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
