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.
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.
He followed the lady across a carpet so thick and soft that the sensation was of treading in warm mud. They were heading for a girl of twelve or thirteen who sat separately, alone on the floor, her back against the panelling, knees drawn up and arms around them. Puddled around her was lavish fabric, plum-dark, veined with gold. She was an intermediary, perhaps, to be sent scampering ahead somewhere in the next stage of this strange mission.
Then he realised that he was looking at her. That was her down there, looking back up at him. Not pregnant, he saw in the same instant, and his heart slammed to a stop before it rushed at her to find her like this, enduring what was befalling her. He knelt in front of her, not because she was queen – indeed, he’d forgotten the necessary preliminaries, offered none of the requisite verbal flourishes, said nothing – and not as one should kneel to a queen, but lower still, sitting back on his heels as if to tend to a child. Her gaze was on his; stark. ‘How much longer?’ came from her, as a kind of growl.
She couldn’t be sitting here like this, knees up, if she were in the last stage of pregnancy. Or perhaps she could; perhaps she was just small. He didn’t dare take another look. Some women would be smaller than others in their pregnancies. She was asking him, How much longer? The question to which no one, it seemed, had an answer. But there was, he realised, something he could tell her: ‘My son was very, very late.’ He was shocked to hear himself say it, but also thrilled.
The tiniest spark of interest from her, with an understandable wariness. Carefully expressionless, she asked, ‘How late?’
‘Two months.’ For the first time ever, he was glad of it; he believed it or believed in its persuasiveness and loved it, and was grateful for it. He watched
her wanting to believe him, and he understood. After all, he’d believed it once himself.
All the same, she checked, her tone properly incredulous: ‘Two months?’
‘Two months.’ Leonor’s pregnancy had lasted eleven months: that was the story. That was what he had been told. He was repeating what everyone had been told and had seemed to believe. Repeated here, it had a purpose: to help her endure what she had to endure.
She entered into it, her tone hopeful: ‘And he was fine?’ But she knew he was.
Rafael confirmed what she knew: ‘My son was fine,’ and his insides tingled at the saying of it. Fine: the glorious inadequacy of the word. That was what had mattered, in the end: that Francisco had been fine. End of story. Happy ending.
Her eyes slid to one side, but unseeing: just to relinquish him and pursue her own thoughts. Then back to him. ‘Were you worried?’
He hoped she didn’t see him flinch. The question was genuine, he sensed, as always with her. She didn’t require him to say yes, to join her in her anxieties. Solidarity was of no interest to her. What mattered to her was the truth, and he could answer truthfully. ‘No.’ What he didn’t tell her was that he hadn’t been worried because he’d trusted in Leonor, and he’d been stupid to do that. Leonor hadn’t seemed worried, and he’d taken his cue from her. He’d trusted her. He’d had to. And, anyway, it was the story he was being told: late, late, late, later, a bit later, and later still. And so it had crept up on him: always late, which he’d never questioned. Not if late, but how late. He tried to remember how he’d explained it to himself, how he’d lived with it, and said to her, now: ‘God moves …’ in mysterious ways. And, with a shrug, ‘Women …’ mysteries aplenty. ‘And dates …’ difficult. In Leonor’s case, though, there’d been the unmistakable physical manifestation of a pregnancy. And that wasn’t the case here.
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