The Constant Princess

by Philippa Gregory

“But they are my ladies-in-waiting. In service to me. They cannot leave without my permission.”

  “It is very wrong of them, indeed,” Margaret said. Something in the way she folded her hands in her lap and looked so steadily and calmly warned Katherine not to probe.

  “So what have you been doing in my absence?” Katherine turned to the ladies, trying to lighten the mood of the room.

  At once they all looked sheepish. “Have you learned any new songs? Have you danced in any masques?” Katherine asked.

  “I know a new song,” one of the girls volunteered. “Shall I sing it?”

  Katherine nodded; at once one of the other women picked up a lute. It was as if everyone was quick to divert her. Katherine smiled and beat the time with her hand on the arm of her chair. She knew, as a woman who had been born and raised in a court of conspirators, that something was very wrong indeed.

  There was the sound of company approaching and Katherine’s guards threw open the door to the king and his court. The ladies stood up, shook out their skirts, bit their lips to make them pink, and sparkled in anticipation. Someone laughed gaily at nothing. Henry strode in, still in his riding clothes, his friends around him, William Compton’s arm in his.

  Katherine was again alert to some difference in her husband. He did not come in, take her in his arms, and kiss her cheeks. He did not stride into the very center of the room and bow to her either. He came in, twinned with his best friend, the two almost hiding behind each other, like boys caught out in a petty crime: part shamefaced, part braggart. At Katherine’s sharp look Compton awkwardly disengaged himself, Henry greeted his wife without enthusiasm, his eyes downcast, he took her hand and then kissed her cheek, not her mouth.

  “Are you well now?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “I am quite well now. And how are you, sire?”

  “Oh,” he said carelessly. “I am well. We had such a chase this morning. I wish you had been with us. We were halfway to Sussex, I do believe.”

  “I shall come out tomorrow,” Katherine promised him.

  “Will you be well enough?”

  “I am quite well,” she repeated.

  He looked relieved. “I thought you would be ill for months,” he blurted out.

  Smiling, she shook her head, wondering who had told him that.

  “Let’s break our fast,” he said. “I am starving.”

  He took her hand and led her to the great hall. The court fell in informally behind them. Katherine could hear the overexcited buzz of whispers. She leaned her head towards Henry so that no one could catch her words. “I hear there have been some quarrels in court.”

  “Oh! You have heard of our little storm already, have you?” he said. He was far too loud, he was far too jovial. He was acting the part of a man with nothing to trouble his conscience. He threw a laugh over his shoulder and looked for someone to join in his forced amusement. Half a dozen men and women smiled, anxious to share his good humor. “It is something and nothing. I have had a quarrel with your great friend, the Duke of Buckingham. He has left the court in a temper!” He laughed again, even more heartily, glancing at her sideways to see if she was smiling, trying to judge if she already knew all about it.

  “Indeed?” Katherine said coolly.

  “He was insulting,” Henry said, gathering his sense of offense. “He can stay away until he is ready to apologize. He is such a pompous man, you know. Always thinks he knows everything. And his sour sister Elizabeth can go too.”

  “She is a good lady-in-waiting and a kind companion to me,” Katherine observed. “I expected her to greet me this day. I have no quarrel with her, nor with her sister Anne. I take it you have no quarrel with them either?”

  “Nonetheless I am most displeased with their brother,” Henry said. “They can all go.”

  Katherine paused, took a breath. “She and her sister are in my household,” she observed. “I have the right to choose and dismiss my own ladies.”

  She saw the quick flush of his childish temper. “You will oblige me by sending them away from your household! Whatever your rights! I don’t expect to hear talk of rights between us!”

  The court behind them fell silent at once. Everyone wanted to hear the first royal quarrel.

  Katherine released his hand and went around the high table to take her place. It gave her a moment to remind herself to be calm. When he came to his seat beside hers she took a breath and smiled at him. “As you wish,” she said evenly. “I have no great preference in the matter. But how am I to run a well-ordered court if I send away young women of good family who have done nothing wrong?”

  “You were not here, so you have no idea what she did or didn’t do!” Henry sought for another complaint and found one. He waved the court to sit and dropped into his own chair. “You locked yourself away for months. What am I supposed to do without you? How are things supposed to be run if you just go away and leave everything?”

  Katherine nodded, keeping her face absolutely serene. She was very well aware that the attention of the entire court was focused on her like a burning glass on fine paper. “I hardly left for my own amusement,” she observed.

  “It has been most awkward for me,” he said, taking her words at face value. “Most awkward. It is all very well for you, taking to your bed for weeks at a time, but how is the court to run without a queen? Your ladies were without discipline, nobody knew how things were to go on, I couldn’t see you, I had to sleep alone—” He broke off.

  Katherine realized, belatedly, that his bluster was hiding a genuine sense of hurt. In his selfishness, he had transformed her long endurance of pain and fear into his own difficulty. He had managed to see her fruitless confinement as her willfully deserting him, leaving him alone to rule over a lopsided court; in his eyes, she had let him down.

