The Constant Princess ttc-1

by Philippa Gregory

  She laughed again and shook her head, making her auburn hair swing this way and that. “I shall tell you about my home,” she offered.

  “All right.” He gathered the purple blanket around them both and waited.

  “When you come through the first door to the Alhambra, it looks like a little room. Your father would not stoop to enter a palace like that.”

  “It’s not grand?”

  “It’s the size of a little merchant’s hall in the town here. It is a good hall for a small house in Ludlow, nothing more.”

  “And then?”

  “And then you go into the courtyard and from there into the golden chamber.”

  “A little better?”

  “It is filled with color, but still it is not much bigger. The walls are bright with colored tiles and gold leaf and there is a high balcony, but it is still only a little space.”

  “And then where shall we go today?”

  “Today we shall turn right and go into the Court of the Myrtles.”

  He closed his eyes, trying to remember her descriptions. “A courtyard in the shape of a rectangle, surrounded by high buildings of gold.”

  “With a huge, dark wooden doorway framed with beautiful tiles at the far end.”

  “And a lake, a lake of a simple rectangle shape, and on either side of the water, a hedge of sweet-scented myrtle trees.”

  “Not a hedge like you have,” she demurred, thinking of the ragged edges of the Welsh fields in their struggle of thorn and weed.

  “Like what, then?” he asked, opening his eyes.

  “A hedge like a wall,” she said. “Cut straight and square, like a block of green marble, like a living green sweet-scented statue. And the gateway at the end is reflected back in the water, and the arch around it, and the building that it is set in. So that the whole thing is mirrored in ripples at your feet. And the walls are pierced with light screens of stucco, as airy as paper, like white-on-white embroidery. And the birds—”

  “The birds?” he asked, surprised, for she had not told him of them before.

  She paused while she thought of the word. “Apodes?” she said in Latin.

  “Apodes? Swifts?”

  She nodded. “They flow like a turbulent river of birds just above your head, round and round the narrow courtyard, screaming as they go, as fast as a cavalry charge. They go like the wind, round and round, as long as the sun shines on the water they go round, all day. And at night—”

  “At night?”

  She made a little gesture with her hands, like an enchantress. “At night they disappear, you never see them settle or nest. They just disappear—they set with the sun, but at dawn they are there again, like a river, like a flood.” She paused. “It is hard to describe,” she said in a small voice. “But I see it all the time.”

  “You miss it,” he said flatly. “However happy I may make you, you will always miss it.”

  She made a little gesture. “Of course. It is to be expected. But I never forget who I am. Who I was born to be.”

  Arthur waited.

  She smiled at him, her face was warmed by her smile, her blue eyes shining. “The Princess of Wales,” she said. “From my childhood I knew it. They always called me the Princess of Wales. And so Queen of England, as destined by God. Catalina, Infanta of Spain, Princess of Wales.”

  He smiled in reply and drew her closer to him. They lay back together, his head on her shoulder, her dark red hair a veil across his chest.

  “I knew I would marry you almost from the moment I was born,” he said reflectively. “I can’t remember a time when I was not betrothed to you. I can’t remember a time when I was not writing letters to you and taking them to my tutor for correction.”

  “Lucky that I please you, now I am here.”

  He put his finger under her chin and turned her face up towards him for a kiss. “Even luckier that I please you,” he said.

  “I would have been a good wife anyway,” she insisted. “Even without this…”

  He pulled her hand down beneath the silky sheets to touch him where he was growing big again.

  “Without this, you mean?” he teased.

  “Without this…joy,” she said and closed her eyes and lay back, waiting for his touch.

  Their servants woke them at dawn and Arthur was ceremonially escorted from her bed. They saw each other again at Mass but they were seated at opposite sides of the round chapel, each with their own household, and could not speak.

  The Mass should be the most important moment of my day, and it should bring me comfort—I know that. But I always feel lonely during Mass. I do pray to God and thank Him for His especial care of me, but just being in this chapel—shaped like a tiny mosque—reminds me so much of my mother. The smell of incense is as evocative of her as if it were her perfume, I cannot believe that I am not kneeling beside her as I have done four times a day for almost every day of my life. When I say “Hail Mary, full of grace” it is my mother’s round, smiling, determined face that I see. And when I pray for courage to do my duty in this strange land with these dour, undemonstrative people, it is my mother’s strength that I need.

  I should give thanks for Arthur, but I dare not even think of him when I am on my knees to God. I cannot think of him without the sin of desire. The very image of him in my mind is a deep secret, a pagan pleasure. I am certain that this is not the holy joy of matrimony. Such intense pleasure must be a sin. Such dark, deep desire and satisfaction cannot be the pure conception of a little prince that is the whole point and purpose of this marriage. We were put to bed by an archbishop, but our passionate coupling is as animal as a pair of sun-warmed snakes twisted all around in their pleasure. I keep my joy in Arthur a secret from everyone, even from God.

