“Yes, Mary. I imagine so.”
“Will it be far?”
“I don’t know. I hope it won’t be too far. But I know you will be an obedient girl, and will go wherever you are sent.”
After a long silence I heard her say, “But I want to stay here, with you. And my brother.” There was a stubbornness in her voice.
“Daughters of kings and queens cannot do whatever they choose. We must do as we are told.”
She did not answer, but spurred her pony forward. I heard her call out, as she passed me, “Must we indeed!”
* * *
On the day I learned that my beloved mother had died, I felt as though my very soul had been torn out of me.
Of that day, that saddest of all days, I cannot write. I can only remember an old song she sang to me.
Ayee ayee! My heart is wrung
I am a lifeless thing
She I loved most, she is gone
I am a stone
Only the crying of the wind
Only the tears of the moon
I am alone
* * *
In the midst of my grieving, feeling cold and ill and comfortless, Prince Henry came to me.
He seemed much altered. Not only taller and stronger-looking, but apprehensive. I could see fear in his light blue eyes.
“I must be quick. My father has set a watch on me—the guardsmen—I cannot stay long.” He looked around and behind him, then went on.
“Catherine, he orders me to sign a new paper saying I will no longer be betrothed to you. You must know this is not of my choosing. It is being forced upon me.”
“But why?” was all I could say, in my bewilderment.
He shook his head, and reached for my hands.
“He no longer needs the might of Spain. And since your mother’s death—”
“There is no might left,” I said, interrupting him. “Yes. I understand.”
He pressed my small hands in his much larger ones.
“I must go, or—”
“Go then,” I told him. “And may the Lord protect us both.”
After he had gone, I pondered what had happened. I had been expecting to marry Prince Henry when he reached his fourteenth birthday, or soon afterward. That birthday was at hand. Yet with my mother’s passing, all had changed. Now the prince would marry someone else—and all because royal marriages were, as everyone understood, marriages between thrones and realms, not men and women. And my mother’s throne, and the force and power of her kingdom of Castile, had been inherited by my sister Juana.
“It is said that Prince Henry will marry one of Queen Juana’s daughters,” I was told by an envoy from my father’s court. “Most likely he will choose Princess Eleanor. And your father King Ferdinand is contemplating marriage to a French princess.”
I, Catherine, was still Princess Dowager of England, yet I was no longer of any importance—and never would be of any importance, unless my father arranged another marriage for me. And though I wrote him long, pleading letters, telling him how wretched I was, and how I could no longer pay my household servants or officers or even (this saddened me terribly) manage to pay my purveyor to buy oats for Griselda—King Henry having stopped sending me my much-needed hundred pounds every month—he did not reply.
Months went by. I prayed. I fasted, hoping for divine aid. I grew thin and often felt ill. When I was strong enough, I rode Griselda, who was also thin and seemed to lack her usual speed and stamina. Princess Mary was no longer allowed to go riding with me. So I rode alone, even when it rained and the wind was cold.
How I longed, in those bitter hours, for the sun and heat of Spain! Even for the dry, parched Estremadura, where every drop of water was precious and no crops or flowers would grow.
My servants were leaving me, complaining that Doña Elvira shouted at them and bullied them, and that they had too little to eat. In desperation I went to moneylenders, who demanded that I pawn my jewels. But my jewels, alas! were not truly mine. They were part of my dowry, and my dowry was in dispute.
One evening, after I had retired for the night, my stomach growling and my head aching, I heard a shriek coming from the chamber next to mine. My maid of honor Maria de Rojas, sleeping on a pallet bed beside me, heard it too.
We hurried into the next room. There was Doña Elvira by the hearth, a pile of letters on a table in front of her, crying out and beating at the skirt of her gown, which had caught fire. Maria snatched up a blanket and smothered the flames, making us all cough from the smoke.
Doña Elvira had been burning the letters. Scraps of charred paper were scattered at the edges of the fire, among the ashes.
