The Constant Princess Read online

“Leave us,” she said.

  “Princess.”

  “I have to speak to him. This is the business of the kingdom.”

  One glance at her determined face told him that she would not be denied. He went past her with his head low, his assistants following behind him. Catalina made a little gesture with her hand and Doña Elvira retreated. Catalina stepped over the threshold and pushed the door shut on them.

  She saw Arthur stir in protest.

  “I won’t come any closer,” she assured him. “I swear it. But I have to be with you. I cannot bear—” she broke off.

  His face when he turned it to her was shiny with sweat, his hair as wet as when he came in from hunting in the rain. His young, round face was strained as the disease leached the life out of him.

  “Amo te,” he said through lips that were cracked and dark with fever.

  “Amo te,” she replied.

  “I am dying,” he said bleakly.

  Catalina did not interrupt nor deny him. He saw her straighten a little, as if she had staggered beneath a mortal blow.

  He took a rasping breath. “But you must still be Queen of England.”

  “What?”

  He took a shaky breath. “Love—obey me. You have sworn to obey me.”

  “I will do anything.”

  “Marry Harry. Be queen. Have our children.”

  “What?” She was dizzy with shock. She could hardly make out what he was saying.

  “England needs a great queen,” he said. “Especially with him. He’s not fit to rule. You must teach him. Build my forts. Build my navy. Defend against the Scots. Have my daughter Mary. Have my son Arthur. Let me live through you.”

  “My love—”

  “Let me do it,” he whispered longingly. “Let me keep England safe through you. Let me live through you.”

  “I am your wife,” she said fiercely. “Not his.”

  He nodded. “Tell them you are not.”

  She staggered at that and felt for the door to support her.

  “Tell them I could not do it.” A hint of a smile came to his drained face. “Tell them I was unmanned. Then marry Harry.”

  “You hate Harry!” she burst out. “You cannot want me to marry him. He is a child! And I love you.”

  “He will be king,” he said desperately. “So you will be queen. Marry him. Please. Beloved. For me.”

  The door behind her opened a crack and Lady Margaret said quietly, “You must not exhaust him, Princess.”

  “I have to go,” Catalina said desperately to the still figure in the bed.

  “Promise me…”

  “I will come back. You will get better.”

  “Please.”

  Lady Margaret opened the door wider and took Catalina’s hand. “For his own good,” she said quietly. “You have to leave him.”

  Catalina turned away from the room; she looked back over her shoulder. Arthur lifted a hand a few inches from the rich coverlet. “Promise,” he said. “Please. For my sake. Promise. Promise me now, beloved.”

  “I promise,” burst out of her.

  His hand fell; she heard him give a little sigh of relief.

  They were the last words they said to each other.

  2ND APRIL 1502

  At six o’clock, vespers, Arthur’s confessor, Dr. Eldenham, administered extreme unction and Arthur died soon after. Catalina kneeled on the threshold as the priest anointed her husband with the oil and bowed her head for the blessing. She did not rise from her knees until they told her that her boy husband was dead and she was a widow of sixteen years old.

  Lady Margaret on one side and Doña Elvira on the other half carried and half dragged Catalina to her bedchamber. Catalina slipped between the cold sheets of her bed and knew that however long she waited there, she would not hear Arthur’s quiet footstep on the battlements outside her room and his tap on the door. She would never again open her door and step into his arms. She would never again be snatched up and carried to her bed, having wanted all day to be in his arms.

  “I cannot believe it,” she said brokenly.

  “Drink this,” Lady Margaret said. “The physician left it for you. It is a sleeping draft. I will wake you at noon.”

  “I cannot believe it.”

  “Princess, drink.”

  Catalina drank it down, ignoring the bitter taste. More than anything else she wanted to be asleep and never wake again.

  That night I dreamed I was on the top of the great gateway of the red fort that guards and encircles the Alhambra Palace. Above my head the standards of Castile and Aragon were flapping like the sails on Cristóbal Colón’s ships. Shading my eyes from the autumn sun, looking out over the great plain of Granada, I saw the simple, familiar beauty of the land, the tawny soil intersected by a thousand little ditches carrying water from one field to another. Below me was the white-walled town of Granada, even now, ten years on from our conquest, still, unmistakably a Moorish town: the houses all arranged around shady courtyards, a fountain splashing seductively in the center, the gardens rich with the perfume of late-flowering roses, and the boughs of the trees heavy with fruit.

  Someone was calling for me: “Where is the Infanta?”

  And in my dream I answered: “I am Katherine, Queen of England. That is my name now.”

  They buried Arthur, Prince of Wales, on St. George’s Day, this first prince of all England, after a nightmare journey from Ludlow to Worcester when the rain lashed down so hard that they could barely make way. The lanes were awash, the water meadows knee-high in floodwater and the Teme had burst its banks and they could not get through the fords. They had to use bullock carts for the funeral procession—horses could not have made their way through the mire on the lanes—and all the plumage and black cloth was sodden by the time they finally straggled into Worcester.

  Hundreds turned out to see the miserable cortege go through the streets to the cathedral. Hundreds wept for the loss of the rose of England. After they lowered his coffin into the vault beneath the choir, the servants of his household broke their staves of office and threw them into the grave with their lost master. It was over for them. Everything they had hoped for, in the service of such a young and promising prince was finished. It was over for Arthur. It felt as if everything were over and could never be set right again.

  No, no, no.

  For the first month of mourning Catalina stayed in her rooms. Lady Margaret and Doña Elvira gave out that she was ill, but not in danger. In truth they feared for her reason. She did not rave or cry, she did not rail against fate or weep for her mother’s comfort. She lay in utter silence, her face turned towards the wall. Her family tendency to despair tempted her like a sin. She knew she must not give way to weeping and madness, for if she once let go she would never be able to stop. For the long month of seclusion Catalina gritted her teeth and it took all her willpower and all her strength to stop herself from screaming out in grief.

  When they woke her in the morning she said she was tired. They did not know that she hardly dared to move for fear that she would moan aloud. After they had dressed her, she would sit on her chair like a stone. As soon as they allowed it, she would go back to bed, lie on her back, and look up at the brightly colored tester that she had seen with eyes half closed by love, and know that Arthur would never pull her into the crook of his arm again.

  They summoned the physician, Dr. Bereworth, but when she saw him, her mouth trembled and her eyes filled with tears. She turned her head away from him and she went swiftly into her bedchamber and closed the door on them all. She could not bear to see him, the doctor who had let Arthur die, the friends who had watched it happen. She could not bear to speak to him. She felt a murderous rage at the sight of the doctor who had failed to save the boy. She wished him dead, and not Arthur.

  “I am afraid her mind is affected,” Lady Margaret said to the doctor as they heard the latch click on the privy-chamber door. “She does not speak, she does not even weep for him.”

&nbs