The ambassador shrugged. “In a court there are no friends, only courtiers.”
“My father will defend me from this…cruelty!” she burst out. “They should have thought of that before they treated me so! There will be no treaties for England with Spain when he hears about this. He will take revenge for this abuse of me.”
He could say nothing, and in the still, silent face that he turned to her she saw the worst truth.
“No,” she said simply. “Not him. Not him as well. Not my father. He did not know. He loves me. He would never injure me. He would never abandon me here.”
Still he could not tell her. He saw her take a deep breath.
“Oh. Oh. I see. I see from your silence. Of course. He knows, of course he knows, doesn’t he? My father? The dowry money is just another trick. He knows of the proposal to marry Prince Harry to Princess Eleanor. He has been leading the king on to think that he can marry Juana. He ordered me to encourage the king to marry Juana. He will have agreed to this new proposal for Prince Harry. And so he knows that the prince has broken his oath to me? And is free to marry?”
“Princess, he has told me nothing. But I think he must know. But perhaps he plans…”
Her gesture stopped him. “He has given up on me. I see. I have failed him and he has cast me aside. I am indeed alone.”
“So shall I try to get us home now?” Fuensalida asked quietly. Truly, he thought, it had become the very pinnacle of his ambitions. If he could get this doomed princess home to her unhappy father and her increasingly deranged sister, the new Queen of Castile, he would have done the best he could in a desperate situation. Nobody would marry Catalina of Spain now she was the daughter of a divided kingdom. Everyone could see that the madness in her blood was coming out in her sister. Not even Henry of England could pretend that Juana was fit to marry when she was on a crazed progress across Spain with her dead husband’s coffin. Ferdinand’s tricky diplomacy had rebounded on him and now everyone in Europe was his enemy, with two of the most powerful men in Europe allied to make war against him. Ferdinand was lost and going down. The best that this unlucky princess could expect was a scratch marriage to some Spanish grandee and retirement to the countryside, with a chance to escape the war that must come. The worst was to remain trapped and in poverty in England, a forgotten hostage that no one would ransom. A prisoner who would be soon forgotten, even by her jailers.
“What shall I do?” Finally she accepted danger. He saw her take it in. Finally, she understood that she had lost. He saw her, a queen in every inch, learn the depth of her defeat. “I must know what I should do. Or I shall be hostage, in an enemy country, with no one to speak for me.”
He did not say that he had thought her just that, ever since he had arrived.
“We shall leave,” he said decisively. “If war comes they will keep you as a hostage and they will seize your dowry. God forbid that now the money is finally coming, it should be used to make war against Spain.”
“I cannot leave,” she said flatly. “If I go, I will never get back here.”
“It is over!” he cried in sudden passion. “You see it yourself, at last. We have lost. We are defeated. It is over for you and England. You have held on and faced humiliation and poverty; you have faced it like a princess, like a queen, like a saint. Your mother herself could not have shown more courage. But we are defeated, Infanta. You have lost. We have to get home as best we can. We have to run, before they catch us.”
“Catch us?”
“They could imprison us both as enemy spies and hold us to ransom,” he told her. “They could impound whatever remains of your dowry goods and impound the rest when it arrives. God knows, they can make up a charge and execute you, if they want to enough.”
“They dare not touch me! I am a princess of royal blood,” she flared up. “Whatever else they can take from me, they can never take that! I am Infanta of Spain even if I am nothing else! Even if I am never Queen of England, at least I will always be Infanta of Spain.”
“Princes of royal blood have gone into the Tower of London before and not come out again,” the ambassador said bleakly. “Princes of the royal blood of England have had those gates shut behind them and never seen daylight again. He could call you a pretender. You know what happens in England to pretenders. We have to go.”
Catalina curtseyed to My Lady the King’s Mother and received not even a nod of the head in return. She stiffened. The two retinues had met on their way to Mass; behind the old lady was her granddaughter the Princess Mary and half a dozen ladies. All of them showed frosty faces to the young woman who was supposed to be betrothed to the Prince of Wales but who had been neglected for so long.
“My lady.” Catalina stood in her path, waiting for an acknowledgment.
The king’s mother looked at the young woman with open dislike. “I hear that there are difficulties over the betrothal of the Princess Mary,” she said.
Catalina looked towards the Princess Mary, and the girl, hidden behind her grandmother, made an ugly grimace at her and broke off with a sudden snort of laughter.
“I did not know,” Catalina said.
“You may not know, but your father undoubtedly knows,” the old woman said irritably. “In one of your constant letters to him you might tell him that he does his cause and your cause no good by trying to disturb our plans for our family.”
“I am very sure he does not—” Catalina started.
“I am very sure that he does; and you had better warn him not to stand in our way,” the old woman interrupted her sharply, and swept on.
“My own betrothal—” Catalina tried.
“Your betrothal?” The king’s mother repeated the words as if she had never heard them before. “Your betrothal?” Suddenly she laughed, throwing her head back, her mouth wide. Behind her the princess laughed too, and then all the ladies were laughing out loud at the thought of the pauper princess pauper speaking of her betrothal to the most eligible prince in Christendom.
“My father is sending my dowry!” Catalina cried out.
