The Queen’s Sorrow

Suzannah Dunn

For Peter Hunter

‘If God is pleased to grant her a child, things will take a turn for the better. If not, I foresee trouble on so great a scale that the pen can hardly set it down.’

SIMON RENARD, Imperial envoy,

writing to EMPEROR CHARLES V, 1555

Contents

Cover Page Title Page Dedication England, At Last Historical Note Acknowledgements About the Author By the Same Author Literary Corner Copyright About the Publisher

ENGLAND, AT LAST, in view: a small harbour settlement crouched on the shoreline. And rain, still this rain, just as he’d been warned. Mid-August, but rain for the three days – and nights, long nights – they’d been anchored offshore. It wasn’t as if Spain didn’t have rain. Plenty of it, sometimes, and sometimes even in August; sometimes lasting all day, perhaps even several days, but then done and gone and the sun hammered back into the sky. In Spain, you marvelled at the rain, you sheltered, you endured it. Exuberant, it was: a visitation. Not like this.

This English rain wasn’t so much falling as getting thrown around on the wind. It had a hold on the air; it settled over him and seeped into his clothes, skin, bones. He should go back below. Yet he stayed on deck as the ship moved forward. A huddle of harbour buildings and, beyond, to the horizon, greenery. Pelt came to mind: pelts; the land looked green-furred. Spain had green: from the subtle, silvered blue-green of olive and almond trees to the deep, dark gloss of citrus trees, and, in the middle, vines, the gentle shade of vines. Plenty of green in Spain, cultivated, trellised and terraced. This, though, here, this English green, looked relentless, creeping into the very lie of the land rather than gracing it.

Six weeks, he’d been told. That’s all. Six weeks, at most, in England. The first ship home will sail within six weeks. Do the job we’re sending you to do, and then you can come home.

England: a small, narrow island up off the edge of everywhere else. A far corner of the world, where the sea turned in on itself, wave-wild, and the sun was cold-shouldered.

What were they doing, now, back home? Rafael closed his eyes to see the luminous shade of the courtyard, risked a hand off the rail to touch the little sundial in his pocket: just touch it, because of course it was no use, calibrated for a different latitude, and anyway there was no sun. He didn’t know what time it was here nor there. But whatever the time back home, if not now then soon someone would be in the courtyard drawing water from the well: that particular, steady creaking of the handle. And even if the courtyard were otherwise deserted, there’d be the conversation of women behind the shutters: his mother, his aunt, his sister-in-law, and Leonor.

And Francisco, his little Francisco, who loved to crouch beside the well to pat the spillage. And if ever the filled bucket was unattended even for the briefest turn of a head, he’d skim it with his upturned palm, spoon it, let it well over his wrist and stream down his arm to splatter on the tiles. And then Leonor would call to Rafael to stop him, and Rafael would pick him up, having to brace himself, these days, against the strength of his son’s reckless, over-eager lunge in the opposite direction.

Someone had made a mistake. That was what Rafael had heard. Someone senior on the Spanish side was supposed to have told the prince that his bride, the English queen, had provided for him; not financially (not a penny) but in terms of staff. A full household – hundreds of Englishmen – had been installed for him at court. The prince – ever-diplomatic – hadn’t presumed that any provision would be made, so, despite meticulous planning for a smooth and inconspicuous arrival in England, he’d come with his own three hundred men, a month ago, to a palace which had very little room for them.

Various Londoners had been persuaded to take some in, it seemed. And now, Rafael and Antonio: belated arrivals, stragglers. Rafael didn’t mind the change of plan. This initial inconvenience, yes, of course, he did mind: waiting to be allocated a host when they’d already suffered five days at sea and then the protracted journey overland in pouring rain. But on the whole, no. It wasn’t going to cost – they’d still be fully provided for – and he’d rather lodge with a local family, he reasoned, than suffer the squeeze at court.

Antonio, predictably, did mind. No doubt he’d bragged back home that he’d be living in royal splendour. While Rafael waited at the office that had been designated to deal with Spanish matters, Antonio prowled around the courtyard outside, heedless of the rain, in search of commiseration with like-minded company. Which meant company other than Rafael’s. How did he do it? – make Rafael feel as if he were his father. He did it all the time; he’d been doing it for the five years that they’d been working together: making Rafael feel middle-aged. In fact, Antonio himself was in his late twenties, by now; there were only twelve years between them.

Rafael had hoped they might be dealt with separately, but then it was, ‘Rafael de Prado and your assistant Antonio Gomez.’

‘Assistant’: Antonio wouldn’t like that. He worked for Rafael on Rafael’s projects; he didn’t ‘assist’. Luckily, he hadn’t heard. The Spanish official conferred irritably with his English, Spanish-speaking, counterpart before pronouncing, ‘Kitson,’ and offering his notes to Rafael, tilting them, indicating the name with a fingertip. Rafael made as if to look, but didn’t; just concentrated on repeating, ‘Kitson.’ A relief: it wasn’t so hard to say. At least he’d be able to manage the name of his host.

‘A merchant,’ read the official.

Out of interest, Rafael asked, ‘Merchant of what?’ but the official shrugged, making clear that he was done.

Fair enough. Rafael stood aside to wait to be fetched. He leaned back against a wall, wishing he could also somehow shrink from himself. He needed to bathe. He longed to bathe. His skin was – well, it was there; it was a presence, where usually he’d be unaware of it, be at ease in it. Raised and tight, was the feeling. His dear hope was that there were no other ‘presences’, nothing having made its own little journey across from a fellow voyager. It was inevitable, though, he knew. Whenever he went to scratch, he’d stop himself, suffer the itch, will it away, try to think of something else. He could think of nothing but water, though: warm, fresh water. He’d had more than enough of sea water. His hair was wild with sea salt and his clothes stiff with it. But fresh, warm water, to lose himself in. Half an hour in it, that’s what he craved. The sea-journey had been bad enough, but now he ached from the wagon: there were jolts packed into his joints and he dreamed of soaking them loose.

Back home, it would be simple, he’d stroll across his family’s land to the shrub-veiled pool at the bend in the river. He’d undress, then clamber over the rocks to meet the glare of the water and – this, he always relished – stare it down for a few moments before his surrender. He’d sit there on the rocks with the sunshine on his back. Still sitting, he’d ease himself forward for the drop and then – God! – the cold would snatch at him and crush him, but his shriek wouldn’t surface because, like magic, the cold was warm. Warm! Warm all along. The trick of it. Tricked, and loving it. He’d wade and loll, gazing at the banks and feeling separate from the world, free of it.

Here, though, in England, in this chill, no one was going to strip off and brave a dip.

Two liveried men arrived, making scant eye-contact with Rafael and barely addressing him or Antonio. Between themselves, though, the pair shared plenty of comment, all of which sounded uncomfortably like complaint.

‘No horses?’ one of them asked Rafael; or barked at him, contemptuous. Horses, Rafael had to guess from the mime: the man exaggeratedly straight-backed, bobbing at the knees, fists paired and raised.

‘No,’ was all Rafael said. What he could’ve said, if it weren’t forbidden to let on, was, A thousand horses, and all of them destriers, no less; our Spanish ships sailed with a thousand war horses. But none of them had sailed into Southampton; they remained moored offshore. The horses were for war with France; they’d soon be sailing on to the Low Countries, now that the wedding was done, as would most of the men and – rumour had it – the prince himself, keen to do his bit but, as a new bridegroom, having to balance expectations and demands.

Not Rafael, though. No soldier, Rafael. Do the job we’re sending you to do, he’d been told, and then you’ll be out of there on the first ship home. Last ship in, first ship back. Six weeks at most, they’d said. He’d need only two or three. Six weeks at most, he kept reminding himself. He kept it in mind while – Antonio in tow – he followed the two miserable-looking men out of the courtyard.

He followed them and then, behind a building, around a corner, there was the river, putting a stop to the land, reclining on it, fat and silver, brimming and gleaming despite the leaden sky. A thousand yards wide, he’d heard, and, seeing it, he believed it. Chilly though the waterfront steps were, Rafael was glad to be there. There was lots to see, from nifty wherries of oarsman and solitary passenger to painted, gilded barges, canopied and fabric-draped, each hauled by its own boat of eight or ten rowers. Two of these barges were idling close to the jetty, self-important liveried staff frowning at the steps in an attempt to lay superior claim while their passengers made moves to gather up their finery. Another barge had just departed, heading downstream, presumably city-bound, gathering speed, its silky banners frantic in the breeze. More serviceable barges lacked the canopies but ran to cushioned benches. One drifted near the jetty, one was disembarking, its sensibly dressed clientele trying to clutch cloaks around themselves while feeling for handrails and accepting helping hands, its four rowers resting, flushed, their oar-blades floating placid. One disembarking gentleman had two dogs with him, on leashes, their collars as wide as their slender necks; they slinked ahead of him on to dry land. Behind the barges, workaday boats jostled for position with their cargoes of hide-covered crates, their crews with rolled-up sleeves and heavy boots. Horses, too, Rafael saw to his surprise. Gliding into view was a vessel bearing five horses. All but one of them stood stock-still, on ceremony, noses raised to the breeze; the troubled one was giving fussy jerks of the head, and an attendant was doing his best to soothe. Wherries passed by, distantly, in both directions, their hulls glinting, the passengers hunkered down and the single or paired oarsmen hauling on the water. Amid all this, fishing boats were biding their time: a couple of dozen, he estimated, on this stretch. And everywhere were swans, some singular, many in conference, each and every one of them looking affronted.

Rafael envied the swans; momentarily forgetting the cold, he wanted to feel his feet like theirs in the water. Suddenly he was impatient to be on it, to feel it under him, buoyant, and to smell it, breathe it in, raw and fragrant. He and Antonio had to wait, though, for a quarter of an hour or so for a small craft – unpromisingly uncovered – to be brought to the steps, and their luggage to be hefted on to it. The three rowers had sweat-plastered hair despite the chill: clearly they’d been busy. To Rafael, they looked horse-faced – these long, flat English faces with big teeth, where they had teeth at all.

He wondered how he looked to them. Foreign, yes, undoubtedly, but how foreign? What kind of ‘foreign’? He’d been attracting some stares on the jetty – he was aware of it – but that happened sometimes in Spain. There, though, it was because of the suspicion of Jewish blood. In Spain, he looked as if he was descended from Jews, as if he came from a family of conversos. But there’d been no Jews in England for more than three hundred years: would the English even know what to look for? Antonio had been attracting some interest, but that’d be because – despite his efforts to appear otherwise – he was with Rafael. On his own, he might be able to pass unremarked, here, his hair not far off blond.

Once aboard, they and their two liveried attendants were rowed upstream, heading north in the shadows of the waterfront walls of Whitehall, the palace in which they’d had to while away the afternoon. The biggest palace in Christendom, Rafael had heard. A whole town had been razed just to make space for the tennis courts. It had been built by the queen’s father, the one who’d had all the wives and killed some of them. The one who’d locked away his long-serving Spanish wife – the queen’s mother – and turned his back on the Pope so that he could marry his English mistress. And now, twenty years on and against all the odds, time had turned and the sole, shut-away, half-Spanish child from that first, ill-fated marriage was queen and married, herself, to a Spaniard, and this palace was hers.

And England was hers and, like her, it was Catholic. That was the idea. Or, at least, the queen’s idea. The problem was that the English people had other ideas, Rafael had heard. They weren’t taking it seriously. At one church, last Easter, the sacrament was stolen some time between Good Friday and Easter Monday, so that, come the triumphant presentation, there was nothing, and the congregation laughed. No one would ever laugh in a Spanish church. No one would dare.

