The Constant Princess Page 8

  Catalina

  P.S. Although I am glad to be married, and to be called to do my duty for Spain and God, I miss you very much. I know you are a queen before a mother, but I would be so glad to have one letter from you. C

  The court bade a cheerful farewell to the Spanish, but Catalina found it hard to smile and wave. After they had gone she went down to the river to see the last of the barges shrink and then disappear in the distance, and King Henry found her there, a lonely figure, on the pier looking downstream, as if she wished she were going too.

  He was too skilled with women to ask her what was wrong. He knew very well what was wrong: loneliness, and homesickness natural enough in a young woman of nearly sixteen years old. He had been an exile from England for almost all his own life. He knew very well the rise and fall of yearning that comes with an unexpected scent, the change of seasons, a farewell. To invite an explanation would only trigger a flood of tears and achieve nothing. Instead, he tucked her cold little hand under his arm and said that she must see his library which he had newly assembled at the palace and she could borrow books to read at any time. He threw an order over his shoulder to one of his pages as he led the princess to the library and walked her round the beautiful shelves, showing her not only the classical authors and the histories that were his own interest but also the stories of romance and heroism which he thought more likely to divert her.

  She did not complain, he noticed with pleasure, and she had rubbed her eyes dry as soon as she had seen him coming towards her. She had been raised in a hard school. Isabella of Spain had been a soldier’s wife and a soldier herself; she did not raise any of her girls to be self-indulgent. He thought there was not a young woman in England who could match this girl for grit. But there were shadows under the princess’s blue eyes and though she took the proffered volumes with a word of thanks she still did not smile.

  “And do you like maps?” he asked her.

  She nodded. “Of course,” she said. “In my father’s library we have maps of the whole world, and Cristóbal Colón made him a map to show him the Americas.”

  “Does your father have a large library?” he asked, jealous of his reputation as a scholar.

  Her polite hesitation before she replied told him everything, told him that his library here, of which he had been so proud, was nothing to the learning of the Moors of Spain. “Of course, my father has inherited many books; they are not all his own collection,” Catalina said tactfully. “Many of them are Moorish authors from Moorish scholars. You know that the Arabs translated the Greek authors before they were ever made into French or Italian, or English. The Arabs had all the sciences and all the mathematics when they were forgotten in Christendom. He has all the Moorish translations of Aristotle and Sophocles and everyone.”

  He could feel his longing for the new learning like a hunger. “He has many books?”

  “Thousands of volumes,” she said. “Hebrew and Arabic, Latin, and all the Christian languages too. But he doesn’t read them all. He has Arab scholars to study them.”

  “And the maps?” he asked.

  “He is advised mostly by Arab navigators and mapmakers,” she said. “They travel so far overland, they understand how to chart their way by the stars. The sea voyages are just the same to them as a journey through the desert. They say that a watery waste is the same as a plain of sand; they use the stars and the moon to measure their journey in both.”

  “And does your father think that much profit will come from his discoveries?” the king asked curiously. “We have all heard of these great voyages of Cristóbal Colón and the treasures he has brought back.”

  He admired how her eyelashes swept down to hide the gleam. “Oh, I could not say.” Cleverly, she avoided the question. “Certainly my mother thinks that there are many souls to save for Jesus.”

  Henry opened the great folder with his collection of maps and spread them before her. Beautifully illuminated sea monsters frolicked in the corners. He traced for her the coastline of England, the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, the handful of regions of France, the new widening borders of her own country of Spain and the papal lands in Italy. “You see why your father and I have to be friends,” he said to her. “We both face the power of France on our doorstep. We cannot even trade with each other unless we can keep France out of the narrow seas.”

  “If Juana’s son inherits the Hapsburg lands, then he will have two kingdoms,” she indicated. “Spain and also the Netherlands.”

  “And your son will have all of England, an alliance with Scotland, and all our lands in France,” he said, making a sweep with his spread palm. “They will be a powerful pair of cousins.”

  She smiled at the thought of it, and Henry saw the ambition in her. “You would like to have a son who would rule half of Christendom?”

  “What woman would not?” she said. “And my son and Juana’s son could surely defeat the Moors, could drive them back and back beyond the Mediterranean Sea?”

  “Or perhaps you might find a way to live in peace,” he suggested. “Just because one man calls Him Allah and another calls him God is no reason for believers to be enemies, surely?”

  At once Catalina shook her head. “It will have to be a war forever, I think. My mother says that it is the great battle between Good and Evil which will go on until the end of time.”

  “Then you will be in danger forever,” he started, when there was a tap on the great wooden door of the library. It was the page that Henry had sent running, bringing a flustered goldsmith who had been waiting for days to show his work to the king and was rather surprised to be summoned in a moment.

  “Now,” Henry said to his daughter-in-law, “I have a treat for you.”

  She looked up at him. “Good God,” he thought. “It would be a man of stone who did not want this little flower in his bed. I swear that I could make her smile, and at any rate, I would enjoy trying.”

