change of clothes, no water except from the freezing conduit.

He feared for Cecily. Food would be imported, but at a price: a price that the Kitsons would probably be able to afford but, as housekeeper, Cecily would be getting up in the small hours, into the stinging cold, and half-running for miles with her bundle of baskets to the docks, chasing rumours of shiploads. And the frantic crowds at the quays, her chances of getting through them and then, if she were successful, getting away from them with her goods and then getting home safe: he didn’t want to dwell on all that. And then, whatever she did manage to bring back: how much of it would be for herself and her son? How generous would the Kitsons be, in the face of their own children’s needs? And even if she and her boy had food, she’d be living among people who were famished: locals and friends whom she’d pass in the street, flinching from their slow, swollen eyes.

In a few months’ time, some of those people would be selling their boots and blankets for food. Wrapping rags around their feet to walk in mud and snow. And even then, some of them would have to tell their children, at the end of the day, that – again – there was nothing to eat. Absolutely nothing. How would Francisco take that? He’d rage, at first, Rafael imagined. For some time, he’d rage, desperate, and refuse to accept it, chucking blame at his father.

Why isn’t there any? I want some! Why can’t you get some?

And then? Weariness would take over and he’d suck his thumb. And then, later, to try to fill the hole, he’d angle his hand and suck the fleshier base of his thumb, wedging it in his mouth. What happens if a child keeps on doing that? – the skin gets raised, raw, and thinner.
Where is God?
That was what Rafael would think, to see those people down below in the lane. Was it really God’s will that people should starve? Children, babies? Mysterious ways, sins of the fathers: he knew all that. He just didn’t seem able to believe it, and if that was a failing of his then so be it.

The Kitsons’ front courtyard was flooded, ankle-deep. At Hampton Court, he’d heard, courtiers were having to troop around daily in procession, whatever the weather, in a courtyard under the queen’s rooms, and she’d appear in a window to wave. The courtiers’ display was supposed to be wishing her luck, cheering her up, but her arriving at the window to wave back at them was giving her the opportunity to prove she was still alive. Which it didn’t, to most people, from what Rafael heard around the household, because they were saying the waving figure was an effigy or someone in disguise. Mrs Dormer, the smiling companion of the queen, Rafael
wondered: would she do that? But he did believe it was the queen at the window; he didn’t believe she was dead. There’d looked to be nothing seriously wrong when he’d seen her. As to whether she’d ever been pregnant: well, who knew? He found it hard to believe that she was perpetrating a conscious act of deception; he suspected she simply didn’t know how or when to stop. If you were waiting for something – someone – how did you know when to give up?

Around the house, he’d often see someone at a window or door staring confounded into the sun-deserted sky. No one remarked on the sun having given up and gone: it was so horribly obvious that it didn’t need saying. At most there’d be a raising of an eyebrow, a silence that was telling. When Cecily was with him in his room, he quite liked the rain restive on the roof. They could be adrift on a sea. Inside his bed-hangings, he strove to do his utter best by her, to magic up pleasure for her and lay it on deep. Sometimes, though, he could do nothing but to drive into her and have her unyielding against him, just as hard, and marvel and marvel again at how strong she was, how definite.

One evening, when everyone was in place for supper, the steward stood up on the dais to make an announcement: the queen had come out of her confinement and would be going away with her husband for the weekend before resuming her duties. From that, he went straight into leading Grace, and then dining commenced in customary silence. On every face that Rafael could see – he couldn’t see Cecily – was a contrived
lack of expression, and eating was brisk: people were bursting to get out of Hall to discuss what they’d just been told.

If the announcement was true, the queen was alive and well enough to travel. And the marriage had survived – at least for now, at least as far as a public view of it. She still had a husband: she’d gone to him and he was taking her away for the weekend. He was supportive, he was publicly at her side. The glaring omission, of course, was any mention of a baby, as if there’d never even been a prospect of one.