And just as the queen had been mistaken in her assumption that her people would take easily to the return to Rome, she’d also been mistaken to assume they’d welcome news of her forthcoming marriage. The ship had been full of it, on the way over: the appalling reception they were facing from the English people. Someone who knew someone who could read English said he’d seen a pamphlet claiming that thousands of Spaniards would be living and working in London by the end of the year. Jack Spaniard, it said, coming to rob the English of their livelihoods. According to someone else, snowballs had been lobbed at the dignitaries arriving at the palace with the marriage treaty. That particular scare-story had less impact because no one knew quite how serious an assault that was: did snowballs hurt? Someone from central Spain was consulted, and – to everyone’s relief – found it amusing.

English women were shameless: that, too, Rafael had heard on the voyage, but he knew better than to believe what men said about women. He hadn’t seen many English women, so far, and had had only fleeting glimpses as he and his fellow countrymen had passed through towns, villages, courtyards. What was striking about them was their minimal headcovering. Certainly no veils. He’d worried that he’d look at them, exposed as they were. Well, he had looked at them. He didn’t know how to look at them: that was what it was. They’d looked at him and at his fellow countrymen, turned and looked, but as yet he’d never once been able to read the expression.

Like most Spaniards, all he’d ever known of England before the scandal of the philandering, excommunicated king, was King Arthur and his round table of knights. Back in his boyhood, he and his best friend Gil had lived and breathed stories of the English King Arthur. He’d forgotten those stories until he’d known he was coming here; but in his boyhood, as for so many Spanish boys, that for him had been England. Likewise for most of his fellow countrymen, he imagined. Now, though, he didn’t seem able to remember anything other than a sword-bearing arm rising from a lake. A woman’s arm, rising strong and unequivocal from the murk and weeds: Here, have this. Handy. Well, from what he’d already seen, England had no shortage of watery habitats. Ladies of the lakes could be a common feature, for all he knew.

He sniffed before he could stop himself. He’d noticed that everyone in England sniffed all the time, and now he, too, was at it. The prince, he’d heard, had had a dreadful cold at his wedding, within four days of coming ashore. Antonio’s nose and the rims of his eyes were red-raw in the wind. He was dishevelled: there was no other word for it. How he must hate that. His near-blond hair, unwashed and damp, was dark; the feather in his hat, lank. Not that Rafael himself would be looking too good, of course, but he didn’t expect otherwise. He didn’t have Antonio’s boyish charm. Mind you, Antonio didn’t have Antonio’s boyish charm, at present. And he was lost without it. It was how he won people over; everyone except Rafael, of course, no illusions about that. Here, so far, in England, it hadn’t been working. Presumably just because he was Spanish, people here turned from it, refused it. It was interesting to witness, but Rafael shied away from gloating. Because, like it or not, they were in this – this trip, this escapade – together.

On the far bank, there was nothing but pasture. Some trees, massive but lopped for firewood. Well, they’d certainly need that, here. A few patches of cultivation – vegetable gardens, by the look of them, although impossible to see from the boat what was being grown – and an occasional orchard. Nothing much, then, south of the river.

When the river curved east, they were at last beyond the palace and the cluster of official-looking buildings. This, now, was residential, and what residences! He’d thought he’d never see anything to rival the finer houses of Seville – nowhere in the world was as rich as Seville – and having been told that the English were a Godless people, he hadn’t expected such elegance. These south-facing houses had their own riverside landings and through the immense ironwork gates there he got glimpses of long, geometrically laid gardens, and statues, fountains and – defiant under the dull sky – sundials. In the distance, behind the riverside walls, were the buildings themselves of rose-red brick and their banks of twisted, towering chimneys.

As the boat came to glide alongside the city itself, Rafael’s overriding impression was of the many, many chimneys in a haze of smoke. This time of year, the fires would only be for cooking. How bad would the air be in winter, when Londoners needed heat as well? Above it all, though, reared a Heaven-high, needle-sharp spire. One of the men saw him looking, and gestured towards it, said: ‘St Paul’s.’ He’d spoken grudgingly, but Rafael smiled his thanks for the information.

Standing to disembark, he turned to see an immense bridge downstream. Just the one bridge – all crossings elsewhere were made via the little wherries that had been cutting across in front of and behind their own vessel – but if a city was going to have just one bridge …

‘Look at that!’ he heard himself say aloud. It was made of arches: nineteen, he made it with a rapid count. Just as impressive, if not more so, was the street of many-storeyed houses that ran down its length. It was like a whole small town afloat on the river.

At the quayside, the two men engaged the services of a porter to assist with the rest of the journey, which was to be undertaken on foot. The cart bearing the trunks trundled off ahead – two near-misses of pedestrians before the first corner – and was soon gone from view. Rafael understood why boating was the preferred mode of transport. The streets were like tunnels: narrow in the first place but made narrower still – almost roofed – by extended, overhanging floors above ground level. Timber-frame buildings. There’d be a big risk of fire even without all the fireplaces these homes and shops would be running during winter. Almost every house was also, on the ground floor, a shop. Doors flew open in their path, admitting and discharging a considerable traffic of customers whose elbows bristled with baskets. Many of them were unaccompanied women. Almost every shop also had a trestle table outside, at which Londoners stopped – usually abruptly – to browse. He’d never seen anything like it: these people clearly loved to shop. As long as you had money to spend, this was the place to be.

Some lanes were paved, but many were lined with planks along which everyone had to process. Londoners were, of course, much better at it than he and Antonio. Londoners were good at it, they were practised, they’d learned to balance. Over-balancing meant sliding into mud and muck, and within yards his boots were in an appalling state. One of the liveried men shook him by the shoulder to get his attention and then clapped his own hands to his pockets: Be wary of thieves. Rafael nodded his thanks, but he didn’t need to be told how to protect himself from thieves – he was from Seville. The problem was that he couldn’t balance if his hands were in his pockets.

He saw beggars crouching in the muck at every street corner, barely clothed, bootless, and often with children. He presumed they were children, but there was nothing childlike about them. Small people. Pitifully small, with scabby scalps and claw-like hands. In Seville, there were beggars, of course, by the thousands, black and white, from all around Spain and from the colonies: they all came to Seville. But here, in London, it seemed somehow different. Worse. These people – the small ones, particularly – looked abject. Because they were cold, perhaps that was it. Perhaps because of the smell of roasting of meats, which seemed to be everywhere here but wasn’t for them – that couldn’t help. Something he’d learned on the ship was that there was no charity in England. There was no one to do it; no monks, no nuns. There’d been no religious houses for the past twenty years, thanks to the old king. Nowhere for people to go in hard times but on to the streets. I hate it here sprang up in him and squeezed his throat. I hate it, I hate it. The choked air, the crammed streets, the pitiful children. How on earth was he going to survive this? Even a day of it, let alone six weeks.

A quarter of an hour or so later, they were in a quiet little street where there were no shops other than what looked like a glove maker’s. The two liveried men consulted a note produced from a pocket, waylaid the sole passer-by for confirmation, and then indicated to Rafael and Antonio that they’d arrived. Rafael was finding it hard to get his bearings, the sun hidden behind tall buildings and then behind cloud, but he decided that the lane ran roughly north–south. All that was to be seen of their destination was a high redbrick wall in which was a solid wooden gate overhung by a sign of crossed keys. A knock on the gate provoked the barking of some dogs and summoned a man in a blue jerkin that was a lot less fancy than the brass-buttoned, braided and crest-embroidered finery of royal households, but nonetheless had the look of livery. Tussling with two wolfhounds, he ushered the visitors through into a cobbled forecourt and there was the house: four-storeyed and newly built, ochre plaster and silvery timber, glassed windows glinting greenish. There was a simple sundial on the wall, a double decliner – north-east facing, then – that’d be no use except on the sunniest of mornings.

They followed the porter and dogs towards the main, rosemary-flanked door of the house on which was a large, interesting doorknocker: the head of some beast, something feline, a leopard. A rap of it got the door opened – and more pandemonium with more dogs – but then someone else had to be found to welcome them inside. And quite something, he was: a tall, slender young man with hair like golden silk. All smiles. Good teeth: just the one gap, but barely visible. The household steward, Rafael later learned. He made much of their welcome to the household, not that they could understand what was actually being said; but whatever it was, it was delivered with flair. Slick, was the word that came to mind. And slick would definitely do, after a day of being fobbed off. Rafael wished he could respond more fulsomely to it, make the effort to enter the performance, but he hadn’t realised how exhausted he was until faced with this ebullience.

The man moved them swiftly to a staircase, shooing back the house dogs, up a flight and then along a rush-carpeted gallery – its walls papered, printed with a design in orange and turquoise – to more stairs, three flights of them. The room was small and simply whitewashed, with a glassed window but no fireplace, and the daylight was so weak that he couldn’t immediately ascertain its aspect. Their two chests had been delivered. On the bed were two piles of bedclothes, folded. A truckle bed was perfunctorily demonstrated: for Antonio, Rafael realised with a lurch of despair; he, too, was to be in here. There was no desk. When the truckle was out, there’d be no room for one.

The steward was confiding something, speaking quickly and quietly, his eyebrows raised; he indicated the doorway, the stairs, perhaps the house beyond. Rafael felt this was an explanation and an apology. The house was full and this was all there was. Rafael was careful to keep smiling and nodding; Antonio, he saw, was staring moodily at the window. The steward wore the same blue as the porter, but better cut and better kept, and beneath it was a shirt of good linen, perhaps even Holland linen. He’d stopped speaking and was instead presenting one hand to Rafael, palm upwards; the other hand prodded at it and then at his mouth. Forking food? Then a sweep of the hand that had held the imaginary food, from the doorway: Some food will be brought up to you, Rafael understood him to mean. More smiles and nods. No mention of dinner. They’d be having dinner daily at the household. Lunch at the palace, dinner at the Kitsons’, both at no cost: that was the arrangement, or so he’d been told. Could they have missed dinner? What time did these people eat? The steward was going, bowing out of the doorway, off to shower someone else with his abundant beneficence. They’d been dealt with.

Rafael sat on the bed – where else was there to go? – and felt he’d never get up again. Such a long, long day, it’d been; it seemed to have started days ago. And in a way, it had – thirteen days ago, when he’d left home. Two days to the port, five days sailing across the sea, three anchored, and then three travelling through England. And here he was, arrived; only just arrived, but ready now to go home. The journey was done – he’d done it, come to England – and now he wanted to go home. He had a home, and the very fact of it was compelling: home was where he should be. All he had to do was turn and go. Yet he felt adrift, and despaired of ever seeing it or Leonor and Francisco again.

Antonio said, ‘I’m going out for a drink.’ He spoke from the doorway; he hadn’t come in any further. He didn’t say, You coming? And of course Rafael didn’t. He could imagine that there might have been a temporary truce on this first evening at the end of their very long journey. A grudging truce. But no, and he was glad, really, and relieved. They’d been in each other’s company all day and – the horror of it – were going to be in each other’s company all night. He said, though, ‘You don’t speak English.’ Meaning, You’re Spanish. And Spanish – as they all knew – wasn’t a good thing to be, at present, in London.

No one expected problems from nobles and officials – they’d be well schooled in manners and they’d have jobs to do and be kept busy doing them – but the common people were known for their dislike of foreigners at the best of times, Rafael had heard, to say nothing of when their reigning monarch had just become a foreigner’s wife. Their ruler: now someone’s wife, and, worse, someone who wasn’t just anyone but heir to the world’s biggest empire. Who, in this marriage, was to obey whom? Should she obey her husband, or should he, mere prince in her country, obey her? But he was her husband, and how could a wife not obey? Well, with considerable ease, in Rafael’s experience and, he bet, in the experience of a lot of husbands with varying degrees of happiness and success. But the Church, in its unmarried wisdom, saw it as impossible. A wife obeys a husband: simple as that. And, anyway, one day soon, this husband – amenable though he was reputed to be – would be ruler of most of the world, which was another reason, so the thinking went, for his wife to get used to knuckling under. They’d been warned over and over again on the ship to anticipate the Englishman’s ambivalence and try to understand it. Play the grateful guest at all times and never rise to provocation because the English – Godless people stuck there on their island – are barbarians and we won’t sink to their level. And remember, above all, remember that it’s not for long. Six weeks and we’ll be gone, diplomatic mission done. Until then, keep your head down.