  I could not confide in anyone, even if I wanted to. We are expressly forbidden from being together as we wish. His grandmother, My Lady the King’s Mother, has ordered this, as she orders everything, even everything here in the Welsh Marches. She has said that he should come to my room once a week every week, except for the time of my courses, he should arrive before ten of the clock and leave by six. We obey her, of course—everybody obeys her. Once a week, as she has commanded, he comes through the great hall, like a young man reluctantly obedient, and in the morning he leaves me in silence and goes quietly away as a young man who has done his duty, not one that has been awake all night in breathless delight. He never boasts of pleasure; when they come to fetch him from my chamber he says nothing, nobody knows the joy we take in each other’s passion. No one will ever know that we are together every night. We meet on the battlements which run from his rooms to mine at the very top of the castle, gray-blue sky arching above us, and we consort like lovers in secret. Concealed by the night, we go to my room, or to his, and we make a private world together, filled with hidden joy.

  Even in this crowded small castle filled with busybodies and the king’s mother’s spies, nobody knows that we are together, and nobody knows how much we are in love.

  After Mass the royal pair went to break their fast in their separate rooms, though they would rather have been together. Ludlow Castle was a small reproduction of the formality of the king’s court. The king’s mother had commanded that after breakfast Arthur must work with his tutor at his books or at sports as the weather allowed; and Catalina must work with her tutor, sew, or read, or walk in the garden.

  “A garden!” Catalina whispered under her breath in the little patch of green with the sodden turf bench on one side of a thin border, set in the corner of the castle walls. “I wonder if she has ever seen a real garden.”

  In the afternoon they might ride out together to hunt in the woods around the castle. It was a rich countryside, the river fast-flowing through a wide valley with old, thick woodlands on the sides of the hills. Catalina thought she would grow to love the pasturelands around the River Teme and, on the horizon, the way the darkness of the hills gave way to the sky. But in the midwinter weather it was a landscape of gra
y and white, only the frost or the snow bringing brightness to the blackness of the cold woods. The weather was often too bad for the princess to go out at all. She hated the damp fog or when it drizzled with icy sleet. Arthur often rode alone.

  “Even if I stayed behind I would not be allowed to be with you,” he said mournfully. “My grandmother would have set me something else to do.”

  “So go!” she said, smiling, though it seemed a long, long time until dinner and she had nothing to do but to wait for the hunt to come home.

  They went out into the town once a week, to go to St. Laurence’s Church for Mass or to visit the little chapel by the castle wall, to attend a dinner organized by one of the great guilds or to see a cockfight, a bull baiting, or players. Catalina was impressed by the neat prettiness of the town; the place had escaped the violence of the wars between York and Lancaster that had finally been ended by Henry Tudor.

  “Peace is everything to a kingdom,” she observed to Arthur.

  “The only thing that can threaten us now is the Scots,” he said. “The Yorkist line are my forebears, the Lancasters too, so the rivalry ends with me. All we have to do is keep the north safe.”

  “And your father thinks he has done that with Princess Margaret’s marriage?”

  “Pray God he is right, but they are a faithless lot. When I am king, I shall keep the border strong. You shall advise me. We’ll go out together and make sure the border castles are repaired.”

  “I shall like that,” she said.

  “Of course, you spent your childhood with an army fighting for borderlands; you would know better than I what to look for.”

  She smiled. “I am glad it is a skill of mine that you can use. My father always complained that my mother was making Amazons, not princesses.”

  They dined together at dusk, and, thankfully, dusk came very early on those cold winter nights. At last they could be close, seated side by side at the high table looking down the hall of the castle, the great hearth heaped with logs on the side wall. Arthur always put Catalina on his left, closest to the fire, and she wore a cloak lined with fur and had layer upon layer of linen shifts under her ornate gown. Even so, she was still cold when she came down the icy stairs from her warm rooms to the smoky hall. Her Spanish ladies—María de Salinas; her duenna, Doña Elvira; and a few others—were seated at one table, the English ladies who were supposed to be her companions at another, and her retinue of Spanish servants were seated at another. The great lords of Arthur’s council—his chamberlain, Sir Richard Pole; warden of the castle, Bishop William Smith of Lincoln; his physician, Dr. Bereworth; his treasurer, Sir Henry Vernon; the steward of his household, Sir Richard Croft; his groom of the privy chamber, Sir William Thomas of Carmarthen—and all the leading men of the principality were seated in the body of the hall. At the back and in the gallery every nosy parker, every busybody in Wales could pile in to see the Spanish princess take her dinner and speculate if she pleased the young prince or no.

  There was no way to tell. Most of them thought that he had failed to bed her. For see! The Infanta sat like a stiff little doll and leaned towards her young husband. The Prince of Wales spoke to her as if by rote, every ten minutes. They were little patterns of good behavior, and they scarcely even looked at each other. The gossips said that he went to her rooms as ordered, but only once a week and never of his own choice. Perhaps the young couple did not please each other. They were young, perhaps too young for marriage.

  No one could tell that Catalina’s hands were gripped tight in her lap to stop herself from touching her husband, nor that every half hour or so he glanced at her, apparently indifferent, and whispered so low that only she could hear: “I want you right now.”

  After dinner there would be dancing and perhaps mummers or a storyteller, a Welsh bard or strolling players to watch. Sometimes the poets would come in from the high hills and tell old, strange tales in their own tongue that Arthur could follow only with difficulty, but which he would try to translate for Catalina.

