The Constant Princess

by Philippa Gregory

  “People don’t object. The country people seem to love the princess,” Arthur suggested mildly. “Her escort says—”

  “Because she wears a stupid hat. Because she is odd: Spanish, rare. Because she is young and—” he broke off “—pretty.”

  “Is she?” he gasped. “I mean: is she?”

  “Haven’t I just gone in to make sure? But no Englishman will stand for any Spanish nonsense once they get over the novelty. And neither will I. This is a marriage to cement an alliance, not to flatter her vanity. Whether they like her or not, she’s marrying you. Whether you like her or not, she’s marrying you. Whether she likes it or not, she’s marrying you. And she’d better get out here now or I won’t like her and that will be the only thing that can make a difference.”

  I have to go out. I have won only the briefest of reprieves and I know he is waiting for me outside the door to my bedchamber and he has demonstrated, powerfully enough, that if I do not go to him, then the mountain will come to Mohammed and I will be shamed again.

  I brush Doña Elvira aside as a duenna who cannot protect me now, and I go to the door of my rooms. My servants are frozen, like slaves enchanted in a fairy tale by this extraordinary behavior from a king. My heart hammers in my ears, and I know a girl’s embarrassment at having to step forwards in public but also a soldier’s desire to let battle be joined, the eagerness to know the worst, to face danger rather than evade it.

  Henry of England wants me to meet his son, before his traveling party, without ceremony, without dignity, as if we were a scramble of peasants. So be it. He will not find a princess of Spain falling back for fear. I grit my teeth. I smile as my mother commanded me.

  I nod to my herald, who is as stunned as the rest of my companions. “Announce me,” I order him.

  His face blank with shock, he throws open the door. “The Infanta Catalina, Princess of Spain and Princess of Wales,” he bellows.

  This is me. This is my moment. This is my battle cry.

  I step forwards.

  The Spanish Infanta—with her face naked to every man’s gaze—stood in the darkened doorway and then walked into the room, only a little flame of color in both cheeks betraying her ordeal.

  At his father’s side, Prince Arthur swallowed. She was far more beautiful than he had imagined, and a million times more haughty. She was dressed in a gown of dark black velvet, slashed to show an undergown of carnation silk, the neck cut square and low over her plump breasts, hung with ropes of pearls. Her auburn hair, freed from the plait, tumbled down her back in a great wave of red-gold. On her head was a black lace mantilla flung determinedly back. She swept a deep curtsey and came up with her head held high, graceful as a dancer.

  “I beg your pardon for not being ready to greet you,” she said in French. “If I had known you were coming, I would have been prepared.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t hear the racket,” the king said. “I was arguing at your door for a good ten minutes.”

  “I thought it was a pair of porters brawling,” she said coolly.

  Arthur suppressed a gasp of horror at her impertinence, but his father was eyeing her with a smile as if a new filly were showing promising spirit.

  “No. It was me, threatening your lady-in-waiting. I am sorry that I had to march in on you.”

  She inclined her head. “That was my duenna, Doña Elvira. I am sorry if she displeased you. Her English is not good. She cannot have understood what you wanted.”

  “I wanted to see my daughter-in-law, and my son wanted to see his bride, and I expect an English princess to behave like an English princess, and not like some damned sequestered girl in a harem. I thought your parents had beaten the Moors. I didn’t expect to find them set up as your models.”

  Catalina ignored the insult with a slight turn of her head. “I am sure that you will teach me good English manners,” she said. “Who better to advise me?” She turned to Prince Arthur and swept him a royal curtsey. “My lord.”

  He faltered in his bow in return, amazed at the serenity that she could muster in this most embarrassing of moments. He reached into his jacket for her present, fumbled with the little purse of jewels, dropped them, picked them up again, and finally thrust them towards her, feeling like a fool.

  She took them and inclined her head in thanks but did not open them. “Have you dined, Your Grace?”