So, how was striding into a London tavern and speaking Spanish keeping your head down? But, of course, Antonio had an answer, as to all things, unintelligible though this one was to Rafael. It was English, he knew: probably, A jug of your best ale, please, sir. Too fast, though, for him to grasp. They’d all learned some English during the voyage – greetings, pleasantries, a few crucial nouns – from English-speaking seamen, and Rafael had worked longer and harder at it than most, but what Antonio had lacked in application, he was clearly making up for in confidence. And so now here he was, ready for drinks with the locals.

Well, good luck to him. Left alone, Rafael lay back on the unmade bed. This is so far from home, came to him. Leonor, this is so far from home. She wouldn’t want to hear that, though; she’d want to hear about the house. What could he tell her? I’m in a grand house in London. Blue-liveried staff. Dogs, though, indoors. In his mind, he walked himself back through the house, the way he’d come, this time taking note and trying to glance ahead. Everything new, by the look of it: freshly painted panelling, the frames red, the insets gold. Tapestries with a sheen to make you blink. There’s a clock just inside the main door, Leonor, and you’ll know that I’ll be going down there to take a closer look at that. She wouldn’t be interested in the clock; clocks were no interest of hers. He sat up, but laid his head in his hands. Francisco, Poppet, the doorknocker’s a leopard’s head. Yes! Snarling, keeping guard on the house. I’ll have to be brave, whenever I knock. And there are dogs, too, inside the house. I came here, to this house, on a river; it’s almost as wide as you can see, and it’s so busy, it’s like a town in itself. Not just boats, but swans, hundreds and hundreds of them. And along the river are huge red houses like castles. Do you remember, darling, your ‘purple house’?

No, he wouldn’t remember, and Rafael himself was surprised by the memory. Francisco hadn’t mentioned his ‘purple house’ for a long time, perhaps a year or more, but back when he was two or so, if he liked something, he’d say he’d have it for his ‘purple house’. I’ll have that in my purple house: a little stool; an ornate-handled knife; a neighbour’s donkey. No one but Francisco knew what or where this purple house was. Nonetheless, it was well furnished. Long forgotten, now, though. He’d moved on.

What would I have in my purple house? Rafael laughed to himself even as he was aware of being close to tears. These past thirteen days, he’d been shaken to the core by how homesick he felt: the savagery of it, its relentlessness. Dizzied by it, was how he felt. About to buckle. Hollowed, as if something had been ripped from him. His chest sang with the pain and he was confused and ashamed because he saw no sign that other men felt like this. Antonio certainly didn’t. But, then, other men too would hide it, wouldn’t they, so there’d be no knowing. He hadn’t anticipated feeling like this. He’d often been away from home – sometimes for a couple of weeks – and had never enjoyed it, but nothing had prepared him for this. And because he hadn’t anticipated it, he felt tripped up, tricked by it, taken unawares and thereby enslaved by it. He couldn’t see how he’d get from under it, or how he was going to cope, to continue, from day to day. Common sense told him that he would, that it would lessen, but he didn’t believe it. This homesickness was going to hunt him down.

He missed his little Francisco – God, how he missed him – and in six weeks there’d be so much more to miss, because he was growing so fast. A head taller at a time, he seemed. Rafael felt that his son’s head came up to his chest now, even though he knew it couldn’t be so – but that’s where he felt the lack of him, that’s where the hollowness was. That little head. Rafael longed to cup the back of it as he had when Francisco was a baby; take the weight of it, enjoy the fit and solidness of it in one hand. His little boy’s hair, too: his silly blond hair, as Rafael thought affectionately of it. He longed to touch it, to relish its abundance. Not much of it was there when he was newborn, most of it had grown since – which Rafael found almost comical, and touching: all that busy, vigorous but gloriously oblivious growing that Francisco had done for himself.

What if something happened to Francisco while he was away? This was what had got a hold on him, these last two weeks. This was what was haunting him: the fear that he’d never see his son again. That he’d already seen him for the last time. A fever, a fall. An act of negligence by a servant, or cruelty from a stranger. An abscess deep in an ear, the poison leaking deeper. A cat scratch going bad, a loose cart wheel, a rotten branch, a misfooting on the riverbank, a kick from a horse … Anything or nothing, really: it could be nothing that would do it, in the end. It happens.

He longed to ask Leonor, How do you live with this fear? In thirteen days, he seemed to have forgotten how to do it.

But Francisco was so full of life, he was crammed with it and, if he were with him now, he wouldn’t be sitting around like this. Snap out of it, Rafael urged himself. Stop this. For his sake. Because what kind of a father are you to him, to sit here like this, foretelling his death?

And it was at that moment that he saw the child. The door had been left ajar by Antonio and in the gap was a small face, a child, a boy of perhaps four or five years old. Huge blue eyes, serious expression. From behind him came a reprimand, ‘Nicholas!’ to which he reacted immediately, scarpering. The voice had been pitched to reach not only the child but also Rafael. And now, pitched even higher, for him alone, came a word he understood: ‘Sorry!’ The tone was cheerful, confident of acceptance, but no less heartfelt for it. He was across the tiny room in two steps. He couldn’t just stay sitting there in silence: he should accept the apology. And make clear that he hadn’t minded. On the contrary, any distraction was welcome, even a mute child.

Below on the stairs was a woman – a servant, judging from her simple linen dress and blue apron. She was poised to descend further, coifed head bowed and nape exposed. She was neither very young nor old. She was very pale. A plain, pale woman. Not plain in a bad way, though. Tall, long-boned and broad-browed: that’s what he noticed about her. That, and how she touched the child. Over one arm was looped some fine fabric – clothing, probably, for repair – and her free hand was on the little lad’s shoulder, ostensibly directing him down on to the step in front of her but, Rafael felt, less a shepherding than an excuse for contact. He recognised the quality of that touch. Parental.

She looked up, saw Rafael, gave a surprised, ‘Oh!’ and a smile. It spoke to him, that smile, he felt, although it said nothing much, said only pretty much what you’d expect: Kids, eh?! That affectation of resignation which was in fact senselessly proud. He did it all the time, he knew, back home, back in his life. He would’ve loved to have been able to say to her, Oh, I know, I know, my own little boy … and he felt she’d have welcomed it. An easy exchange, unremarkable, but such as he hadn’t had for weeks. The possibility of which, he realised, he’d begun to despair of. As it was, he returned the smile and said, ‘It’s fine, it’s fine,’ forgetting his English and speaking his own language. She understood him, though, he saw.

The next day, Rafael and Antonio had lunch at court – a whole separate sitting for Spaniards – before returning to their host, as arranged, for supper. Supper was served at five o’clock, they’d learned to their dismay. As such, it would follow their afternoon rest. They’d thought they’d stay at the palace for the afternoons – finding somewhere to bed down – but now they realised that, tide permitting, they might as well go back to the Kitson household after lunch and rest in the relative comfort of their room until supper. The problem concerned afterwards: no doubt everyone at the Kitsons’ would return to work after supper for a few hours, but for Rafael and Antonio there would be the journey all the way back to Whitehall. And, again, there was the tide to consider. The cost, too, although the fare was regulated and reasonable. Rafael had been told he’d be fully provided for, but of course he’d come with some money in hand. Whichever way they worked it, there would be, most days, a lot of waiting around, some unanticipated expenditure, and two long return journeys on the river.

Not for the time being, though. Apart from a couple of site visits, Rafael didn’t need to be anywhere in particular to do his work, although it would help to have space to lay out his drawings. In a couple of weeks’ time, though, Antonio would need a workshop in which to execute the design.

Tiredness always made Rafael hungry, and, after a night of trying and failing to sleep in the same room as Antonio, who snored, his tiredness was beyond anything that an afternoon rest could have improved. And, anyway, it hadn’t been much of a rest. The palace lunch had been so heavy that they’d been unable to face the river-journey immediately afterwards and instead they’d napped – or tried to – in the uncomfortably crowded room of friends that Antonio had made. Antonio had then suggested that they stay at the palace until the evening, skipping supper, making do with leftovers passed on from his new friends, but Rafael had insisted they both put in an appearance back at the house. He was going to have Antonio behave properly for once.

He regretted this stand of his, though, as they paused in the doorway of the Hall at five o’clock. Inside, there were tens of people already sitting packed together, while others hurried to step over benches and slot themselves down at the long tables. Clearly everyone knew his or her place. Even dogs, he saw to his horror: four, he spotted, nosing among the diners and receiving the occasional indulgent pat. Beyond all this, up on its dais at the far end of the room, was the elaborately set high table, as yet unoccupied by the householder and his family and their guests.

Where do we go? He sensed people staring, and no wonder: he and Antonio were conspicuous in their hesitancy. No overt hostility in the stares, he didn’t think, but nonetheless difficult to take. He couldn’t meet their eyes, there were too many of them; and even if he could have, then what? He had the distinct feeling that, if he smiled at them, they wouldn’t smile back. They didn’t want his smiles, they just wanted a good look at him: stranger, Spaniard.

And then he spotted the steward in the same instant the steward spotted him, but any relief was dashed when he saw from the man’s fleetingly startled expression that he’d forgotten all about them. Even this supremely organised steward had no idea where they should go and – worse – was about to make quite a show of rectifying the situation. And here it came, the big smile and a scanning of the tables before ‘Ah!’ – raised eyebrows, raised forefinger – as if he’d known all along that it was there, indeed had reserved it, and had only momentarily lost sight of it: a place for them.

As they made their way towards the bench, Rafael saw the servant-woman and her son in the glow from a west-facing window. She seemed at first to see him, but no: her gaze merely touched his face before moving onwards unchanged. She was whispering, he saw, to her son. No one in the room was talking, but she’d said something fast and low, a mere scrap of words. She mimicked inexpressiveness but there was tension in her face. No smile now. The little boy’s eyes were turned to hers. Rafael recognised that manner of hers, both distracted and emphatic: parental, again. She’d been making something clear: I told you …; or, Didn’t I ask you …

Over the next few days, he found himself half-looking for her, because hers was one of the few faces he recognised in the household and the only one that didn’t seem flummoxed to see him. He’d find himself checking whether she was around, and feeling safer – more at home – if she was.

In those initial few days, he was kept busy learning the ropes. First to learn was the journey to and from the palace, which proved easy enough. Then, at the palace, a place had to be found for him and Antonio to work. For this most basic of requirements to be taken seriously, he had to make various appointments with relevant personnel who would then turn out not to be the relevant personnel after all. In the meantime, they had to pass their time there in Hall with their fellow countrymen who were keeping themselves busy playing cards, making music and – those who could – writing home.

His other priorities were how to send letters home and how to get his laundry done. The first was being organised, he discovered, by the Spanish office that had been set up at the palace, although of course he didn’t yet know how reliable they’d be. But the laundry remained a mystery. Having little English and even less confidence in it, he had to learn at the Kitsons’ by watching, and that was how, on the first evening, he’d discovered where jugs and bowls of clean water were to be had. Where this water came from, he didn’t know. There was no well in either the front courtyard or the rear; and although there was a very small walled garden adjoining the rear, south-west-facing courtyard, he hadn’t seen anyone bringing a bucket in from there. He passed two wells in the streets close to the house on his way to and from the river, and he decided these were the sources, although he’d not seen anyone struggling into the house with containers. He could now wash himself – and be shaved at the palace by a Spanish barber – but the problem was his shirts. Even if he could properly wash them in a little bowl, where would he then dry them? His – and Antonio’s – room was so tiny that they couldn’t even air the layers of clothes that were dampened every day by the rain, and Rafael was conscious of smelling like a wet dog.