  “When the long yellow summer comes and victory comes to us,

  And the spreading of the sails of Brittany,

  And when the heat comes and when the fever is kindled,

  There are portents that victory will be given to us.”

  “What is that about?” she asked him.

  “The long yellow summer is when my father decided to invade from Brittany. His road took him to Bosworth and victory.”

  She nodded.

  “It was hot, that year, and the troops came with the Sweat, a new disease, which now curses England as it does Europe with the heat of every summer.”

  She nodded again. A new poet came forwards, played a chord on his harp, and sang.

  “And this?”

  “It’s about a red dragon that flies over the principality,” he said. “It kills the boar.”

  “What does it mean?” Catalina asked.

  “The dragon is the Tudors: us,” he said. “You’ll have seen the red dragon on our standard. The boar is the usurper, Richard. It’s a compliment to my father based on an old tale. All their songs are ancient songs. They probably sang them in the ark.” He grinned. “Songs of Noah.”

  “Do they give you Tudors credit for surviving the Flood? Was Noah a Tudor?”

  “Probably. My grandmother would take credit for the Garden of Eden itself,” he returned. “This is the Welsh border. We come from Owen ap Tudor, from Glendower. We are happy to take the credit for everything.”

  As Arthur predicted, when the fire burned low they would sing the old Welsh songs of magical doings in dark woods that no man could know. And they would tell of battles and glorious victories won by skill and courage. In their strange tongue they would tell stories of Arthur and Camelot, and Merlin the prince, and Guinevere: the queen who betrayed her husband for a guilty love.

  “I should die if you took a lover,” he whispered to her as a page shielded them from the hall and poured wine.

  “I can never even see anyone else when you are here,” she assured him. “All I see is you.”

  Every evening there was music or some entertainment for the Ludlow court. The king’s mother had ruled that the prince should keep a merry house—it was a reward for the loyalty of Wales that had put her son Henry Tudor on an uncertain throne. Her grandson must repay the men who had come out of the hills to fight for the Tudors and remind them that he was a Welsh prince and that he would go on counting on their support to rule the English, whom no one could count on at all. The Welsh must join with England, and together the two of them could keep out the Scots, and manage the Irish.

  When the musicians played the slow, formal dances of Spain, Catalina would dance with one of her ladies, conscious of Arthur’s gaze on her, keeping her face prim, like a little mummer’s mask of respectability, though she longed to twirl around and swing her hips like a woman in the seraglio, like a Moorish slave girl dancing for a sultan. But My Lady the King’s Mother’s spies watched everything, even in Ludlow, and would be quick to report any indiscreet behavior by the young princess. Sometimes Catalina would slide a glance at her husband and see his eyes on her, his look that of a man in love. She would snap her fingers as if part of the dance, but in fact to warn him that he was staring at her in a way that his grandmother would not like, and he would turn aside and speak to someone, tearing his gaze away from her.

  Even after the music was over and the entertainers gone away, the young couple could not be alone. There were always men who sought council with Arthur, who wanted favors or land or influence, and they would approach him and talk low-voiced, in English, which Catalina did not yet fully understand, or in Welsh, which she thought no one could ever understand. The rule of law barely ran in the borderlands, each landowner was like a warlord in his own domain. Deeper in the mountains there were people who still thought that Richard was on the throne, who knew nothing of the changed world, who spoke no English, who obeyed no laws at all.

  Arthur argued, and pr
aised, and suggested that feuds should be forgiven, that trespasses should be made good, that the proud Welsh chieftains should work together to make their land as prosperous as their neighbor England, instead of wasting their time in envy. The valleys and coastal lands were dominated by a dozen petty lords, and in the high hills the men ran in clans like wild tribes. Slowly, Arthur was determined to make the law run throughout the land.

  “Every man has to know that the law is greater than his lord,” Catalina said. “That is what the Moors did in Spain, and my mother and father followed them. The Moors did not trouble themselves to change people’s religions nor their language; they just brought peace and prosperity and imposed the rule of law.”

  “Half of my lords would think that was heresy,” he teased her. “And your mother and father are now imposing their religion: they have driven out the Jews already, the Moors will be next.”

  She frowned. “I know,” she said. “And there is much suffering. But their intention was to allow people to practice their own religion. When they won Granada that was their promise.”

  “D’you not think that to make one country, the people must always be of one faith?” he asked.

  “Heretics can live like that,” she said decidedly. “In al Andalus the Moors and Christians and Jews lived in peace and friendship alongside one another. But if you are a Christian king, it is your duty to bring your subjects to God.”

  Catalina would watch Arthur as he talked with one man and then another, and then, at a sign from Doña Elvira, she would curtsey to her husband and withdraw from the hall. She would read her evening prayers, change into her robe for the night, sit with her ladies, go to her bedroom and wait, and wait and wait.

  “You can go, I shall sleep alone tonight,” she said to Doña Elvira.

  “Again?” The duenna frowned. “You have not had a bed companion since we came to the castle. What if you wake in the night and need some service?”

  “I sleep better with no one else in the room,” Catalina would say. “You can leave me now.”