The Queen's Sorrow

by Suzannah Dunn

  But she took it, his story, with the faintest nod of acknowledgement. It was a good thing to have done, he told himself. It was to help her. It was the only thing to be done. And that might have been how Leonor had felt, he supposed. Leonor, his heart called across more than a thousand miles and back four years. Four years ago, he should’ve been kneeling in front of her, looking her in the eye. Leonor, he could have begun. He should have taken the lead from where he was, outside the calamity into which she was locked. He should’ve done it then, when it was a lie laid over their lives and not yet stitched tight into it.

  Because no pregnancy lasts eleven months.

  Something was wrong, here, he knew. What he didn’t know was what, or how wrong. And there were so many other people who were better placed to know: attendants and midwives and physicians. People who undressed her, people who examined her. The people who’d know: it was their business to tell her, when they knew. And when that time came, whatever it was that they had to tell her, she’d be ready for them, he was certain of it. She’d hear them. This was a queen who relished the truth, for whom nothing mattered but the truth – who lived her life to pursue it – and had always shown mercy to those who admitted it. They wouldn’t be cheating her of the truth, surely, when she was in such dire need of it. They’d achieve nothing by it.

  There was a relenting of her stare, an appeal – he felt – to him: How bizarrely similar our lives, it said, her look. He thought so, too, and – despite the circumstances – was glad of it.

  ‘My husband –’ she whispered, but there was no reticence; indeed, the hiss of the whisper gave it a fierceness ‘– he despairs.’

  Rafael didn’t doubt it. Her husband and everyone else.

  ‘He’s been so patient.’ She needed that understood, and Rafael nodded. Understood, too, though, was an unspoken but. She hadn’t moved a muscle. Could there possibly be a live, full-term baby inside her? Would she be able to sit here like this, if there was? Surely the baby would be testing its strength, revelling in it, dragging her around in its wake.

  ‘He’s ready to leave,’ she whispered, ‘my husband. Whatever happens, now, he’ll go.’ The same level delivery. She said it in order to face it, he sensed, to hear it said aloud. The studied absence of inflection made him uneasy: the effort it must’ve taken her. And it gave no clue as to whether or how he should respond. And he, too, was ready to go. She could have been speaking about him: traitor, deserter. He sat frozen as she was, buttocks on his heels, hands on his thighs.

  ‘Ten weeks,’ she said, ‘ten weeks since I’ve seen him.’ And her eyes moved, just a little, as if seeing beyond him. She was seeing nothing, really, though, he felt.

  Ten months: ten months since I’ve seen Francisco and Leonor.

  ‘I miss him.’ Again, no complaint; just the fact of the matter. ‘I write to him, every day. All day, I keep a letter going.’ Like a fire, he thought. ‘I know what people think’– she frowned – ‘there can’t be anything for me to say, being stuck in here. But there’s always something to say, isn’t there?’

  He didn’t doubt that she always had something to say. He felt that he knew what she was going to say next. His lower lip was skewered beneath an incisor, he realised; he made himself let it go.

  She had at last dropped her gaze, and spoke to her knees. ‘He doesn’t write to me.’ Carefully free of recrimination. ‘Not unless there’s business to be dealt with. But men don’t, do they? Write. Find things to say.’ She corrected herself. ‘Most men.’

  Then, looking up again: ‘He does ask me if I’m well. Whenever he writes, he asks if I’m well. And I am,’ she said, as if it had just occurred to her and surprised her but somehow didn’t particularly please her. ‘I am well.’

  And she looked it, or didn’t look unwell. Rafael found himself taking a breath, as if he were about to speak; it seemed time for him to speak, although he had no idea what he’d say. But she was already saying, ‘I’m glad I never escaped to Spain. My brother’s men were plotting to have me killed, but I could’ve escaped to Spain. It was all planned. I dressed as a maid and went one night with Mrs Dormer to the boat. But I turned around. I had God’s work to do here.’ She sighed hugely, and closed her eyes. ‘Still do. It’s still all to do.’ More – much more – than she’d bargained for, he realised. Suddenly, her eyes opened, shining. ‘And I do it.’ Said like a pledge.

  But she didn’t know what was being done on her behalf, in her name, while she was closeted in here. Rafael did know, and knew he should say so. The English people were shut away from their queen’s mercy. The Church was taking advantage of her incapacity, and losing her the respect and trust of her people. Speak, he willed himself.