His supply of clean shirts dwindled: the need for fresh ones would soon be pressing. Despite increased vigilance, he saw no evidence in the house of any laundry. No hanging of it in the courtyards or from windows (and of course not, in this weather). Nor any sign of an actual laundry room: no wafts of steam, and none of those fragrances of hot liquid soap and boiled herbs. His searches – admittedly tentative, because he couldn’t go barging down private-looking corridors or open doors – led nowhere. And Antonio was no use: he referred cryptically to an arrangement at court, the implication being that it was a personal one. He’d charmed someone to take in his washing.

Rafael could’ve made a stab at asking the steward if he’d known how to ask for him, but he hadn’t managed to catch his name and he didn’t know the English for ‘Steward’. And every dinnertime for several days running, to his dismay, the opportunity to waylay the man would somehow disappear. So, in the end, he was reduced to hanging around at the foot of his staircase or near the kitchen, looking lost and hopeful: hoping that someone would step in and fetch the man in charge. He hated having to do it, this wide-eyed helplessness. The staff were too busy to notice him, or that’s how they liked to appear. Busy or not, they were clearly reluctant to engage with him. And then, at last, after perhaps a half-hour of his hanging around, someone did fetch Mr Kitson’s secretary, who spoke Italian. As if Italian could substitute. They were bogged down in language difficulties immediately, but just as he was about to try to mime the washing of his shirt, the pale woman approached them. The woman who’d smiled at him and – thank God – here she was, doing it again, looking attentive and keen to help, unlike everyone else. Rafael said, ‘Madam, please,’ and then asked her in his own language even though there was no chance of the actual words being understood: Was there a laundry in the house? Then the inevitable mime: he plucked at his shirt, before vigorously rubbing his hands together.

‘Here? No.’

She indicated that he should give his shirts to her. ‘To me.’ She was so pale: her eyes were transparent and her skin had the luminosity of stone or weathered bone.

Whenever he saw her after that, she was carrying fabric and he wondered how he had ever missed it. She was no doubt a seamstress; she’d have been the obvious person to ask about laundry. Linen was what came to mind, now, whenever he saw her. Forget stone and bone. Linen: unfussy, durable, adaptable.

Still nothing had happened at Whitehall to provide Rafael with office space, but at last he gained permission to visit the queen’s private garden in which he was to site the sundial. He had no need of Antonio for this, and left him engrossed in a card game.

Doing as he’d been told, he entered from an orchard at the south, opening an unlocked door on to a vast gravelled courtyard. On his left, the eastern side, bordering the river, was the queen’s private residence. These garden-facing windows would catch any afternoon sunshine, but today the building was blank-eyed. At the far end, facing south, was a double-storeyed, ornately carved and gilded gallery, on which was mounted a direct-south dial. No one would be inside that gallery seeking shade on a day such as this. The centrepiece of the garden was a white marble fountain: a portly, pouting sea-creature depicted mid-flex, craning skywards, its dribble clattering into the basin like heavy rain. Dark, less well-defined figures stood to attention here and there in other parts of the garden: topiary girls, full-skirted and small-headed. Wood-carved, pet-sized beasts postured on top of twisty-twirly poles: a green-and-gilded lion up on its hind legs, flourishing paws and fangs, and a long-muzzled, mordant-faced – which was to say English-looking – hound resting on its haunches. All very pretty, perhaps, but fussy. There were many raised beds – a bed of lilies, one of poppies, one of daisies – and areas of lavender bordered by rosemary, as well as similarly shaped areas of clipped grass. Nearer the fountain, the beds looked different. Curious, Rafael crunched across the gravel to them. The borders of these beds, too, were low-hedged, but contained more ankle-high hedging – two kinds to each bed – planted in a pattern to give the illusion of two strands intertwining, of being linked in a loose, elegant knot. He crouched and rubbed a piece of foliage to confirm: thyme. Thyme partnered with cotton lavender. Peppered around the knot to make up its background were low-growing, spiky pink flowers.

He glimpsed one of the queen’s doors opening, and rose, ready for interrogation – Who was he? What was he doing? – but realised that he had no way of making himself understood. Why hadn’t he asked for a note in English to bring with him? The interloper was a solitary lady – absurdly richly dressed – and she hadn’t yet noticed him. Closing the door behind her, she came no further, leaning back instead against the wall and tipping her face as if to the sun. For a moment, he too stood still, but then decided he’d better get on as planned. He’d have a look, first, at that direct-south dial.

His walking around the fountain alerted her to his presence, though, and she came towards him at a brisk pace – how she managed it in that dress, he didn’t know. She advanced with authority; no wariness in this approach to a strange man in the queen’s own garden. He braced himself. From her stature – tiny – he’d assumed she was not much more than a girl, but now he could see she was in early middle age, folds bracketing her mouth, a line between her eyebrows, and a dustiness to her pallor. He was surprised to have made the mistake, because she had none of the softness of a girl; her shoulders were sharp and movements abrupt. She was so English-looking: fireside-dry skin, ashen but flushed, as if it were scalded. The smallness of her colourless eyes was accentuated by their stare. Due to genuine short-sightedness, he judged the stare to be, rather than any attempt to intimidate him.

She was all dress, parading what must’ve been years of other people’s close work, and all of it layered, furred, edged. She’d probably taken until this late in the day to get dressed. For all the effort, though, the result was disappointing. Curtains, was what came to Rafael’s mind. Not just the fabrics – splendid, yes, but sombre – but also the lack of shape. She was dressed in the old-fashioned, softer-lined English style – no Spanish farthingale – and on her thin frame the clothes were shapeless.

She asked him something and, small though she was, her voice had no squeakiness to it; it was unexpectedly deep. And officious though her approach might have been, there was no unpleasantness in her manner. She’d sounded straightforward, no nonsense, which gave him some confidence. He greeted her and stated his name, hoping he wouldn’t have to say much more. Surprisingly, she came back at him in what he recognised as Aragonese: ‘You’re Spanish?’

An English speaker of a Spanish language! He confirmed that he was indeed Spanish.

‘Welcome to England,’ she said in Aragonese, touchingly serious, which made him smile, although nothing similar came back from her. He wondered at her connection with Spain – she was so very English-looking, English-dressed, but her accent had been good and there’d been a naturalness in how she’d spoken. Not like an English person trying a few words of Spanish. Surely she did have some connection with Spain. She asked him something else but he didn’t grasp it – he couldn’t speak Aragonese. ‘Castilian?’ he asked her; he’d be able to converse in Castilian.

She shook her head, regretful. ‘French?’

No.

‘Latin?’

He could read Latin but had never been able to speak it.

In English, she said, ‘I speak French to my husband – he understands French – and he speaks Castilian to me, because I understand a little.’ She gave an exasperated roll of her eyes but, Rafael detected, she was proud of their complicated arrangement. She looked expectantly at him; he considered how best to convey what he was up to.

‘For the sun,’ he said in Castilian, gesturing – pointlessly – at the sky, then remembering the vertical dial on the gallery wall and indicating that instead. ‘For the queen, from the prince.’

‘Ah.’ Interest – approval – shone in her eyes.

Then came an interruption: a second lady emerging from that same doorway. This lady was younger, prettier, altogether lighter, a breath of fresh air, and she was all a-bustle, giving the impression that she’d been following the first lady and failed to keep up: ‘Oh!’ – found you. She collected herself, exhaled hugely, a hand pressed to her breastbone to steady her heart, and then she dropped into a deep curtsey.

Rafael understood at once. His own heart halted and restarted with a bang, his blood dropped away then beat back into his ears. Time had taken a wrong turning and was away before he could retrieve it and make good; he’d never, ever be able to make this good. He couldn’t believe what he’d done. He simply couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t have done it: no one could, no one, not even a child. Especially not a child: a child would have had an instinct. No one but he could have been so stupid. What exactly was it that he’d missed? He’d missed something clear and simple, he’d been busy thinking of something else, perhaps too busy translating. All he could think, now, was that, despite the finery, she’d seemed so ordinary. Her face was ordinary, and she spoke ordinarily. But, then, what did he know of how a queen would look and speak?

What now? He had no idea, absolutely no idea how to save himself. Everything – courage, imagination – failed him and he stood there like, he felt, a small child. She’d known, hadn’t she: she’d known that he had no idea who she was, and she hadn’t enlightened him. How, though, really, could she have maintained her dignity while she enlightened him? She was talking cheerfully to the other woman, the new arrival – ‘Mrs Dormer’, she called her – indicating Rafael as she did so. Mrs Dormer’s eyes had a mischievous glint. She knew. So, it had been obvious. It was that bad. Even though she hadn’t been there, from the distant doorway she’d somehow guessed from his demeanour – presumably from his lack of deference – that he hadn’t known he was in the presence of the queen. He longed for her – for both of them – to go, and then perhaps there’d be the tiniest chance he could pretend to himself that it had never happened. He would never, ever tell anyone. Would they? He wasn’t sure of the merry-looking Mrs Dormer. It was a funny story, to her, and he sensed she liked a funny story. He’d have begged her then and there, if he’d known how. If she did tell, what kind of trouble would he get into? I’ll get sent home for this: it flashed across his mind, lifting his heart.

Both women were waiting on him, now, politely interested. He did his utmost to look as if he were of service. Everything had changed: he was no longer a sundial-designer being waylaid by some woman, but a man being granted a personal audience by the queen of England. And he did what he should have done at the beginning: bowed fulsomely, abjectly, all the time horribly aware of the merry-looking lady witnessing it. Graciously, the queen was declining to acknowledge that anything had been amiss; she continued speaking, wishing him well with his work. She looked up into the sky and a note of apology came into her voice:‘… no sun here …’ she was saying. And then they headed back to the door, the queen leading the way at a jaunty pace.

Watching her go, Rafael felt a pang. She’d seemed so pleased that he was Spanish, but what, until now, had Spain ever done for her? Her Spanish mother had been set aside by the king in favour of a mistress, and she herself – an only child, twelve years old – had been taken from her, for ever kept from her and disinherited. And what had her uncle, the Spanish king, done? He’d expressed his concern and sympathy, his disgust and outrage, and he’d done so time and time again for years and years. But what had he actually done? And then, during her little half-brother’s reign, she’d been persecuted for her religion, prevented from practising it, harassed, hounded and vilified, and what had her uncle done? Expressed more concern and sympathy, more disgust and outrage. She and her mother were just women, after all; and it was just England, after all. He could never have gone to war for them.

Watching her go, he found it hard to believe that she was the woman over whose accession to the throne, he’d heard, there’d been such jubilation: such jubilation, it was said, as had never before been seen in England. She’d spent most of her life shut away but then, when it mattered, the English people – making much of their sense of fair play – had rallied and championed the old king’s eldest daughter as rightful heir. Rafael had seen her as ordinary when she’d stood talking to him, but, also, he now saw, nothing could be further from the truth. Her bearing, as she walked away, was regal.

Like an aunt, though, she’d seemed to him. A maiden aunt, spry and assiduously interested in him, with a no-nonsense voice and clothes of excellent quality but no flair. Somehow girlish but with no youthfulness. An eldest daughter, the dutiful one, no one’s favourite; well respected but not loved. No children of her own, and now past childbearing. But none of this, now, was the truth, he reminded himself. She was thirty-eight, he knew: just in time, was the hope. Hence the marriage. She was no longer a maiden aunt but a newlywed with a husband – her respectful nephew – who was eleven years her junior.

He didn’t mention the encounter in his letter home. It would sound ridiculous, unbelievable, and he didn’t want those back home to doubt him, didn’t want to add to the distance between them. His letters should be like whispers in their ears. If he told them that he’d spoken with the queen, they would – as he envisioned it – take a step back in surprise and confusion.

And so, instead, it was more of the same: the shocking weather, the unfresh food, the shops, the dogs. He’d been going to tell Francisco about there being a boy of his own age in the house, but had changed his mind. He’d been thinking of the little boy as a kind of friend, almost, for Francisco, before realising there was a risk – however ridiculous – that his own little lad would see the English child as a threat, as a potential competitor for his father’s affections.

