Arthur was about to complain at the wild extravagance of sawing up the furniture, but then he paused. This was, perhaps, not just some girlish folly; she was trying to show him something.
She was wearing a most extraordinary costume. On her head was a twist of the finest silk, turned and knotted like a coronet with a tail hanging down behind that she had tucked nonchalantly in one side of the headdress as if she would pull it over her face like a veil. Instead of a decent gown she wore a simple shift of the finest, lightest silk, smoky blue in color, so fine that he could almost see through it, to glimpse the paleness of her skin underneath. He could feel his heartbeat thud when he realized she was naked beneath this wisp of silk. Beneath the chemise she was wearing a pair of hose—like men’s hose—but nothing like men’s hose, for they were billowy leggings which fell from her slim hips where they were tied with a drawstring of gold thread, to her feet where they were tied again, leaving her feet half bare in dainty crimson slippers worked with a gold thread. He looked her up and down, from barbaric turban to Turkish slippers, and found himself bereft of speech.
“You don’t like my clothes,” Catalina said flatly, and he was too inexperienced to recognize the depth of embarrassment that she was ready to feel.
“I’ve never seen anything like them before,” he stammered. “Are they Arab clothes? Show me!”
She turned on the spot, watching him over her shoulder and then coming back to face him again. “We all wear them in Spain,” she said. “My mother too. They are more comfortable than gowns and cleaner. Everything can be washed, not like velvets and damask.”
He nodded. He noticed now a light rosewater scent which came from the silk.
“And they are cool in the heat of the day,” she added.
“They are…beautiful.” He nearly said “barbaric” and was so glad that he had not, when her eyes lit up.
“Do you think so?”
“Yes.”
At once she raised her arms and twirled again to show him the flutter of the hose and the lightness of the chemise.
“You wear them to sleep in?”
She laughed. “We wear them nearly all the time. My mother always wears them under her armor. They are far more comfortable than anything else, and she could not wear gowns under chain mail.”
“No…”
“When we are receiving Christian ambassadors, or for great state occasions, or when the court is at feast, we wear gowns and robes, especially at Christmas when it is cold. But in our own rooms, and always in the summer, and always when we are on campaign, we wear Morisco dress. It is easy to make, and easy to wash, and easy to carry, and best to wear.”
“You cannot wear it here,” Arthur said. “I am so sorry. But My Lady the King’s Mother would object if she knew you even had them with you.”
She nodded. “I know that. My mother was against me even bringing them. But I wanted something to remind me of my home and I thought I might keep them in my cupboard and tell nobody. Then tonight, I thought I might show you. Show you myself, and how I used to be.”
Catalina stepped to one side and gestured to him that he should come to the table. He felt too big, too clumsy, and on an instinct he stooped and shucked off his riding boots and stepped onto the rich rugs barefoot. She gave a little nod of approval and beckoned him to sit. He dropped to one of the gold-embroidered cushions.
Serenely, she sat opposite him and passed him a bowl of scented water, with a white napkin. He dipped his fingers and wiped them. She smiled and offered him a gold plate laid with food. It was a dish of his childhood, roasted chicken legs, deviled kidneys, with white manchet bread: a proper English dinner. But she had made them serve only tiny portions on each individual plate, dainty bones artfully arranged. She had sliced apples served alongside the meat and added some precious spiced meats next to sliced sugared plums. She had done everything she could to serve him a Spanish meal, with all the delicacy and luxury of the Moorish taste.
Arthur was shaken from his prejudice. “This is…beautiful,” he said, seeking a word to describe it. “This is…like a picture. You are like…” He could not think of anything that he had ever seen that was like her. Then an image came to him. “You are like a painting I once saw on a plate,” he said. “A treasure of my mother’s from Persia. You are like that. Strange, and most lovely.”
She glowed at his praise. “I want you to understand,” she said, speaking carefully in Latin. “I want you to understand what I am. Cuiusmodi sum.”
“What you are?”
“I am your wife,” she assured him. “I am the Princess of Wales, I will be Queen of England. I will be an Englishwoman. That is my destiny. But also, as well as this, I am the Infanta of Spain, of al Andalus.”
“I know.”
“You know; but you don’t know. You don’t know about Spain, you don’t know about me. I want to explain myself to you. I want you to know about Spain. I am a princess of Spain. I am my father’s favorite. When we dine alone, we eat like this. When we are on campaign, we live in tents and sit before the braziers like this, and we were on campaign for every year of my life until I was seven.”
“But you are a Christian court,” he protested. “You are a power in Christendom. You have chairs, proper chairs. You must eat your dinner off a proper table.”
“Only at banquets of state,” she said. “When we are in our private rooms we live like this, like Moors. Oh, we say grace; we thank the One God at the breaking of the bread. But we do not live as you live here in England. We have beautiful gardens filled with fountains and running water. We have rooms in our palaces inlaid with precious stones and inscribed with gold letters telling beautiful truths in poetry. We have bathhouses with hot water to wash in and thick steam to fill the scented room, we have icehouses packed in winter with snow from the sierras so our fruit and our drinks are chilled in summer.”
