The Queen's Sorrow (28 page)

He’d passed the night in a room in a gatehouse which was comfortable and peaceful enough, but he’d slept poorly, his restlessness having less to do with the unfamiliar surroundings than his fear for the queen. He’d seen that she was in the grip of her confinement and, until the hold it had on her was broken, nothing would change. It had to end soon.

In the morning he found the Spanish office and was handed a payment that was insufficient for the building of his
sundial. The officials had clearly lost all interest in it. He was going home, was all that he could get them to tell him, and they’d send for him. The office was mostly packed up. There were no letters for him but, he was told, a ship from Spain had been lost a week or two ago in the Bay of Biscay. On his way back to the river, he found the big astronomical wall clock that had been built by the old king’s clockmaker. Blue and gold, busy with roman numerals and zodiac signs, it displayed the hour, the day, the month, the number of days since the beginning of the year, and the phases of the moon. He read the time as being between nine and ten on the eleventh of June, and the moon was on the wane.

He was back at the Kitsons’ by early afternoon. He’d only been in his room for a few minutes when he glimpsed from his window a group of the Kitson servants hurrying away down the lane, Cecily and her son among them. Intrigued, he watched for almost an hour for their return; then, seeing them coming back, nipped downstairs. They filed in, grim-faced – a cold was doing the rounds – with only Cecily sparing him a glance. He responded with a quick smile, but a hello was more than he could have safely said. A hello would have spoken loud and clear of a week in which they hadn’t spoken at all. A week in which he’d altogether avoided her. If he said sorry, he was pretty sure she’d come back with,
What for?
She wouldn’t make it easy for him, and why should she? His nerve failed him, yet he didn’t feel able to move away.

She was busy with Nicholas’s cloak. But then came a pointed, ‘Look, Nicholas: it’s Rafael,’ which Nicholas obeyed, if warily. Even a four-year-old could detect the atmosphere. She told her son to run along, said she’d be following soon.
To Rafael she said, ‘They had news, these men we’ve just seen.’ She spoke as if he were somehow making her do so. She said, ‘I wanted to hear it for myself. To make up my own mind.’

As to its likely truth, he understood her to mean. She’d said it as if he were the one telling her lies. ‘I’m sick of rumour.’ Again, as if rumour were somehow his fault.

Everyone else had drifted away; they were stranded alone together.

‘And they were good men,’ she insisted, as if to counter some contradiction from him. ‘Serious, thoughtful men.’ As if those qualities were rare; and perhaps they were, but why say it as if he were disputing it?

He had to ask, ‘Who?’

‘These two men,’ she said. ‘They have a job to do.’

Unlike me?

‘They’ve come to London with the ashes of a man who was burned. William Pigot: that was the man. Burned for saying that we should be able to read the Bible in English. Those two men think we should know. And you know what?
I
think we should know, too.’ She folded her arms, hard, staring at him. ‘All of us.’

Even a four-year-old? Nicholas had been there, wherever she’d gone to hear those men speak. How much had he understood?

‘Those men, they can read and they say the queen wrote a letter last week to the bishops, telling them to work harder at burning Protestants.’ She’d lowered her voice, but it hadn’t softened; if anything, it sounded even more furious as a whisper. ‘Get more of them arrested, convicted, burned.’ Her
eyes glittered with defiance. ‘You think I’m a Protestant, don’t you, Rafael, to speak like this?’

He knew he should deny it.

She threw a hand in the direction of the kitchen. ‘All of us here: Protestants – that’s what you think, isn’t it? But no one here’s a Protestant,’ she warned him. ‘No one here’s a Catholic. In England, Rafael,’ she spelt it out, ‘no one cares. God is God, and, beyond that, no one cares.’ As if she were threatening him, she said, ‘People, is what we are. Human beings.’

Still, before he knew what to say, she’d added, ‘The queen thinks her baby won’t be born until she’s burned all the “heretics”.’ She quoted the word, sceptical, derisive.

She was throwing all this at him as if everything were his fault. Certainly he hadn’t been acting well towards her, but he wasn’t responsible for any of this. She was angry at him for everything. How easy for her. She spoke as if he were contradicting her, when he’d had no wish to do so, but now, cornered, he was coming close. He could question the veracity of that so-called letter to the bishops, but that would be quibbling. Instead, he simply said, ‘You think I like this because I’m Spanish?’