  But she was the one who was speaking, daring with round-eyed wonder: ‘Has God abandoned me?’

  There was terror and dread in the question, but also sheer wonder at the notion of a Godless existence. All the rejections of her life, they’d been dealt with, lived through, endured, but this … The question had seemed to come unbidden. But it was what was inside her, this dread, he saw. It was this with which she was living. It was her life.

  He had no answer for her. There was nothing he could say to her, nothing anyone could say, and she knew it. And so they stared at each other – neither of them, he felt, daring even to breathe.

  Then, ‘I do his work,’ she said again.

  He did speak, he dared: ‘How hard, for you to know what to do.’

  But she simply said, ‘I do what’s right, Mr Prado,’ and sounded calm, her previously widened eyes softened. She didn’t seem to have heard the doubt in his voice. He was confounded, said, ‘The burnings?’ Said it gently, and said no more. Did she even know there were burnings? Let alone of women who had babies at home.

  ‘Mr Prado.’ She said his name with feeling, as if she felt for him, for his ignorance. ‘My subjects have hard lives. They work hard – so hard – and for what?’ Her voice was so low that he could hardly hear, but the words were clearly enunciated. ‘There’s never enough food. And they’re cold, summers as well as winters. Sick, a lot of the time. In pain. And their children, Mr Prado: their children die. They have to watch their children die.’ He flinched but she held his gaze in hers. Understand this. ‘And there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m their queen, and there’s nothing I can do. I can hand over some coins – I do, Mr Prado, of course I do – and they’ll buy food and firewood, but I can’t feed everyone in England, I can’t keep everyone warm, and I can’t cure anyone’s sickness. All the coins in my kingdom won’t stop a baby from dying, if that baby is going to die.’

  She waited for him to look back up at her. ‘What my people do have, in their lives, Mr Prado – if they’re lucky, and I dearly hope they are – is love. The love of their parents, spouse, friends, and – God willing – children. But they die, those parents, the spouse, the friends, a child. They go,’ she reminded him, gently. ‘But there’s someone else in every life, above and beyond all this, who doesn’t ever go, and that’s God. God’s love, Mr Prado,’ she urged, in her harsh whisper, ‘His infinite love. And when a life is over, that’s what’s there: the love of God. My people trust to that. They can go to God. God is the light in all this darkness, and at the end they’ll be reunited with their loved ones for all eternity in His presence.’ She paused; then, as if – regrettably – having to break something to him: ‘That’s what heretics take from people, Mr Prado: God. They take advantage of people’s innocence. Most of my subjects haven’t had the luxury of schooling, and heretics take advantage of that. They tell them they can ask questions and know the answers, which appeals to people with no learning. It’s a cynical play to their one weakness. Faith is not for questioning, Mr Prado,’ she appealed, barely audible. ‘That’s not what faith is. You question, and your faith is broken. Broken before you know it, and never, ever able to be mended. You break a person’s faith and you break them, you make them nothing. Heretics make nothing of people, Mr Prado – their lives, their lo
ves, their hopes, what very little they ever had or could hope for – and they do it just because they can.’

  He felt sick – hot, dizzy, unable to crouch for much longer.

  ‘The cruelty of it, Mr Prado,’ she hissed, aghast. ‘The callousness. The …’ she frowned, searching for a word ‘… disregard.’ Said as if it was the very worst that could ever be said and, hearing her saying it like that, he knew it, too: there could be nothing worse than a person’s utter disregard for a fellow human being.

  ‘They must … be gone. Every last trace.’

  He shifted, swallowed, and returned – a little – to himself. And it occurred to him: why, though, was it wrong to question Christ’s presence in the sacrament? How exactly did that turn other people from love? He tried: ‘Some of these people, though, they just –’

  ‘No,’ she was emphatic. ‘No. Not “just”. Never “just”.’ As if he were naïve.

  It was she, though, who didn’t understand. She was so far removed, now, from her people. He had to try again: ‘But –’

  ‘There is no “but”.’ She spoke solemnly, as if reminding him. ‘We are all in danger. If faith unravels, then there is no faith and we’re all lost. We have to keep God with us, keep close to God. Faith is not for questioning,’ she repeated, and he knew these were her final words on it: ‘You question faith, and it’s broken, and it lets the darkness in.’

  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.