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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-nonsensevoice 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 homebefore 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 before they wrapped him up and parcelled him away for ever. He couldn’t yet know if something had happened. For six