The Constant Princess

by Philippa Gregory

  But I don’t forget Scotland. I never forget Arthur’s fear of Scotland. The Privy Council has spies along the border, and Thomas Howard, the old Earl of Surrey, was placed there, quite deliberately, I think, by the old king. King Henry my father-in-law gave Thomas Howard great lands in the north so that he, of all people, would keep the border safe. The old king was no fool. He did not let others do his business and trust to their abilities. He tied them into his success. If the Scots invade England they will come through Howard lands, and Thomas Howard is as anxious as I that this will never happen. He has assured me that the Scots will not come against us this summer, in any numbers worse than their usual brigand raids. All the intelligence we can gather from English merchants in Scotland, from travelers primed to keep their eyes open, confirms the earl’s view. We are safe for this summer at least. I can take this moment and send the English army to war against the French. Henry can march out in safety and learn to be a soldier.

  Katherine watched the dancing at the Christmas festivities, applauded her husband when he twirled other ladies around the room, laughed at the mummers, and signed off the court’s bills for enormous amounts of wine, ale, beef, and the rarest and finest of everything. She gave Henry a beautiful inlaid saddle for his Christmas gift, and some shirts that she had sewn and embroidered herself with the beautiful blackwork of Spain.

  “I want all my shirts to be sewn by you,” he said, putting the fine linen against his cheek. “I want to never wear anything that another woman has touched. Only your hands shall make my shirts.”

  Katherine smiled and pulled his shoulder down to her height. He bent down like a grown boy, and she kissed his forehead. “Always,” she promised him. “I shall always sew your shirts for you.

  “And now my gift to you,” he said. He pushed a large leather box towards her. Katherine opened it. There was a great set of magnificent jewels: a diadem, a necklace, two bracelets, and matching rings.

  “Oh, Henry!”

  “Do you like them?”

  “I love them,” she said.

  “Will you wear them tonight?”

  “I shall wear them tonight and at the Twelfth Night feast,” she promised.

  The young queen shone in her happiness, this first Christmas of her reign. The full skirts of her gown could not conceal the curve of her belly. Everywhere she went the young king would order a chair to be brought for her, she must not stand for a moment, she must never be wearied. He composed for her special songs that his musicians played, special dances and special masques were made up in her honor. The court, delighted with the young queen’s fertility, with the health and strength of the young king, with itself, made merry late into the night and Katherine sat on her throne, her feet slightly spread to accommodate the curve of her belly, and smiled in her joy.

  Westminster Palace,

  January 1510

  I WAKE IN THE NIGHT TO PAIN and a strange sensation. I dreamed that a tide was rising in the river Thames and that a fleet of black-sailed ships were coming upriver. I think that it must be the Moors, coming for me, and then I think it is a Spanish fleet—an armada, but strangely, disturbingly, my enemy, and the enemy of England. In my distress I toss and turn in bed and I wake with a sense of dread and find that it is worse than any dream, my sheets are wet with blood, and there is a real pain in my belly.

  I call out in terror, and my cry wakes María de Salinas, who is sleeping with me.

  “What is it?” she asks. Then she sees my face and calls out sharply to the maid at the foot of the bed and sends her running for my ladies and for the midwives, but somewhere in the back of my mind I know already that there is nothing that they can do. I clamber into my chair in my bloodstained nightdress and feel the pain twist and turn in my belly.

  By the time they arrive, struggling from their beds, all stupid with sleep, I am on my knees on the floor like a sick dog, praying for the pain to pass and to leave me whole. I know that there is no point in praying for the safety of my child. I know that my child is lost. I can feel the tearing sensation in my belly as he slowly comes away.

  After a long, bitter day, when Henry comes to the door again and again, and I send him away, calling out to him in a bright voice of reassurance, biting the palm of my hand so that I do not cry out, the baby is born, dead. The midwife shows her to me, a little girl, a white, limp little thing: poor baby, my poor baby. My only comfort is that it is not the boy I had promised Arthur I would bear for him. It is a girl, a dead girl, and then I twist my face in grief when I remember that he wanted a girl first, and she was to be called Mary.

  I cannot speak for grief, I cannot face Henry and tell him myself. I cannot bear the thought of anyone telling the court. I cannot bring myself to write to my father and tell him that I have failed England, I have failed Henry, I have failed Spain, and worst of all—and this I could never tell anyone—I have failed Arthur.

  I stay in my room. I close the door on all the anxious faces, on the midwives wanting me to drink strawberry-leaf tisanes, on the ladies wanting to tell me about their stillbirths, and their mothers’ stillbirths and their happy endings, I shut them away from me and I kneel at the foot of my bed, and press my hot face against the covers. I whisper through my sobs, muffled so that no one but him can hear me. “I am sorry, so sorry, my love. I am so sorry not to have had your son. I don’t know why, I don’t know why our gentle God should send me this great sorrow. I am so sorry, my love. If I ever have another chance I will do my best, the very best that I can, to have our son, to keep him safe till birth and beyond. I will, I swear I will. I tried this time, God knows, I would have given anything to have your son and named him Arthur for you, my love.” I steady myself as I can feel the words tumbling out too quickly, I can feel myself losing control, I feel the sobs starting to choke me.

