The Queen's Sorrow Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 Spanishfarthingale – 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 complicatedarrangement. 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.’