The Constant Princess

by Philippa Gregory

  Then I start to wonder if I might go home for a short visit on my own. I cannot bear to be without Arthur for even a night, but then I think that unless I go to Spain alone I will never see my mother again, and the thought of that, never feeling the touch of her hand on my hair or seeing her smile at me—I don’t know how I would bear to never see her again.

  I am glad and proud to be Princess of Wales and the Queen of England-to-be, but I did not think, I did not realize—I know, how silly this is of me—but I did not quite understand that it would mean that I would live here forever, that I would never come home again. Somehow, although I knew I would be married to the Prince of Wales and one day be Queen of England, I did not fully understand that this would be my home now and forever and that I may never see my mother or my father or my home again.

  I expected at least that we would write, I thought I would hear from her often. But it is as she was with Isabel, with María, with Juana; she sends instructions through the ambassador, I have my orders as a princess of Spain. But as a mother to her daughter, I hear from her only rarely.

  I don’t know how to bear it. I never thought such a thing could happen. My sister Isabel came home to us after she was widowed, though she married again and had to leave again. And Juana writes to me that she will go home on a visit with her husband. It isn’t fair that she should go and I not be allowed to. I am only just sixteen. I am not ready to live without my mother’s advice. I am not old enough to live without a mother. I look for her every day to tell me what I should do—and she is not there.

  My husband’s mother, Queen Elizabeth, is a cipher in her own household. She cannot be a mother to me, she cannot command her own time, how should she advise me? It is the king’s mother, Lady Margaret, who rules everything; and she is a most well-thought-of, hardhearted woman. She cannot be a mother to me, she couldn’t be a mother to anyone. She worships her son because thanks to him she is the mother of the king; but she does not love him, she has no tenderness. She does not even love Arthur and if a woman could not love him she must be utterly without a heart. Actually, I am quite sure that she dislikes me, though I don’t know why she should.

  And anyway, I am sure my mother must miss me as I miss her? Surely, very soon, she will write to the king and ask him if I can come home for a visit? Before it gets much colder here? And it is terribly cold and wet already. I am sure I cannot stay here all the long winter. I am sure I will beill. I am sure she must want me to come home….

  Catalina, seated at the table before the window, trying to catch the failing light of a gray February afternoon, took up her letter, asking her mother if she could come for a visit to Spain, and tore it gently in half and then in half again and fed the pieces into the fire in her room. It was not the first letter she had written to her mother asking to come home, but—like the others—it would never be sent. She would not betray her mother’s training by turning tail and running from gray skies and cold rain and people whose language no one could ever understand and whose joys and sorrows were a mystery.

  She was not to know that even if she had sent the letter to the Spanish ambassador in London, then that wily diplomat would have opened it, read it, and torn it up himself, and then reported the whole to the King of England. Rodrigo Gonsalvi de Puebla knew, though Catalina did not yet understand, that her marriage had forged an alliance between the emerging power of Spain and the emerging power of England against the emerging power of France. No homesick princess wanting her mother would be allowed to unbalance that.

  “Tell me a story.”

  “I am like Scheherazade, you want a thousand stories from me.”

  “Oh yes!” he said. “I will have a thousand and one stories. How many have you told me already?”

  “I have told you a story every night since we were together, that first night, at Burford,” she said.

  “Forty-nine days,” he said.

  “Only forty-nine stories. If I were Scheherazade I would have nine hundred and fifty-two to go.”

  He smiled at her. “Do you know, Catalina, I have been happier in these forty-nine days than ever in my life before?”

  She took his hand and put it to her lips.

  “And the nights!”

  Her eyes darkened with desire. “Yes, the nights,” she said quietly.

  “I long for every nine hundred and fifty-two more,” he said. “And then I will have another thousand after that.”

  “And a thousand after that?”

  “And a thousand after that forever and ever until we are both dead.”

  She smiled. “Pray God we have long years together,” she said tenderly.