  “Have you?”

  Henry gestured to the man who flapped out a cloth of maroon velvet from his pocket and then spilled the contents of his knapsack onto the scarlet background. A tumble of jewels, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, pearls, chains, lockets, earrings, and brooches was swiftly spread before Catalina’s widening gaze.

  “You shall have your pick,” Henry said, his voice warm and intimate. “It is my private gift to you, to bring the smile back to your pretty face.”

  She hardly heard him. She was at the table in a moment, the goldsmith holding up one rich item after another. Henry watched her indulgently. So she might be a princess with a pure bloodline of Castilian aristocrats, while he was the grandson of a workingman; but she was a girl as easily bought as any other. And he had the means to please her.

  “Silver?” he asked.

  She turned a bright face to him. “Not silver,” she said decisively.

  Henry remembered that this was a girl who had seen the treasure of the Incas cast at her feet.

  “Gold, then?”

  “I do prefer gold.”

  “Pearls?”

  She made a little moue with her mouth.

  “My God, she has a kissable mouth,” he thought. “Not pearls?” he asked aloud.

  “They are not my greatest favorite,” she confided. She smiled up at him. “What is your favorite stone?”

  “Why, she is flirting with me,” he said to himself, stunned at the thought. “She is playing me like she would an indulgent uncle. She is reeling me in like a fish.”

  “Emeralds?”

  She smiled again.

  “No. This,” she said simply.

  She had picked out, in a moment, the most expensive thing in the jeweler’s pack, a collar of deepest blue sapphires with a matching pair of earrings. Charmingly, she held the collar against her smooth cheeks so that he could look from the jewels to her eyes. She took a step closer towards him so that he could smell the scent on her hair, orange-blossom water from the gardens of the Alhambra. She smelled as if she were an exotic flower hers
elf. “Do they match my eyes?” she asked him. “Are my eyes as blue as sapphires?”

  He took a little breath, surprised at the violence of his response. “They are. You shall have them,” he said, almost choking on his desire for her. “You shall have this and anything else you like. You shall name your…your…wish.”

  The look she threw up at him was of pure delight. “And my ladies too?”

  “Call your ladies. They shall have their pick.”

  She laughed with pleasure and ran to the door. He let her go. He did not trust himself to stay in the room without chaperones. Hastily, he took himself out into the hall and met his mother, returning from hearing Mass.

  He kneeled, and she put her fingers on his head in her blessing. “My son.”

  “My lady mother.”

  He rose to his feet. She quickly took in the flush of his face and his suppressed energy. “Has something troubled you?”

  “No!”

  She sighed. “Is it the queen? Is it Elizabeth?” she asked wearily. “Is she complaining about the Scots’ marriage for Margaret again?”

  “No,” he said. “I have not seen her today.”

  “She will have to accustom herself,” she said. “A princess cannot choose whom she marries and when she leaves home. Elizabeth would know that if she had been properly brought up. But she was not.”

  He gave his crooked smile. “That is hardly her fault.”

  His mother’s disdain was apparent. “No good would ever have come from her mother,” she said shortly. “Bad breeding, the Woodvilles.”

  Henry shrugged and said nothing. He never defended his wife to his mother—her malice was so constant and so impenetrable that it was a waste of time to try to change her mind. He never defended his mother to his wife; he never had to. Queen Elizabeth never commented on her difficult mother-in-law or her demanding husband. She took him, his mother, his autocratic rule, as if they were natural hazards, as unpleasant and as inevitable as bad weather.

  “You should not let her disturb you,” his mother said.

  “She has never disturbed me,” he said, thinking of the princess who did.

  I am certain now that the king likes me, above all his daughters, and I am so glad of it. I am used to being the favorite daughter, the baby of the family. I like it when I am the favorite of the king, I like to feel special.

  When he saw that I was sad at my court going back to Spain and leaving me in England, he spent the afternoon with me, showing me his library, talking about his maps, and finally, giving me an exquisite collar of sapphires. He let me pick out exactly what I wanted from the goldsmith’s pack, and he said that the sapphires were the color of my eyes.

  I did not like him very well at first, but I am becoming accustomed to his abrupt speech and his quick ways. He is a man whose word is law in this court and in this land, and he owes thanks to no one for anything, except perhaps his Lady Mother. He has no close friends, no intimates but her and the soldiers who fought with him, who are now the great men of his court. He is not tender to his wife nor warm to his daughters, but I like it that he attends to me. Perhaps I will come to love him as a daughter. Already I am glad when he singles me out. In a court such as this, which revolves around his approval, it makes me feel like a princess indeed when he praises me or spends time with me.

  If it were not for him then I think I would be even more lonely than I am. The prince my husband treats me as if I were a table or a chair. He never speaks to me, he never smiles at me, he never starts a conversation; it is all he can do to find a reply. I think I was a fool when I thought he looked like a troubadour. He looks like a milksop and that is the truth. He never raises his voice above a whisper, he never says anything of any interest. He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say—what good are they? We live as strangers, and if he did not come to my bedchamber at night, once a week as if on duty, I would not know I was married at all.