  “We’ll eat here,” he said bluntly. “I ordered dinner already.”

  “Then can I offer you a drink? Or somewhere to wash and change your clothes before you dine?” She examined the long, lean length of him consideringly, from the mud spattering his pale, lined face to his dusty boots. The English were a prodigiously dirty nation: not even a great house such as this one had an adequate hammam or even piped water. “Or perhaps you don’t like to wash?”

  A harsh chuckle was forced from the king. “You can order me a cup of ale and have them send fresh clothes and hot water to the best bedroom and I’ll change before dinner.” He raised a hand. “You needn’t take it as a compliment to you. I always wash before dinner.”

  Arthur saw her nip her lower lip with little white teeth as if to refrain from some sarcastic reply. “Yes, Your Grace,” she said pleasantly. “As you wish.” She summoned her lady-in-waiting to her side and gave her low-voiced orders in rapid Spanish. The woman curtseyed and led the king from the room.

  The princess turned to Prince Arthur.

  “Et tu?” she asked in Latin. “And you?”

  “I? What?” he stammered.

  He felt that she was trying not to sigh with impatience.

  “Would you like to wash and change your coat also?”

  “I’ve washed,” he said. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he could have bitten off his own tongue. He sounded like a child being scolded by a nurse, he thought. “I’ve washed,” indeed. What was he going to do next? Hold out his hands palms upwards so that she could see he was a good boy?

  “Then will you take a glass of wine? Or ale?”

  Catalina turned to the table where the servants were hastily laying cups and flagons.

  “Wine.”

  She raised a glass and a flagon and the two chinked together, and then chink-chink-chinked again. In amazement, he saw that her hands were trembling.

  She poured the wine quickly and held it to him. His gaze went from her hand and the slightly rippled surface of the wine to her pale face.

  She was not laughing at him, he saw. She was not at all at ease with him. His father’s rudeness had brought out the pride in her, but alone with him she was just a girl, some months older than he, but still just a girl. The daughter of the two most formidable monarchs in Europe but still just a girl with shaking hands.

  “You need not be frightened,” he said very quietly. “I am sorry about all this.”

  He meant—your failed attempt to avoid this meeting, my father’s brusque informality, my own inability to stop him or soften him, and, more than anything else, the misery that this business must be for you: coming far from your home among strangers and meeting your new husband, dragged from your bed under protest.

  She looked down. He stared at the flawless pallor of her skin, at the fair eyelashes and pale eyebrows.

  Then she looked up at him. “It’s all right,” she said. “I have seen far worse than this, I have been in far worse places than this, and I have known worse men than your father. You need not fear for me. I am afraid of nothing.”

  No one will ever know what it cost me to smile, what it cost me to stand before your father and not tremble. I am not yet sixteen, I am far from my mother, I am in a strange country, I cannot speak the language, and I know nobody here. I have no friends but the party of companions and servants that I have brought with me, and they look to me to protect them. They do not think to help me.

  I know what I have to do. I have to be a Spanish princess for the English and an English princess for the Spanish. I have to seem at ease where I am not and assume confi
dence when I am afraid. You may be my husband, but I can hardly see you, I have no sense of you yet. I have no time to consider you. I am absorbed in being the princess that your father has bought, the princess that my mother has delivered, the princess that will fulfill the bargain and secure a treaty between England and Spain.

  No one will ever know that I have to pretend to ease, pretend to confidence, pretend to grace. Of course I am afraid. But I will never, never show it. And, when they call my name I will always step forwards.

  The king, having washed and taken a couple of glasses of wine before he came to his dinner, was affable with the young princess, determined to overlook their introduction. Once or twice she caught him glancing at her sideways, as if to get the measure of her, and she turned to look at him, full on, one sandy eyebrow slightly raised as if to interrogate him.

  “Yes?” he demanded.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said equably. “I thought Your Grace needed something. You glanced at me.”