Rafael wasn’t expecting letters in return: six weeks was the estimated delivery time to and from Seville. He’d be home before he could get any post. He’d probably be home before they got his missives, but he wrote just in case. There could be a delay, sea-journeys being as they were. Or sea-journeys being as they were, the worst could happen, and at least then they’d have word that he’d been thinking of them during his time away. At least Francisco would have something of him.

Francisco’s preoccupation in the months before Rafael’s departure had been death. He’d discovered it. Some of their conversations on the subject had been wonderfully weird, Francisco once excitedly considering, ‘What shall I have written on my grave, Daddy? What would you like on yours?’ Mostly, though, of course, they’d been distressing: When you die, Daddy, and Mummy dies, I’ll have no one left to love. In that instance, Rafael had tried to explain that it often wasn’t quite like that. ‘You’ll be old by then,’ he’d dared to hope, ‘and you’ll have your own wife,’ wondering with a pang if that would indeed be true, ‘and your own children.’

Rafael’s fear was persistent: that the worst might’ve already happened to his son, but that he didn’t yet know it. A choking on a grape. The yanking over of a cauldron of boiling laundry. And Rafael not there to hold him, to try to ease his terror and his pain, not there to wash him before they wrapped him up and parcelled him away for ever. He couldn’t yet know if something had happened. For six whole weeks, he wouldn’t know. For six whole weeks he’d carry on as usual, eating and sleeping and sailing on the river, mindless, oblivious and unforgivable.

The household staff made much of looking busy, put upon, stretched – more, Rafael guessed, than was warranted by the actual workload. Mostly men, they were, and mostly liveried, which didn’t help him learn to distinguish them from one another: grooms, watchmen, footmen and clerks. Rafael’s family was probably no smaller but served more than adequately by a handful of staff who seemed to have all the time in the world. Those first few days in London, he longed to encounter the insouciance of his mother’s maid, Maria, or the sleepiness of Vicente, the stablehand. Cook was the exception, back home, but that was just Cook: no one gave his rattiness any credence, and Rafael began to think even of him with affection.

One of the Kitson grooms limped: that one Rafael recognised. One of Mr Kitson’s clerks was blind in one eye. One of the lads who served at dinner was a redhead. As for the Kitsons themselves, Rafael tried to get an idea of who they all were. They were easy to spot, sharing a certain foxy-faced look. The family was well endowed with girls: a pack of them, of all ages, and all, it seemed, assigned to looking after one another, so that one of them was almost always rounding on another with exaggerated patience or haughtiness. Sometimes, inevitably, their ill-fitting poise would slip. Once, he glimpsed one of the girls rushing up the central staircase, feet jabbing at the treads, her skirt held high, her scarlet-clad ankles and calves revealed. Another time, he saw from his window a Kitson girl swipe viciously at a smaller one who dodged, laughed in the face of her companion’s fury and skipped away. There were only two Kitson boys. One was nine or ten years old and walked with the aid of two sticks. The other was several years older, with a long face and big ears and a permanent stare into the middle-distance. Sometimes he’d cover those ears and shut his unfocused eyes and rock. He kept close to the lady Rafael knew to be Mrs Kitson, or to a sister who appeared to be the eldest of the pack. The girl was old enough to have dropped the airs and graces affected by her sisters and sometimes, from across the Hall, she gave Rafael a timid smile, for which he was grateful.

He didn’t need the presence of the Kitson boys to remind him to be thankful for Francisco’s perfection. Back at home, he’d sometimes found it funny: it’d seemed too much – perhaps that was what it was – so that sometimes, seeing it, he’d feel a laugh welling up. Incredulity, he supposed it was, but it felt like a laugh. So precarious, though, it seemed now, that perfection.

There were three other young men in the household who were clearly well-to-do, not staff, but didn’t share the Kitson resemblance and, anyway, were too keen, too polite and too watchful of themselves to be members of the immediate family. At dinner, they served the high table. Rafael couldn’t fathom who they were or what the arrangement with the Kitsons might be.

At the palace, a Spanish lad had got himself into trouble and had had his earlobe bitten off in a fight with an Englishman, according to Antonio. ‘Clean off,’ were Antonio’s words.

Rafael doubted that there’d been much cleanliness about it. ‘A fight?’

Antonio looked expressionlessly at him. ‘There are a lot of fights,’ he said.

But that was at the palace, where Spanish and English were shut in side by side. In the city, Rafael was beginning to feel more confident, braving some local exploration. To and from the river, he began to deviate just a little from his route: down Lombard Street and then Abchurch Lane, perhaps, or St Nicholas Lane, instead of St Swithins Lane. Or down Walbrooke into Dowgate. Up St Laurence Pountney Hill. The English might not like foreigners but there were foreigners here nevertheless, running their businesses. Word had spread among Rafael’s fellow countrymen of French button makers, Dutch shoemakers, an Italian hatmaker, a Genovese glove-perfumer. These people were managing to live their lives here unmolested. Still, Rafael walked fast with his head down, his hat low over his face, avoiding streets from which tavern noise came, turning from streets in which he’d have to balance on planks. These precautions afforded him a limited view of London, of course. He saw few sundials – hardly surprising, given the climate – and none was innovative: nothing more unusual than a decliner. He noticed the forlorn remains of shrines: stripped empty, often stuffed with rubbish. Something else that struck him – head down, listening more than he dared look around – was how much the English talked: they never seemed to stop; they even talked to the dogs they took around on leashes, even to cats on top of walls. For all this talk, there was never any flow to it that he could hear; hard and sharp, the words sounded to him.

The river was an easier place for Rafael to be – not only on it, but also on the quayside. There, he could stop and stand, facing south, soaking up whatever sunlight there was, and take his time to look. Breathing space. Once, he watched the dazzling royal barge being towed downstream. On that occasion, he could enjoy the luxury of being just one of the crowd.

If he wasn’t at or en route to and from the palace, nor in the Kitsons’ Hall for dinner, then he was up in his gloomy little north-east-facing room. That was where he spent the evenings. Downstairs, the Kitsons entertained themselves and their guests as the trestle tables were cleared and stacked away, music played and dancing attempted. Staff finished their various duties and then retreated to the kitchen, Rafael presumed, to gossip and play cards. Up in his room, having written home – a little, each evening, towards a weekly letter – Rafael would work on calculations, work on his design. He also spent a lot of time gazing from the window: hours, he spent, doing that. St Bartholomew’s Lane was below with nothing much to it, just houses, but linking Threadneedle Street and Throgmorton Street, so there was always someone passing through. Sometimes more than someone: gangs, probably apprentices on the loose, and, to judge from the whoops and kicking of a ball, good-natured enough, but he was very glad not to be down there. Later on, he’d see the Kitsons’ guests leaving, as comfortable defying curfew as anyone in any other city he’d ever visited, their way lit for them by torch-bearing boys.

His little window was glassed and had a curtain, for which he was grateful. No shutters, though, and he missed them – the window looked odd, to him, without them. Exposed. And in general, around the Kitson house and on the houses along his routes, he missed their sounds: the clunks and gratings as a household stirred at the start of a day and then as it settled down at the end. When he’d had enough of staring into the dusk, there was the mere rasp of curtain rings along a pole. Dusk, in England, took for ever. Worth watching, it would’ve been, if there’d been a sky to see, if there’d been light enough to cast shadows. But as it was, it just hung around outside, damp, like something mislaid.

From time to time in any evening, though, came something that made it sparkle: the booming of church bells. Sometimes his floor would shake with it, and he’d get down there to feel it. There were three churches just beyond the end of St Bartholomew’s Lane. A hundred in the square mile of London, he’d been told. For a Godless country, that was a lot of churches.

If Antonio wasn’t back by the nine o’clock curfew, he wouldn’t be coming back and Rafael would doze in the near-dark before waking to darkness and lighting a candle by which he’d get ready for bed.

Nights, he missed Leonor. Waking, he’d remember how, on his last morning, Francisco had climbed into bed and laid down beside him, thrown his rag-rabbit into the air, caught it, turned over and gone back to sleep.

In his second week, he got a bad cold. The surprise was that it’d taken that long, as all the Spaniards he came across had already been laid low. Especially Antonio, who had lolled around for days on end, hugging himself and barely raising his eyes, refusing to do the river-journey back to the Kitsons, imposing instead on friends at the palace. Well, now Rafael understood. For two days, he stayed at the Kitsons’, stayed in his room except at suppertime. Then the worst of the cold shifted, but only down to his throat where it stuck, itching, causing a cough which inflamed it further, particularly at night. After several days and nights of this, he was taking his place for supper when a cup was placed in front of him on the table. He swivelled to see the pale woman: a flash of a smile from her, her fingertips to her throat and a forced cough, It’s for your cough. And then she was gone – stepping back and away across the room – before he’d begun to thank her. He was touched, but mortified that his cough had been so noticeable. Under the faintly contemptuous glances of his neighbours, he raised the cup to his nose but was too blocked still to be able to smell it. He took a sip: honey, he detected, and something sharper. Two more sips and complete relief: something he’d stopped believing was possible. Enough remained in the cup for him to take it to his room and he got his first good night’s sleep for almost a week.

The following evening, the woman did the same and this time he was ready to thank her. The evening after that, too, and the one after that. But the next one, he thanked her as usual and said, ‘It’s good, now,’ and, smiling, raised his hand – Enough, thank you – which she must have understood because that was the last of it.

He still felt rotten for much of the time, because of indigestion. There was so much meat in England and so little else. Meat, even on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and even in the court of this Catholic queen. Clearly she was bringing back only some of the Catholic ways. The Kitson family went to Mass, but everybody did now that the queen required it. There was no other evidence of their Catholicism. Rafael didn’t know if he knew much about Protestantism. He knew that a Protestant priest would speak in English, not Latin, which he found hard to imagine: it didn’t seem, to him, to be a language for wonders. And Protestants believed they could talk to God, he knew: offer up their every hope and grievance and He’d hear them, He’d listen to them. They debated the contents of the Bible, too, as if it were up for debate and by anyone.

Rafael had been going with the Kitson household to Mass at St Bartholomew’s on the corner, but he missed a few days when he had his cold and, afterwards, didn’t resume. He realised that if anyone marked his absence, they’d assume he was attending Spanish Masses at the palace. Likewise, his fellow countrymen, if they considered it at all, would assume that he was going to Mass with the Kitsons. At home, for years, his attendance at church had been the bare minimum. Church distracted him from God – that was how he felt – and perhaps this was because of the gloom of the buildings when – he was sure of it – God was in light. He didn’t know how his brothers could bear it, that gloom, the two brothers of his who were priests. He’d feel God’s presence sometimes when he was riding, or in the garden, or making calculations, and often when he glanced at his son. The feeling was always both awesome and intimate. It was a feeling he hadn’t yet had in England.

When he was young, he’d talked about that feeling with his friends and many of them had felt the same. The Spanish Church, though, would judge it heretical; so now, older and, he hoped, wiser, he was careful to keep it to himself. He, whose family, Jewish-looking, Jewish-named, had no room for error.

During one of his visits to the Kitsons’ local church, he’d glimpsed the pale woman. She’d had her eyes closed, as did many people – but they were dozing, he was sure, and she was biting her lip. He saw there was a vigilance about her.

Towards the end of the second week, Rafael was advised by an official in the Spanish office to abandon his project. The strain on the prince’s budget – two households to support, the one he’d brought with him and the one his bride had assembled for him – meant that there was no guarantee that Rafael would be paid, nor even that he’d be reimbursed for what he planned to spend soon on materials. ‘But you must’ve known,’ Rafael objected. The prince had been in England for a month. ‘You could’ve stopped me coming.’

‘Not me,’ the official replied with a shrug, ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’

Rafael had known that very few of his fellow countrymen were working. Duplication of any Englishman’s duties was to be avoided. In deciding this, Spanish officials had been trying to keep the peace. Sit tight, everyone had been told, and passage home will soon be arranged.

