The Constant Princess Read online

  Doña Elvira will not learn English. She affects not to be able to understand French when it is spoken with an English accent. The Welsh she treats with absolute contempt as barbarians on the very edge of civilization, which is not very comfortable when we are visiting the townspeople of Ludlow. To be honest, sometimes she behaves more grandly than any woman I have ever known, she is prouder than my mother herself. She is certainly grander than me. I have to admire her, but I cannot truly love her.

  But Margaret Pole was educated as the niece of a king and is as fluent in Latin as I am. We speak French easily together, she is teaching me English, and when we come across a word we don’t know in any of our shared languages, we compose great mimes that set us wailing with giggles. I made her cry with laughing when I tried to demonstrate indigestion, and the guards came running, thinking we were under attack when she used all the ladies of the court and their maidservants to demonstrate to me the correct protocol for an English hunt in the field.

  With Margaret, Catalina thought she could raise the question of her future, and her father-in-law of whom she was frankly nervous.

  “He was displeased before we came away,” she said. “It is the question of the dowry.”

  “Oh, yes?” Margaret replied. The two women were seated in a window, waiting for the men to come back from hunting. It was bitterly cold and damp outside, neither of them had wanted to go out. Margaret thought it better to volunteer nothing about the vexed question of Catalina’s dowry; she had already heard from her husband that the Spanish king had perfected the art of double-dealing. He had agreed a substantial dowry for the Infanta, but then sent her to England with only half the money. The rest, he suggested, could be made up with the plate and treasure that she brought as her household goods. Outraged, King Henry had demanded the full amount. Sweetly Ferdinand of Spain replied that the Infanta’s household had been supplied with the very best, Henry could take his pick.

  It was a bad way to start a marriage that was, in any case, founded only on greed and ambition, and a shared fear of France. Catalina was caught between the determination of two coldhearted men. Margaret guessed that one of the reasons that Catalina had been sent to Ludlow Castle with her husband was to force her to use her own household goods and so diminish their value. If King Henry had kept her at court in Windsor or Greenwich or Westminster, she would have eaten off his plates and her father could have argued that the Spanish plate was as good as new, and must be taken as the dowry. But now, every night they ate from Catalina’s gold plates and every scrape of a careless knife knocked a little off the value. When it was time to pay the second half of the dowry, the King of Spain would find he would have to pay cash. King Ferdinand might be a hard man and a cunning negotiator but he had met his match in Henry Tudor of England.

  “He said that I should be a daughter to him,” Catalina started carefully. “But I cannot obey him as a daughter should, if I am to obey my own father. My father tells me not to use my plate and to give it to the king. But he won’t accept it. And since the dowry is unpaid, the king sends me away with no provision; he doesn’t even pay my allowance.”

  “Does the Spanish ambassador not advise you?”

  Catalina made a little face. “He is the king’s own man,” she said. “No help to me. I don’t like him. He is a Jew, but converted. An adaptable man. A Spaniard, but he has lived here for years. He is become a man for the Tudors, not for Aragon. I shall tell my father that he is poorly served by Dr. de Puebla, but in the meantime, I have no good advice, and in my household Doña Elvira and my treasurer never stop quarreling. She says that my goods and my treasure must be loaned to the goldsmiths to raise money; he says he will not let them out of his sight until they are paid to the king.”

  “And have you not asked the prince what you should do?”

  Catalina hesitated. “It is a matter between his father and my father,” she said cautiously. “I didn’t want to let it disturb us. He has paid for all my traveling expenses here. He is going to have to pay for my ladies’ wages at midsummer, and soon I will need new gowns. I don’t want to ask him for money. I don’t want him to think me greedy.”

  “You love him, don’t you?” Margaret asked, smiling, and watched the younger woman’s face light up.

  “Oh yes,” the girl breathed. “I do love him so.”

  The older woman smiled. “You are blessed,” she said gently. “To be a princess and to find love with the husband you are ordered to marry. You are blessed, Catalina.”

  “I know. I do think it is a sign of God’s especial favor to me.”

  The older woman paused at the grandness of the claim, but did not correct her. The confidence of youth would wear away soon enough without any need for warnings. “And do you have any signs?”

  Catalina looked puzzled.

  “Of a child coming? You do know what to look for?”

  The young woman blushed. “I do know. My mother told me. There are no signs yet.”

  “It’s early days,” Lady Margaret said comfortingly. “But if you had a child on the way I think there would be no difficulty with a dowry. I think nothing would be too good for you if you were carrying the next Tudor prince.”

  “I ought to be paid my allowance whether I have a child or not,” Catalina observed. “I am Princess of Wales, I should have an allowance to keep my state.”

  “Yes,” said Margaret drily. “But who is going to tell the king that?”

  “Tell me a story.”

  They were bathed in the dappled gold of candlelight and firelight. It was midnight and the castle was silent but for their low voices, all the lights were out but for the blaze of Catalina’s chambers where the two young lovers were resisting sleep.

  “What shall I tell you about?”

  “Tell me a story about the Moors.”

  She thought for a moment, throwing a shawl around her bare shoulders against the cold. Arthur was sprawled across the bed but when she moved he gathered her to him so her head rested on his naked chest. He ran his hand through her rich red hair and gathered it into his fist.

  “I will tell you a story about one of the sultanas,” she said. “It is not a story. It is true. She was in the harem—you know that the women live apart from the men in their own rooms?”

  He nodded, watching the candlelight flicker on her neck, on the hollow at her collarbone.

  “She looked out of the window and the tidal river beneath her window was at low ebb. The poor children of the town were playing in the water. They were on the slipway for the boats and they had spread mud all around and they were slipping and sliding, skating in the mud. She laughed while she watched them and she said to her ladies how she wished that she could play like that.”

  “But she couldn’t go out?”

  “No, she could never go out. Her ladies told the eunuchs who guarded the harem and they told the grand vizier and he told the sultan, and when she left the window and went to her presence chamber, guess what?”

  He shook his head, smiling. “What?”

  “Her presence chamber was a great marble hall. The floor was made of rose-veined marble. The sultan had ordered them to bring great flasks of perfumed oils and pour them on the floor. All the perfumiers in the town had been ordered to bring oil of roses to the palace. They had brought rose petals and sweet-smelling herbs and they had made a thick paste of oil of roses and rose petals and herbs and spread it, one foot thick, all across the floor of her presence chamber. The sultana and her ladies stripped to their chemises and slid and played in the mud, threw rose water and petals and all the afternoon played like the mud larks.”

  He was entranced. “How glorious.”

  She smiled up at him. “Now it is your turn. You tell me a story.”

  “I have no stories like that. It is all fighting and winning.”

  “Those are the stories you like best when I tell them,” she pointed out.

  “I do. And now your father is going to war again.”

  “H