  “Wait for me,” I say quietly. “Wait for me still. Wait for me by the quiet waters in the garden where the white and the red rose petals fall. Wait for me and when I have given birth to your son Arthur and your daughter Mary and done my duty here, I will come to you. Wait for me in the garden and I will never fail you. I will come to you, love. My love.”

  The king’s physician went to the king directly from the queen’s apartments. “Your Grace, I have good news for you.”

  Henry turned a face to him that was as sour as a child’s whose joy has been stolen. “You have?”

  “I have indeed.”

  “The queen is better? In less pain? She will be well?”

  “Even better than well,” the physician said. “Although she lost one child, she has kept another. She was carrying twins, Your Grace. She has lost one child but her belly is still large and she is still with child.”

  For a moment the young man could not understand the words. “She still has a child?”

  The physician smiled. “Yes, Your Grace.”

  It was like a stay of execution. Henry felt his heart turn over with hope. “How can it be?”

  The physician was confident. “By various ways I can tell. Her belly is still firm, the bleeding has stopped. I am certain she is still with child.”

  Henry crossed himself. “God is with us,” he said positively. “This is the sign of His favor.” He paused. “Can I see her?”

  “Yes, she is as happy at this news as you.”

  Henry bounded up the stairs to Katherine’s rooms. Her presence chamber was empty of anyone but the least-informed sightseers, the court and half the City knew that she had taken to her bed and would not be seen. Henry brushed through the crowd who whispered hushed blessings for him and the queen, strode through her privy chamber, where her women were sewing, and tapped on her bedroom door.

  María de Salinas opened it and stepped back for the king. The queen was out of her bed, seated in the window seat, her book of prayers held up to the light.

  “My love!” he exclaimed. “Here is Dr. Fielding come to me with the best of news.”

  Her face was radiant. “I told him to tell you privately.”<
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  “He did. No one else knows. My love, I am so glad!”

  Her eyes were wet with tears. “It is like a redemption,” she said. “I feel as if a cross has been lifted from my shoulders.”

  “I shall go to Walsingham the moment our baby is born and thank Our Lady for her favor,” he promised. “I shall endow the shrine with a fortune, if it is a boy.”

  “Please God that He grants it,” she murmured.

  “Why should He not?” Henry demanded. “When it is our desire, and right for England, and we ask it as holy children of the church?”

  “Amen,” she said quickly. “If it is God’s will.”

  He flicked his hand. “Of course it must be His will,” he said. “Now you must take care and rest.”

  Katherine smiled at him. “As you see.”

  “Well, you must. And anything you want, you shall have.”

  “I shall tell the cooks if I want anything.”

  “And the midwives shall attend you night and morning to make sure that you are well.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “And if God is willing, we shall have a son.”

  It was María de Salinas, my true friend who had come with me from Spain, and stayed with me through our good months and our hard years, who found the Moor. He was attending on a wealthy merchant, traveling from Genoa to Paris. They had called in at London to value some gold and María heard of him from a woman who had given a hundred pounds to Our Lady of Walsingham, hoping to have a son.

  “They say he can make barren women give birth,” she whispers to me, watching that none of my other ladies have come close enough to overhear.

  I cross myself as if to avoid temptation. “Then he must use black arts.”

  “Princess, he is supposed to be a great physician. Trained by masters who were at the University of Toledo.”

  “I will not see him.”

  “Because you think he must use black arts?”

  “Because he is my enemy and my mother’s enemy. She knew that the Moors’ knowledge was unlawfully gained, drawn from the devil, not from the revealed truth of God. She drove the Moors from Spain and their magical arts with them.”

  “Your Grace, he may be the only doctor in England who knows anything about women.”

  “I will not see him.”

  María took my refusal and let a few weeks go by and then I woke in the night with a deep pain in my belly, and slowly, felt the blood coming. She was quick and ready to call the maids with the towels and with a ewer to wash, and when I was back in bed again and we realized that it was no more than my monthly courses returned, she came quietly and stood beside the head of the bed. Lady Margaret Pole was silent at the doorway.

  “Your Grace, please see this doctor.”

  “He is a Moor.”

  “Yes, but I think he is the only man in this country who will know what is happening. How can you have your courses if you are with child? You may be losing this second baby. You have to see a doctor that we can trust.”

  “María, he is my enemy. He is my mother’s enemy. She spent her life driving his people from Spain.”

  “We lost their wisdom with them,” María says quietly. “You have not lived in Spain for nearly a decade, Your Grace. You do not know what it is like there now. My brother writes to me that people fall sick and there are no hospitals that can cure them. The nuns and the monks do their best; but they have no knowledge. If you have a stone it has to be cut out of you by a horse doctor, if you have a broken arm or leg then the blacksmith has to set it. The barbers are surgeons, the tooth drawers work in the marketplace and break people’s jaws. The midwives go from burying a man sick with sores to a childbirth and lose as many babies as they deliver. The skills of the Moorish physicians, with their knowledge of the body, their herbs to soothe pain, their instruments for surgery, and their insistence on washing—it is all lost.”