  “So what will you tell me tonight?”

  She thought. “I shall tell you of a Moor’s poem.”

  Arthur settled back against the pillows as she leaned forwards and fixed her blue gaze on the curtains of the bed, as if she could see beyond them, to somewhere else.

  “He was born in the deserts of Arabia,” she explained. “So when he came to Spain he missed everything about his home. He wrote this poem.

  “A palm tree stands in the middle of Rusafa,

  Born in the west, far from the land of palms.

  I said to it: How like me you are, far away and in exile

  In long separation from your family and friends.

  You have sprung from soil in which you are a stranger

  And I, like you, am far from home.”

  He was silent, taking in the simplicity of the poem. “It is not like our poetry,” he said.

  “No,” she replied quietly. “They are a people who have a great love of words, they love to say a true thing simply.”

  He opened his arms to her and she slid alongside him so that they were lying, thigh to thigh, side to side. He touched her face, her cheek was wet.

  “Oh my love! Tears?”

  She said nothing.

  “I know that you miss your home,” he said softly, taking her hand in his and kissing the fingertips. “But you will become accustomed to your life here, to your thousand thousand days here.”

  “I am happy with you,” Catalina said quickly. “It is just…” Her voice trailed away. “My mother,” she said, her voice very small. “I miss her. And I worry about her. Because…I am the youngest, you see. And she kept me with her as long as she could.”

  “She knew you would have to leave.”

  “She’s been much…tried. She lost her son, my brother, Juan, and he was our only heir. It is so terrible to lose a prince, you cannot imagine how terrible it is to lose a prince. It is not just the loss of him but the loss of everything that might have been. His life has gone, but his reign and his future have gone too. His wife will no longer be queen, everything that he hoped for will not happen. And then the next heir, little Miguel, died at only two years old. He was all we had left of my sister Isabel, his mother, and then it pleased God to take him from us too. Poor María died far away from us in Portugal, she went away to be married and we never saw her again. It was natural that my mother kept me with her for comfort. I was her last child to leave home. And now I don’t know how she will manage without me.”

  Arthur put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close. “God will comfort her.”

  “She will be so lonely,” she said in a little voice.

  “Surely she, of all women in the world, feels God’s comfort?”

  “I don’t think she always does,” Catalina said. “Her own mother was tormented by sadness, you know. Many of the women of our family can get quite sick with sorrow. I know that my mother fears sinking into sadness just like her mother: a woman who saw things so darkly that she would rather have been blind. I know she fears that she will never be happy again. I know that she liked to have me with her so that I could make her happy. She said that I was a child born for joy, that she could tell that I would always be happy.”

  “Does your father not comfort her?”

  “Yes,” she said uncertainly. “But he is often away from
her. And anyway, I should like to be with her. But you must know how I feel. Didn’t you miss your mother when you were first sent away? And your father and your sisters and your brother?”

  “I miss my sisters but not my brother,” he said so decidedly that she had to laugh.

  “Why not? I thought he was such fun.”

  “He is a braggart,” Arthur said irritably. “He is always pushing himself forwards. Look at our wedding—he had to be at the center of the stage all the time. Look at our wedding feast when he had to dance so that all eyes were on him. Pulling Margaret up to dance and making a performance of himself.”

  “Oh no! It was just that your father told him to dance, and he was merry. He’s just a boy.”

  “He wants to be a man. He tries to be a man, he makes a fool of all of us when he tries. And nobody ever checks him! Did you not see how he looked at you?”

  “I saw nothing at all,” she said truthfully. “It was all a blur for me.”

  “He fancies himself in love with you, and dreamed that he was walking you up the aisle on his own account.”

  She laughed. “Oh! How silly!”

