The Queen's Sorrow (19 page)

‘Sword,’ said the boy, to the floor.

‘
Sword
, yes, thank you, a sword in the stone,’ Rafael was careful not to falter, ‘and he says to all the men in England: “Next week there is a tournament, and who takes this sword from this stone, he is the true king.”’

He paused for dramatic effect, and to give himself time to remember the story that he and Gil had so loved. ‘Arthur’s dad and his brother come to the tournament, and Arthur helps. Two days, they ride; sleep one night in an inn. Then the brother – he is silly, sometimes, this brother –’ and Rafael slapped his palm to his forehead:‘“Oh! No! my sword! at the inn!” But Arthur says, “I go and get it.” And he rides. But the inn is shut: everyone goes to the tournament.’ A heavy sigh to portray Arthur’s disappointment. ‘Arthur comes back, but he’ – Rafael raised a hand and crooked it sideways to illustrate that Arthur took a wrong turning – ‘and he sees a sword in a stone. “Oh,” he says, “good: a sword.” And he takes it from the stone.’

Nicholas looked up at him, searchingly.

‘Easy,’ Rafael pronounced, ‘for Arthur. And Merlin comes, he says, “You are the true king of England,” but Arthur says, “No, I am a boy, I want to be a –”’ Rafael squeezed shut his eyes, a parody of concentration.

‘Knight,’ offered Nicholas.

‘“– a knight.” But Merlin says, “You are king. You are a good, good king.”’ Rafael stood up. ‘Tomorrow,’ he promised, ‘more.’ All the way down the stairs, he was half-expecting to be heckled but – thank God – heard nothing.

In the ninth year of his marriage to Leonor, Gil had died. He’d sickened and died in a matter of days. He’d had a stomach ache – Rafael could remember him mentioning it – and then he hadn’t appeared for a few days. Rafael hadn’t thought anything of it, but then the messenger had arrived with the news. ‘Are you sure?’ Rafael had asked the embarrassed man, in utter disbelief, abject with grief. ‘I mean, are you sure?’ Gil had worsened rapidly, doubled up and sweating, groaning his way through something like contractions; then sick, then pale, and no longer acknowledging any pain. How could it have happened? – he’d always been so full of life; and a doctor, too. And Rafael’s best friend. The only person who’d ever understood him. Except that had stopped long ago, hadn’t it, even if Gil – good, loyal, Gil – hadn’t known it. Not sure if Leonor would receive him, Rafael went to see her. She was polite but distant.

Rafael continued with the Arthur stories – for two days on the top step, and thereafter in the relative comfort of his room
where they took up position, cross-legged, at opposite ends of the bed. Nicholas hadn’t spoken again, he just stared at Rafael as if defying him to look away, which Rafael never did, or not until he was saying, ‘And that’s enough, now, for today.’ He described Lord Pellinore’s challenge to the new king, and his eventual, glad capitulation; the handing over of Excalibur from the depths; the foundation of Camelot and the round table; and the marriage to Guinevere and arrival of Lancelot, that brave, loyal knight who was to become Arthur’s best friend.

The kitchen boy died, and although Rafael didn’t see Cecily at all for a week afterwards, Nicholas still turned up daily for his story, peering through the door which Rafael had left ajar, waiting to be invited inside. Even when Rafael had finally had the troublesome tooth pulled and pain reverberated high-pitched in his jawbone, he had to manage the storytelling: sitting there, composed, on the end of the bed when he longed to collapse on to it and shove his head under a pillow.

With similarly spectacular bad timing, the Spanish office had chosen the day of the tooth extraction to call him in to listen to apologies, explanations and assurances from someone senior they’d rustled up. Word had come from Rafael’s contact in Spain and, clearly, whatever the officials had heard had persuaded them of their earlier mistake. While Rafael nursed his jaw, the contrite nobleman assured him that his continued presence was much appreciated and that the sundial project was dear to the prince’s heart. Funding was now on its way, he claimed, and the sundial could celebrate the birth of the prince. That was all very well, Rafael countered, but the royal
baby wasn’t due for three months. He’d be willing to return in due course, but for now he needed to go home. More than four months, he’d been away. Apart from anything else, his family was having to rely on his brother to provide for them. He needed to get back to Spain to do some paid work. The situation was absurd.

There was no answer to that; the officials and their nobleman merely looked hurt. Rafael told them that if they couldn’t arrange passage home for him within a fortnight, he’d do it himself. In truth, though, he had no idea how he’d afford it.

Trying to take his mind off the situation, and to pass the time, he’d begun to do his walks around London again. With the exception of when he was telling Arthur stories to Nicholas, walking around the city was better than sitting in the Kitsons’ house. He’d done enough of that during the past four or five months, and now there was no Cecily for company. Not that his walks were in the least cheering. Leafless trees could have looked delicate with their tracery of bare branches but in reality were stark and grotesque. Holly – so admired, it seemed, by the English – looked reptilian to him. Several times on his walks he passed groups of friars – Franciscan, Dominican – and this was new: back in December, there’d been no friars. They were returning, he guessed, from wherever they’d been in exile on the Continent.

Back at the Kitsons’, he began to see Cecily around, but she looked exhausted and kept herself to herself. He would have to give her time to recover. He and Nicholas moved on to the arrival at Camelot of Morgana, Arthur’s beautiful half-sister – but evil, if only Arthur knew it.

‘Why?’ Nicholas surprised him with the challenge.