  “I was thinking you’re not much like your portrait,” he said.

  She flushed a little. Portraits were designed to flatter the sitter, and when the sitter was a royal princess on the marriage market, even more so.

  “Better-looking,” Henry said begrudgingly, to reassure her. “Younger, softer, prettier.”

  She did not warm to the praise as he expected her to do. She merely nodded as if it were an interesting observation.

  “You had a bad voyage,” Henry remarked.

  “Very bad,” she said. She turned to Prince Arthur. “We were driven back as we set out from Coruña in August, and we had to wait for the storms to pass. When we finally set sail, it was still terribly rough, and then we were forced into Plymouth. We couldn’t get to Southampton at all. We were all quite sure we would be drowned.”

  “Well, you couldn’t have come overland,” Henry said flatly, thinking of the parlous state of France and the enmity of the French king. “You’d be a priceless hostage for a king who was heartless enough to take you. Thank God you never fell into enemy hands.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully. “Pray God I never do.”

  “Well, your troubles are over now,” Henry concluded. “The next boat you are on will be the royal barge when you go down the Thames. How shall you like to become Princess of Wales?”

  “I have been the Princess of Wales ever since I was three years old,” she corrected him. “They always called me Catalina, the Infanta, Princess of Wales. I knew it was my destiny.” She looked at Arthur, who still sat silently observing the table. “I have known we would be married all my life. It was kind of you to write to me so often. It made me feel that we were not complete strangers.”

  He flushed. “I was ordered to write to you,” he said awkwardly. “As part of my studies. But I liked getting your replies.”

  “Good God, boy, you don’t exactly sparkle, do you?” asked his father critically.

  Arthur flushed scarlet to his ears.

  “There was no need to tell her that you were ordered to write,” his father ruled. “Better to let her think that you were writing of your own choice.”

  “I don’t mind,” Catalina said quietly. “I was ordered to reply. And, as it happens, I should like us always to speak the truth to each other.”

  The king barked out a laugh. “Not in a year’s time you won’t,” he predicted. “You will be all in favor of the polite lie then. The great savior of a marriage is mutual ignorance.”

  Arthur nodded obediently, but Catalina merely smiled, as if his observations were of interest but not necessarily true. Henry found himself piqued by the girl, and still aroused by her prettiness.

  “I daresay your father does not tell your mother every thought that crosses his mind,” he said, trying to make her look at him again.

  He succeeded. She gave him a long, slow, considering gaze from her blue eyes. “Perhaps he does not,” she conceded. “I would not know. It is not fitting that I should know. But whether he tells her or not: my mother knows everything anyway.”

  He laughed. Her dignity was quite delightful in a girl whose head barely came up to his chest. “She is a visionary, your mother? She has the gift of Sight?”

  She did not laugh in reply. “She is wise,” she said simply. “She is the wisest monarch in Europe.”

  The king thought he would be foolish to bridle at a girl’s devotion to her mother, and it would be graceless to point out that her mother might have unified the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon but that she was still a long way from creating a peaceful and united Spain. The tactical skill of Isabella and Ferdinand had forged a single country from the Moorish kingdoms; they had yet to make everyone accept their peace. Catalina’s own journey to London had been disrupted by rebellions of Moors and Jews who could not bear the tyranny of the Spanish kings. He changed the subject. “Why don’t you show us a dance?” he demanded, thinking that he would like to see her move. “Or is that not allowed in Spain either?”

  “Since I am an English princess, I must learn your customs,” she said. “Would an English princess get up in the middle of the night and dance for the king after he forced his way into her rooms?”

  Henry laughed at her. “If she had any sense she would.”

  She threw him a small, demure smile. “Then I will dance with my ladies,” she decided, and rose from her seat at the high table and went down to the center of the floor. She called one by name, Henry noted, María de Salinas, a pretty, dark-haired girl who came quickly to stand beside Catalina. Three other young women, pretending shyness but eager to show themselves off, came forwards.

