The Queen's Sorrow (24 page)

Once when he’d put Francisco to bed and all the good-nights had been said, Francisco added in his still-new, stilted, formal language, ‘I will miss my friend.’ Puzzled, Rafael asked, ‘Who’s your friend, darling?’ and Francisco confided shyly but with obvious pleasure and pride, ‘Daddy is my friend.’

The bell-ringing died down after an hour or so to become more doleful than celebratory, a distant tinkling instead of overhead clamour. Rafael and Antonio had braved the tables when some food remained to be had; now, the tables were crumb-littered, forlorn. Still no sign of Cecily. Rafael assumed she was helping in the kitchen, and, anyway, why would she want to stand around in the cold breeze? He was only doing so because he’d spent so long confined to the house, and because this would be one of his last evenings in London. He stayed watching, conscious of making a memory.

I’ll remember this
.

Here and there amid a mess of blue-black, gilt-edged cloud were patches of turquoise sky.

This is what I’ll take with me
.

A long, cold dusk wild with bells. The mustiness of beer and the spiciness of woodsmoke.

Firewood had been carried into the lane from the bigger houses and Rafael and Antonio headed for the bonfire with none of the reticence that’d been necessary for the food. Rafael
was chilled to the bone and longed to be standing too close to the fire, barely enduring the heat. When they reached the newly lit pile, flames were already tearing into the wood, unleashed on it and racing to make nothing of it. Instantly, the spectacle – its grandeur – had him stupefied. The insubstantiality of fire, but its unsurpassed savagery: he stared into the flames to try to make sense of them, to track their wild work, but there was no sense to be made, the fire was hauling in the very air itself and turning it instantly into nothing.
And they put people in that
.

Later, back in his room, he wondered again where Cecily had been, all evening. His preoccupation the last few hours had been with memories, but now the future turned around and stared him down. Cecily would grow old here and he’d never see it. And surely he should be glad of that, but glad was the absolute opposite of how he felt. And even though he didn’t understand it, he let himself feel that sadness and his utter desolation to be leaving her. He didn’t understand it: he loved Leonor, didn’t he? Yes, he did. He really did, often somehow in spite of himself. So, what was this, then? Well, it didn’t matter what it was – he was going home, so it didn’t matter how he felt. Already it belonged to the past.
T
his
happened to me
: he nestled it away beneath his breastbone, this sadness of his, to take back with him to Spain. It was of no consequence. It would just have to be lived with.

That night, lying awake, he tried to remember if he’d been surprised when, after they’d married, Leonor hadn’t got pregnant. Or had he expected nothing? Oddly, he really couldn’t
remember. He hadn’t felt that much about it, he suspected.
So
be it
. And perhaps, in a way, it’d been a relief. He hadn’t been able to imagine being a father – that, he did remember. He’d paid lip service to the idea –
I
t’d be lovely if we were blessed
– but the truth was that life was good or certainly good enough. Better than he’d ever imagined it could be. No, that wasn’t true – he had imagined it that good, of course he had. He just hadn’t ever thought it’d happen. But it had. He’d got what he’d wanted: he’d married Leonor.

Except that he hadn’t got what he’d wanted, had he. He’d wanted Leonor to be in love with him, and that hadn’t happened. He knew it.

And sex: they did have sex, but not often, then even less often, then rarely. There’d been no problems in the early years of their marriage, no shyness from her, and she took pleasure in the act, liked to be on top. No, it wasn’t her pleasure that was at issue, but his. There was nothing amiss physically, but he could never quite shake off the suspicion that his presence – the presence of him in particular, in person – was of no consequence to her. He felt he might’ve just as easily not been there: not him. He could have been any man. Certainly he never felt made love to, and that was what he wanted from her. She reached her climax with a muted sound, as if she’d been caught out and had to give in. It had the tenor of resentment, that small sound of hers, even though the climax was something she’d been striving for.

And then, one morning three years into their marriage, standing looking from their bedroom window, arms folded, she said, ‘I’m going to have a baby.’ Said levelly, businesslike, as if saying she were off to the shops.

‘Baby?’

She didn’t react; he’d got it right.

But she didn’t have babies: that was a fact about her. Two husbands, twelve years of marriage and now thirty-six years old. And as yet, no babies.

She looked at him as he floundered – that faintly critical look of hers that she always had for him. In this, too, he was failing: she had big news for him and he couldn’t take it in. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, pathetically.

‘Sure as I can be.’

They stared at each other.

‘When?’

‘October?’ She shrugged: hard to know.

He said, ‘Congratulations,’ because wasn’t that what was said, in these circumstances? He had a faint tingling in his stomach: everything was going to change and he didn’t have the faintest clue how.

Arriving downstairs for breakfast, Rafael walked into an atmosphere that wasn’t quite what he’d expected for a morning following celebrations. There was a blankness to people’s faces and a carelessness in their demeanour – platters and cups slammed down and dragged across tables. He might’ve put the blankness down to hangovers if it hadn’t been for that noisiness.