It took her aback. Plainly put, it was clearly ridiculous.

‘Spaniards are Catholics,’ she blustered.

He couldn’t believe it of her, especially not after what she’d just said. ‘Catholics!’ He dismissed it, his anger a match for hers. ‘It’s the same in Spain,’ he insisted. If he was Catholic, it was because there wasn’t anything else to be in Spain. But she wouldn’t understand that, would she? She knew nothing of how he had to live: head down, watching his step. His turn,
now, to spell something out: ‘I am from a country where the Church is Catholic.’ He added, ‘I don’t care what
England
is. Why would I care?’

And that was his mistake: he saw at once that he’d said something very wrong.

‘Yes,’ she countered, ‘why would you care? You’ll be gone in a week or so, and you’ll never be back. It’s nothing to you, is it.’ And then she was off, leaving him standing there, watching her go. Her laced-up back, the tied-up back of her cap.

He returned to his room. He’d been getting more and more tired since he’d arrived here. Never had he imagined it possible to be so tired. He lay down on the bed. Somewhere below him were footfalls scattered in someone’s wake on a stretch of stairs; voices here and there, sounding like idlings on a keyboard.

Darkness must have coincided with his own brief oblivion, because he woke in the early hours, the too-early English hours, and lay looking into the light that wasn’t yet light and listening to the silence which – solid – seemed to be listening back. Inside him, pain held its one blaring note. Because Cecily had turned and walked away from him.

Cecily
– he willed it to her –
Don’t hate me
.

But she did. She did. He knew it.

Please, Cecily. There’s nothing I can do. You know there’s nothing I
can do. If there was anything else I could do
…

But he sensed her there, across the house, locked hard away from him, even in her sleep.

And that was why, a little later, he came to be standing outside her door. Not to wake her, but just to be near her. That was all he knew.
Cecily, if there was anything I could do
. He
could be here, even if she never knew it. Because she’d never know it, his soundless trip across the house tucked away into these smallest of hours.

It was easy. The house had been abandoned, surrendered to night-time, and, lacking an audience, it lacked its usual glamour and failed to intimidate him. It hadn’t cared to stand in his way, had turned a blind eye and let him get away with it, floorboards mute.

And here he was, on the stairs outside Cecily’s room. He had no idea what he was doing; just that he couldn’t have stayed in his room. Here he was, keeping a vigil at a door on which he’d never knock.

Looking at it, that unyielding English oak door, he recalled something from boyhood that his father had taught him: how to touch a door if there’s danger of fire on the other side. Not as you’d touch anything else, with fingertips, palm; not openhanded, but with the back of your hand, the briefest touch of your bones to the wood. And then, if your hand burns, instinct bounces it back to you. Open-handed, the instinct is to touch, reach, hold on if only for the most fleeting of moments, but by then the damage would be done. He sighed.
Look at you, just look at you
: not even able to touch her door, not even to touch it.
Just touch it
. He put his fingertips to the cold wood. Then his palm, then his forehead. And there he stayed, for a while. And then he turned and laid himself back against it, and some time later he slid the length of it, squatted at the foot of it and hugged his knees. There in the darkness, where he didn’t have to explain himself, he was hers.

I can at least have this: nothing though it is, I can have this
. He’d come to her door in the hope of quelling his pain, quietening
its clamour, but the feeling he had was of something being worked beneath his skin, shocking and to be endured. He was lodged here on this tiny landing and she was behind that door, in her room, in her life with her child, in the room that was her home. He’d had a life, before all this, a life that had been his and, yes, it’d had its problems and imperfections, but he’d lived in it; it’d gone on, day by day, year by year, a life of his own with a life of its own. But now, for the past nine months, it hadn’t; it’d stopped, and he had no idea if it was still waiting for him.

He pictured Francisco asleep, how during his first year he used to sleep on his back with his arms thrown above his head, as if in protest. At about a year old, he was able to turn himself over, and he’d fold his knees up beneath him. He’d be kneeling, prostrate, in his sleep, and although he was folded up, this new position of his shared something with the earlier, open one: a fierceness of intent. Latterly, he’d slept as anyone else would: on his side, at the ready for waking.