I snatched up two of the letters from the pile in front of Doña Elvira and quickly realized that they were letters I had written to my father. Letters I believed had been sent months earlier by courier or with ship captains bound for Spanish ports. She had assured me again and again that every word I wrote to my father had been delivered.
She had been deceiving me! Betraying me! Now I knew why he had never responded, or sent me money, or even acknowledged my distress!
“Liar!” I shouted. “Deceiver!” And I slapped Doña Elvira as hard as I could, until her sagging cheeks were red.
“How dare you betray me, when you knew I loved you and trusted you!”
In my fury I felt dizzy, but only for a moment.
“I hope you burn in hell for what you have done!” I shouted, but my voice was not as loud as it had been, and I felt the sting of tears.
Hoping to steady me, Maria de Rojas took my thin arm, but I angrily yanked it away.
“Whip the traitor! Torture her!” I cried again and again. “Do you hear me?”
I looked around, expecting to see Count de Cabra and my guardsmen, or at least the nearest of my grooms and valets, come rushing into the room. Then I remembered: Count de Cabra had left my service, to join the household of my sister Juana, and a number of the soldiers had gone with him. Who was there to protect me?
I shivered, suddenly afraid. Almost in the same moment, I recovered, and straightened my spine and lifted my head. I was the daughter of the great Queen Isabella. I was in no danger.
But Doña Elvira had seen my weakness—and the tears that I tried to keep from falling. She did not cower, or submit. Instead she squared her shoulders and glared at me.
“You foolish, foolish girl! You stupid fool! No one will obey you. Shout all you like! Look around you. How many servants do you see? Ten? Twenty? Once there were sixty. Soon there will be only a handful.”
“Because you drove them away, with your demands and threats!”
“No! Because your mother died, and no one wants you anymore.” She paused for breath. “You are nothing, less than nothing. You belong to King Henry. He can do what he likes with you. But even he won’t marry you now!”
Her face had turned a vivid purplish red. I thought she might collapse. Instead she reached for a goblet and, at a single gulp, drank what was in it.
I was aware that Maria de Rojas had slipped out of the room and into the corridor beyond. I felt my anger rising once more.
“How dare you say such things to me! I will have you hanged by your heels and flogged, like a dog, until you cry for mercy!”
But Doña Elvira only laughed.
“Then you will have to have Don Fuensalida flogged as well, and Dr. de Puebla, and every other Spaniard at King Henry’s court. For they all say the same thing! That you are nothing. A worm, a spot of dust. A gob of spit in the rushes!”
“Leave me,” I said in quiet fury. “Leave this place.”
And just then, as if in answer to my command, my steward entered the room, with half a dozen others, among them my aged doorkeeper, two kitchen boys and several sturdy gardeners, all of them out of breath. Maria de Rojas was with them, she had evidently called for help and they were the first to arrive.
The men rushed to seize Doña Elvira, who swore and struggled. I did not look at her as she was dragged from the room, b
ut I could still hear her shouting as she was taken down the corridor.
“You are cursed! You killed Doña Aldonza, you killed Prince Arthur! You killed the queen’s baby! You were cursed the day your mother saw you in your wedding dress!”
The sounds of her outburst thinned until they became one long wail, and I, trembling and weeping, sank into Maria de Rojas’s waiting arms.
* * *
I had lost my mother, my promised future husband, and my duenna, all within a very short space of time. My household was in chaos now that Doña Elvira was no longer there to keep order. I had sold two gold bracelets to buy provisions for my remaining servants, but thieves had broken into the storerooms and larders of Durham House and much had been taken.
I wrote to my father, begging him to send me at least a small allowance, and asking that he would pay the unpaid portion of my dowry—since I knew that King Henry resented the debt. I entrusted my letter to my almoner Master Reveles, feeling certain that he would not deceive me as Doña Elvira had. He was soon to leave on a journey to my father’s kingdom of Aragon, and he promised me that he would return with a response as soon as he could. In the meantime, there was little I could do to improve my situation.
