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

it, sometimes even leaving the room, presumably in search of what was left of it. The scrutiny involved a slow turning of her hand one way and the other, then a flip so that the skeins could dangle free and light run the length of them. The final test was a single strand concentrated in a tiny loop, like an insect’s wing, which she’d press to the embroidery for consideration against what was already there. From what he could glimpse, her design was of some kind of beast – stylised – prancing or pawing inside a geometric border. Her brilliant colours were so unlike those in which his designs were realised by Antonio. His and Antonio’s colours were incidental: ochre tints in marble and patinas on bronze. And her materials, lax in her lap, were so pliable in comparison to theirs, which needed tackling.
    Whenever he was too tired to think, he sketched what he saw in the room: the immense fireplace and, in detail, the Tudor roses carved into it; an expanse of wall-panelling and its delicately carved frames; sections of the decorative plasterwork on the ceiling; several floor tiles of differing heraldic designs; and the table clock from all angles. One evening, he began sketching Nicholas: unapproachable Nicholas. And perhaps that was why, the dare of it. Nicholas: approachable only like this, in surreptitious glances from across the room. And, anyway, Rafael found himself thinking, he stares at me , from that first evening, from the doorway, and ever since. Nicholas had never yet spoken in Rafael’s presence, nor smiled. What he did – all he did – was stare. There was no blankness to that stare, it was full of intent: Leave me alone . Whenever their paths crossed, Nicholas stared Rafael down; stared until Rafael – smile abandoned – looked away.
    Not now, though, for once. Not when the boy was relatively off-guard, weary at the end of the day and wedged under the wing of his mother. He was kneeling beside her, playing with a tin of buttons. Well, not playing. Play must have been his mother’s intention – ‘Here, look!’ – and he was obliging her to the extent that he was doing something with the buttons, but all he was doing was gazing at them as he dabbled his fingertips in the tin. Rafael had considered him an unnaturally still child – never running around, always clinging to Cecily – but now he noticed how much the apparently motionless Nicholas was in fact moving: chewing his lip, and shifting his shoulders – one, two, one, two – in a strange, rigid wiggle. The poor boy was so taken over by this restlessness that there was nothing of him left for button-playing.
    Francisco would be lost to those buttons, he’d love them. He’d line them up on the floor, transforming them in his imagination into something else, creating a drama for them and probably talking them through it. He was always occupied. What he was actually doing might well not be clear to an observer. He’d be sitting straight-backed with that downward incline of his head, his attention on his hands, and his hands busy.
    Cecily shifted on her cushion and her son’s gaze snapped up to her. However unwelcoming those eyes were to anyone but his mother, there was no denying that they were extraordinary: huge, almond-shaped, and a proper blue, not what passed for blue in most eyes here in England but was really an absence of colour, a mere shallow pooling of what passed for light.
    Francisco’s smile was famous, lightning-quick and lightning-bright, all eyes and teeth, almost absurd in its intensity. People would laugh aloud when first faced with it, and turn to Rafael, incredulous and celebratory: What a beautiful smile! Truly it was a gift: such a smile could never be learned. Rafael recalled it from Francisco’s earliest days: Leonor turning around to walk away, and there over her shoulder was the baby and in a flash that cheeky, laughable smile. Nothing withheld, nothing watchful or measured in it. Such a smile anticipated no