  “I think at the very least you should do as I ask,” he said pettishly. “I have had trouble enough these last months. All this reflects very badly on me, I have been made to look a fool. And no help from you at all.”

  “Very well,” Katherine said peaceably. “I shall send Elizabeth away and her sister Anne too, since you ask it of me. Of course.”

  Henry found his smile, as if the sun were coming out from behind clouds. “Yes. And now you are back we can get everything back to normal.”

  Not a word for me, not one word of comfort, not one thought of understanding. I could have died trying to bring his child into the world; without his child I have to face sorrow, grief and a haunting fear of sin. But he does not think of me at all.

  I find a smile to reply to his. I knew when I married him that he was a selfish boy and I knew he would grow into a selfish man. I have set myself the task of guiding him and helping him to be a better man, the best man that he can be. There are bound to be times when I think he has failed to be the man he should be. And when those times come, as now, I must see it as my failure to guide him. I must forgive him.

  Without my forgiveness, without me extending my patience further than I thought possible, our marriage will be a poorer one. He is always ready to resent a woman who cares for him—he learned that from his grandmother. And I, God forgive me, am too quick to think of the husband that I lost, and not of the husband that I won. He is not the man that Arthur was, and he will never be the king that Arthur would have been. But he is my husband and my king and I should respect him.

  Indeed: I will respect him, whether he deserves it or not.

  The court was subdued over breakfast, few of them could drag their eyes from the high table where, under the gold canopy of state, seated on their thrones, the king and queen exchanged conversation and seemed to be quite reconciled.

  “But does she know?” one courtier whispered to one of Katherine’s ladies.

  “Who would tell her?” she replied. “If María de Salinas and Lady Margaret have not told her already then she doesn’t know. I would put my earrings on it.”

  “Done,” he said. “Ten shillings that she finds out
.”

  “By when?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  I had another piece of the puzzle when I came to look at the accounts for the weeks while I had been in confinement. In the first days that I had been away from court there had been no extraordinary expenses. But then the bill for amusements began to grow. There were bills from singers and actors to rehearse their celebration for the expected baby, bills from the organist, the choristers, from drapers for the material for pennants and standards, extra maids for polishing the gold christening bowl. Then there were payments for costumes of Lincoln green for disguising, singers to perform under the window of Lady Anne, a clerk to copy out the words of the king’s new song, rehearsals for a new May Day masque with a dance, and costumes for three ladies with Lady Anne to play the part of Unattainable Beauty.

  I rose from the table where I had been turning over the papers and went to the window to look down at the garden. They had set up a wrestling ring and the young men of the court were stripped to their shirtsleeves. Henry and Charles Brandon were gripped in each other’s arms like blacksmiths at a fair. As I watched, Henry tripped his friend and threw him to the ground and then dropped his weight on him to hold him down. Princess Mary applauded, the court cheered.

  I turned from the window. I began to wonder if Lady Anne had proved to be unattainable indeed. I wondered how merry they had been on May Day morning when I had woken on my own, in sadness, to silence, with no one singing beneath my window. And why should the court pay for singers, hired by Compton, to seduce his newest mistress?

  The king summoned the queen to his rooms in the afternoon. Some messages had come from the Pope and he wanted her advice. Katherine sat beside him, listened to the report of the messenger and stretched up to whisper in her husband’s ear.

  He nodded. “The queen reminds me of our well-known alliance with Venice,” he said pompously. “And indeed, she has no need to remind me. I am not likely to forget it. You can depend on our determination to protect Venice and indeed all Italy against the ambitions of the French king.”

  The ambassadors nodded respectfully. “I shall send you a letter about this,” Henry said grandly. They bowed and withdrew.

  “Will you write to them?” he asked Katherine.

  She nodded. “Of course,” she said. “I thought that you handled that quite rightly.”

  He smiled at her approval. “It is so much better when you are here,” he said. “Nothing goes on right when you are away.”

  “Well, I am back now,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. She could feel the power of the muscle under her hand. Henry was a man now, with the strength of a man. “Dearest, I am so sorry about your quarrel with the Duke of Buckingham.”

  Under her hand she felt his shoulder hunch; he shrugged away her touch. “It is nothing,” he said. “He shall beg my pardon and it will be forgotten.”

  “But perhaps he could just come back to court,” she said. “Without his sisters if you don’t want to see them—”

  Inexplicably he barked out a laugh. “Oh, bring them all back by all means,” he said. “If that is your true wish, if you think it will bring you happiness. You should never have gone into confinement. There was no child, anyone could have seen that there would be no child.”

  She was so taken aback that she could hardly speak. “This is about my confinement?”

  “It would hardly have happened without. But everyone could see there would be no child. It was wasted time.”

  “Your own doctor—”

  “What did he know? He only knows what you tell him.”

  “He assured me—”

  “Doctors know nothing!” he burst out. “They are always guided by the woman; everyone knows that. And a woman can say anything. Is there a baby, isn’t there a baby? Is she a virgin, isn’t she a virgin? Only the woman knows and the rest of us are fooled.”

  Katherine felt her mind racing, trying to trace what had offended him, what she could say. “I trusted your doctor,” she said. “He was very certain. He assured me I was with child and so I went into confinement. Another time I will know better. I am truly sorry, my love. It has been a very great grief to me.”