Rafael had no doubt that the problem in his particular case would be resolved in his favour. In the meantime, it cost him nothing to continue with his work, so he wandered in the direction of the queen’s garden. It was a raw morning, and he’d assumed no one would be there but, opening the door in the wall, he saw he was mistaken: she was there, the queen, at the fountain, accompanied by the mischievous-looking Mrs Dormer. His heart clenched, squeezing the breath from him, and he backtracked immediately. He’d claim, if questioned later, that he’d taken a wrong turning. To his dismay, though, she’d seen him, or – short-sighted – she’d seen someone, and was beckoning. A whole-arm beckoning, it was: enthusiastic, unequivocal. Yes, she was mistaking him for someone else. Wouldn’t her smirking companion put her right? He didn’t know what to do. There was no choice, though. He couldn’t disobey. He’d have to accept that he’d got himself into this – How? it was not like him to be incautious – and he’d have to see it through.

How, though, to approach her? He couldn’t just stride over there. How else, though, would he get to her? And where – while he was walking – should he look? Surely he shouldn’t stare into her face; but wouldn’t it be disrespectful to fail to meet her gaze? And crucially: when, exactly, where, should he bow? Now, in the doorway? Or when he was closer? Or both? And how much closer? And how many bows?

But there she was, gesturing with cheerful impatience. So, in the end, he just did it, putting his trust in her accepting him as a bumptious Spanish peasant, and walking over to join her. He stopped at what he hoped was a respectful distance and bowed deeply, but she was already speaking to him in English: ‘No sun, Mr Prado.’ She said it anxiously, with only the briefest, most reluctant of skyward glances. Hard to imagine what kind of harvest could come from a summer such as this. He wondered again: how did the people here survive? They’d be going hungry, next year, and they didn’t look in great shape – to say the least – even now.

Nor did she. Her small, watery eyes were pink-rimmed. It was said that she worked very hard. Rafael recalled hearing that she’d appointed a huge council of men – any English nobleman who had any claim, regardless of religious persuasion – and insisted on listening to each and every one of them, more than thirty, on each and every issue. If her extraordinary openness to him was anything to go by, he could believe it.

She said, ‘My husband is a good man.’ Good to have arranged the gift of the sundial, he took her to mean. She glanced at Mrs Dormer with something nearing a smile – a softening, a shyness – to which the lady responded with her own dazzler. Bashfully dipping her gaze, the queen repeated, ‘My husband,’ as if to listen to it, to hear it. To relish it. Rafael was surprised by such girlishness in a woman who’d been unmarried for almost forty years. He’d been assuming that this marriage of convenience was a personal inconvenience for her, just as it was for the prince. Word was that, when she’d come to the throne, she’d resisted her council’s suggestion that she should marry. Hardly surprising, given the fate of her unfortunate mother. Everyone in Spain knew that the prince had had to leave behind a mistress, his wife in all but name. Did the queen know? The prince’s job, now, was to be attentive to his new wife, and he’d be taking it seriously. Rafael didn’t envy him his duty. For all the queen’s openness, there was something off-putting about her. Not her looks, despite what everyone said; nothing so simple. It was perhaps her openness itself, he felt. An over-eagerness.

He wondered how – as heir to the throne – she’d got to such an age and not already been married. The prince was an old hand, he’d been married and widowed. Eleven years her junior, but already second time around for him. Then Rafael remembered that she hadn’t been heir: she’d been a disinherited heir, which was worse than no heir at all. A liability. Who’d have wanted her? How everything had changed for her in just one year. So much change so late in life. This once-sidelined spinster was now wife of the man who would one day be the most powerful in the world.

She was peering at him. ‘Do you have a wife, Mr Prado?’

Yes, he was glad to tell her. ‘Leonor.’ Her name came to him like a cry, which he forced down to be a lump in his throat. What would Leonor make of this? Being discussed by the queen of England. That’d be some gift to take back with him: The queen asked about you.

‘Children?’

‘One, Your Grace: a son, Francisco.’ If Francisco were present in person, he’d be frustrating his father’s efforts, clinging to his legs, refusing to look up.

‘Francisco,’ she echoed, appreciative. ‘And how old is he?’

Three, he told her.

‘He’s little.’ She sounded surprised, and asked, bluntly, ‘How old is your wife?’

Taken aback, the English word eluded him; he found himself raising his hands and doing four flashes of all his fingers.

‘Forty?’ She turned, chatting animatedly, to her companion. He felt he knew why his answer pleased her: Leonor had had her first baby in her late thirties, the queen’s own age. The queen, though, looked so much older; she could easily be ten years older than Leonor. She turned back to him, held him in that pale stare of hers. ‘I’m thirty-eight,’ she said. She placed her hands squarely on her belly and said, matter-of-fact, ‘Pray for me, Mr Prado.’ As queen, she could expect an entire population to be praying for her, but he understood that she was truly asking it of him and he was honoured. Then she and her companion were going before he realised, and he had to do his bowing in her wake.

Again, Rafael refrained from making mention of the queen in his letter home. He’d tell Leonor when he saw her. We spoke about you. He could see, in his mind’s eye, her habitual expression of humourful disdain, the scepticism with which she always faced him. He’d insist, No, really, and watch her making up her mind whether to believe him. That watchfulness of hers: that cautious, clever look. The tilt to her chin, and the hard little mouth with its crookedness so that it slipped whenever she spoke and more so when she smiled. Which made her smile seem partial, reflective, wry. She almost always looked amused, but Rafael couldn’t remember ever having heard her laugh aloud. When he’d first ever seen her, she’d been standing with her arms folded, and that’s how she almost always stood, how she seemed to be most comfortable although it didn’t look comfortable to Rafael. She held herself separately, seemed to be appraising – a look to which he hadn’t warmed, at first – but he’d learned in time that this wasn’t so. On the contrary: more than anyone else he knew, she suspended judgement.

She’d arrived in Rafael’s life as the bride of his boyhood best friend. Gil, a doctor’s son and a doctor himself, now, had gone away to study and returned home with a bride. So far, so predictable. But with her tightly folded arms and half-smile, she wasn’t the kind of woman Rafael had expected Gil to bring home; Gil, who asked little of life except that he be in the thick of it, offering a helping hand. Rafael didn’t know what to make of her. The women in his family simultaneously indulged him and brushed him off, as they did with all men. Leonor, though, took the trouble to talk with him. Well, sometimes. Her talk was of nothing much, for much of the time, but that was what made it special. The women in his family talked to him to organise him, cajole him, or set him right: they had aims in their dealings with him. Leonor meandered, passing the time of day, her gaze idling on his, her slate-hued irises sometimes blue, sometimes green, grey, even almost amber. Occasionally, she’d speak more seriously – religion, politics – and say things that, in Rafael’s experience, most people didn’t dare say, but never provocatively, never carelessly. Always properly cautious, she was. But then she’d seem to be gone from him for perhaps as long as several weeks at a stretch, even though in fact she was there, around, arms folded and gaze unflinching.

If she didn’t suit Gil, Rafael often wondered who’d suit her: who would he have imagined her with, if he hadn’t known she was married to Gil? Someone older, he felt, someone reserved. He wondered what she and Gil saw in each other. Something, though, that was for certain, because once, years into their marriage, he spotted them kissing in the grove behind their house. Slipping away unseen, he nursed his shock, because it wasn’t what he’d have expected of them.

He’d fallen in love with Leonor. When? For a while, the question preoccupied him, he felt he owed it to his helpless, hopeless loving to be able to account for it. And then he accepted that he’d been searching for an excuse: she’d always been her, he’d always been him, and thus he’d always loved her, even when he hadn’t quite liked her, even when he hadn’t been quite sure of her.

How did he live those years of unspoken love for his best friend’s wife? There was no art to it. He worked hard and was away a lot, eventually, with his work. He lived from breath to breath, and hard at his heels were the doubts, the fears: what did she feel for him, and what did she know – or suspect – of what he felt for her? In one breath, he’d dread that his longing was an open wound; but in the next, he’d be congratulating himself on his subterfuge. Each and every heartbeat trapped him between a craving to see her and a desperation to avoid her. He loathed himself – of course he did – but sometimes there was also something like pride, because sometimes the secret that he carried inside himself as a stone was, instead, a gem.

And Gil. How had he felt about him? Well, he’d felt all things, over the years, and often all at once. He felt close to him, his boyhood soul mate, in their shared love for this woman with the hard-folded arms and cool eyes. He felt distant from him, too, though, as the husband of his beloved, which was who he’d become. He pitied Gil his treacherous best friend. And he resented him, of course he did. But he’d never wished him dead. No, he’d never done that.

In the early days, to keep himself going, Rafael allowed himself the luxury of imagining that he and Leonor might just once allude to their feelings for each other being deeper than they should be. For a time, he thought that’d be enough, but that was before he caught sight of her in the grove and witnessed the hunger in her kissing. From then on, for a while, nothing was enough and he stopped at nothing in his exploration of the life that they might have had together. Getting into bed, he’d find himself thinking about whom they might have entertained that evening, if they’d been married, and what they might have remarked to each other when alone again. And longing to see the look in her eyes as she reached around to unfasten her hair, last thing.

At the end of his second week, Rafael arrived home for supper one afternoon with Antonio to find the house being packed up. Just inside the main door, three men were taking down a tapestry: two of them up on ladders, the third supervising from below, and all three absorbed in a tense exchange of what sounded like suggestions and recriminations. Rafael might have assumed that the huge, heavy hanging was being removed for cleaning or repair – although no tapestry in the Kitson household looked old enough to require cleaning or repair – had he not noticed the packing cases around the hallway. Some were fastened and stacked, others still open. In one lay household plate: platters and jugs, the silverware for which England was famed. In another, cushions of a shimmering fabric. Towering over the cases, resting against the wall, was a dismantled bedframe, the posts carved with fruits and painted red, green and gold; and on the floor he spotted – just as he was about to trip over it – a rolled-up rug.

One of the men glanced down, eyes rheumy with a cold, as if wondering whether he had to pack the two Spaniards as well. At this point, the pale woman appeared, hurrying as if she’d been looking for them: a purposeful approach. ‘Mr Prado? Mr Gomez?’ Some kind of announcement was going to be made, it seemed, and, to judge from her expression, one that would give her pleasure. She spoke, indicating the boxes, then herself, a touch of her fingertips to her breastbone. Rafael missed it, and looked to Antonio for translation. Antonio looked dazed, still catching up with her. ‘She’s the house –’ He frowned, and then it came to him: ‘She’s the housekeeper?’

She was. A skeleton staff was staying behind, of which she was the backbone, the housekeeper. Later, Rafael would learn that the Kitsons lived for most of the year at their manor in the countryside and, like many of their friends, had only been at their townhouse to witness the splendour of the royal newlyweds’ entrance into London and the elaborate pageants held in the streets to celebrate it. They’d ended up having to be patient. The wedding had taken place at Winchester Cathedral just days after the prince had come ashore at Southampton, but the royal couple’s progress to London thereafter had been leisurely, taking almost a month.

Now, though, in the first week of September, festivities over, the Kitsons were heading back to their manor. In Spain, the land was for peasants: that was the unanimous view of Rafael’s fellow countrymen. Something, then, that he had in common with the English: the dislike of towns and cities, the preference for open expanse and woods.

The first evening after the Kitsons’ departure, he arrived back alone. Antonio was using the departure as an excuse for his own absence – as he saw it, he no longer needed to play the part of the guest. Not that he’d ever really done so. Rafael took it to mean the contrary, considering himself obliged to show support for the pale woman who’d been left almost alone to cater for them. He knocked on the door – wielded the leopard’s head – and was disappointed to hear that one of the dogs remained in residence. The pale woman opened the door, dodging the animal; the boy, too, was behind her. The woman wasn’t quite so pale – flushed and somehow scented – and Rafael guessed she’d been cooking. He wanted to apologise for having interrupted her, but didn’t know how. She looked behind him. ‘Mr Gomez?’