  “He’s always been like that,” he said resentfully. “And because he is the favorite of everyone he is allowed to say and do exactly as he wants. I have to learn the law, and languages, and I have to live here and prepare myself for the crown; but Harry stays at Greenwich or Whitehall at the center of court as if he were an ambassador; not an heir who should be trained. He has to have a horse when I have a horse—though I had been kept on a steady palfrey for years. He has a falcon when I have my first falcon—nobody makes him train a kestrel and then a goshawk for year after year, then he has to have my tutor and tries to outstrip me, tries to outshine me whenever he can and always takes the eye.”

  Catalina saw he was genuinely irritated. “But he is only a second son,” she observed.

  “He is everyone’s favorite,” Arthur said glumly. “He has everything for the asking and everything comes easily to him.”

  “He is not the Prince of Wales,” she pointed out. “He may be liked, but he is not important. He only stays at court because he is not important enough to be sent here. He does not have his own Principality. Your father will have plans for him. He will probably be married and sent away. A second son is no more important than a daughter.”

  “He is to go into the church,” he said. “He is to be a priest. Who would marry him? So he will be in England forever. I daresay I shall have to endure him as my archbishop, if he does not manage to make himself pope.”

  Catalina laughed at the thought of the flushed-faced blond, bright boy as pope. “How grand we shall all be when we are grown up,” she said. “You and me, King and Queen of England, and Harry, archbishop; perhaps even a cardinal.”

  “Harry won’t ever grow up,” he insisted. “He will always be a selfish boy. And because my grandmother—and my father—have always given him whatever he wanted, just for the asking, he will be a greedy, difficult boy.”

  “Perhaps he will change,” she said. “When my oldest sister, poor Isabel, went away to Portugal the first time, you would have thought her the vainest, most worldly girl you could imagine. But when her husband died and she came home she cared for nothing but to go into a convent. Her heart was quite broken.”

  “Nobody will break Harry’s heart,” his older brother asserted. “He hasn’t got one.”

  “You’d have thought the same of Isabel,” Catalina argued. “But she fell in love with her husband on her wedding day and she said she would never love again. She had to marry for the second time, of course. But she married unwillingly.”

  “And did you?” he asked, his mood suddenly changing.

  “Did I what? Marry unwillingly?”

  “No! Fall in love with your husband on your wedding day?”

  “Certainly not on my wedding day,” she said. “Talk about a boastful boy! Harry is nothing to you! I heard you tell them all the next morning that having a wife was very good sport.”

  Arthur had the grace to look abashed. “I may have said something in jest.”

  “That you had been in Spain all night?”

  “Oh, Catalina. Forgive me. I knew nothing. You are right, I was a boy. But I am a man now, your husband. And you did fall in love with your husband. So don’t deny it.”

  “Not for days and days,” she said dampeningly. “It was not love at first sight at all.”

  “I know when it was, so you can’t tease me. It was the evening at Burford when you had been crying and I kissed you for the first time properly, and I wiped your tears away with my sleeves. And then that night I came to you, and the house was so quiet that it was as if we were the only people alive in the whole world.”

  She snuggled closer into his arms. “And I told you my first story,” she said. “But do you remember what it was?”

  “It was the story of the fire at Santa Fe,” he said. “When the luck was against the Spanish for once.”

  She nodded. “Normally, it was us who brought fire and the sword. My father has a reputation of being merciless.”

  “Your father was merciless? Though it was land he was claiming for his own? How did he hope to bring the people to his will?”

  “By fear,” she said simply. “And anyway, it was not his will. It was God’s will, and sometimes God is merciless. This was not an ordinary war, it was a crusade. Crusades are cruel.”

  He nodded.

  “They had a song about my father’s advance. The Moors had a song.”

  She threw back her head and in a haunting low voice translating the words into French, she sang to him:

  “Riders gallop through the Elvira gate, up to the Alhambra,

  Fearful tidings they bring the king.

  Ferdinand himself leads an army, flower of Spain,

  Along the banks of the Jenil; with him comes

  Isabel, Queen with the heart of a man.”

  Arthur was delighted. “Sing it again!”

  She laughed and sang again.

