The Constant Princess ttc-1 Read online

  “What does that say?” she demanded of Madilla, her nursemaid.

  Madilla squinted upwards. “I don’t know,” she said crossly. She always denied her Moorish roots. She always tried to pretend that she knew nothing of the Moors or their lives though she had been born and bred a Moor herself and only converted—according to Juana—for convenience.

  “Tell us, or we’ll pinch you,” Juana offered sweetly.

  The young woman scowled at the two sisters. “It says: ‘May God allow the justice of Islam to prevail within.’ ”

  Catalina hesitated for a moment, hearing the proud ring of certainty, a determination to match her own mother’s voice.

  “Well, He hasn’t,” Juana said smartly. “Allah has deserted the Alhambra, and Isabella has arrived. And if you Moors knew Isabella like we do, you would know that the greatest power is coming in and the lesser power going out.”

  “God save the queen,” Madilla replied quickly. “I know Queen Isabella well enough.”

  As she spoke, the great doors before them, black wood studded with black nails, swung open on their black hammered hinges, and with another blast of trumpets the king and queen strode into the inner courtyard.

  Like dancers rehearsed till they were step perfect, the Spanish guard peeled off to right and left inside the town walls, checking that the place was safe and no despairing soldiers were preparing a last ambush. The great fort of the Alcazaba, built like the prow of a ship jutting out over the plain of Granada, was to their left, and the men poured into it, running across the parade square, ringing the walls, running up and down the towers. Finally, Isabella the queen looked up to the sky, shaded her eyes with her hand clinking with Moorish gold bracelets, and laughed aloud to see the sacred banner of St. James and the silver cross of the crusade flying where the crescent had been.

  Then she turned to see the domestic servants of the palace slowly approaching, their heads bowed. They were led by the grand vizier, his height emphasized by his flowing robes, his piercing black eyes meeting hers, scanning King Ferdinand at her side and the royal family behind them: the prince, and the four princesses. The king and the prince were dressed as richly as sultans, wearing rich, embroidered tunics over their trousers; the queen and the princesses were wearing the traditional kamiz tunics made from the finest silks, over white linen trousers, with veils falling from their heads held back by fillets of gold.

  “Your Royal Highnesses, it is my honor and duty to welcome you to the Alhambra Palace,” the grand vizier said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to hand over the most beautiful palace in Christendom to armed invaders.

  The queen and her husband exchanged one brief glance. “You can take us in,” she said.

  The grand vizier bowed and led the way. The queen glanced back at her children. “Come along, girls,” she said and went ahead of them, through the gardens surrounding the palace, down some steps, and into the discreet doorway.

  “This is the main entrance?” She hesitated before the small door set in the unmarked wall.

  The man bowed. “Your Highness, it is.”

  Isabella said nothing, but Catalina saw her raise her eyebrows as if she did not think much of it, and then they all went inside.

  But the little doorway is like a keyhole to a treasure chest of boxes, the one opening out from another. The man leads us through them like a slave opening doors to a treasury. Their very names are a poem: the Golden Chamber, the Courtyard of the Myrtles, the Hall of the Ambassadors, the Courtyard of the Lions, or the Hall of the Two Sisters. It will take us weeks to find our way from one exquisitely tiled room to another. It will take us months to stop marveling at the pleasure of the sound of water running down the marble gulleys in the rooms, flowing to a white marble fountain that always spills over with the cleanest, freshest water of the mountains. And I will never tire of looking through the white stucco tracery to the view of the plain beyond, the mountains, the blue sky and golden hills. Every window is like a frame for a picture: they are designed to make you stop, look, and marvel. Every window frame is like whitework embroidery—the stucco is so fine, so delicate, it is like sugar work by confectioners, not like anything real.