The words were as seductive as the images. “You make yourself sound so strange,” he said reluctantly. “Like a fairy tale.”
“I am only just realizing now how strange we are to each other,” Catalina said. “I thought that your country would be like mine, but it is quite different. I am coming to think that we are more like Persians than like Germans. We are more Arabic than Visigoth. Perhaps you thought that I would be a princess like your sisters, but I am quite, quite different.”
He nodded. “I shall have to learn your ways,” he proposed tentatively. “As you will have to learn mine.”
“I shall be Queen of England, I shall have to become English. But I want you to know what I was, when I was a girl.”
Arthur nodded. “Were you very cold today?” he asked. He could feel a strange new feeling, like a weight in his belly. He realized it was discomfort, at the thought of her being unhappy.
She met his look without concealment. “Yes,” she said. “I was very cold. And then I thought that I had been unkind to you, and I was very unhappy. And then I thought that I was far away from my home and from the heat and the sunshine and my mother, and I was very homesick. It was a horrible day, today. I had a horrible day, today.”
He reached his hand out to her. “Can I comfort you?”
Her fingertips met his. “You did,” she said. “When you brought me in to the fire and told me you were sorry. You do comfort me. I will learn to trust that you always will.”
He drew her to him. The cushions were soft and easy. He laid her beside him and he gently tugged at the silk that was wrapped around her head. It slipped off at once, and the rich red tresses tumbled down. He touched them with his lips, then her sweet slightly trembling mouth, her eyes with the sandy eyelashes, her light eyebrows, the blue veins at her temples, the lobes of her ears. Then he felt his desire rise, and he kissed the hollow at the base of her throat, her thin collarbones, the warm, seductive flesh from neck to shoulder, the hollow of her elbow, the warmth of her palm, the erotically deep-scented armpit, and then he drew her shift over her head and she was naked, in his arms, and she was hi
s wife, and a loving wife, at last, indeed.
I love him. I did not think it possible, but I love him. I have fallen in love with him. I look at myself in the mirror, in wonderment, as if I am changed, as everything else is changed. I am a young woman in love with my husband. I am in love with the Prince of Wales. I, Catalina of Spain, am in love. I wanted this love, I thought it was impossible, and I have it. I am in love with my husband, and we shall be King and Queen of England. Who can doubt now that I am chosen by God for His especial favor? He brought me from the dangers of war to safety and peace in the Alhambra Palace, and now He has given me England and the love of the young man who will be its king.
In a sudden rush of emotion I put my hands together and pray: “Oh, God, let me love him forever, do not take us from each other as Juan was taken from Margot, in their first months of joy. Let us grow old together, let us love each other forever.”
Ludlow Castle, January 1502
THE WINTER SUN WAS LOW AND RED over the rounded hills as they rattled through the great gate that pierced the stone wall around Ludlow. Arthur, who had been riding beside the litter, shouted to Catalina over the noise of the hooves on the cobbles. “This is Ludlow, at last!”
Ahead of them the men-at-arms shouted: “Make way for Arthur! Prince of Wales!” and the doors banged open and people tumbled out of their houses to see the procession go by.
Catalina saw a town as pretty as a tapestry. The timbered second stories of the crowded buildings overhung cobbled streets with prosperous little shops and working yards tucked cozily underneath them on the ground floor. The shopkeepers’ wives jumped up from their stools set outside the shops to wave to her, and Catalina smiled and waved back. From the upper stories the glovers’ girls and shoemakers’ apprentices, the goldsmiths’ boys and the spinsters leaned out and called her name. Catalina laughed and caught her breath as one young lad looked ready to overbalance but was hauled back in by his cheering mates.
They passed a great bull ring with a dark-timbered inn, as the church bells of the half dozen religious houses, college, chapels and hospital of Ludlow started to peal their bells to welcome the prince and his bride home.
Catalina leaned forwards to see her castle and noted the unassailable march of the outer bailey. The gate was flung open, they went in, and found the greatest men of the town—the mayor, the church elders, the leaders of the wealthy trades guilds—assembled to greet them.
Arthur pulled up his horse and listened politely to a long speech in Welsh and then in English.
“When do we eat?” Catalina whispered to him in Latin and saw his mouth quiver as he held back a smile.
“When do we go to bed?” she breathed, and had the satisfaction of seeing his hand tremble with desire on the rein. She gave a little giggle and ducked back into the litter until finally the interminable speeches of welcome were finished and the royal party could ride on through the great gate of the castle to the inner bailey.
It was a neat castle, as sound as any border castle in Spain. The curtain wall marched around the inner bailey high and strong, made in a curious rosy-colored stone that made the powerful walls more warm and domestic.
Catalina’s eye, sharpened by her training, looked from the thick walls to the well in the outer bailey, the well in the inner bailey, took in how one defensible area led to another, thought that a siege could be held off for years. But it was small, it was like a toy castle, something her father would build to protect a river crossing or a vulnerable road. Something a very minor lord of Spain would be proud to have as his home.