  “And they really called her that: ‘Queen with the heart of a man’?”

  “Father says that when she was in camp it was better than two battalions for strengthening our troops and frightening the Moors. In all the battles they fought, she was never defeated. The army never lost a battle when she was there.”

  “To be a king like that! To have them write songs about you.”

  “I know,” Catalina said. “To have a legend for a mother! It’s not surprising I miss her. In those days she was never afraid of anything. When the fire would have destroyed us, she was not afraid then. Not of the flames in the night and not of defeat. Even when my father and all the advisors agreed that we would have to pull back to Toledo and rearm, come again next year, my mother said no.”

  “Does she argue with him in public?” Arthur asked, fascinated at the thought of a wife who was not a subject.

  “She does not exactly argue,” she said thoughtfully. “She would never contradict him or disrespect him. But he knows very well when she doesn’t agree with him. And mostly, they do it her way.”

  He shook his head.

  “I know what you’re thinking, a wife should obey. She would say so herself. But the difficulty is that she’s always right,” said her daughter. “All the times I can think of, whenever it has been a great question as to whether the army should go on, or whether something can be done. It’s as if God advises her, it really is: she knows best what should be done. Even Father knows that she knows best.”

  “She must be an extraordinary woman.”

  “She is queen,” Catalina said simply. “Queen in her own right. Not a mere queen by marriage, not a commoner raised to be queen. She was born a princess of Spain like me. Born to be a queen. Saved by God from the most terrible dangers to be Queen of Spain. What else should she do but command her kingdom?”

  That night I dream I am a bird, a volucris, a swift, flying high and fearless over the kingdom of New Castile, sou
th from Toledo, over Córdoba, south to the kingdom of Granada, the ground below me laid out like a tawny carpet, woven from the gold-fleeced sheep of the Berbers, the brass earth pierced by bronze cliffs, the hills so high that not even olive trees can cling to their steep slopes. On I fly, my little bird heart thudding until I see the rosy walls of the Alcázar, the great fort which encloses the palace of the Alhambra, and flying low and fast, I skim the brutal squareness of the watchtower where the flag of the sickle moon once waved, to plunge down towards the Court of Myrtles to fly round and around in the warm air, enclosed by dainty buildings of stucco and tile, looking down on the mirror of water and seeing at last the one I am looking for: my mother, Isabella of Spain, walking in the warm evening air, and thinking of her daughter in faraway England.

  MARCH 1502

  “I want to ask you to meet a lady who is a good friend of mine and is ready to be a friend of yours,” Arthur said, choosing his words with care.

  Catalina’s ladies-in-waiting, bored on a cold afternoon with no entertainment, craned forwards to listen while trying to appear engaged in their needlework.

  At once she blanched as white as the linen she was embroidering. “My lord?” she asked anxiously. He had said nothing of this in the early hours of the morning when they had woken and made love. She had not expected to see him until dinner. His arrival in her rooms signaled that something had happened. She was wary, waiting to know what was going on.

  “A lady? Who is she?”

  “You may have heard of her from others, but I beg you to remember that she is eager to be your friend, and she has always been a good friend to me.”

  Catalina’s head flew up, she took a breath. For a moment, for a dreadful moment she thought that he was introducing a former mistress into her court, begging a place among ladies-in-waiting for some woman who had been his lover, so that they might continue their affair.

  If this is what he is doing, I know what part I must play. I have seen my mother haunted by the pretty girls that my father, God forgive him, cannot resist. Again and again we would see him pay attention to some new face at court. Each time my mother behaved as if she had noticed nothing, dowered the girl handsomely, married her off to an eligible courtier, and encouraged him to take his new bride far, far away. It was such a common occurrence that it became a joke: that if a girl wanted to marry well with the queen’s blessing, and travel to some remote province, all she had to do was to catch the eye of the king, and in no time she would find herself riding away from the Alhambra on a fine new horse with a set of new clothes.