The Constant Princess ttc-1

by Philippa Gregory

  The duenna and the ladies would bid her good night and leave; the maids would come and unlace her bodice, unpin her headdress, untie her shoes, and pull off her stockings. They would hold out her warmed linen nightgown and she would ask for her cape and say she would sit by the fire for a few moments, and then send them away.

  In the silence, as the castle settled for the night, she would wait for him. Then, at last she would hear the quiet sound of his footfall at the outer door of her room, where it opened onto the battlements that ran between his tower and hers. She would fly to the door and unbolt it, he would be pink-cheeked from the cold, his cape thrown over his own nightshirt as he tumbled in, the cold wind blowing in with him as she threw herself into his arms.

  “Tell me a story.”

  “Which story tonight?”

  “Tell me about your family.”

  “Shall I tell you about my mother when she was a girl?”

  “Oh yes. Was she a princess of Castile like you?”

  Catalina shook her head. “No, not at all. She was not protected or safe. She lived in the court of her brother, her father was dead, and her brother did not love her as he should. He knew that she was his only true heir. He favored his daughter; but everyone knew that she was a bastard, palmed off on him by his queen. She was even nicknamed by the name of the queen’s lover. They called her La Beltraneja after her father. Can you think of anything more shameful?”

  Arthur obediently shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “My mother was all but a prisoner at her brother’s court; the queen hated her, of course, the courtiers were unfriendly, and her brother was plotting to disinherit her. Even their own mother could not make him see reason.”

  “Why not?” he asked, and then caught her hand when he saw the shadow cross her face. “Ah, love, I am sorry. What is the matter?”

  “Her mother was sick,” she said. “Sick with sadness. I don’t understand quite why, or why it was so very bad. But she could hardly speak or move. She could only cry.”

  “So your mother had no protector?”

  “No, and then the king her brother ordered that she should be betrothed to Don Pedro Girón.” She sat up a little and clasped her hands around her knees. “They said he had sold his soul to the devil, a most wicked man. My mother swore that she would offer her soul to God and God would save her, a virgin, from such a fate. She said that surely no merciful God would take a girl like her, a princess, who had survived long years in one of the worst courts of Europe, and then throw her at the end into the arms of a man who wanted her ruin, who desired her only because she was young and untouched, who wanted to despoil her.”

  Arthur hid a grin at the romantic rhythm of the story. “You do this awfully well,” he said. “I hope it ends happily.”

  Catalina raised her hand like a troubadour calling for silence. “Her greatest friend and lady-in-waiting Beatriz had taken up a knife and sworn that she would kill Don Pedro before he laid hands on Isabella; but my mother kneeled before her prie-dieu for three days and three nights and prayed without ceasing to be spared this rape.

  “He was on his journey towards her, he would arrive the very next day. He ate well and drank well, telling his companions that tomorrow he would be in the bed of the highest-born virgin of Castile.

  “But that very night he died.” Catalina’s voice dropped to an awed whisper. “Died before he had finished his wine from dinner. Dropped dead as surely as if God had reached down from the heavens and pinched the life out of him as a good gardener pinches out a greenfly.”

  “Poison?” asked Arthur, who knew something of the ways of determined monarchs and who thought Isabella of Castile quite capable of murder.

  “God’s will,” Catalina answered seriously. “Don Pedro found, as everyone else has found, that God’s will and my mother’s desires always run together. And if you knew God and my mother as I know them, you would know that their will is always done.”

  He raised his glass and drank a toast to her. “Now that is a good story,” he said. “I wish you could tell it in the hall.”

  “And it is all true,” she reminded him. “I know it is. My mother told me it herself.”

  “So she fought for her throne too,” he said thoughtfully.

  “First for her throne, and then to make the kingdom of Spain.”

  He smiled. “For all that they tell us that we are of royal blood, we both come from a line of fighters. We have our thrones by conquest.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I come from royal blood,” she said. “My mother has her throne by right.”

  “Oh yes. But if your mother had not fought for her place in the world, she would have been Doña whatever his name was—”

  “Girón.”

  “Girón. And you would have been born a nobody.”

  Catalina shook her head. The idea was quite impossible for her to grasp. “I should have been the daughter of the sister of the king whatever happened. I should always have had royal blood in my veins.”

  “You would have been a nobody,” he said bluntly. “A nobody with royal blood. And so would I if my father had not fought for his throne. We are both from families who claim their own.”

  “Yes,” she conceded reluctantly.

  “We are both the children of parents who claim what rightfully belongs to others.” He went further.

  Her head came up at once. “They do not! At least my mother did not. She was the rightful heir.”

  Arthur disagreed. “Her brother made his daughter his heir, he recognized her. Your mother had the throne by conquest. Just as my father won his.”

  Her color rose. “She did not,” she insisted. “She is the rightful heir to the throne. All she did was defend her right from a pretender.”

  “Don’t you see?” he said. “We are all pretenders until we win. When we win, we can rewrite the history and rewrite the family trees, and execute our rivals, or imprison them, until we can argue that there was always only one true heir: ourselves. But before then, we are one of many claimants. And not even always the best claimant with the strongest claim.”