“Is this it?” she asked blankly, thinking of the city that was housed inside the walls of her home, of the gardens and the terraces, of the hill and the views, of the teeming life of the town center, all inside defended walls. Of the long hike for the guards: if they went all around the battlements they would be gone for more than an hour. At Ludlow a sentry would complete the circle in minutes. “Is this it?”
At once he was aghast. “Did you expect more? What were you expecting?”
She would have caressed his anxious face if there had not been hundreds of people watching. She made herself keep her hands still. “Oh, I was foolish. I was thinking of Richmond.” Nothing in the world would have made her say that she was thinking of the Alhambra.
He smiled, reassured. “Oh, my love. Richmond is new-built, my father’s great pride and joy. London is one of the greatest cities of Christendom, and the palace matches its size. But Ludlow is only a town, a great town in the Marches for sure, but a town. But it is wealthy, you will see, and the hunting is good and the people are welcoming. You will be happy here.”
“I am sure of it,” said, Catalina smiling at him, putting aside the thought of a palace built for beauty, only for beauty, where the builders had thought firstly where the light would fall and what reflections it would make in still pools of marble.
She looked around her and saw, in the center of the inner bailey, a curious circular building like a squat tower.
“What’s that?” she asked, struggling out of the litter as Arthur held her hand.
He glanced over his shoulder. “It’s our round chapel,” he said negligently.
“A round chapel?”
“Yes, like in Jerusalem.”
At once she recognized with delight the traditional shape of the mosque—designed and built in the round so that no worshipper was better placed than any others, because Allah is praised by the poor man as well as the rich. “It’s lovely.”
Arthur glanced at her in surprise. To him it was only a round tower built with the pretty plum-colored local stone, but he saw that it glowed in the afternoon light and radiated a sense of peace.
“Yes,” he said, hardly noticing it. “Now this”—he indicated the great building facing them, with a handsome flight of steps up to the open door—“this is the great hall. To the left are the council chambers of Wales and, above them, my rooms. To the right are the guest bedrooms and chambers for the warden of the castle and his lady: Sir Richard and Lady Margaret Pole. Your rooms are above, on the top floor.”
He saw her swift reaction. “She is here now?”
“She is away from the castle at the moment.”
She nodded. “There are buildings behind the great hall?”
“No. It is set into the outer wall. This is all of it.”
Catalina schooled herself to keep her face smiling and pleasant.
“We have more guest rooms in the outer bailey,” he said defensively. “And we have a lodge house, as well. It is a busy place, merry. You will like it.”
“I am sure I will.” She smiled. “And which are my rooms?”
He pointed to the highest windows. “See up there? On the right-hand side, matching mine, but on the opposite side of the hall.”
She looked a little daunted. “But how will you get to my rooms?” she asked quietly.
He took her hand and led her, smiling to his right and to his left, towards the grand stone stairs to the double doors of the great hall. There was a ripple of applause, and their companions fell in behind them. “As My Lady the King’s Mother commanded me, four times a month I shall come to your room in a formal procession through the great hall, ”he said. He led her up the steps.
“Oh.” She was dashed.
He smiled down at her. “And all the other nights, I shall come to you along the battlements,” he whispered. “There is a private door that goes from your rooms to the battlements that run all around the castle. My rooms go onto them too. You can walk from your rooms to mine whenever you wish and nobody will know whether we are together or not. They will not even know whose room we are in.”
He loved how her face lit up. “We can be together whenever we want?”
“We will be happy here.”
Yes I will, I will be happy here. I will not mourn like a Persian for the beautiful courts of his home and declare that there is nowhere else fit for life. I will not say that these mountains are a desert without oa
ses, like a Berber longing for his birthright. I will accustom myself to Ludlow, and I will learn to live here, on the border, and later in England. My mother is not just a queen, she is a soldier, and she raised me to know my duty and to do it. It is my duty to learn to be happy here and to live here without complaining.
I may never wear armor as she did, I may never fight for my country, as she did; but there are many ways to serve a kingdom, and to be a merry, honest, constant queen is one of them. If God does not call me to arms, He may call me to serve as a lawgiver, as a bringer of justice. Whether I defend my people by fighting for them against an enemy or by fighting for their freedom in the law, I shall be their queen, heart and soul, Queen of England.
It was nighttime, past midnight. Catalina glowed in the firelight. They were in bed, sleepy, but too desirous of each other for sleep.
“Tell me a story.”
“I have told you dozens of stories.”
“Tell me another. Tell me the one about Boabdil giving up the Alhambra Palace with the golden keys on a silk cushion and going away crying.”
“You know that one. I told it to you last night.”
“Then tell me the story about Yarfa and his horse that gnashed its teeth at Christians.”
“You are a child. And his name was Yarfe.”
“But you saw him killed?”
“I was there, but I didn’t see him actually die.”
“How could you not watch it?”
“Well, partly because I was praying as my mother ordered me to, and because I was a girl and not a bloodthirsty, monstrous boy.”
Arthur tossed an embroidered cushion at her head. She caught it and threw it back at him.
“Well, tell me about your mother pawning her jewels to pay for the crusade.”
The Constant Princess Page 11