Free The Queen's Sorrow by Suzannah Dunn

knock-backs, no caution on behalf of the beholder, nothing but the absolute best in response. It was wonderful to witness and Rafael understood the seriousness of being the guardian of it.
    Naïvely, he’d not intended Cecily to see his sketch of her son. But on one of her trips from the room with her silks, she glanced over and exclaimed. Instantly, though, came a hesitancy, as if it might have been presumptuous of her even to have recognised the subject. Rafael sat there with it in his lap, helpless, exposed. Was it a gift? Just because that hadn’t been his intention … It was a gift, wasn’t it, this sketch of her boy. Had to be.
    ‘Nicholas,’ she said, sounding amazed. ‘Look.’ And then that hesitancy again: to Rafael, ‘May I?’
    He handed it to her, and she knelt beside her boy to show him. ‘It’s you.’
    He stared at it, no less wary than when confronting Rafael himself, studying it, intent and grave, as if looking for something, before surrendering it back to his mother. She received it with a slight reluctance. In turn she went to hand it to Rafael, but he declined with a smile and a raising of his hands.He hoped to strike the right note – a glad giving up of it, but not too dismissive of it, either – but didn’t know that he’d been all that successful. She withdrew gingerly, looked for somewhere to place it and laid it face-up on the table, where it seemed, to Rafael, vulnerable.
    The following evening, he sketched Cecily’s hand; not the one busy with the needle but the other, the steadying one, her left. The one on which she wore a wedding band. And he wondered: was she a widow? He’d been presuming so, but maybe there was a husband working away somewhere – perhaps for Mr Kitson, abroad, or at the country house. Rafael hadn’t a clue as to the ways people lived and worked here in England. Perhaps it was normal for spouses to live – to work – apart. If she was a widow, how long had she been bereaved? The child was only four. Clearly she’d had him late in life, and Rafael wondered if there were others, elsewhere, grown up. Rafael imagined opening the conversation: You know, my wife and I, we only ever had the one, and late . They had so nearly not had him; he had so nearly never happened.
    There would become a graininess to the dusk and soon they’d see that it’d already happened: the lovely, velvety mix of light and dark would finally have lost balance in favour of darkness. However hard Rafael tried to see the moment happen, he never succeeded. It was, he knew, in the nature of it: it had to happen unseen or it couldn’t happen at all. This evening, as on all others, they’d been sinking into the shadows, letting themselves and the room be taken. But soon Cecily would get up and begin lighting candles, and the candlelight would gently scoop them up, set them apart and make them observers of those shadows.
    He could see how unscarred her hands were: unburned, uncalloused; no signs of hardship. Certainly she endured none in this house. She was a seamstress who didn’t do the laundry; she shopped for food rather than pulling it from the soil or kneading or cooking it. But she’d have come from somewhere. She’d have survived things; there would have been things to survive, there were always things to have to survive. Had she always lived and worked in houses like this? There was no trace of her personal history on her hands, except for the marriage. It shone, the evidence of that. How long had she been here, gliding through this household, fabric over her arm, and ready when required to claim the favoured position of housekeeper? For ever, said her demeanour, but – Rafael felt – a little too deliberately. The child gave her away. That child wasn’t at home, here.
    Rafael concentrated again on his sketch. There was plenty for him to do, from the fan of bones across the back of the hand to the indentations on the knuckles. His own wife’s hands, by comparison, were small