  She frowned. “What are you saying?” she demanded. “Are you saying that I am not the true princess? That you are not the true heir to England?”

  He took her hand. “No, no. Don’t be angry with me,” he soothed her. “I am saying that we have and we hold what we claim. I am saying that we make our own inheritance. We claim what we want, we say that we are Prince of Wales, Queen of England. That we decide the name and the title we go by. Just like everyone else does.”

  “You are wrong,” she said. “I was born Infanta of Spain and I will die Queen of England. It is not a matter of choice, it is my destiny.”

  He took her hand and kissed it. He saw there was no point pursuing his belief that a man or a woman could make their own destiny with their own conviction. He might have his doubts; but with her the task was already done. She had complete conviction: her destiny was made. He had no doubt that she would indeed defend it to death. Her title, her pride, her sense of self were all one. “Katherine, Queen of England,” he said, kissing her fingers, and saw her smile return.

  I love him so deeply, I did not know that I could ever love anyone like this. I can feel myself growing in patience and wisdom, just through my love for him. I step back from irritability and impatience, I even bear my homesickness without complaint. I can feel myself becoming a better woman, a better wife, as I seek to please him and make him proud of me. I want him always to be glad that he married me. I want us always to be as happy as we are today. There are no words to describe him…there are no words.

  A messenger came from the king’s court bringing the newlyweds some gifts: a pair of deer from the Windsor forest, a parcel of books for Catalina, letters from Elizabeth the queen, and orders from My Lady the King’s Mother who had heard, though no one could imagine how, that the prince’s hunt had broken down some hedges, and who commanded Arthur to make sure that they were restored and the
landowner compensated.

  He brought the letter to Catalina’s room when he came at night. “How can she know everything?” he demanded.

  “The man will have written to her,” she said ruefully.

  “Why not come direct to me?”

  “Because he knows her? Is he her liege man?”

  “Could be,” he said. “She has a network of alliances like spider threads across the country.”

  “You should go to see him,” Catalina decided. “We could both go. We could take him a present, some meat or something, and pay what we owe.”

  Arthur shook his head at the power of his grandmother. “Oh yes, we can do that. But how can she know everything?”

  “It’s how you rule,” she said. “Isn’t it? You make sure that you know everything and that anyone with a trouble comes to you. Then they take the habit of obedience and you take the habit of command.”

  He chuckled. “I can see I have married another Margaret Beaufort,” he said. “God help me with another one in the family.”

  Catalina smiled. “You should be warned,” she admitted. “I am the daughter of a strong woman. Even my father does as he is bid by her.”

  He put down the letter and gathered her to him. “I have longed for you all day,” he said into the warm crook of her neck.

  She opened the front of his nightshirt so she could lay her cheek against his sweet-smelling skin. “Oh, my love.”

  With one accord they moved to the bed. “Oh, my love.”

  “Tell me a story.”

  “What shall I tell you tonight?”

  “Tell me about how your father and mother were married. Was it arranged for them, as it was for us?”

  “Oh no,” she exclaimed. “Not at all. She was quite alone in the world, and though God had saved her from Don Pedro she was still not safe. She knew that her brother would marry her to anyone who would guarantee to keep her from inheriting his throne.

  “They were dark years for her—she said that when she appealed to her mother it was like talking to the dead. My grandmother was lost in a world of her own sorrow, she could do nothing to help her own daughter.

  “My mother’s cousin, her only hope, was the heir to the neighboring kingdom: Ferdinand of Aragon. He came to her in disguise. Without any servants, without any soldiers, he rode through the night and came to the castle where she was struggling to survive. He had himself brought in, and threw off his hat and cape so she saw him, and knew him at once.”

  Arthur was rapt. “Really?”

  Catalina smiled. “Isn’t it like a romance? She told me that she loved him at once, fell in love on sight like a princess in a poem. He proposed marriage to her then and there and she accepted him then and there. He fell in love with her that night, at first sight, which is something that no princess can expect. My mother, my father, were blessed by God. He moved them to love and their hearts followed their interests.”

  “God looks after the kings of Spain,” Arthur remarked, half joking.

  She nodded. “Your father was right to seek our friendship. We are making our kingdom from al Andalus, the lands of the Moorish princes. We have Castile and Aragon, now we have Granada and we will have more. My father’s heart is set on Navarre, and he will not stop there. I know he is determined to have Naples. I don’t think he will be satisfied until all the south and western regions of France are ours. You will see. He has not made the borders he wants for Spain yet.”

  “They married in secret?” he asked, still amazed at this royal couple who had taken their lives into their own hands and made their own destiny.

  She looked slightly sheepish. “He told her he had a dispensation, but it was not properly signed. I am afraid that he tricked her.”

  He frowned. “Your wonderful father lied to his saintly wife?”

