The Queen's Sorrow by Suzannah Dunn Read Free Book Online

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 thatoccasion, 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 thedusk, 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,