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,