Then I had what I thought was a stroke of good fortune. Good fortune for me, that is. My favorite sister Juana and her husband Philip, Duke of Burgundy, had been caught in a violent storm and their ship had been wrecked, along with many others in their flotilla, on the English coast. They were on their way to King Henry’s court.
My hopes rose. Juana would surely rescue me from my needy, friendless state. She had always been the most active and energetic of my sisters, quick to do whatever she could when needed, agile of mind and tongue. I could hardly wait to see her.
But when we met, at Durham House, I was shocked to see the change in her. When I had last seen her, nine years earlier, she had been saying goodbye, leaving Granada to travel to Flanders, to begin her new married life. She had been full of excitement and hope, for her future husband Philip was said to be exceptionally good-looking and strong, highborn and wealthy, his bloodline lofty and worthy of our own as daughters of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. I remembered how spirited she had been on the day she left, promising to return as soon as she could, promising to keep us all in her prayers.
Yet as I looked at her on that raw January morning at Durham House, she seemed shattered, fragile, as though unable to recover from some mighty blow or shock. It was not easy to believe that my sister was now Juana, Queen of Castile, our mother’s heir. Though as we talked, I thought I glimpsed in her, from time to time, something of our mother’s regal dignity.
Juana had her young son Charles with her, a hefty blond square-faced boy who regarded me gravely when I smiled down at him. Juana told me that he was not yet seven years old.
“Do you like to ride?” I asked him. He nodded. “If only Princess Mary were here, the two of you could ride her pony.”
“I have my own horses,” the boy told me. He seemed self-possessed, his gaze unflinching.
“Of course you do. But it is always a pleasure to ride with a companion, and the princess is good company.”
To this the young prince said nothing, but merely looked up at his mother.
“He has heard it said that the princess may become his wife one day,” Juana told me when Charles was taken away by one of his nursemaids.
“Is he always so solemn?”
She nodded, then suddenly burst into tears. Tears that soon turned to sobs, then to a violent shaking that racked her whole body.
I watched in alarm, not knowing what to do or say.
I called her name. I asked her if I ought to send for my physician. But she shook her head, with such vehemence that I hesitated, once again feeling alarmed.
Finally her spasms seemed to grow less, and she shrank into herself, exhausted. I called for wine, and when it was brought, Juana drank thirstily. After a time she spoke.
“I smelled it, you see,” I heard her say, her voice low, as if coming from a long distance away. “I smelled the storm. It was night, only there were no stars, no wind. Only the storm-scent, and then the horses were whinnying and stamping. The waves began to rise, and the ship rocked, and then we heard it, the roaring of the wind.”
Her eyes widened, and her face grew pale at the memory of what she was describing. She seemed to have forgotten I was there with her.
“There were so many of us, you see. Dozens of ships, thousands of soldiers. And the great guns, so terrifying, the noise of the great guns.”
She paused, then went on.
“But the guns could do nothing against the wind, and the huge crashing waves. All that night it went on, and the next day and the next night. We couldn’t sleep, we knew we were going to die. We did die—”
“No, Juana, no. You are here, and alive. You did not die.”
“Oh yes! We did. So many did. So many bodies—”
Horrified by what I was hearing, I thought she would begin to cry and shake once again. Instead she calmly folded her hands in her lap and began repeating a prayer. Then the words of the prayer turned to a groaning noise, and I thought, what has become of my sister?
“It was the ship. It was in pain. I heard it moan, calling out in pain. I knew it would die, just like the rest of us.” She lifted her face, and looked at me. Suddenly she smiled.
“I wanted him to die, Catalina. He is cruel to me. The Lord is punishing him, I thought.” Once again she began to quiver. She got up and paced around the room.
“Please, Juana, let me summon my physician.”