  She gave a little rueful smile. “Indeed, he will do anything to get his own way. You quickly learn it when you have dealings with him. He always thinks ahead, two, perhaps three, steps ahead. He knew my mother was devout and would not marry without the dispensation and olé!—there is a dispensation in her hand.”

  “But they put it right later?”

  “Yes, and though his father and her brother were angry, it was the right thing to do.”

  “How could it be the right thing to do? To defy your family? To disobey your own father? That’s a sin. It breaks a commandment. It is a cardinal sin. No pope could bless such a marriage.”

  “It was God’s will,” she said confidently. “None of them knew that it was God’s will. But my mother knew. She always knows what God wills.”

  “How can she be so sure? How could she be so sure then, when she was only a girl?”

  She chuckled. “God and my mother have always thought alike.”

  He laughed and tweaked a lock of her hair. “She certainly did the right thing in sending you to me.”

  “She did,” Catalina said. “And we shall do the right thing by the country.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I have such plans for us when we come to the throne.”

  “What shall we do?”

  Arthur hesitated. “You will think me a child, my head filled with stories from books.”

  “No I shan’t, tell me!”

  “I should like to make a council, like the first Arthur did. Not like my father’s council, which is just filled with his friends who fought for him, but a proper council of all the kingdom. A council of knights, one for each county. Not chosen by me because I like their company, but chosen by their own county—as the best of men to represent them. And I should like them to come to the table and each of them should know what is happening in their own county, they should report. And so if a crop is going to fail and there is going to be hunger we should know in time and send food.”

  Catalina sat up, interested. “They would be our advisors. Our eyes and ears.”

  “Yes. And I should like each of them to be responsible for building defenses, especially the ones in the north and on the coasts.”

  “And for mustering troops once a year, so we are always ready for attack,” she added. “They will come, you know.”

  “The Moors?”

  She nodded. “They are defeated in Spain for now, but they are as strong as ever in Africa, in the Holy Lands, in Turkey and the lands beyond. When they need more land they will move again into Christendom. Once a year in the spring, the Ottoman sultan goes to war, like other men plow the fields. They will come against us. We cannot know when they will come, but we can be very certain that they will do so.”

  “I want defenses all along the south coast against France, and against the Moors,” Arthur said. “A string of castles, and beacons behind them, so that when we come under attack in—say—Kent, we can know about it in London, and everyone can be warned.”

  “You will need to build ships,” she said. “My mother commissioned fighting ships from the dockyard in Venice.”

  “We have our own dockyards,” he said. “We can build our own ships.”

  “How shall we raise the money for all these castles and ships?” Isabella’s daughter asked the practical question.

  “Partly from taxing the people,” he said. “Partly from taxing the merchants and the people who use the ports. It is for their safety, they should pay. I know people hate the taxes but that is because they don’t see what is done with the money.”

  “We will need honest tax collectors,” Catalina said. “My father says that if you can collect the taxes that are due and not lose half of them along the way it is better than a regiment of cavalry.”

  “Yes, but how d’you find men that you can trust?” Arthur thought aloud. “At the moment, any man who wants to make a fortune gets himself a post of collecting taxes. They should work for us, not for themselves. They should be paid a wage and not collect on their own account.”

  “That has never been achieved by anyone but the Moors,” she said. “The Moors in al Andalus set up schools and even universities for the sons of poor
men, so that they had clerks that they could trust. And their great offices of court are always done by the young scholars, sometimes the young sons of their king.”

  “Shall I take a hundred wives to get a thousand clerks for the throne?” he teased her.

  “Not another single one.”

  “But we have to find good men,” he said thoughtfully. “You need loyal servants to the crown, those who owe their salary to the crown and their obedience to the crown. Otherwise they work for themselves and they take bribes and all their families become overmighty.”

  “The church could teach them,” Catalina suggested. “Just as the imam teaches the boys for the Moors. If every parish church was as learned as a mosque with a school attached to it, if every priest knew he had to teach reading and writing, then we could found new colleges at the universities, so that boys could go on and learn more.”

  “Is it possible?” he asked. “Not just a dream?”

  She nodded. “It could be real. To make a country is the most real thing anyone can do. We will make a kingdom that we can be proud of, just as my mother and father did in Spain. We can decide how it is to be, and we can make it happen.”

  “Camelot,” he said simply.

  “Camelot,” she repeated.

  SPRING 1502

  It snowed for a sennight in February, and then came a thaw and the snow turned to slush and now it is raining again. I cannot walk in the garden, nor go out on a horse, nor even ride out into the town by mule. I have never seen such rain in my life before. It is not like our rain that falls on the hot earth and yields a rich, warm smell as the dust is laid and the plants drink up the water. But this is cold rain on cold earth, and there is no perfume and only standing pools of water with dark ice on it like a cold skin.

  I miss my home with an ache of longing in these cold dark days. When I tell Arthur about Spain and the Alhambra it makes me yearn that he should see it for himself, and meet my mother and father. I want them to see him, and know our happiness. I keep wondering if his father would not allow him out of England…but I know I am dreaming. No king would ever let his precious son and heir out of his lands.