The Constant Princess Read online

  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