She glared at me. I was frightened. She was my older sister. She had to be obeyed. I hesitated.
“Listen! Watch! The torches are out. The sea devours them—” She ran into a corner of the room and sank down onto the floor, making herself as small as possible. “The mast—watch out for the mast—the fire—the rocks—” She made gulping sounds.
She is lost, I thought. Not to the sea, but to the fancies in her mind. The realization made me weep.
I went over to where she cowered against the wall and tried to help her to her feet. She laughed. She was jubilant.
“I loved it all, you see. All the noise, all the dying—”
Then, all at once, she was quiet. The look on her face changed. She blinked rapidly, as if regaining her bearings. I backed away. She stood up, walked gracefully to the hearth, then turned toward me, composed and serene.
“My daughter Eleanor will not be betrothed to Prince Henry, whatever you may have heard,” she told me. “I have a better match in mind for her, with the King of Portugal’s oldest son. Catalina! Why do you weep, Catalina? If Eleanor is matched to Prince Manuel, then you can become betrothed to Prince Henry once again, do you not understand that? Just as our mother meant you to be.”
It was as if she had become someone else entirely. As if she had been possessed, then returned to herself once more. Only this self was not a Juana I recognized.
I had hoped that Juana would be the loving sister I remembered, who would bring me back from the desolation I felt. Instead, having seen the troubling woman she had become, I felt more lost and alone than ever.
* * *
Not long afterward I was told that my sister and her husband had quarreled, loudly and bitterly, and in the presence of King Henry and his courtiers, and that she had left London, taking her son with her.
I did not see her again.
But I did see Duke Philip. I was summoned to Richmond, and watched with many others of the court as the duke invested Prince Henry with the Order of the Golden Fleece. He did not have the look of a man who had just survived a harrowing storm at sea. He looked like a man freed of a vexatious burden. And he was surrounded by a cluster of young girls, among them my half-sister Maria Juana.
5
I was beginning to think that King Henry would never let me leave England.
He kept me shut away at Durham House, year after year, while I grew
older and (I felt certain) less desirable. When I looked in my pier glass I saw an unhappy girl who should already have been married and given her husband three or four children. A sad, wistful girl. I tried not to think about what Doña Elvira had told me in anger: that I was cursed.
My new maid of honor Maria de Salinas, as loyal and encouraging as Doña Elvira had been domineering and critical, told me that I was far from being old and that when I smiled, I was lovely to look at. She was a beauty herself, and only a year younger than I was. She did not regard herself as undesirable, and she expected to be married before long, just as soon as her sister Inez found the right husband for her.
My new young confessor, Fray Diego Fernandez, told me I must not look at myself in the pier glass at all.
“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!” he cried when he heard me admit that I had been looking at my reflection. “Smash the glass, mortify the flesh! Keep vigil against your own self-praise, Infanta Catalina! Else your heavenly Father will reject you, and you will be damned for eternity!”
Fray Diego reprimanded me, but he also praised me for my learning. I had been tutored in Latin and could read the writings of St. Jerome and St. Augustine and Pope Gregory, as well as the Roman historians and the least impure of the poets. I had pleased my mother by reading to her from the lives of the saints—in Latin. She prided herself on being able to understand at least some of what I read, having made an effort to learn, as an adult, the language of the church and the mass.
She was envious of my learning, never having been tutored herself as a child. Yet envious or not, she was very proud of me, and encouraged me to compose verses myself, though I did not imagine that they had value. I knew that they were only the raw and stumbling efforts of a novice. Still, I was pleased when she praised and encouraged me, and with her encouragement, wrote more.
I needed such heartening just then, and was fortunate in that Maria de Salinas and Fray Diego helped to raise my low spirits. But it was Prince Henry who did the most to keep me from despair.
Oddly enough, he did this by sharing with me his own anger and his conviction that his father the king was losing his wits.
The Spanish Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon Page 6