  I show the sapphires to his sister, the Princess Margaret, and she is eaten up with jealousy. I shall have to confess to the sin of vanity and of pride. It is not right for me to flaunt them before her; but if she had ever been kind to me by word or deed, then I would not have shown her. I want her to know that her father values me, even if she and her grandmother and her brother do not. But now all I have done is upset her and put myself in the wrong, and I will have to confess and make a penance.

  Worst of all, I did not behave with the dignity that a princess of Spain should always show. If she were not such a fishwife’s apprentice, then I could have been better. This court dances around the king as if nothing matters more in the world than his favor, and I should know better than to join in. At the very least I should not be measuring myself against a girl four years younger than me and only a princess of England, even if she calls herself Queen of Scotland at every opportunity.

  The young Prince and Princess of Wales finished their visit to Richmond and started to make their own royal household in Baynard’s Castle. Catalina had her rooms at the back of the house, overlooking the gardens and the river, with her household, her Spanish ladies, her Spanish chaplain, and duenna, and Arthur’s rooms overlooked the City with his household, his chaplain, and his tutor. They met formally only once a day for dinner, when the two households sat at opposite sides of the hall and stared at each other with mutual suspicion, more like enemies in the middle of a forced truce than members of a united home.

  The castle was run according to the commands of Lady Margaret, the king’s mother. The feast days and fast days, the entertainments and the daily timetable were all commanded by her. Even the nights when Arthur was to visit his wife in her bedchamber had been appointed by her. She did not want the young people becoming exhausted, nor did she want them neglecting their duties. So once a week the prince’s household and friends solemnly escorted him to the princess’s rooms and left him there overnight. For both young people the experience was an ordeal of embarrassment. Arthur became no more skilled. Catalina endured his silent determination as politely as she could. But then, one day in early December, Catalina’s monthly course started and she told Doña Elvira. The duenna at once told the prince’s groom of the bedchamber that the prince could not come to the Infanta’s bed for a week; the Infanta was indisposed. Within half an hour, everyone from the king at Whitehall to the spit boy at Baynard’s Castle knew that the Princess of Wales was having her course and so no child had yet been conceived, and everyone from the king to the spit boy wondered, since the girl was lusty and strong and since she was bleeding—obviously fertile—if Arthur was capable of doing his side of their duty.

  In the middle of December, when the court was preparing for the great twelve-day feast of Christmas, Arthur was summoned by his father and ordered to prepare to leave for his castle at Ludlow.

  “I suppose you’ll want to take your wife with you,” the king said, smiling at his son in an effort to seem unconcerned.

  “As you wish, sir,” Arthur replied carefully.

  “What would you wish?”

  After enduring a week’s ban from Catalina’s bed, with everyone remarking among themselves that no child had been made—but to be sure, it was early days yet, and it might be nobody’s fault—Arthur felt embarrassed and discouraged. He had not gone back to her bedroom, and she had sent no message to invite him. He could not expect an invitation—he knew that was ridiculous—a princess of Spain could hardly send for the prince of England; but she had not smiled or encouraged him in any way at all. He had received no message to tell him to resume his visits, and he had no idea how long these mysteries usually took. There was no one that he could ask, and he did not know what he should do.

  “She does not seem very merry,” Arthur observed.

  “She’s homesick,” his father said briskly. “It’s up to you to divert her. Take her to Ludlow with you. Buy her things. She’s a girl like any other. Praise her beauty. Tell her jokes. Flirt with her.”

  A
rthur looked quite blank. “In Latin?”

  His father barked his harsh laugh. “Lad. You can do it in Welsh if your eyes are smiling and your cock is hard. She’ll know what you mean. I swear it. She’s a girl who knows well enough what a man means.”

  There was no answering brightness from his son. “Yes, sir.”

  “If you don’t want her with you, you’re not obliged to take her this year, you know. You were supposed to marry and then spend the first year apart.”

  “That was when I was fourteen.”

  “Only a year ago.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “So you do want her with you?”

  His son flushed. The father regarded the boy with sympathy. “You want her, but you are afraid she will make a fool of you?” he suggested.

  The blond head drooped, nodded.

  “And you think if you and she are far from court and from me, then she will be able to torment you.”

  Another small nod. “And all her ladies. And her duenna.”

  “And time will hang heavy on your hands.”

  The boy looked up, his face a picture of misery.

  “And she will be bored and sulky and she will make your little court at Ludlow a miserable prison for both of you.”

  “If she dislikes me…” he started, his voice very low.

  Henry rested a heavy hand on his boy’s shoulder. “Oh, my son. It doesn’t matter what she thinks of you,” he said. “Perhaps your mother was not my choice, perhaps I was not hers. When a throne is involved the heart comes in second place if it ever matters at all. She knows what she has to do; and that is all that counts.”