The Queen's Sorrow (13 page)

That seemed to please her. One more, a pink: ‘Lady-blush.’

‘Lady …?’

‘Blush.’ She patted her cheeks, raised her eyebrows.

Oh. He smiled.
Blush
.

She put them back, then pointed into the pouch at another: ‘Pound-citron.’ She was matter-of-fact, now. Another: ‘Brazil.’ A last one: ‘Isabella-colour.’ Then, busying herself back with her embroidery: ‘My father was a wool merchant. We lived on a farm.’

A wool merchant, a sheep farm. Big business. The annual shearing, and wool-winders descending, setting up camp while they cleaned the wool and packed it for bringing to London for grading and packing again for export. The year-round busyness of a farm, too, not just with the ploughing and sowing and harvesting, but the endless ditching and weeding and repairing. Back at the house – as at any manor house – the brewing and egg-collecting and cheese-making, candle-making and butchery. And there’d have been an office for the collection and collation of tithes and rents, and the keeping of accounts. Big money in English wool. How, then, had she ended up here? Hers was a valued and responsible role in the Kitson household, but all the same she was a servant.

‘Your father?’ she asked him.

‘Doctor.’

She nodded in approval.

‘And one brother, a doctor.’ He refrained from saying the other two were priests.

‘But not you.’ She said it with a smile.

‘Not me.’ He returned the smile. She knew what he did for his work, but he worried that she didn’t fully understand why he wasn’t working here. He wondered if he should try explaining it again, but she was asking, ‘Your father …?’ Full of concern: asking if his father was alive.

‘No. But my mother, yes.’

‘Oh.’ Careful: sympathy for the death of his father, thankful that his mother was alive.

‘You?’ he dared.

She lowered her eyes, shook her head. ‘Fifty-one.’

He had to grasp the number itself before he could recall the English sickness of 1551, the closing of the ports in his country to ships from hers. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, and she glanced up from her work in acknowledgement of it. And then that seemed to be it, for the evening: no more was said.

Later that night, Rafael recalled Francisco’s very first encounter with the notion of death: how his little boy’s reaction had shaken him.
But people don’t want to die!
– his outrage, his distress had been immediate and unequivocal. How had he known? He’d never been told, it’d never been discussed – he was three years old – but he knew.

It was something everyone knew.

Cecily’s countryside childhood came up again when, a few days later, they went blackberrying. Rafael was delighted to be asked along. Quite an occasion, this trip, to judge from her bustling preparations. The morning was glorious, the first in all the time since his arrival. Richard was to drive them. ‘Up to Shoreditch,’ Cecily said. Even Nicholas looked pleased at the prospect, but no one matched the dog’s excitement: he was first into the cart, and no one admonished him.

Richard drove along Threadneedle Street, then Bishopsgate Street. From up in the cart, Rafael could occasionally see over walls into gardens. Many of the houses and other premises up this way had small gardens – some with simple sundials, which, for once, were of use – and even little orchards. Fruit trees, he glimpsed, and vines; other climbers, too, and rose-bushes, poppies and pinks, although none were in flower. Francisco went through a phase of picking flowers for Rafael, the smallest flowers he could find and a solitary bloom at a time.
I’ve got you a flower – look! – I’ve got you a flower, Daddy.
A solemn bestowing, a little drama: a gesture that he could make.
Oh, thank you, Francisco, that’s lovely, that’s really lovely,
thank you
. For several months, the house was littered with those single, spindly stems and their tiny, wilted flower heads, and Rafael was forever having to judge when Francisco had lost interest in them so that they could be tidied away. He didn’t always get it right, this betrayal of his son.

Where’s the flower I gave you, Daddy?
Or,
Hey! Who threw my
flower away?

Francisco came to suspect him, he was sure, or half-suspect him, incredulous though he must have been at his father’s disregard. He turned watchful; it was harder and harder for
Rafael to manage to get rid of those flowers. By the time of Rafael’s departure, Francisco wasn’t looking at flowers; they held no interest for him. The stakes were higher, there was so much more he could do, his world was so much bigger and faster.