‘Why she comes to Camelot? Oh, to –’

‘No.’ Nicholas’s hard stare. ‘Why
evil
?’

Yes, why? Rafael found himself stuttering through an explanation of how she’d been unloved and alone as a child. It cut no ice, though, he saw, with Nicholas.

Out walking, later that week, in the first week of February, he became aware of a swell of disturbance. There was always something up, in London – an eddy around every corner – but this was a commotion: doors slamming, people converging then breaking away and moving fast in one direction. Mindful of having been stuck at St Paul’s, Rafael wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice, and he didn’t like the look on these people’s faces. But of course he was curious, so he began making his way in their direction, but tentatively, hanging behind so that he could stop, turn around, find his way back again at any time. He kept his head down, caught no one’s eye. Kept his ears open, but heard nothing that told him anything. He had a sense, from the terseness to this hush, that something was being held back.

He came across the cause sooner than he’d anticipated; he’d seen it before he realised what he was seeing. The crowd had gathered to witness a man being shoved along by a handful of uniformed, armed guards. Suddenly, the prisoner arched, stretched out to reach into the crowd: startlingly graceful for someone in manacles. A guard put a stop to it with a prod to his back. On the fringe of the crowd, a bristle of hands had been thrust up in response to the man’s reach, and these
people rose forward in a wave which broke against two guards who stepped into the breech. A woman, Rafael saw, with children: a woman holding a small child and half-holding another, and around her legs more children – three? – whom she was also trying to hold but of course she couldn’t, and those children were scrabbling at her and scrabbling at the man. One of them was screaming: proper, adult-like screaming, not childish protest. Rafael had felt their lurch towards the man as if it were his own: his own blood crashing. The crowd lobbed words at the guards, giving voice to their outrage like no one would dare in Spain. Rafael saw now that there were in fact many more guards than the handful shepherding the man: there were guards linked, braced, tottering with the pressure of the crowd at their backs.

That was when Rafael saw what looked like a pyre. But they didn’t do that, in England: burn people. In Spain and countries under Spanish rule, yes, but that was one of the main objections of the English: that the Spanish were savages who burned people alive. The Spanish tied people up, made a fire at their feet and left them to it, to burn like rubbish. But the English didn’t do it. They had different methods. That was a pyre, though: the stack of wood, the stool, and the stake in the middle; the clearing all around it. Was this, then, some kind of display? A threat, an elaborate enactment? But if it was, the people didn’t know it because there was nothing fake in their outrage.

A man was officiating: Rafael watched him losing the battle, reasoning and imploring and berating and threatening all at once. He was utterly at a loss: just making a noise, or trying to, but making a lot less than the furious crowd. But
still it was happening, it hadn’t stopped: a manacled man was going to be burned away in front of these people.

But the English didn’t do this
. Their executions were done by hangings and cuttings: sharp, precise actions; the jerk of the rope, the slash of the knife. Not the chaos of flame. There was method to English executions: they were done in stages, for display. The body – usually dead – was acted upon, degraded in detail. Not burned away. Their savagery was of a different kind, a cold kind.

Rafael turned away. He could no longer see the manacled man and in any case he didn’t want to see – or hear – any of this. Whatever that man had done – the man being shoved towards the pyre – he had a family who loved him: that had been clear. A family denied a last touch. That bawling child. And this whole crowd: so many, many people, but helpless. And now here he was, turning and leaving that man to his appalling fate. But what else could he do? What could he do that this crowd couldn’t? Still, he despised himself for it.

He half-ran back the way he’d come but was too late to get out of earshot, because then it came: the cry, in unison, of disbelief. The fire was being lit, he knew: the touch of a torch to the kindling, the bestowing of flame and the instant of its taking hold.
There’s nothing you can do
, he told himself with every breath,
nothing you can do, nothing you can do
, but what he intended as a vague comfort rang inside him as a taunt:
nothing
you can do
. The crowd might still kick away the faggots, trample down the flames, cut the man free. They might. He could hope. He’d hope that the English rabble would do their best, their worst.

He recalled the nick of a flame to his hand and the reflex, the yanking back to safety. If there was no escape, would the burning – in time – cease to hurt? Wouldn’t sensation be burned away into numbness? He was desperate to believe it, but it was not what he’d heard. And, anyway, there wasn’t just the burning; there was the smoke, that scalding smoke and the smell of it: suffocating on the smoke of your own burning body. He made himself think of it because a person who didn’t think of it was capable of lighting such a fire.

He didn’t go back to the Kitsons’. He went instead to the river. It was flotsam-pocked, the swans slit-eyed and sour-beaked. News of the burning didn’t seem to have reached there, yet: there was none of the confusion he’d encountered in the streets closer to the cathedral. The beggars were serene by comparison. Men loaded and unloaded boats, verbal exchanges limited to the necessary. Other boatmen lolled, conversing as they waited for custom. Rafael envied them their all-too-temporary ignorance of what was taking place within walking distance.

What had that man done, to be burned for it? Heresy. Couldn’t bishops have argued with him, instead? Why burn him? He was being burned for having the wrong ideas, evil ideas, for denying God, for saying black’s white and for keeping on saying it, because what if everyone said it? It would bring the whole world down. Rafael knew it all – heretics were evil, they aimed for chaos and darkness and there was no place in the world for them; but he couldn’t stop seeing those hands reaching for that man, those little hands, and he couldn’t reconcile it. Would that man really have wanted chaos and darkness for those children of his?