  Henry looked them over. He had asked Their Majesties of Spain that their daughter’s companions should all be pretty, and he was pleased to see that however blunt and ill-mannered they had found his request, they had acceded to it. The girls were all good-looking, but none of them outshone the princess, who stood composed and then raised her hands and clapped, to order the musicians to play.

  He noticed at once that she moved like a sensual woman. The dance was a pavane, a slow ceremonial dance, and she moved with her hips swaying and her eyes heavy-lidded, a little smile on her face. She had been well schooled. Any princess would be taught how to dance in the courtly world where dancing, singing, music, and poetry mattered more than anything else; but she danced like a woman who let the music move her, and Henry, who had some experience, believed that women who could be summoned by music were the ones who responded to the rhythms of lust.

  He went from pleasure in watching her to a sense of rising irritation that this exquisite piece would be put in Arthur’s cold bed. He could not see his thoughtful, scholarly boy teasing and arousing the passion in this girl on the edge of womanhood. He imagined that Arthur would fumble about and perhaps hurt her, and she would grit her teeth and do her duty as a woman and a queen must, and then, like as not, she would die in childbirth; and the whole performance of finding a bride for Arthur would have to be undergone again, with no benefit for himself but only this irritated, frustrated arousal that she seemed to inspire in him. It was good to see she was desirable, since she would be an ornament to his court; but it was a nuisance that she should be so very desirable to him.

  Henry looked away from her dancing and comforted himself with the thought of her dowry, which would bring him lasting benefit and come directly to him, unlike this bride, who seemed bound to unsettle him and must go, however mismatched, to his son. As soon as they were married her treasurer would hand over the first payment of her dowry: in solid gold. A year later he would deliver the second part in gold and in her plate and jewels. Having fought his way to the throne on a shoestring and uncertain credit, Henry trusted the power of money more than anything in life—more even than his throne, for he knew he could buy a throne with money, and far more than women, for they are cheaply bought; and far, far more than the joy of a smile from a virgin princess who stopped her dance now, swept him a curtsey, and came up smiling.

  “Do I please y
ou?” she demanded, flushed and a little breathless.

  “Well enough,” he said, determined that she should never know how much. “But it’s late now and you should go back to your bed. We’ll ride with you a little way in the morning before we go ahead of you to London.”

  She was surprised at the abruptness of his reply. Again, she glanced towards Arthur as if he might contradict his father’s plans; perhaps stay with her for the remainder of the journey, since his father had bragged of their informality. But the boy said nothing. “As you wish, Your Grace,” she said politely.

  The king nodded and rose to his feet. The court billowed into deep curtseys and bows as he stalked past them, out of the room. “Not so informal at all,” Catalina thought as she watched the King of England stride through his court, his head high. “He may boast of being a soldier with the manners of the camp, but he insists on obedience and on the show of deference. As indeed he should,” added Isabella’s daughter to herself.

  Arthur followed behind his father with a quick “Good night” to the princess as he left. In a moment all the men in their train had gone too, and the princess was alone but for her ladies.

  “What an extraordinary man,” she remarked to her favorite, María de Salinas.

  “He liked you,” the young woman said. “He watched you very closely, he liked you.”

  “And why should he not?” she asked with the instinctive arrogance of a girl born to the greatest kingdom in Europe. “And even if he did not, it is all already agreed, and there can be no change. It has been agreed for almost all my life.”

  He is not what I expected, this king who fought his way to the throne and picked up his crown from the mud of a battlefield. I expected him to be more like a champion, like a great soldier, perhaps like my father. Instead he has the look of a merchant, a man who puzzles over profit indoors, not a man who won his kingdom and his wife at the point of a sword.

  I suppose I hoped for a man like Don Hernando, a hero that I could look up to, a man I would be proud to call father. But this king is lean and pale like a clerk, not a knight from the romances at all.