The Queen's Sorrow (35 page)
Read The Queen's Sorrow Online
Authors: Suzannah Dunn
Tags: #Royalty, #Fiction - Historical, #16th Century, #Tudors, #England/Great Britain
The steward answered simply, ‘Yes,’ and suddenly
surprised
was a euphemism. She’d been distressed: that was the implication of his abrupt, unequivocal
Yes
.
‘And she’s not back?’ But he knew she wasn’t back. The steward had said she wasn’t back.
All he got now was a shake of the head.
His intention had been to make for the kitchen, but instead he retreated to his room to nurse his unease. Sitting on his floor, knees clasped, back against the bed, he reminded himself that the queen had taken Cecily and Nicholas’s plight to her heart. He’d seen her sorrow with his own eyes. The duke’s men had come for Cecily and Nicholas because there was no safer way, at this troubled time, to accompany a woman and child across the city. Cecily had been distressed because she hadn’t yet known why they’d come for her. And if it’d happened sooner than he’d anticipated, wasn’t that good? All this he told himself over and over again, but his disquiet persisted and he remained on the floor until the dogs were let out, their claws clicking over the cobblestones beneath his window. Hearing the steward’s soft call for their return, he hauled himself up and got into bed.
He’d ended up leaving late, not that he’d been holding all that much hope of Cecily’s return. He’d reckoned on a quarter of an hour for the walk to London Bridge, but the sundial on St Benet’s showed that he’d taken that long just to get down Lombard Street. He was finding the walk hard going. He’d had a bad night. The day was unusually warm and he was burdened with his cloak. Turning into Gracechurch Street, heading south, he squinted against the sun and, above his left eye, the thumb pressure began again.
By the time Gracechurch Street became New Fish Street, the pain was flaring into the socket. He stopped – someone bumping into him – to press it with the heel of his palm. Somewhere nearby, a child was crying: a frantic crying that he recognised from the aftermath of battles with Francisco when protest had given way to helplessness and despair. The eye began to stream and he ducked into a lane for respite from the sun’s glare. The bawling child was in the lane but at a distance and about to disappear around a corner. A boy, about Francisco’s age. He was lagging behind an adult, or he was from one of the houses. In no time, someone would swoop back for him or bundle him indoors.
One side of the lane was so deep in shade as to be invisible. Rafael blinked hard, twice, and pressed the throbbing eye before trying again, scanning the row of dark buildings. He glimpsed the child being embraced by a little companion. The eye welled; wiping it, he saw that he’d been mistaken and the boy was still alone. Very alone, he realised suddenly; hence the crying. The boy was desperately alone, throwing himself on the mercy of the deserted lane. Rafael took a few steps up the lane, and the child became Nicholas. He slapped a hand over his bad eye, but the child remained Nicholas; the child
was
Nicholas
. Definitely Nicholas. And no Cecily. Rafael’s chest contracted with such violence that he clutched at it. Around the corner came a woman; she tentatively approached the boy, bending down to him. He blared his distress into her face. She straightened, a hand on his shoulder, and glanced around, called up the lane. A man appeared, similarly reticent at first but then he too was shouting. A single step backwards so dizzied Rafael that he vomited. When he’d steadied himself
enough to be able to look up, he saw that doors had opened and more people had arrived. A crowd: a crowd had gathered around Nicholas, and it was outraged on his behalf. With hands on his head, his shoulders, between his little shoulder blades, people were shepherding him up the lane, proclaiming the news ahead.
In the end, Rafael wasn’t up on deck with everyone else to witness England dwindling. He lay on his bunk, all around him the jockeying of timber and waves. And so he had no sense of leaving England, only of giving himself over to the sea.
Rafael de Prado, Antonio Gomez, and the members of the Kitson household are my own invention. In all other respects, I have aimed for historical accuracy.
For further information about about the writing of this book, please visit www.suzannahdunn.co.uk.
Many, many thanks to David and Vincent, for putting up with me – most of the time! – while this book was being written, which took some doing; Antony Topping of Greene and Heaton and Clare Smith of HarperCollins, for their very hard work on my behalf, their ideas and limitless good humour, patience and kindness; Jo Adams and Carol Painter, for so often letting me have the run of their lovely Bird-combe Cottage, where much of this book was written; Malcolm Knight, Secretary of the Thames Traditional Rowing Association (see www.traditionalrowing.com), for information on – you guessed it – rowing on the Thames during the Tudor era; and Matt Bates, who knows a thing or two about old queens.
The following books were very useful to me:
Erickson, Carolly,
Bloody Mary, The life of Mary Tudor
(Dent, 1987; Robson Books, 1995)
Loades, D.M.,
Mary Tudor: A life
(Basil Blackwell, 1989)
Picard, Liza,
Elizabeth’s London
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003; Phoenix, 2004)
Prockter, A., and Taylor, R.,
The A to Z of Elizabethan London
(Harry Margary, Lympne Castle, Kent, in association with Guildhall Library, London, 1979)
Ridley, Jasper,
The life and times of Mary Tudor
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973)
Weir, Alison,
Children of England: The Heirs of Henry VIII
(Jonathan Cape, 1996; Pimlico, 1997)
SUZANNAH DUNN
is the author of ten books of fiction:
Darker Days Than Usual, Quite Contrary, Blood Sugar, Past Caring, Venus Flaring, Tenterhooks, Commencing Our Descent, The Queen of Subtleties, The Sixth Wife,
and
The Queen’s Sorrow
. She lives in Shropshire.
Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Darker Days Than Usual
Quite Contrary
Blood Sugar
Past Caring
Venus Flaring
Tenterhooks
Commencing Our Descent
The Queen of Subtleties
The Sixth Wife
‘The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.’
EDITH WHARTON
A Word From The Author
Things To Think About
What To Read Next
Reviews for Suzannah Dunn
‘To be able to look life in the face: that’s worth living in a garret for, isn’t it?’
EDITH WHARTON
‘True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision,’ claimed Edith Wharton. Few would dispute the truth of this statement, yet the process by which such visions are vouchsafed is a mysterious one. What is it that inspires authors to put pen to paper: curiosity, sympathy, passion, obsession? In her own words, Suzannah Dunn reveals what fascinated her about the reign of Mary Tudor …
We shy away from Mary Tudor. If she appears at all in fiction or films, she’s dowdy and earnest if not also vengeful and deluded. Her problem is that she wasn’t glamorous, to say the very least. Worse, for the English, she’s embarrassing: that un-English religious fervour of hers, and the pitifully public nature of her lifetime of humiliations and rejections. And so she was – and still is, almost five hundred years later – eclipsed by the success story: her half-sister, Elizabeth. We all seem to forget Mary’s own considerable claim to fame: she was England’s first-ever ruling queen. And hard though it is to believe it now, she came to the throne amid such jubilation, it’s said, as had never been seen before nor has been since. The English people were championing the underdog, displaying their much-vaunted sense of fair play. Mary – disinherited – had been denied her birthright, and the English people weren’t prepared to tolerate it. Mary’s tragedy was that, in her naivety, she mistook their jubilation for endorsement of her plan to return England to the Catholic faith. Within just five years, this once notably merciful queen was at war with her own people. And there she remains, to this day, as ‘Bloody Mary’.
Into an already tense situation came the hapless Spaniards in Philip of Spain’s entourage. The prince came to marry Mary (his maiden aunt) with his staff of hundreds of Spanish men. Someone had neglected to pass on the information that Mary had appointed a household in readiness for him, for which he was expected to foot the bill. So hundreds of Spanish men pitched up at a palace which had little room and no work for them. They were to discover that England was inhospitable not only in its weather (the summer of 1555 being one of the worst ever known). The English were dead set against their queen’s marriage, which they considered compromised their independence (Spain was the empire) and their fledgling Protestantism. The Spaniards were faced not only with – as they saw it – the Godlessness of the English and the relentlessly bad weather, the lack of fresh food, the legendary drunkenness, but were also overcharged, swindled, attacked and robbed. The prince hadn’t intended to stay long, but then, to everyone’s surprise, the ailing, middle-aged queen announced that she was pregnant and made clear that she expected her new husband to remain by her side …
SUZANNAH DUNN
‘There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.’
EDITH WHARTON
From Socrates to the salons of pre-Revolutionary France, the great minds of every age have debated the merits of literary offerings alongside questions of politics, social order and morality. Whether you love a book or loathe it, one of the pleasures of reading is the discussion books regularly inspire. Below are a few suggestions for topics of discussion about
The
Queen’s Sorrow
…
- Mary Tudor is portrayed in
The Queen’s Sorrow
as a tragic figure as well as, increasingly, a tyrant. How sympathetic did you find her character? How much of her religious extremism can be explained or even excused by her personal unhappiness and difficult upbringing? - What insight, if any, do you think the author’s portrayal of Mary gives us into other historical figures and the ways in which personal motivations can underwrite the political? Is this a discussion that is relevant to today’s leaders?
- The central characters in
The Queen’s Sorrow
are unfaithful to their spouses. How harshly should they be judged for this? What factors drive the various characters to be unfaithful? Can their actions be excused as a side-effect of the nature of marriage in sixteenth-century England and Spain? - Overall, is religion a destructive or constructive force throughout the novel? To what extent, if any, is the ideological debate in
The
Queen’s Sorrow
relevant to the modern day?
- Rafael spends much of the novel feeling uncomfortably ‘foreign’. What does his experience tell us about the sixteenth-century world view, and the ways in which these attitudes have (or haven’t) changed?
- Cecily’s position throughout much of the novel is uncertain – she is neither married nor widowed, neither upper nor lower class. Rafael is similarly an outsider. What authority or insight do you think this marginal status gives these two characters? To what extent does this make it easier or more difficult for them to act in their own interests?
- What would you have done in Cecily’s position? What would you have done in Rafael’s? Could either of them have acted in a way that might have prevented tragedy?
- How responsible is Rafael for the events at the novel’s end? Are his actions motivated by kindness, naivety or an unwillingness to accept the truth? To what extent does his motivation excuse the results of his attempt to intervene on Cecily’s behalf?
‘A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.’
EDITH WHARTON
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The Queen’s Sorrow
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Visit www.harpercollins.co.uk for more information.
‘After all, one knows one’s weak points so well, that it’s rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.’
EDITH WHARTON
Here’s what critics have said about previous books by
SUZANNAH DUNN
…
Praise for
The Sixth Wife
‘My, what a story … delightfully vulgar and utterly compelling.’
The Times
‘Suzannah Dunn … weaves … a love story that is both moving and believable … of second chances at love, and passion reawakened.’
Telegraph
‘Mesmerising and beautifully written.’
Scotsman
Praise for The Queen of Subtleties
‘Suzannah Dunn is, as ever, a mistress at describing the material world through which her characters move.’
Guardian
‘A boisterous historical recreation.’
Independent
‘
The Queen of Subtleties
offers a stunningly refreshing way of retelling an old story … I really could not put this one down.’
ALISON WEIR