  We move into the harem as the easiest and most convenient rooms for my three sisters and me, and the harem servants light the braziers in the cool evenings and scatter the scented herbs as if we were the sultanas who lived secluded behind the screens for so long. We have always worn Moorish dress at home and sometimes at great state occasions, so still there is the whisper of silks and the slap of slippers on marble floors, as if nothing has changed. Now we study where the slave girls read, we walk in the gardens that were planted to delight the favorites of the sultan. We eat their fruits, we love the taste of their sherbets, we tie their flowers into garlands for our own heads, and we run down their allées where the heavy scent of roses and honeysuckle is sweet in the cool of the morning.

  We bathe in the hammam, standing stock-still while the servants lather us all over with a rich soap that smells of flowers. Then they pour golden ewer after golden ewer of hot water over us, splashing from head to toe, to wash us clean. We are soothed with rose oil, wrapped in fine sheets and lie, half drunk with sensual pleasure, on the warm marble table that dominates the entire room, under the golden ceiling where the star-shaped openings admit dazzling rays of sunlight into the shadowy peace of the place. One girl manicures our toes while another works on our hands, shaping the nails and painting delicate patterns of henna. We let the old woman pluck our eyebrows, paint our eyelashes. We are served as if we are sultanas, with all the riches of Spain and all the luxury of the East, and we surrender utterly to the delight of the palace. It captivates us, we swoon into submission, the so-called victors.

  Even Isabel, grieving for the loss of her husband, starts to smile again. Even Juana, who is usually so moody and so sulky, is at peace. And I become the pet of the court, the favorite of the gardeners, who let me pick my own peaches from the trees, the darling of the harem, where I am taught to play and dance and sing, and the favorite of the kitchen where they let me watch them preparing the sweet pastries and dishes of honey and almonds of Arabia.

  My father meets with foreign emissaries in the Hall of the Ambassadors, he takes them to the bathhouse for talks, like any leisurely sultan. My mother sits cross-legged on the throne of the Nasrids who have ruled here for generations, her bare feet in soft leather slippers, the drapery of her kamiz falling around her. She listens to the emissaries of the Pope himself, in a chamber that is walled with colored tiles and dancing with pagan light. It feels like home to her: she was raised in the Alcázar in Seville, another Moorish palace. We walk in their gardens, we bathe in their hammam, we step into their scented leather slippers, and we live a life that is more refined and more luxurious than they could dream of in Paris or London or Rome. We live graciously. We live, as we have always aspired to do, like Moors. Our fellow Christians herd goats in the mountains, pray at roadside cairns to the Madonna, are terrified by superstition and lousy with disease, live dirty and die young. We learn from Moslem scholars, we are attended by their doctors, study the stars in the sky which they have named, count with their numbers which start at the magical zero, eat of their sweetest fruits and delight in the waters which run through their aqueducts. Their architecture pleases us: at every turn of every corner we know that we are living inside beauty. Their power now keeps us safe: the Alcazaba is, indeed, invulnerable to attack once more. We learn their poetry, we laugh at their games, we delight in their gardens, in their fruits, we bathe in the waters they have made flow. We are the victors, but they have taught us how to rule. Sometimes I think that we are the barbarians, like those who came after the Romans or the Greeks, who could invade the palaces and capture the aqueducts and then sit like monkeys on a throne, playing with beauty but not understanding it.

  We do not change our faith, at least. Every palace servant has to give lip service to the beliefs of the One True Church. Th
e horns of the mosque are silenced; there is to be no call to prayer in my mother’s hearing. And anyone who disagrees can either leave for Africa at once, convert at once, or face the fires of the Inquisition. We do not soften under the spoils of war; we never forget that we are victors and that we won our victory by force of arms and by the will of God. We made a solemn promise to poor King Boabdil, that his people, the Moslems, should be as safe under our rule as the Christians were safe under his. We promise the convivencia—a way of living together—and they believe that we will make a Spain where anyone, Moor or Christian or Jew, can live quietly and with self-respect since all of us are “People of the Book.” Their mistake is that they meant that truce, and they trusted that truce, and we—as it turns out—do not.