‘No.’ He didn’t know how to say more.

She shrugged, seemed happy enough to give up on him, and stepped aside to let Rafael in. He noticed the bunch of keys on her belt: all the house keys, he presumed. She said something that sounded concerned and, frowning, touched his cloak. Said it again: ‘Drenched.’ Drenched. Then something else, faster, and a mime of eating, a pointing towards the Hall.

Having hung up his cloak, he went along to the Hall and, self-consciously, took a place at the single table alongside the others: the porter who’d let him through the gate; a man who he was fairly sure was one of the grooms; and a quite elderly man whom he’d seen around but had no idea what he did. And the dog, of course. The old man was talking to the others – dog included – and didn’t let up when the pale woman began bringing in the dishes. Rafael rose to go and help her, but she shook her head and then he saw that she had the child in tow as helper. When an array of dishes was on the table, she helped the boy on to the bench and took her place beside him. After Grace, the old man resumed his chat and the others took him up on it, although the child kept quiet. Clearly, mealtime silence was only for when the whole household was in residence. Perhaps they were catching up on a day spent mostly alone.

Eventually, Rafael felt he should say something. ‘Very good,’ he said to the woman, indicating the spread, even though it was yet more meat – poultry of various types – served as usual with the jellies which he guessed were made from berries of some kind, whatever kinds they had in England. She frowned and shook her head, and he understood her to mean it wasn’t her doing – this food had been left by the cook for them. But to this, he smiled back his own dismissal: the food was well presented and that would have been her doing; there was still plenty that she’d done. And this time, albeit with a small show of reluctance, she allowed it, bowing her head. To follow the meats, she fetched a bowl of something sweet, causing much excitement among his fellow diners. Usually there wasn’t anything sweet, just the soft, wet cheeses. This was a sweetened, fruited cream with the unmistakable, delectable flavour of strawberries.

When the table had finally been cleared, Rafael wondered what he should do. Usually, he’d go to his room and work on his design, but surely it would be rude to walk away openly from this small gathering. The woman indicated that he should join them on cushions around the fireplace – in which no fire was lit – and so he did, only to find to his embarrassment that both the porter and the groom were excusing themselves. The old man took a heap of cushions and lay back immediately for a sleep, and the dog muscled in. The woman seemed to have produced from nowhere an article of clothing to adapt or repair, and her little boy began working on another, unpicking stitches for her. Rafael felt profoundly awkward: he had nothing with him, nothing to do. Pretend to doze, perhaps; perhaps he should do that. He had a cold and was conscious, in the silence, of his snuffling. But then the woman spoke to him: ‘Spain, England,’ and she drew a horizontal line in the air with her index finger. ‘How many days?’ She laid the fabric in her lap and held up both hands to display her fingers: ‘Five, six, seven …?’

‘Five,’ he said. ‘Five days.’

She looked appreciative of the answer – that he had answered – but then didn’t seem to know what to make of it, didn’t seem to know if a five-day sea-journey was long or short, or indeed longer or shorter than she might’ve guessed. There was nothing to say.

He indicated her son: ‘Four, five years?’

‘Four.’

So, he’d been right; and of course, because Francisco was almost four. ‘Big,’ he said, careful to sound impressed.

Looking at her boy, she shrugged with her mouth as if considering. She was being modest; the boy was tall, and – Rafael saw it – she was pleased he’d noticed. Sad, too, though – Rafael saw this, too – if only for a heartbeat: a fleeting sadness, perhaps at her little boy growing older and leaving his infant years behind. ‘Nicholas,’ she said. Rafael repeated it with obvious approval. ‘My son,’ he said, making a fist over his heart. ‘Three years. Francisco.’

‘Oh!’ Her eyes lit up, and she looked as if she’d like to ask more. Instead, though, a small gesture, and unconsciously, Rafael felt, a reflection of his own: a brief, steadying touch of her own hand to her own heart. Which rather touched him.

‘Rafael,’ he said, tapping his chest.

‘Cecily,’ she reciprocated. This, he hadn’t expected, and suffered a pang of anxiety that he’d pushed her into it. ‘Madam’would’ve been fine. Again she looked expectant and he guessed that he was supposed to repeat it, to try it out, which he did and to which she looked amused although it had sounded all right to him.

After that, he’d felt relaxed enough to excuse himself and go up to his room to fetch paper and charcoal, and for the following couple of hours in Cecily’s company he sketched and half-worked on ideas.

Subsequent evenings, this became the routine, sometimes with him working at the table, sometimes on a letter home. The old man, Richard – and dog, Flynn – would sleep; and Cecily would continue her work on a gown. Fine wool, it usually was: definitely not her own. ‘Frizado,’ she said, once, holding it up for him to see and relishing the texture between her fingertips. Another time, ‘Mockado,’ and another, ‘Grogram.’ Later, every evening, though, she’d put her work aside and then, standing up, standing tall to stretch, she’d reach to the small of her back to release her apron’s bow with a tug. As it dropped away, she’d swoop it up, giving it a shake to release any creases and looping it into a couple of easy, loose folds. Then she’d reach into the linen basket for the little unassuming roll of undyed linen in which were pinned and pocketed her own special needles and threads.

The first time, she’d held up a needle, presented it to him although it was so fine that it vanished in the air between them, and said, ‘From Spain.’ She said it with a depreciating little laugh: there wasn’t a lot they could talk about and this was the best she could do. For his part, he’d tried to look interested. What did interest him was that she’d made the effort to find something they had in common. That was what mattered; not the actual, invisible, though no doubt very good needle. She turned it in the air: ‘Very, very good,’ she assured him, eyebrows raised and head tilted in a parody of earnestness which he then mirrored so that she smiled.

Also in that linen pouch were floss silks of various colours. Her method was to lay them on the dark glossy tabletop to make her selection. The skeins were greens and blues, reds and yellows: the greens from fresh and bud-like to velvety firblues; the blues from palest lunar glow to deepest ultramarine; the reds from cat’s tongue rosiness to alizarin; the yellows from the creaminess of blossom to the confidence of lemons and the darker, greeny-gold of pears. The best needles might well come from Spain, but everyone knew the best embroidery came from England.

Rafael would watch Cecily choosing her colours. She’d feel her way along the range, not touching: fingers walking above the row, rising and falling as if idling on the keys of a virginal. Then – yes – she’d pick one up, pleased to have made the decision but perhaps also a little regretful, Rafael detected, to have committed herself. The selection would be hung over her finger, unregarded, while she made the next few choices, then she’d drape them all in the fold between thumb and forefinger to trail across her palm. That little handful she’d lift into the light, whatever remained of it, sometimes even leaving the room, presumably in search of what was left of it. The scrutiny involved a slow turning of her hand one way and the other, then a flip so that the skeins could dangle free and light run the length of them. The final test was a single strand concentrated in a tiny loop, like an insect’s wing, which she’d press to the embroidery for consideration against what was already there. From what he could glimpse, her design was of some kind of beast – stylised – prancing or pawing inside a geometric border. Her brilliant colours were so unlike those in which his designs were realised by Antonio. His and Antonio’s colours were incidental: ochre tints in marble and patinas on bronze. And her materials, lax in her lap, were so pliable in comparison to theirs, which needed tackling.

Whenever he was too tired to think, he sketched what he saw in the room: the immense fireplace and, in detail, the Tudor roses carved into it; an expanse of wall-panelling and its delicately carved frames; sections of the decorative plasterwork on the ceiling; several floor tiles of differing heraldic designs; and the table clock from all angles. One evening, he began sketching Nicholas: unapproachable Nicholas. And perhaps that was why, the dare of it. Nicholas: approachable only like this, in surreptitious glances from across the room. And, anyway, Rafael found himself thinking, he stares at me, from that first evening, from the doorway, and ever since. Nicholas had never yet spoken in Rafael’s presence, nor smiled. What he did – all he did – was stare. There was no blankness to that stare, it was full of intent: Leave me alone. Whenever their paths crossed, Nicholas stared Rafael down; stared until Rafael – smile abandoned – looked away.

Not now, though, for once. Not when the boy was relatively off-guard, weary at the end of the day and wedged under the wing of his mother. He was kneeling beside her, playing with a tin of buttons. Well, not playing. Play must have been his mother’s intention – ‘Here, look!’ – and he was obliging her to the extent that he was doing something with the buttons, but all he was doing was gazing at them as he dabbled his fingertips in the tin. Rafael had considered him an unnaturally still child – never running around, always clinging to Cecily – but now he noticed how much the apparently motionless Nicholas was in fact moving: chewing his lip, and shifting his shoulders – one, two, one, two – in a strange, rigid wiggle. The poor boy was so taken over by this restlessness that there was nothing of him left for button-playing.

Francisco would be lost to those buttons, he’d love them. He’d line them up on the floor, transforming them in his imagination into something else, creating a drama for them and probably talking them through it. He was always occupied. What he was actually doing might well not be clear to an observer. He’d be sitting straight-backed with that downward incline of his head, his attention on his hands, and his hands busy.

Cecily shifted on her cushion and her son’s gaze snapped up to her. However unwelcoming those eyes were to anyone but his mother, there was no denying that they were extraordinary: huge, almond-shaped, and a proper blue, not what passed for blue in most eyes here in England but was really an absence of colour, a mere shallow pooling of what passed for light.

Francisco’s smile was famous, lightning-quick and lightning-bright, all eyes and teeth, almost absurd in its intensity. People would laugh aloud when first faced with it, and turn to Rafael, incredulous and celebratory: What a beautiful smile! Truly it was a gift: such a smile could never be learned. Rafael recalled it from Francisco’s earliest days: Leonor turning around to walk away, and there over her shoulder was the baby and in a flash that cheeky, laughable smile. Nothing withheld, nothing watchful or measured in it. Such a smile anticipated no knock-backs, no caution on behalf of the beholder, nothing but the absolute best in response. It was wonderful to witness and Rafael understood the seriousness of being the guardian of it.

Naïvely, he’d not intended Cecily to see his sketch of her son. But on one of her trips from the room with her silks, she glanced over and exclaimed. Instantly, though, came a hesitancy, as if it might have been presumptuous of her even to have recognised the subject. Rafael sat there with it in his lap, helpless, exposed. Was it a gift? Just because that hadn’t been his intention … It was a gift, wasn’t it, this sketch of her boy. Had to be.

‘Nicholas,’ she said, sounding amazed. ‘Look.’ And then that hesitancy again: to Rafael, ‘May I?’

He handed it to her, and she knelt beside her boy to show him. ‘It’s you.’

He stared at it, no less wary than when confronting Rafael himself, studying it, intent and grave, as if looking for something, before surrendering it back to his mother. She received it with a slight reluctance. In turn she went to hand it to Rafael, but he declined with a smile and a raising of his hands. He hoped to strike the right note – a glad giving up of it, but not too dismissive of it, either – but didn’t know that he’d been all that successful. She withdrew gingerly, looked for somewhere to place it and laid it face-up on the table, where it seemed, to Rafael, vulnerable.

The following evening, he sketched Cecily’s hand; not the one busy with the needle but the other, the steadying one, her left. The one on which she wore a wedding band. And he wondered: was she a widow? He’d been presuming so, but maybe there was a husband working away somewhere – perhaps for Mr Kitson, abroad, or at the country house. Rafael hadn’t a clue as to the ways people lived and worked here in England. Perhaps it was normal for spouses to live – to work – apart. If she was a widow, how long had she been bereaved? The child was only four. Clearly she’d had him late in life, and Rafael wondered if there were others, elsewhere, grown up. Rafael imagined opening the conversation: You know, my wife and I, we only ever had the one, and late. They had so nearly not had him; he had so nearly never happened.