To give up, childless, on that absurdly long confinement and offer no word of explanation: there was dignity in it, or at least an attempt to be dignified in the face of a humiliation that Rafael couldn’t come close to being able to imagine. To have made such a mistake, such a fundamental miscalculation, not just under the gaze of your husband but everyone in the whole world, from monarchs to peasants who hadn’t even known where England was. To know you’d be the subject of children’s songs and games for years to come: the queen who dreamt up a baby, who pushed out her belly and walked around wincing and rubbing the small of her back. The ageing queen who’d deluded herself that she was young enough to be blessed with a baby. And even worse: to know there were so many people who considered that you deserved what had happened. The Kitson houseful did, Rafael knew. He could see it. Not a smidgeon of pity in any of those faces, just a desperation to get out of the room and gossip about it.

In his mind’s eye, he could see the queen: the set of her face, and those bright, staring little eyes. He imagined her resolute busyness within a put-upon, pained air. The visible tension across her shoulders. Beyond that, he couldn’t
imagine – he couldn’t imagine how she must be feeling. ‘Dismay’ was a weak word for it. A fierce dismay, then. A scorching dismay. To have believed herself to be cosseting a little one for those many, many months. To have
been
cosseting him: breathing his breaths for him, eating his food for him, and at the end of each day settling him down, inside her, to sleep, while she dreamed up futures for him. And then to realise that in fact there’d been no one, there’d never been anyone there. Just herself, alone as ever.

For Rafael, though, the news meant something quite different from what it meant to everyone else in Hall. The royal couple’s weekend away was the beginning of the prince’s leave-taking, he sensed. A show of husbandly concern before he deserted her. This was the beginning of the end. After the weekend, the prince would raise the subject of his going to France. Rafael imagined the prince’s impatience to return to his life, his relief that it was finally over for him in England. He could get back to the proper work of a prince: ruling his lands. Ruling, not sitting around waiting to be invited to share rule here: an invitation that now would never come, now that the blessed marriage had been proved to be anything but. And England, anyway: why on earth would he want to rule this place? – a country that couldn’t even burn a handful of heretics without descending into anarchy. That was probably how he saw it. And there’d be no talking him round, Rafael guessed. He’d done his duty, as far as he was concerned. He’d endured more than he should ever have had to, and now he was off.

After supper, Rafael went to his room. He waited up for Cecily until midnight, but she didn’t come. He’d thought she
might, but wasn’t surprised that she didn’t – and, in a sense, he was relieved. He didn’t know quite what he’d have said to her. He didn’t know what she’d have said to
him
, but he did know that whatever he’d have had to listen to, it wouldn’t have been good. This wasn’t good news for her. Nothing had changed, and that was the worst possible news for her. Even bad news – what
she
’d have regarded as bad news, the birth of a healthy prince – would have been better, because at least she could have tried to make decisions. At least she’d have known what she was likely to be in for, at least for the near-future. But this: this just meant more of the same, more waiting, more nothing. An ageing, heirless queen but still, despite everything, alive, and still married, and still, presumably, with a chance – however slim – of a future pregnancy. Despite all that England had been through, for a whole year, it was back exactly where it’d started.

Rafael had no idea of what he’d have said to Cecily, but he’d have liked to try to offer comfort. She probably wanted to be left alone, which he understood, but he doubted it was for the best.

And, anyway, there was a change coming, for her. Hadn’t she realised? – he’d be gone, within days.

He barely slept, lying there in his bed while the hours turned slowly around him and drew back the night.

In the morning, Cecily, too, looked exhausted, and the child appeared clinging, fractious. Rafael only saw them from a distance – a distance which, he felt, she’d contrived. She half-met his gaze, to give him a brief, wan smile. It twisted his heart.
Talk to me
. She didn’t come up to his room that day – a day during which there was a burning, news of it reaching the
house by suppertime and spreading along the queue for Hall. The victim of the burning was a woman whose crime had been to advocate the Bible in English. How wonderful, she’d declared before the kindling was lit, to be able to hear the word of God. The burning had been bungled, was what people were saying: no one fanning the flames, the guards and officials battling instead with the crowd. Her legs had burned away to mid-thigh but then she had to wait until reinforcements arrived and the pyre was re-built, re-lit, and properly tended.