‘When you’re dead,’ he’d asked Rafael, ‘can you move your arms?’ He simply couldn’t grasp the notion of lifelessness.

‘When we’re dead,’ he’d said, ‘can we be buried next to each other? Because then we can cuddle.’

Rafael knew he wouldn’t need to shift for quite a while – the household was at least an hour away from its very first stirrings. He gave himself up to the silence which rose around him and hissed in his ears. Only a little later, though, came the chirping of shoe-leather on flagstones below him, and then the scuff of it on wood, on a stair. He scrambled up a few steps, around the corner, and stopped. The person was heading up the stairs. The person was
Cecily
: that was the
pitch and rhythm of her footfalls. His own breathing seemed noisier than her tread; his heart, panicked, was throwing punches at him and thwacking blood into his ears. He was shaking so much that standing was hard, but a crouch would risk a crack from his knees. Half-standing, hands on knees, his noisy breathing was amplified, thundering back up at him.

Her door opened, then closed, and the silence down there washed in as if never displaced. He, too, stayed exactly where he was, didn’t dare move a muscle, didn’t dare even straighten. And there he remained, waiting for her to settle, to sleep. And beginning to make sense of what he’d heard.

He’d been outside her room for some time – and she’d been wearing her boots. Night-chill drifted up the stairwell like smoke. She’d been outdoors. She’d come back from somewhere in the small hours, the very smallest hours. So: an assignation. It had to be.
Got you
: a victory of a kind. He should try to savour it.
You thought I’d never know, didn’t you
, but he’d laid her secret bare. Perhaps not quite so much a fool.

Someone else.

But of course, he’d known, really. Hadn’t he? Of course he had. He’d known, all along, but hadn’t wanted to face it. And now there it was, facing him, staring him down. Behind him lay the year he’d spent in Cecily’s company, now shadowed. If he so much as turned around, he knew, he’d be going back through it, conversation by conversation, even smile by smile, to trace that shifting shadow.

He was still breathing hard, the air turning to nothing inside him as if he were ruining it by the act of breathing. Eventually, he relented and sat down, breathed a little easier, at
an utter loss.
Now what?
Bed, he supposed. There was nothing else for it.

Back in bed, he gave himself a talking-to. So, Cecily had someone, and so what? He had no claim on her. Nothing could ever have happened between them. What business was it of his how she spent her nights? Couldn’t he be adult about this? She was a free woman, free to do as she wished. And he should be happy for her.

He’d imagined a misunderstanding between them, but in fact she’d had no expectations of him. He could simply walk away from her and go home.

He wondered about the man whose bed, somewhere across the city, was warmed and scented by Cecily. He wondered if she loved him and how long it’d been going on.

Dawn deepened into day. He got up and got through it. At mealtimes, he didn’t so much as glance at Cecily, although her presence persisted like a thumbprint. Night dawdled but finally began sighing into the house around nine and he took it up on its desultory offer, headed for bed. He was desperate for sleep but it played with him and at first light he realised he was lying there listening for Cecily and her surreptitious return. If he was right about what she was up to, she’d be doing it again. Her return to her room had sounded well practised.

He lay there hearing nothing. He’d have to be closer to her room. He got up and dressed, not keen to risk discovery at large in the early hours in his nightgown. He’d be better prepared for discovery, fully clothed. He listened hard for her ahead or behind him, taking up position in a stairwell opposite hers.

Once there, though, he woke to the futility of what he was doing and its shamefulness. What on earth did he hope to learn? He couldn’t bear to imagine her expression of horror and loathing if she came across him. But he’d come here and he was trapped now, for fear of bumping into her on his return. So he stayed in the stairwell, cold and cramped and frightened, until what he judged to be close to five: beyond the time she’d risk a return, but just before anyone else in the household was around. Back in his room, he threw himself into sleep, only surfacing after midday.

The following night, he slept through, relieved to find himself delivered straight from sleep into a fully fledged morning. The night after that, he was unable to stop himself resuming his watch and felt cheated when he discovered nothing. The next night, sleep kept him in its grip until morning and then only reluctantly relinquished him, dogging him all day. The next two, he was awake before four and going about the grim business of surveillance, and it was on the second of these that he witnessed her return again.