“Too late! You are far too late!” the king’s mother wailed, clutching at the arm of her friend.
Catalina, confronted by a dozen laughing faces reduced to helpless hysteria at the thought of this patched princess offering her bits of plate and gold, ducked her head down, pushed through them, and went away.
That night the ambassador of Spain and an Italian merchant of some wealth and great discretion stood side by side on a shadowy quayside at a quiet corner of the London docks and watched the quiet loading of Spanish goods on to a ship bound for Bruges.
“She has not authorized this?” the merchant whispered, his dark face lit by flickering torchlight. “We are all but stealing her dowry! What will happen if the English suddenly say that the marriage is to go ahead and we have emptied her treasure room? What if they see that the dowry has come from Spain at last, but it never reached her treasure room? They will call us thieves. We will be thieves!”
“They will never say it is to go ahead,” the ambassador said simply. “They will impound her goods and imprison her the moment that they declare war on Spain, and they could do that any day now. I dare not let King Ferdinand’s money fall into the hands of the English. They are our enemies, not our allies.”
“What will she do? We have emptied her treasury. There is nothing in her strong room but empty boxes. We have left her a pauper.”
The ambassador shrugged. “She is ruined anyway. If she stays here when England is at war with Spain then she is an enemy hostage and they will imprison her. If she runs away with me she will have no kind welcome back at home. Her mother is dead and her family is ruined and she is ruined too. I would not be surprised if she did not throw herself into the Thames and drown. Her life is over. I cannot see what will become of her. I can save her money, if you will ship it out for me. But I cannot save her.”
I know I have to leave England; Arthur would not want me to stay to face danger. I have
a terror of the Tower and the block that would be fitting only if I were a traitor, and not a princess who has never done anything wrong but tell one great lie, and that for the best. It would be the jest of all time if I had to put my head down on Warwick’s block and die, a Spanish pretender to the throne where he died a Plantagenet.
That must not happen. I see that my writ does not run. I am not such a fool as to think I can command anymore. I do not even pray anymore. I do not even ask for my destiny. But I can run away. And I think the time to run away is now.
“You have done what?” Catalina demanded of her ambassador. The inventory in her hand trembled.
“I took it upon my own authority to move your father’s treasure from the country. I could not risk…”
“My dowry.” She raised her voice.
“Your Grace, we both know it will not be needed for a wedding. He will never marry you. They would take your dowry and he would still not marry you.”
“It was my side of the bargain!” she shouted. “I keep faith! Even if no one else does! I have not eaten, I have given up my own house so as not to pawn that treasure. I make a promise and I keep to it, whatever the cost!”
“The king would have used it to pay for soldiers to fight against your father. He would have fought against Spain with your father’s own gold!” Fuensalida exclaimed miserably. “I could not let it happen.”
“So you robbed me!”
He stumbled over the words. “I took your treasure into safekeeping in the hopes that—”
“Go!” she said abruptly.
“Princess?”
“You have betrayed me, just as Doña Elvira betrayed me, just as everyone always betrays me,” she said bitterly. “You may leave me. I shall not send for you again. Ever. Be very sure that I shall never speak to you again. But I shall tell my father what you have done. I shall write to him at once and tell him that you have stolen my dowry monies, that you are a thief. You will never be received at the court in Spain.”
He bowed, trembling with emotion, and then he turned to leave, too proud to defend himself.
“You are nothing more than a traitor!” Catalina cried as he reached the door. “And if I were a queen with the power of the queen I would have you hanged for treason.”
He stiffened. He turned, he bowed again; his voice when he spoke was ice. “Infanta, please do not make a fool of yourself by insulting me. You are badly mistaken. It was your own father who commanded me to return your dowry. I was obeying his direct order. Your own father wanted your treasury stripped of every valuable. It is he who decided to make you a pauper. He wanted the dowry money returned because he has given up all hope of your marriage. He wanted the money kept safe and smuggled safely out of England.
“But I must tell you,” he added with weighty malice, “he did not order me to make sure that you were safe. He gave no orders to smuggle you safely out of England. He thought of the treasure but not of you. His orders were to secure the safety of the goods. He did not even mention you by name. I think he must have given you up for lost.”
As soon as the words were out he wished he had not said them. The stricken look on her face was worse than anything he had ever seen before. “He told you to send back the gold but to leave me behind? With nothing?”
“I am sure…”
Blindly, she turned her back to him and walked to the window so that he could not see the blank horror on her face. “Go,” she repeated. “Just go.”
I am the sleeping princess in the story, a snow princess left in a cold land and forgetting the feel of the sun. This winter has been a long one, even for England. Even now, in April, the grass is so frosty in the morning that when I wake and see the ice on my bedroom windows, the light filtering through is so white that I think it has snowed overnight. The water in the cup by my bed is frozen by midnight, and we cannot now afford to keep the fire in through the night. When I walk outside on the icy grass, it crunches thickly under my feet and I can feel its chill through the thin soles of my boots. This summer, I know will have all the mild sweetness of an English summer, but I long for the burning heat of Spain. I want to have my despair baked out of me once more. I feel as if I have been cold for seven years, and if nothing comes to warm me soon I shall simply die of it, just melt away under the rain, just blow away like the mist off the river. If the king is indeed dying, as the court rumor says, and Prince Harry comes to the throne and marries Eleanor, then I shall ask my father for permission to take the veil and retire to a convent. It could not be worse than here. It could not be poorer, colder or more lonely. Clearly my father has forgotten his love for me and given me up, just as if I had died with Arthur. Indeed, now, I acknowledge that every day I wish that I had died with Arthur.