  “If it was sinful knowledge it is better lost,” I say stubbornly.

  “Why would God be on the side of ignorance and dirt and disease?” she asks fiercely. “Forgive me, Your Grace, but this makes no sense. And you are forgetting what your mother wanted. She always said that the universities should be restored, to teach Christian knowledge. But by then she had killed or banished all the teachers who knew anything.”

  “The queen will not want to be advised by a heretic,” Lady Margaret said firmly. “No English lady would consult a Moor.”

  María turns to me. “Please, Your Grace.”

  I am in such pain that I cannot bear an argument. “Both of you can leave me now,” I say. “Just let me sleep.”

  Lady Margaret goes out of the door but María pauses to close the shutters so that I am in shadow. “Oh, let him come then,” I say. “But not while I am like this. He can come next week.”

  She brings him by the hidden stairway which runs from the cellars through a servants’ passage to the queen’s private rooms at Richmond Palace. I am wearily dressing for dinner, and I let him come into my rooms while I am still unlaced, in my shift with a cape thrown on top. I grimace at the thought of what my mother would say at a man coming into my privy chamber. But I know, in my heart, that I have to see a doctor who can tell me how to get a son for England. And I know, if I am honest, that something is wrong with the baby they say I am carrying.

  I know him for an unbeliever the moment I see him. He is black as ebony, his eyes as dark as jet, his mouth wide and sensual, his face both merry and compassionate, all at the same time. The back of his hands are black, dark as his face, long-fingered, his nails rosy pink, the palms brown, the creases ingrained with his color. If I were a palmist I could trace the lifeline on his African palm like cart tracks of brown dust in a field of terra-cotta. I know him at once for a Moor and a Nubian; and I want to order him away from my rooms. But I know, at the same time, that he may be the only doctor in this country who has the knowledge I need.

  This man’s people, infidels, sinners who have set their black faces against God, have medicine that we do not. For some reason, God and His angels have not revealed to us the knowledge that these people have sought and found. These people have read in Greek everything that the Greek physicians thought. Then they have explored for themselves, with forbidden instruments, studying the human body as if it were an animal, without fear or respect. They create wild theories with forbidden thoughts and then they test them, without superstition. They are prepared to think anything, to consider anything; nothing is taboo. These people are educated where we are fools, where I am a fool. I might look down on him as coming from a race of savages, I might look down on him as an infidel doomed to hell, but I need to know what he knows.

  If he will tell me.

  “I am Catalina, Infanta of Spain and Queen Katherine of England,” I say bluntly, that he may know that he is dealing with a queen and the daughter of a queen who had defeated his people.

  He inclines his head, as proud as a baron. “I am Yusuf, son of Ismail,” he says.

  “You are a slave?”

  “I was born to a slave, but I am a free man.”

  “My mother would not allow slavery,” I tell him. “She said it was not allowed by our religion, our Christian religion.”

  “Nevertheless, she sent my people into slavery,” he remarks. “Perhaps she should have considered that high principles and good intentions end at the border.”

  “Since your people won’t accept the salvation of God, then it doesn’t matter what happens to your earthly bodies.”

  His face lights up with amusement, and he gives a delightful, irrepressible chuckle. “It matters to us, I think,” he says. “My nation allows slavery, but we don’t justify it like that. And most important, you cannot inherit slavery with us. When you are born, whatever the condition of your mother, you are born free. That is the law, and I think it a very good one.”

  “Well, it makes no difference what you think,” I say rudely. “Since you are wrong.”

  Again he laughs aloud, in true merriment, as
if I have said something very funny. “How good it must be, always to know that you are right,” he says. “Perhaps you will always be certain of your rightness. But I would suggest to you, Catalina of Spain and Katherine of England, that sometimes it is better to know the questions than the answers.”

  I pause at that. “But I want you only for answers,” I say. “Do you know medicine? Whether a woman can conceive a son? If she is with child?”

  “Sometimes it can be known,” he says. “Sometimes it is in the hands of Allah, praise His holy name, and sometimes we do not yet understand enough to be sure.”

  I cross myself against the name of Allah, quick as an old woman spitting on a shadow. He smiles at my gesture, not in the least disturbed. “What is it that you want to know?” he asks, his voice filled with kindness. “What is it that you want to know so much that you have to send for an infidel to advise you? Poor queen, you must be very alone if you need help from your enemy.”

  My eyes are filling with too-quick tears at the sympathy in his voice and I brush my hand against my face.

  “I have lost a baby,” I say shortly. “A daughter. My physician says that she was one of twins and that there is another child still inside me, that there will be another birth.”

  “So why send for me?”

  “I want to know for sure,” I say. “If there is another child I will have to go into confinement, the whole world will watch me. I want to know that the baby is alive inside me now, that it is a boy, that he will be born.”

  “Why should you doubt your own physician’s opinion?”