  We betray our word in three months, expelling the Jews and threatening the Moslems. Everyone must convert to the True Faith, and then, if there is any shadow of doubt, or any suspicion against them, their faith will be tested by the Holy Inquisition. It is the only way to make one nation: through one faith. It is the only way to make one people out of the great varied diversity which had been al Andalus. My mother builds a chapel in the council chamber, and where it had once said “Enter and ask. Do not be afraid to seek justice for here you will find it,” in the beautiful shapes of Arabic, she prays to a sterner, more intolerant God than Allah, and no one comes for justice anymore.

  But nothing can change the nature of the palace. Not even the stamp of our soldiers’ feet on the marble floors can shake the centuries-old sense of peace. I make Madilla teach me what the flowing inscriptions mean in every room, and my favorite is not the promises of justice, but the question written in the Courtyard of the Two Sisters, which says: “Have you ever seen such a beautiful garden?” and then answers itself: “We have never seen a garden with greater abundance of fruit, nor sweeter, nor more perfumed.”

  It is not truly a palace, not even as those we had known at Córdoba or Toledo. It is not a castle, nor a fort. It was built first and foremost as a garden, with rooms of exquisite luxury so that one could live outside. It is a series of courtyards designed for flowers and people alike. It is a dream of beauty: walls, tiles, pillars melting into flowers, climbers, fruit, and herbs. The Moors believe that a garden is a paradise on earth, and they have spent fortunes over the centuries to make this “al-Yanna”: the word that means garden, secret place, and paradise.

  I know that I love it. Even as a little child I know that this is an exceptional place, that I will never find anywhere more lovely. And even as a child I know that I cannot stay here. It is God’s will and my mother’s will that I must leave al-Yanna, my secret place, my garden, my paradise. It is to be my destiny that I should find the most beautiful place in all the world when I am just six years old, and then leave it when I am fifteen, as homesick as Boabdil, as if happiness and peace for me will only ever be short-lived.

  Dogmersfield Palace,

  Hampshire, Autumn 1501

  “I SAY, YOU CANNOT COME IN! If you were the King of England himself—you could not come in.”

  “I am the King of England,” Henry Tudor said without a flicker of amusement. “And she can either come out right now or I damned well will come in and my son will follow me.”

  “The Infanta has already sent word to the king that she cannot see him,” the duenna said witheringly. “The noblemen of her court rode out to explain to him that she is in seclusion, as a lady of Spain. Do you think the King of England would come riding down the road when the Infanta has refused to receive him? What sort of a man do you think he is?”

  “Exactly like this one,” he said and thrust his fist with the great gold ring towards her face. The Count de Cabra came into the hall in a rush and at once recognized the lean, forty-year-old man threatening the Infanta’s duenna with a clenched fist, a few aghast servitors behind him, and gasped out, “The king!”

  At the same moment the duenna recognized the new badge of England, the combined roses of York and Lancaster, and recoiled. The count skidded to a halt and threw himself into a low bow.

  “It is the king,” he hissed, his voice muffled by speaking with his head on his knees. The duenna gave a little gasp of horror and dropped into a deep curtsey.

  “Get up,” the king said shortly. “And fetch her.”

  “But she is a princess of Spain, Your Grace,” the woman said, rising but with her head still bowed low. “She is to stay in seclusion. She cannot be seen by you before her wedding day. This is the tradition. Her gentlemen went out to explain to you—”

  “It’s your tradition. It’s not my tradition. And since she is my daughter-in-law in my country, under my laws, she will obey my tradition.”

  “She has been brought up most carefully, most modestly, most properly—”

  “Then she will be very shocked to find an angry man in her bedroom. Madam, I suggest that you get her up at once.”

  “I will not, Your Grace. I take my orders from the Queen of Spain herself and she charged me to make sure that every respect was shown to the Infanta and that her behavior was in every way—”

  “Madam, you can take your working orders from me or your marching orders from me. I don’t care which. Now send the girl out or I swear on my crown I will come in, and if I catch her naked in bed, then she won’t be the first woman I have ever seen in such a case. But she had better pray that she is the prettiest.”