Antonio said, ‘You heard?’ and suddenly Rafael realised he was the only person who hadn’t heard. Antonio enlightened him: ‘No prince.’

Rafael’s heart clenched before Antonio elaborated, ‘No, I mean, there never was. Not yet. False alarm. Not born yet.’

But that was ridiculous. How could that have happened?

‘Palace never confirmed.’

So, a rumour had gathered momentum as it rolled through London, and galloped away.

Antonio smirked, ‘They’ll have to do it all again.’ But Rafael knew that’d be impossible. The innocence would be gone, the enthusiasm wouldn’t be garnered.

After breakfast, he retreated to his room, not even having looked around for Cecily. He’d resolved that he was going to avoid her – he was going to
have
to avoid her – as best he could until he left.

For the next two days he was successful in avoiding her altogether, but she had a hand in his dreams. The first night, he dreamt they were at the market and she was with Nicholas at a stall, conducting her business, the very picture of competence, while he stood with one of the household dogs on a leash. The dog’s neck was all muscle and he was rearing on his hind legs, desperate to be off. Rafael pleaded with the dog, appealing to him to behave, while passers-by gave him derisive looks because this was no place to bring a dog. And then the dog was loose, gone, the leash bouncing behind him. Barging through the crowd with spectacular disregard for obstacles. Boxes crashed to the cobbles and oranges rolled gaudily in the mud. Rafael was frantic; not for the dog – he’d be back – but as to how he could apologise enough to Cecily for shaming her. He woke and lay stunned, uneasy.

The second dream – what he remembered of it – was that he was travelling somewhere to see her.
Hang on for me, I’ll get
to you, I’ll get there
, but the distance was daunting and time was folding down hard on him. He was on horseback but the terrain was sand and eventually he had to dismount and lead the horse. Each step – for both of them – was protracted. Then suddenly the terrain was rocky, every step jolting his spine up into the back of his head, and some of the rocks crumbled or rolled away underfoot, snatching his footing or that of the horse. His back was slick with sweat and he was shaking all over. Then came rain, drowning rain. The air itself was water and still they plodded on, Rafael and his horse, even though he felt as far away as he’d ever been and – worse – he couldn’t go back because to turn around now would be as hopeless as pushing onwards. And then he woke, baffled and wretched.

How had this happened? He hadn’t felt like this for years and he’d assumed he never would again. And to feel it for a colourless, frank-faced, almost eerily composed Englishwoman, of whom he knew next to nothing. Love was done with: that was how he’d felt, before Cecily. It had been a journey – the journey of his young life, long and exhausting – which had reached its destination in Leonor. What was happening made no sense. He loved Leonor. Didn’t he? He’d just about always loved her; he’d spent his adult life yearning for her. He cringed to think how she’d look at him if she knew what he’d brought on himself with Cecily: amused, a little scornful, sceptical. Which was just how she always looked at him. He yearned for her, but she was forever retreating. There was no home for his heart in Leonor. He’d married her and had been stupid enough to think that was the end of it. In their married life, he was like a dog turning and turning,
ready to make his bed, ever hopeful and trusting, but kept there turning, turning, turning.

It happened again, four days later. The news – if that was what it was – came shouted down the lane and Rafael, up in his room, heard it: ‘A prince!’ The proclamation delivered in a laughing yell, the clear implication of which was,
Really, truly,
this time
. The first time in four days that Rafael had heard any reference from anyone to the previous mistake.

People were in doorways and on thresholds in a flash, but self-conscious, peering up and down the lane. Rafael hurried downstairs. The steward was already at the door and literally in an awkward position, his back to the open doorway as he tried to humour the restless Kitson crowd. Apologetic, he’d raised a hand, a palm, to hold them back. ‘This evening, yes? This evening.’ Asking them to bide their time, this time. If warranted, he implied, there’d be celebrations in the evening. By which time, presumably, there’d be confirmation or otherwise.

Someone had been sent to get confirmation, which did end up taking all day. Rafael kept himself to himself in his room until shortly before supper when he detected the return of the messenger. Downstairs in the kitchen, household servants had gathered by the door, obviously still curious but also clearly having lost heart during the day-long wait. Cecily was there ahead of Rafael and didn’t see him. The bearer of the news was soaked, scarcely recognisable as one of Mr Kitson’s secretary’s assistants. Self-important but exhausted, he slung them the news – ‘No’ – as he pushed through on his
way to whomever he was required to report to. Everyone dispersed without a word.

On his way back upstairs, Rafael reasoned that this was still before the due date, and first babies tend to be late, and it’s easy, anyway, to get dates wrong. Impossible to get them right. And, anyway, the longer a baby stays inside, the better. The bigger, the stronger.
Stay safe. Rest up
. The queen would keep stitching. All those ladies around her, stitching, pacing themselves through the days, taking the tiniest steps – miles of them – around expanses of linen.