I have sworn never to despair—the women of my family dissolve into despair like molasses into water. But this ice in my heart does not feel like despair. It feels as if my rock-hard determination to be queen has turned me to stone. I don’t feel as if I am giving way to my feelings like Juana; I feel as if I have mislaid my feelings. I am a block, an icicle, a princess of constant snow.
I try to pray to God but I cannot hear Him. I fear He has forgotten me as everyone else has done. I have lost all sense of His presence, I have lost my fear of His will, and I have lost my joy in His blessing. I can feel nothing for Him. I no longer think I am His special child, chosen to be blessed. I no longer console myself that I am His special child, chosen to be especially tested. I think He has turned His face from me. I don’t know why, but if my earthly father can forget me, and forget that I was his favorite child, as he has done, then I suppose my Heavenly Father can forget me too.
In all the world I find that I care for only two things now: I can still feel my love for Arthur, like a warm, still-beating heart in a little bird that has fallen from a frozen sky, chilled and cold. And I still long for Spain, for the Alhambra Palace, for al-Yanna: the garden, the secret place, paradise.
I endure my life only because I cannot escape it. Each year I hope that my fortunes will change. Each year when Harry’s birthday comes around and the betrothal is not made marriage, I know that another year of my fertile life has come and gone. Each midsummer day, when the dowry payment falls due and there is no draft from my father, I feel shame like a sickness in my belly. And twelve times a year, for seven years, that is eighty-four times, my courses have come and gone. Each time I bleed I think, there is another chance to make a prince for England wasted. I have learned to grieve for the stain on my linen as if it is a child lost. Eighty-four chances for me to have a son, in the very flush of my youth; eighty-four chances lost. I am learning to miscarry. I am learning the sorrow of miscarriage.
Each day, when I go to pray, I look up at the crucified Christ and say, “Your will be done.” That is each day for seven years, that is two thousand, five hundred and fifty-six times. This is the arithmetic of my pain. I say, “Your will be done,” but what I mean is, “Make Your will on these wicked English councilors and this spiteful, unforgiving English king and his old witch of a mother. Give me my rights. Make me queen. I must be queen, I must have a son, or I will become a princess of snow.”
21ST APRIL 1509
“The king is dead,” Fuensalida the ambassador wrote briefly to Catalina, knowing that she would not receive him in person, knowing that she would never forgive him for stealing her dowry and naming her as a pretender, for telling her that her father had abandoned her. “I know you will not see me but I have to do my duty and warn you that on his deathbed the king told his son that he was free to marry whomever he chooses. If you wish me to commission a ship to take you home to Spain I have personal funds to do so. Myself, I cannot see that you will gain anything by staying in this country but insult, ignominy, and perhaps danger.”
“Dead,” Catalina said.
“What?” one of her ladies asked.
Catalina crumpled the letter into her hand. She never trusted anyone with anything now. “Nothing,” she said. “I am goin
g for a walk.”
María de Salinas stood up and put Catalina’s patched cloak about her shoulders. It was the same cloak that she had worn wrapped around her in the winter cold when she and Arthur had left London for Ludlow, seven years earlier.
“Shall we come with you?” María offered, without enthusiasm, glancing at the gray sky beyond the windows.
“No.”
I pound alongside the river, the graveled walk pricking the soles of my feet through the thin leather, as if I am trying to run away from hope itself. I wonder if there is any chance that my luck might change, might be changing now. The king who wanted me, and then hated me for refusing him, is dead. They said he was sick; but God knows, he never weakened. I thought he would reign forever. But now he is dead. Now he has gone. It will be the prince who decides.
I dare not touch hope. After all these years of fasting, I feel as if hope would make me drunk if I had so much of a drop of it on my lips. But I do hope for just a little taste of optimism, just a little flavor which is not my usual diet of grim despair.
Because I know the boy, Harry. I swear I know him. I have watched him as a falconer wakes with a tired bird. Watched him, and judged him, and checked my judgment against his behavior again and again. I have read him as if I were studying my catechism. I know his strengths and his weaknesses, and I think I have faint, very faint, reason for hope.
Harry is vain. It is the sin of a young boy and I do not blame him for it, but he has it in abundance. On the one hand this might make him marry me, for he will want to be seen to be doing the right thing—honoring his promise, even rescuing me. At the thought of being saved by Harry, I have to stop in my stride and pinch my nails into the palms of my hands in the shelter of my cloak. This humiliation too I can learn to bear. Harry may want to rescue me and I shall have to be grateful. Arthur would have died of shame at the thought of his little braggart brother rescuing me; but Arthur died before this hour, my mother died before this hour: I shall have to bear it alone.
The Constant Princess Page 30