Approaching Bishopsgate, they passed a site which looked as though it had been a religious institution. It was derelict – doors broken down and windows gaping, gates taken, roof tiles missing and timbers exposed – but some reconstruction had begun with two ladders propped against a wall and a pile of new bricks in one of the courtyards. Cecily caught his eye and read his mind: ‘No’ – shaking her head – ‘for rich people, a big house.’ And he understood this was no re-establishment of the religious order, but a residential conversion.

Traffic through the Gate was heavy, not only with vehicles but a flock of geese being driven to market. Whether there had been anything on the Gate – bits of bodies, traitors’ bodies – he didn’t know, he’d avoided looking. Beyond the gatehouse, the roadside remained built up. One cluster of well-ordered buildings just outside the Gate seemed to cause particular interest, Cecily and Richard gazing at it. ‘Hospital,’ Cecily told Rafael when she realised he was watching her, and Richard tapped his head. ‘Bedlam,’ Cecily said. Rafael glimpsed a big stone sundial wedged out from a wall to make it direct-east: no need for the maker to have calculated the angle of declination.

He saw none of the archery practice that he’d been told happened on the land outside the walls. Too built up, here, for that. Gradually, there were fewer buildings at the roadside. Cecily closed her eyes. Rafael loved to see her like this:
relaxed, in sunshine. He loved to be riding along with her. Eventually they arrived at what had probably once been a village quite separate from London. ‘Shoreditch,’ Cecily announced.

Flynn was first out, bounding from the cart and stretching himself on the warm ground to soak up the sunshine. Cecily showed Rafael the fruits to pick, the blackberries, and he was keen to do his best for her. There were thorns and he’d have to be wary, too, of nettles. He found the hedges themselves interesting, made of different kinds of vegetation. ‘Whitethorn,’ Cecily told him of the one that seemed to be the most common. He liked it that she wanted to tell him. When he looked closely, he saw that in some places the branches had been trained horizontally to give a sturdy weave. ‘Plashing,’ she called it. There were other fruits, too, less prevalent, as small as the blackberries but smooth, spherical and blue-black. He indicated them to Cecily:
These?
Should he pick these? ‘Blackthorn,’ she said of the bush, ‘Sloes,’ of the fruits, and shook her head: ‘November.’ The same – ‘November’ – for something more tree than bush which she called Bullace, and which, he saw, bore fruits with identical blue-black frosting but oval and bigger, like tiny plums.
November
: she’d held his gaze for a heartbeat when she’d said it, he felt. By November, he’d be gone.

The sun laid down its light, piling it down in a rich silt. Back home, sunlight was thin and sharp and on the attack from overhead. In this slanted illumination, trees cast webs of shadow. Sometimes Rafael’s own shadow took him aback, bringing him up sharp: so distinct, it was, and compact, solid-looking, advancing with confidence. The sun blessed his face,
his shoulders, his back. The trees fizzed with breeze; a bumblebee hummed like a bow dandled on a string. Both Nicholas and Richard were industrious. Cecily’s face had some colour, Rafael saw.
Lady-blush
.

The day should have been perfect, but Cecily was tense because the yield was poor. Apart from the scattering of plum-like fruits, blackberries were the last before the long winter, she told him, and should have been plentiful. She didn’t like other pickers near, Rafael noticed, which was because they were competition but could also have been because many of them were so obviously armed, firearms slung over their shoulders. Whenever anyone else was around, Rafael kept quiet, kept his head down. He was even less protected, he realised, than in London. Had Cecily realised it, too? Did she see him as vulnerable, up here? He hoped she didn’t, and he hoped he hadn’t been foolish to come.

Whenever he glanced up, London was there in the distance, all spires. A city of churches, yes, but invisible from here were the ruins of some and the ransacked look of others. Seeing him pause to take in the view, once, Cecily confided, ‘I don’t like London.’

He was surprised: she’d never even hinted at it. ‘No?’

She merely shook her head.

‘You prefer …?’ He waved a hand around: open countryside.

She considered how to reply. ‘I come from far away,’ she said, eventually, in that careful English with which she spoke to him.