There would become a graininess to the dusk and soon they’d see that it’d already happened: the lovely, velvety mix of light and dark would finally have lost balance in favour of darkness. However hard Rafael tried to see the moment happen, he never succeeded. It was, he knew, in the nature of it: it had to happen unseen or it couldn’t happen at all. This evening, as on all others, they’d been sinking into the shadows, letting themselves and the room be taken. But soon Cecily would get up and begin lighting candles, and the candlelight would gently scoop them up, set them apart and make them observers of those shadows.

He could see how unscarred her hands were: unburned, uncalloused; no signs of hardship. Certainly she endured none in this house. She was a seamstress who didn’t do the laundry; she shopped for food rather than pulling it from the soil or kneading or cooking it. But she’d have come from somewhere. She’d have survived things; there would have been things to survive, there were always things to have to survive. Had she always lived and worked in houses like this? There was no trace of her personal history on her hands, except for the marriage. It shone, the evidence of that. How long had she been here, gliding through this household, fabric over her arm, and ready when required to claim the favoured position of housekeeper? For ever, said her demeanour, but – Rafael felt – a little too deliberately. The child gave her away. That child wasn’t at home, here.

Rafael concentrated again on his sketch. There was plenty for him to do, from the fan of bones across the back of the hand to the indentations on the knuckles. His own wife’s hands, by comparison, were small and featureless. Not that he’d ever actually sketched them, but, then, he didn’t have to, he knew them. Dainty, was how he’d thought of Leonor’s hands, if he’d thought anything of them at all, although the realisation surprised him because he’d never thought of her as dainty. She was small, yes, but strong.

Prettily bejewelled, was what he remembered now of Leonor’s hands. Cecily’s wedding ring, her only ring, was loose. It moved as she moved her hand, dropping back towards the knuckle and revealing a stripe of pallor. She was fussing Nicholas’s hair now and Rafael could almost feel the reassuring clunk of that ring – its solidity and smoothness – as if on his own head. The slight resistance of it, its switching back and forth. He wondered if her feet were like her hands, long and distinctly boned. And then he wondered what he was doing, wondering about her feet. The dusk must be addling him. He wasn’t thinking of her feet, of course: what he was thinking of was proportion and line. Because that was what he did, in life. In his work. Angles. She had begun to walk around the room now with her taper, bestowing glowing pools, and he let himself think of the strong arches beneath those soft-sounding feet of hers.

Then she took him utterly by surprise in coming up and looking over his shoulder. No escape.

The surprise, now, was hers. ‘My hands?’

He cringed. ‘Yes.’

She looked down for a while longer at the drawing, then began to look at her own, real hands – raising and slowly rotating them – as if for comparison. As if seeing them when before, perhaps, they’d gone unremarked. But also as if they weren’t hers. He said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh! – no.’ The briefest, faintest of smiles to reassure him. Then, tentatively, the tip of her index finger down on to the paper, on to a stroke of charcoal, where it paused as if resisting following the line. Then back, locked away into a demure clasp of her hands. She gave him another brief smile, this time as if in formal thanks. This sketch, he didn’t offer her. It was just a study, after all. A technical exercise. That’s all it was.

Thereafter, chastened, he made a show of sketching the far end of the Hall, rigorous in his shading, frowning at his efforts. Cecily had returned to her embroidery, her son was drowsily stroking the dog, and the old man rattled with snores. When Rafael judged an acceptable interval had elapsed, he made his excuses. Cecily’s upwards glance was dazed from the close work she’d been doing and – reminded, herself, of time having passed – she switched that glance from Rafael to Nicholas, to check on him. And there he was, fallen asleep. Rafael hadn’t noticed, either. He wasn’t surprised, though: the child had quite a nasty cold. Cecily huffed, exasperated: he’d have to be woken to go to bed.

Rafael slammed down the impulse to offer to lift him. It would be too familiar of him. But it must have occurred to Cecily, too, because now she was looking at him as if she didn’t quite dare ask. He’d have to do it, then; but here came a flush of pleasure that he could do something, could offer her something. Still mindful, though, of overstepping the mark, he gestured: Shall I …?

Her response was a hopeful wince: Could you? Would you mind?

He set down his sketches and charcoal, convinced that he was going to do it wrong, do it awkwardly and wake the boy, who’d be alarmed to find himself being pawed by the Spanish stranger. Approaching him, Rafael sized him up, deliberated how to ensure least disturbance and greatest lifting power. Cecily fluttered around him as if offering assistance, but in fact doing nothing of the kind – although there was nothing much she could do except wipe her son’s nose. Rafael crouched, slotted his hands under Nicholas’s arms and drew him to his chest. ‘Come on, little man,’ he found himself soothing, just as he would with Francisco. The boy offered no resistance and Rafael nearly overbalanced. Righting himself, he strained for the lift, bore the weight then settled him, marvelling how the little body could feel both so unlike Francisco’s and, somehow, at the same time, identical. His heart protested at the confusion. Breathing in the muskiness of the boy’s hair, he nodded to Cecily to lead the way.

She led him from the Hall to a staircase and up the narrow stone steps to a first-floor door, opened the door, ushered him inside, and drew a truckle bed from beneath the main bed. He made sure not to look around – that would be improper – as he lowered Nicholas on to the mattress. Nicholas frowned, turned on to his side and drew up his knees; Cecily bent over him, wiping his nose again and then busy with blankets. Rafael retreated, risking a glance back from the doorway and getting a preoccupied smile in thanks. She’d be staying in the room. He made his way to his own.

The next day, visitors arrived: Mr Kitson’s secretary – in London on business – with four smartly dressed men whom Rafael didn’t recognise. They, too, talked all through dinner, but just amongst themselves, perhaps on business matters, which left Rafael’s usual crowd in respectful near-silence. Suffering the beginning of Nicholas’s cold, Rafael was content to sit back. He listened not for the actual words but to the sounds, and he found that he was beginning to be able to distinguish between those sounds: yes, there were the blunt ones, particularly concerning things to hand – the food, and the dog, in whom they all took an interest as if it were a child, in fact in place of any interest in the actual child – but then they’d turn into conversation which had more flow, and Rafael would catch notes of French and Latin. It was a ragbag of a language, English.

They’d gone by the following suppertime. After that meal, Rafael retired as usual to the cushions alongside Cecily and her son, and Richard – the old man – and dog, to sketch from memory the front elevation of the house, for Francisco. This is where I’m staying. This – up here – is my window. After a while, it occurred to him that Cecily might be watching him: occasionally there was a quick lift and turn of her head in his direction. Once, he’d managed to meet her gaze but she’d glanced back down, expressionless, as if hoping to get away with it. Having sketched her, he’d unsettled her, which he was sorry to see. She was anxious to know what he was up to, to see if she was once again his subject. But it would be too open an acknowledgement for him to take the initiative and show her his drawing. Instead, he took to putting it down every now and then in what he estimated to be her view, while he blew his nose; and then, when that didn’t seem to have worked, he laid it aside while he paced to stretch his aching legs. After that, there were no more surreptitious glances.

Later that week, he found himself dabbling at the cleft between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand. In isolation, the fold wouldn’t be recognisable: just a smudge of charcoal. Nothing, really. A space.

There was something about her brow, though, with its broadness that he’d noticed when he’d first seen her. There was something appealing about that. The eyes wide-spaced, unlike so many English faces, which tended towards the pinched. Hers was an open face. He half-sketched, doodled, seeing how little she had by way of eyebrows or eyelashes. Cursory and incomplete, they were, as if only the briefest attempts had been made at them. He had to be so very light with the charcoal to draw their absence.

He could see some of her hair, even though he wasn’t looking. It reflected light – but whether it was golden or silvery, he didn’t see. Women’s caps here were placed back to reveal middle partings and hair sleek to the head. In Spain, there was never a glimpse of hair: just foreheads, high and bare. Leonor wouldn’t sketch well, even if he dared try. Spanish women were generally soft-faced and doe-eyed, but Leonor had a sharp face with small, slate-coloured eyes, and her mouth was hard, thin-lipped, slipped sideways. He adored that cussed little mouth, a glimpse of it never failed to give a kick to his heart. The memory of it, even. Her hair was plain brown and her complexion sallow, which suggested she was delicate when in fact she was anything but. A trick, that. She was no classic beauty, but still Rafael was captivated by her.

That night, for the first time in a long time, he thought of Beatriz. She’d been his mother’s maid and she’d seemed to him, aged fifteen, to have been in the household for ever. But it had probably only been two or three years, and she was likely no older than he was. He’d never looked at her: that was the truth. Not like that. She was just there, his mother’s maid. Later, he puzzled how he’d missed that she was so extraordinary-looking with her pale face and amber eyes. Her hair – an abundance of tiny copper curls – he couldn’t have known about.

One afternoon, while he was sitting in the garden, she approached him, coming up close as if curious. She bent to look into his eyes, and held the look. His worry was that he’d done something wrong and been discovered, because there was a knowingness to her expression. There was nothing for him to do but look back at her, and wait. He’d never before looked into her eyes – of course not – and he was intrigued by their colour. Not a colour that he’d ever seen in anyone else’s eyes, nor even imagined possible for eyes. Amber. Then she had her fingers in his hair, lifting it back off his forehead, away from his face, as if he had a fever. He was suddenly conscious of her laced-up bosom, so close. The easing of his hair from his scalp was causing him a physical stirring of the kind he’d felt before – no use pretending otherwise – but never in direct response to someone’s touch. But then she was gone, across the garden, back towards the house.

He knew something. He was suddenly in possession of a knowledge, he felt sure, that was going to make all the difference to his life: a touch – the mere touch – of a woman was all that mattered, was reason enough to be alive.

From now on, he hungered for her presence. That was all. He was sure she’d come to him again; he understood that was what she’d wanted him to know. And a couple of days later, she did come to him. In the garden, again. She stopped as if he’d called her to a halt, which he hadn’t. And gave him that same look, albeit from a distance. He was to come to her, then. Her stillness reminded him of childhood ‘catch’, the pause before the dash. His blood beat inside his ears, great giddying thwacks. When he reached her, he didn’t know what to do; he didn’t know what it was that he was supposed to do. Washed up, he was, there before her. Her face. The linen band of her cap, its edge proud beneath his fingertips; the tiniest drop down on to bare skin and along to the scarcely perceptible well of one temple. The rough silk of her eyebrows. Folds of her nose, one side and the other. Crest of her lips, its resistance. Then the lips themselves, the drag of them in the wake of his fingertip, his complete, so-slow circle. Her lips, their fingertip-breadth, as if made for this.

They opened, those lips, just a little, just enough to catch his fingertip in her front teeth: the very lightest of bites, very smallest of threats. The serrated edges of her teeth and the unevenness of their set. And then her tongue, a burst of soft, wet warmth.

He withdrew his fingertip, but only because he wanted to put his own tongue there against hers, just inside her lips. Her breath was hot, which he hadn’t anticipated, and musty. The tip of her tongue lifted his, and he was surprised by its strength.

Fearing he was about to disgrace himself, he took his mouth from hers, but within a heartbeat he was prepared to take the risk and was back there. Suddenly, though, she pulled away, was on her way across the garden, and only then did he hear what she must have been listening for: footsteps. Into view came the kitchen boy with a handful of herbs. All Rafael could think was how he and Beatriz could continue. It was as urgent as if someone had stopped his breath.

When he next encountered her in the garden, she did the stopping and looking but then moved off and he realised he was to follow her. She led him through the gate into the woods; and from then on, that was where they met. She’d take off her cap and shake free her wonderful hair. The cap was all she ever took off; he never saw her less than fully dressed. They’d lie down and kiss; she’d lie on him and he’d be all too aware of the pillow of her bosom. They lay pressed together, pushing against each other to get closer still. After a week or so of this, she did reach underneath herself to unlace him, but he assumed that she was merely making him more comfortable. She’d have known that he’d never dare do it himself in her company, so she was doing it for him, allowing it, tolerating his indecorous state.

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