LITMIR.BIZ

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He’d wade and loll, gazing at the banks and feeling separate from the world, free of it.

      Here, though, in England, in this chill, no one was going to strip off and brave a dip.

      Two liveried men arrived, making scant eye-contact with Rafael and barely addressing him or Antonio. Between themselves, though, the pair shared plenty of comment, all of which sounded uncomfortably like complaint.

      ‘No horses?’ one of them asked Rafael; or barked at him, contemptuous. Horses, Rafael had to guess from the mime: the man exaggeratedly straight-backed, bobbing at the knees, fists paired and raised.

      ‘No,’ was all Rafael said. What he could’ve said, if it weren’t forbidden to let on, was, A thousand horses, and all of them destriers, no less; our Spanish ships sailed with a thousand war horses. But none of them had sailed into Southampton; they remained moored offshore. The horses were for war with France; they’d soon be sailing on to the Low Countries, now that the wedding was done, as would most of the men and – rumour had it – the prince himself, keen to do his bit but, as a new bridegroom, having to balance expectations and demands.

      Not Rafael, though. No soldier, Rafael. Do the job we’re sending you to do, he’d been told, and then you’ll be out of there on the first ship home. Last ship in, first ship back. Six weeks at most, they’d said. He’d need only two or three. Six weeks at most, he kept reminding himself. He kept it in mind while – Antonio in tow – he followed the two miserable-looking men out of the courtyard.

      He followed them and then, behind a building, around a corner, there was the river, putting a stop to the land, reclining on it, fat and silver, brimming and gleaming despite the leaden sky. A thousand yards wide, he’d heard, and, seeing it, he believed it. Chilly though the waterfront steps were, Rafael was glad to be there. There was lots to see, from nifty wherries of oarsman and solitary passenger to painted, gilded barges, canopied and fabric-draped, each hauled by its own boat of eight or ten rowers. Two of these barges were idling close to the jetty, self-important liveried staff frowning at the steps in an attempt to lay superior claim while their passengers made moves to gather up their finery. Another barge had just departed, heading downstream, presumably city-bound, gathering speed, its silky banners frantic in the breeze. More serviceable barges lacked the canopies but ran to cushioned benches. One drifted near the jetty, one was disembarking, its sensibly dressed clientele trying to clutch cloaks around themselves while feeling for handrails and accepting helping hands, its four rowers resting, flushed, their oar-blades floating placid. One disembarking gentleman had two dogs with him, on leashes, their collars as wide as their slender necks; they slinked ahead of him on to dry land. Behind the barges, workaday boats jostled for position with their cargoes of hide-covered crates, their crews with rolled-up sleeves and heavy boots. Horses, too, Rafael saw to his surprise. Gliding into view was a vessel bearing five horses. All but one of them stood stock-still, on ceremony, noses raised to the breeze; the troubled one was giving fussy jerks of the head, and an attendant was doing his best to soothe. Wherries passed by, distantly, in both directions, their hulls glinting, the passengers hunkered down and the single or paired oarsmen hauling on the water. Amid all this, fishing boats were biding their time: a couple of dozen, he estimated, on this stretch. And everywhere were swans, some singular, many in conference, each and every one of them looking affronted.

      Rafael envied the swans; momentarily forgetting the cold, he wanted to feel his feet like theirs in the water. Suddenly he was impatient to be on it, to feel it under him, buoyant, and to smell it, breathe it in, raw and fragrant. He and Antonio had to wait, though, for a quarter of an hour or so for a small craft – unpromisingly uncovered – to be brought to the steps, and their luggage to be hefted on to it. The three rowers had sweat-plastered hair despite the chill: clearly they’d been busy. To Rafael, they looked horse-faced – these long, flat English faces with big teeth, where they had teeth at all.

      He wondered how he looked to them. Foreign, yes, undoubtedly, but how foreign? What kind of ‘foreign’? He’d been attracting some stares on the jetty – he was aware of it – but that happened sometimes in Spain. There, though, it was because of the suspicion of Jewish blood. In Spain, he looked as if he was descended from Jews, as if he came from a family of conversos. But there’d been no Jews in England for more than three hundred years: would the English even know what to look for? Antonio had been attracting some interest, but that’d be because – despite his efforts to appear otherwise – he was with Rafael. On his own, he might be able to pass unremarked, here, his hair not far off blond.

      Once aboard, they and their two liveried attendants were rowed upstream, heading north in the shadows of the waterfront walls of Whitehall, the palace in which they’d had to while away the afternoon. The biggest palace in Christendom, Rafael had heard. A whole town had been razed just to make space for the tennis courts. It had been built by the queen’s father, the one who’d had all the wives and killed some of them. The one who’d locked away his long-serving Spanish wife – the queen’s mother – and turned his back on the Pope so that he could marry his English mistress. And now, twenty years on and against all the odds, time had turned and the sole, shut-away, half-Spanish child from that first, ill-fated marriage was queen and married, herself, to a Spaniard, and this palace was hers.

      And England was hers and, like her, it was Catholic. That was the idea. Or, at least, the queen’s idea. The problem was that the English people had other ideas, Rafael had heard. They weren’t taking it seriously. At one church, last Easter, the sacrament was stolen some time between Good Friday and Easter Monday, so that, come the triumphant presentation, there was nothing, and the congregation laughed. No one would ever laugh in a Spanish church. No one would dare.

      And just as the queen had been mistaken in her assumption that her people would take easily to the return to Rome, she’d also been mistaken to assume they’d welcome news of her forthcoming marriage. The ship had been full of it, on the way over: the appalling reception they were facing from the English people. Someone who knew someone who could read English said he’d seen a pamphlet claiming that thousands of Spaniards would be living and working in London by the end of the year. Jack Spaniard, it said, coming to rob the English of their livelihoods. According to someone else, snowballs had been lobbed at the dignitaries arriving at the palace with the marriage treaty. That particular scare-story had less impact because no one knew quite how serious an assault that was: did snowballs hurt? Someone from central Spain was consulted, and – to everyone’s relief – found it amusing.

      English women were shameless: that, too, Rafael had heard on the voyage, but he knew better than to believe what men said about women. He hadn’t seen many English women, so far, and had had only fleeting glimpses as he and his fellow countrymen had passed through towns, villages, courtyards. What was striking about them was their minimal headcovering. Certainly no veils. He’d worried that he’d look at them, exposed as they were. Well, he had looked at them. He didn’t know how to look at them: that was what it was. They’d looked at him and at his fellow countrymen, turned and looked, but as yet he’d never once been able to read the expression.

      Like most Spaniards, all he’d ever known of England before the scandal of the philandering, excommunicated king, was King Arthur and his round table of knights. Back in his boyhood, he and his best friend Gil had lived and breathed stories of the English King Arthur. He’d forgotten those stories until he’d known he was coming here; but in his boyhood, as for so many Spanish boys, that for him had been England. Likewise for most of his fellow countrymen, he imagined. Now, though, he didn’t seem able to remember anything other than a sword-bearing arm rising from a lake. A woman’s arm, rising strong and unequivocal from the murk and weeds: Here, have this. Handy. Well, from what he’d already seen, England had no shortage of watery habitats. Ladies of the lakes could be a common feature, for all he knew.

      He sniffed before he could stop himself. He’d noticed that everyone in England sniffed all the time, and now he, too, was at it. The prince, he’d heard, had had a dreadful cold at his wedding, within four days of coming ashore. Antonio’s nose and the rims of his eyes were red-raw in the wind. He was dishevelled: there was no other word for it. How he must hate that. His near-blond hair, unwashed and damp, was dark; the feather in his hat, lank.

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