  “It just makes me look such a fool!” he said plaintively. “It’s no wonder that I…”

  “That you? What?”

  “Nothing,” said Henry, sulkily.

  “It is such a lovely afternoon, let us go for a walk,” I say pleasantly to my ladies. “Lady Margaret will accompany me.”

  We go outside. My cape is brought and put over my shoulders and my gloves. The path down to the river is wet and slippery and Lady Margaret takes my arm and we go down the steps together. The primroses are thick as churned butter in the hedgerows and the sun is out. There are white swans on the river, but when the barges and wherries go by the birds drift out of the way as if by magic. I breathe deeply. It is so good to be out of that small room and to feel the sun on my face again that I hardly want to open the subject of Lady Anne.

  “You must know what took place?” I say to her shortly.

  “I know some gossip,” she says levelly. “Nothing for certain.”

  “What has angered the king so much?” I ask. “He is upset about my confinement, he is angry with me. What is troubling him? Surely not the Stafford girl’s flirtation with Compton?”

  Lady Margaret’s face is grave. “The king is very attached to William Compton,” she said. “He would not have him insulted.”

  “It sounds as if all the insult is the other way,” I say. “It is Lady Anne and her husband who are dishonored. I would have thought the king would have been angry with William. Lady Anne is not a girl to tumble behind a wall. There is her family to consider and her husband’s family. Surely the king should have told Compton to behave himself?”

  Lady Margaret shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “None of the girls will even talk to me. They are as silent as if it were a grave matter.”

  “But why, if it was nothing more than a foolish affair? Youth calls to youth in springtime?”

  She shakes her head. “Truly, I don’t know. You would think so. But if it is a flirtation why would the duke be so very offended? Why quarrel with the king? Why would the girls not be laughing at Anne for getting caught?”

  “And another thing…” I say.

  She waits.

  “Why should the king pay for Compton’s courtship? The fee for the singers is in the court accounts.”

  She frowned. “Why would he encourage it? The king must have known that the duke would be greatly offended.”

  “And Compton remains in high favor?”

  “They are inseparable.”

  I speak the thought that is sitting cold in my heart. “So do you think that Compton is the shield and the love affair is between the king, my husband, and Lady Anne?”

  Lady Margaret’s grave face tells me that my guess is her own fear. “I don’t know,” she says, honest as ever. “As I say, the girls tell me nothing, and I have not asked anyone that question.”

  “Because you think you will not like the answer?”

  She nods. Slowly, I turn, and we walk back along the river in silence.

  Katherine and Henry led the company into dinner in the grand hall and sat side by side under the gold canopy of state as they always did. There was a band of special singers that had come to England from the French court and they sang without instruments, very true to the note, with a dozen different parts. It was complicated and beautiful and Henry was entranced by the music. When the singers paused, he applauded and asked them to repeat the song. They smiled at his enthusiasm, and sang again. He asked for it once more, and then sang the tenor line back to them: note perfect.

  It was their turn to applaud him and they invited him to sing with them the part that he had learned so rapidly. Katherine, on her throne, leaned forwards and smiled as her handsome young husband sang in his clear young voice, and the ladies of the court clapped in appreciation.

&nbs
p; When the musicians struck up and the court danced, Katherine came down from the raised platform of the high table and danced with Henry, her face bright with happiness and her smile warm. Henry, encouraged by her, danced like an Italian, with fast, dainty footwork and high leaps. Katherine clapped her hands in delight and called for another dance as if she had never had a moment’s worry in her life. One of her ladies leaned towards the courtier who had taken the bet that Katherine would find out. “I think I shall keep my earrings,” she said. “He has fooled her. He has played her for a fool, and now he is fair game to any one of us. She has lost her hold on him.”

  I wait till we are alone, and then I wait until he beds me with his eager joy, and then I slip from the bed and bring him a cup of small ale.

  “So tell me the truth, Henry,” I say to him simply. “What is the truth of the quarrel between you and the Duke of Buckingham, and what were your dealings with his sister?”

  His swift sideways glance tells me more than any words. He is about to lie to me. I hear the words he says: a story about a disguising and all of them in masks and the ladies dancing with them and Compton and Anne dancing together, and I know that he is lying.

  It is an experience more painful than I thought I could have with him. We have been married for nearly a year, a year next month and always he has looked at me directly, with all his youth and honesty in his gaze. I have never heard anything but truth in his voice: boastfulness, certainly, the arrogance of a young man, but never this uncertain deceitful quaver. He is lying to me, and I would almost rather have a barefaced confession of infidelity than to see him look at me, blue-eyed and sweet as a boy, with a parcel of lies in his mouth.

  I stop him, I truly cannot bear to hear it. “Enough,” I say. “I know enough at least to realize that this is not true. She was your lover, wasn’t she? And Compton was your friend and shield?”

  His face is aghast. “Katherine…”

  “Just tell me the truth.”

  His mouth is trembling. He cannot bear to admit what he has done. “I didn’t mean to…”