  The Spanish duenna went quite white at the insult.

  “Choose,” the king said stonily.

  “I cannot fetch the Infanta,” she said stubbornly.

  “Dear God! That’s it! Tell her I am coming in at once.”

  She scuttled backwards like an angry crow, her face blanched with shock. Henry gave her a few moments to prepare and then called her bluff by striding in behind her.

  The room was lit only by candles and firelight. The covers of the bed were turned back as if the girl had hastily jumped up. Henry registered the intimacy of being in her bedroom, with her sheets still warm, the scent of her lingering in the enclosed space, before he looked at her. She was standing by the bed, one small white hand on the carved wooden post. She had a cloak of dark blue thrown over her shoulders and her white nightgown trimmed with priceless lace peeped through the opening at the front. Her rich auburn hair, plaited for sleep, hung down her back, but her face was completely shrouded in a hastily thrown mantilla of dark lace.

  Doña Elvira darted between the girl and the king. “This is the Infanta,” she said. “Veiled until her wedding day.”

  “Not on my money,” Henry Tudor said bitterly. “I’ll see what I’ve bought, thank you.”

  He stepped forwards. The desperate duenna nearly threw herself to her knees. “Her modesty—”

  “Has she got some awful mark?” he demanded, driven to voice his deepest fear. “Some blemish? Is she scarred by the pox and they did not tell me?”

  “No! I swear.”

  Silently, the girl put out her white hand and took the ornate lace hem of her veil. Her duenna gasped a protest but could do nothing to stop the princess as she raised the veil and then flung it back. Her clear blue eyes stared into the lined, angry face of Henry Tudor without wavering. The king drank her in and then gave a little sigh of relief at the sight of her.

  She was an utter beauty: a smooth, rounded face, a straight long nose, a full, sulky, sexy mouth. Her chin was up, he saw; her gaze challenging. This was no shrinking maiden fearing ravishment. This was a fighting princess standing on her dignity even in this most appalling moment of embarrassment.

  He bowed. “I am Henry Tudor, King of England,” he said.

  She curtseyed.

  He stepped forwards, and saw her curb her instinct to flinch away. He took her firmly at the shoulders and kissed one warm, smooth cheek and then the other. The perfume of her hair and the warm female smell of her body came to him, and he felt desire pulse in his groin and at his temples. Quickly he stepped back and let her go.

  “You are welcom
e to England,” he said. He cleared his throat. “You will forgive my impatience to see you. My son too is on his way to visit you.”

  “I beg your pardon,” she said icily, speaking in perfectly phrased French. “I was not informed until a few moments ago that Your Grace was insisting on the honor of this unexpected visit.”

  Henry fell back a little from the whip of her temper. “I have a right…”

  She shrugged, an absolutely Spanish gesture. “Of course. You have every right over me.”

  At the ambiguous, provocative words, he was again aware of his closeness to her: of the intimacy of the small room, the tester bed hung with rich draperies, the sheets invitingly turned back, the pillow still impressed with the shape of her head. It was a scene for ravishment, not for a royal greeting. Again he felt the secret thud-thud of lust.

  “I’ll see you outside,” he said abruptly, as if it were her fault that he could not rid himself of the flash in his mind of what it would be like to have this ripe little beauty that he had bought. What would it be like if he had bought her for himself, rather than for his son?

  “I shall be honored,” she said coldly.

  He got himself out of the room briskly enough and nearly collided with Prince Arthur, hovering anxiously in the doorway.

  “Fool,” he remarked.

  Prince Arthur, pale with nerves, pushed his blond fringe back from his face, stood still, and said nothing.

  “I’ll send that duenna home at the first moment I can,” the king said. “And the rest of them. She can’t make a little Spain in England, my son. The country won’t stand for it, and I damned well won’t stand for it.”