‘Me, too,’ he said, and then they both laughed. He’d have loved to have asked her more, if he’d known how. And she’d
taken it as a joke, his coming from far away, but he, too, had grown up in the countryside. Three miles from Seville, although he’d gone to school there and his father had worked there, as did all his brothers.

His brother Pedro’s working away every day in Seville was what had enabled his wife, Jeronima, to have her affair. Rafael tried not to think of it, but that night after the blackberrying, he was unable to stop himself.

Jeronima had had a playful smile but seemed to play with no one except, of course, her two adorable little girls. From everyone else in the household, she was pleasantly aloof. She’d been living alongside Rafael for five years by the time he was nineteen and he still knew nothing about her. But why would he? – he was a nineteen-year-old lad and she was an elegant woman in her mid-twenties, a wife and mother.

One Sunday, he’d fallen down some steps, leaving him shaken-up and bruised, his ankle twisted and swollen, and his mother had allowed him to stay home instead of going to Mass. He was in his bedroom, lying on his bed and thinking nothing much, as he often did. Thank God that was all he’d been doing, because suddenly his sister-in-law was in the doorway. He hadn’t known she was also at home, didn’t know of her own indisposition; he might have been told, but he wouldn’t have listened. She was in her nightgown, her hair down, and there was that smile of hers. She was inside his room and locking the door. He sat up, startled, puzzled as to what she’d want with him, but somehow she was already
sitting on the edge of his bed, leaning over and kissing him. The touch of her lips, her tongue to his: the physical effect was immediate and he felt both strong and helpless. What was she up to? Some kind of a game. Must be. A game he didn’t quite get. He would, though: in a second, he would, and then it’d be over, and they’d be sitting back from each other and laughing. Until then, she was his sister-in-law. Her mouth was on his. Two compelling reasons for shutting up and doing as she required.

Her mouth was different from Beatriz’s: that was what he was thinking. And she was scented: something floral. How clever, to be scented like that. Artful. Floral-scented and fine-boned: the bones of her back rippled beneath his hands. She was beautiful, he realised. She was utterly beautiful and he’d been blind to miss it.

But what was she doing? His sister-in-law, this glorious woman, rose, moved beside him – still with the smile – and then lay against him, comfy as a cat, before easing him over on top of her. A game, a joke, all soon to be revealed but, until then, indulged in. She was so warm. He’d forgotten about the warmth of a body and how intoxicating it was. He played along: kissing her, lying on top of her. With pleasure, yes, but merely playing along. Not to say that he wasn’t aroused – of course he was, but he practically always was, although never before pressed against his sister-in-law. He hoped against hope that she hadn’t noticed: if this was a game, he didn’t want to spoil it.

She eased him on to his back and knelt beside him, began unlacing him, unbuttoning. As if this happened all the time. She didn’t actually hum, but it was that kind of unlacing:
brisk, no fuss. Perhaps this was going too far: it occurred to him to resist, to put a halting hand over hers, but it was done before he could and, anyway, she was his sister-in-law and it wasn’t his business to halt her. That’s how it seemed, to him. It wasn’t his business to do anything other than comply. And be glad about it. His state was now obvious to her, but she didn’t seem bothered. On the contrary, she pulled her nightgown up over her head and dropped it to the floor.
Naked
. No: some kind of lower garment – he didn’t dare look but glimpsed it – which was untied by a tug on a knot or bow, and then that, too, was on the floor. And then she was naked, she was naked. He’d never seen breasts before and hadn’t anticipated that they’d be beautiful: but these, this pair, the swell of them counterbalancing her bony shoulders, and the delicate buds that were her nipples. But suddenly she was back beneath him: he was lying on top of her, afraid of squashing those breasts. Her legs felt strong; he hadn’t thought of her as having strong legs but, then, he hadn’t thought of her legs at all, just those long, pretty skirts of hers. And then he was inside her and then it was all over. She looked up at him with humourful exasperation – a ticking-off – but held him there anyway and, for some time, moved rhythmically against him, just a little, as one might run a spoon around an empty dish to scoop every last trace.