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