The Queen's Sorrow by Suzannah Dunn

oil, but they’d be better than nothing so he bought some. He was contemplating buying some dates and figs for Cecily, dried though they were. At the neighbouring stall, she was asking for some oatmeal. Taking the paper cone of oatmeal from the stallholder, she turned around, expectant, and asked, ‘Where’s Nicholas?’ Rafael did the same; turned around to look and even to ask someone behind him, although there was no one he could ask. He turned right around, twice, his gaze sweeping both close up and further away. No Nicholas. How could there be no Nicholas? There’d be a simple explanation for his momentary disappearance. They just weren’t looking in the right place. Cecily, though, was already demanding of everyone: ‘Where’s Nicholas?’ No one was answering, of course. A couple of people shuffled to one side, making way, self-conscious, unsure what was being asked of them. She began shouting Nicholas’s name: no more questions for bystanders but a direct appeal to her missing son. Dismay and disbelief flared inside Rafael, even anger. You wouldn’t dare, would you? You wouldn’t dare run off. Not here. Here, of all places .
    He heard himself shouting, too, but what he heard was his accent. He was hearing himself as others heard him, and he saw them looking. They were turning around not because ofthe commotion over a lost child but to trace the source of the accent. A liability to Cecily, he was: people were looking at him rather than looking for her boy. His anger switched to them: stupid people, stupid English . Then Cecily’s eyes were briefly on his and he saw the terror in them and knew it as if it were his own. One of them would have to stay in case Nicholas returned. ‘You stay here,’ he said to her, even though he knew it would be agony for her, that her instinct was to go, to search. But he couldn’t have said, I’ll stay, you go ; he couldn’t have said that. He’d spoken first, and there was nothing else he could have said. She began to object but he shouted her down – ‘ For Nicholas ’ – and span away before she could stop him, shouldering his way into the crowd, checking with a glance every stall, every alleyway. It was his fault: yes, his fault, for having given Nicholas the gingerbread man. Rafael hollered his name over people’s heads, and did it defiantly, making the most of it because the boy couldn’t fail to be struck by the accent, to recognise it, to look up, to give himself up.
    How could anyone ever get anywhere in this crowd, let alone get lost? A four-year-old boy couldn’t have gone far. But, then, the opposite was just as true: a lost person would never be found in all this. And suddenly, ridiculously, Rafael’s fear was for himself, turning on him, rearing up and making a strike back at him, because what if Cecily hadn’t listened? What if she didn’t stay, but abandoned her post at the grain stall to go after her son? Face it: that was where she was going to go, after her son. And then he, Rafael, would be lost. She’d find her son and go home, relieved, while Rafael was here among the wily traders and the beggars, unable ever to findhis way back to the house. That was what he felt, even though he knew it was mad. He was mere streets away and he could ask, even if it was in fractured English, or he could head down to the river and find his way home from there.
    Ridiculous , he told himself. Focus , he ordered himself, but everything was in his way: baskets and boxes and barrels, boots and the hems of cloaks, dogs, horses’ haunches. Focus, focus . He was failing at this. He was failing a little boy who’d be terrified. He was hopeless on the boards, tottering along, and he didn’t know the lie of the land, didn’t know where Cheapside led, didn’t know which alleys were dead-ends. And couldn’t ask anyone anything. He should never have charged off, acting the big man. Cecily would have been swifter and sharper.
    He’d gone far enough in one direction;