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whole weeks, he wouldn’t know. For six whole weeks he’d carry on as usual, eating and sleeping and sailing on the river, mindless, oblivious and unforgivable.

    The household staff made much of looking busy, put upon, stretched – more, Rafael guessed, than was warranted by the actual workload. Mostly men, they were, and mostly liveried, which didn’t help him learn to distinguish them from one another: grooms, watchmen, footmen and clerks. Rafael’s family was probably no smaller but served more than adequately by a handful of staff who seemed to have all the time in the world. Those first few days in London, he longed to encounter the insouciance of his mother’s maid, Maria, or the sleepiness of Vicente, the stablehand. Cook was the exception, back home, but that was just Cook: no one gave his rattiness any credence, and Rafael began to think even of him with affection.
    One of the Kitson grooms limped: that one Rafael recognised. One of Mr Kitson’s clerks was blind in one eye. One of the lads who served at dinner was a redhead. As for the Kitsons themselves, Rafael tried to get an idea of who they all were. They were easy to spot, sharing a certain foxy-faced look. The family was well endowed with girls: a pack of them, of all ages, and all, it seemed, assigned to looking after one another, so that one of them was almost always rounding on another with exaggerated patience or haughtiness. Sometimes, inevitably, their ill-fitting poise would slip. Once, he glimpsed one of the girls rushing up the central staircase, feet jabbing at the treads, her skirt held high, her scarlet-clad ankles and calves revealed. Another time, he saw from his window a Kitson girl swipe viciously at a smaller one who dodged, laughed in the face of her companion’s fury and skipped away. There were only two Kitson boys. One was nine or ten years old and walked with the aid of two sticks.The other was several years older, with a long face and big ears and a permanent stare into the middle-distance. Sometimes he’d cover those ears and shut his unfocused eyes and rock. He kept close to the lady Rafael knew to be Mrs Kitson, or to a sister who appeared to be the eldest of the pack. The girl was old enough to have dropped the airs and graces affected by her sisters and sometimes, from across the Hall, she gave Rafael a timid smile, for which he was grateful.
    He didn’t need the presence of the Kitson boys to remind him to be thankful for Francisco’s perfection. Back at home, he’d sometimes found it funny: it’d seemed too much – perhaps that was what it was – so that sometimes, seeing it, he’d feel a laugh welling up. Incredulity, he supposed it was, but it felt like a laugh. So precarious, though, it seemed now, that perfection.
    There were three other young men in the household who were clearly well-to-do, not staff, but didn’t share the Kitson resemblance and, anyway, were too keen, too polite and too watchful of themselves to be members of the immediate family. At dinner, they served the high table. Rafael couldn’t fathom who they were or what the arrangement with the Kitsons might be.
    At the palace, a Spanish lad had got himself into trouble and had had his earlobe bitten off in a fight with an Englishman, according to Antonio. ‘Clean off,’ were Antonio’s words.
    Rafael doubted that there’d been much cleanliness about it. ‘A fight?’
    Antonio looked expressionlessly at him. ‘There are a lot of fights,’ he said.
    But that was at the palace, where Spanish and English were shut in side by side. In the city, Rafael was beginningto feel more confident, braving some local exploration. To and from the river, he began to deviate just a little from his route: down Lombard Street and then Abchurch Lane, perhaps, or St Nicholas Lane, instead of St Swithins Lane. Or down Walbrooke into Dowgate. Up St Laurence Pountney Hill. The English might not like foreigners but there were foreigners here nevertheless, running